Kosovo Albanians push for talks about self-determination

Mr. Kosumi, like Mr. Haradinaj before him, also extends the olive branch to Kosovo's Serbs, who boycotted last year's election. "Serbs in Kosovo live here in Kosovo," he says. "They should get engaged more in their futures here. I do not expect them to cut their relationship with Belgrade, but these will be the people who will work together with us and decide together about our future."

Kosovo's Serbs, for the most part, aren't buying it. Some 80,000 Serbs live here, mostly in enclaves protected in part by 18,000 NATO peacekeepers. The March riots, the Albanians' choosing a war-crimes suspect - Haradinaj - as prime minister last year, and anxiety about their safety has left them looking to Belgrade, 220 miles north of Pristina, because it's the capital of Serbia proper and is still, on paper, sovereign over Kosovo.

Because he has a job in Pristina, Nenad Maksimovic may not be a typical resident of Gracanica, a Serb enclave about a 10-minute drive southeast of the capital. But he doesn't trust the Kosovo government. Take the constitutional framework, he says. The way things are set up now, Serbs will have at most 40 seats in the 120-seat assembly, leaving them without political clout.

"You can participate, but you don't have substantial influence," he says. "As long as I see Serbs not having influence, I'm not going to vote. I'm not going to vote for a puppet."

The majority of Albanians aren't happy either. Unemployment is gauged at between 33 and 60 percent. A typical monthly wage is about 150 euros ($183). In western Kosovo, which in the late 1990s saw the first clashes between Serbian police and Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas, analysts have noted that weapons and organized crime have proliferated in the past six years.

"If I'd known it was like this, I wouldn't have returned from Germany," says Istref Kelmndi, at his tire shop outside Pec, in western Kosovo. Mafia assassinations in the town, he says, now mean that people driving from Pristina stop at his shop to ask, "Is it safe?" Business, he says, is catastrophic.

Some 30 minutes down the road, Baskim Kryziu still flies the American flag at his sack shop. He lost more than 20 relatives, including his brother, to Serb forces before NATO intervened in 1999, but says he's willing to wait for whatever has to be done before Kosovo becomes independent.

"We have always been patient. If we look at the will of the people, then you have to implement it," he says. "If [the Americans and the international community] don't want to have their investment in Kosovo up until now lost, they'll listen to us."

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