-- Adem Jashari. He's the great martyr-hero of Kosovo's war of liberation. He was from Drenica, which is a rural region in central Kosovo with a long tradition of resistance to the authorities... Turkish, Yugoslav, Serbian, whoever. Maybe more important, he was a Jashari. Rural Kosvo is all about clans, big extended families, and the Jasharis were one of the richest and most important clans in Drenica, or indeed in all of Kosovo. Adem Jashari was one of the founders of the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army. This was in 1996, after the Dayton Agreement convinced some Kosovar Albanians that there was no hope but war. (Dayton ended the war in Bosnia, but at the expense of completely ignoring what Milosevic was doing in Kosovo.) In its first year or 18 months of existence, the KLA wasn't much. They had maybe a few hundred active members, in a province of ~2 million people. Most Albanians were still going along with Ibrahim Rugova's program of non-violent resistance. This wasn't because Albanians are a peaceful people. No. It was because Milosevic and the Serbs seemed stronger than ever, international assistance seemed wildly unlikely, and armed resistance looked like a bloody dead end. So the KLA made a nuisance of itself, but not much more. It killed some Serb police (who were universally loathed as corrupt and brutal), set off some bombs, and managed to make some regions (like Drenica) a no-go area for Serb forces. But overall it accompanied little of military significance. Until the spring of 1998. In February and March of that year, the Serbs unleashed a series of deadly attacks on Albanian villages containing KLA guerrillas. The most famous of these was on Donji Prekaz, the village of the Jashari family. It was aimed at Adem Jashari, who by this time had become one of the most famous or notorious KLA commanders.
"In the early morning hours of March 5, a terrorist group attacked another police patrol near the village of Donje Prekaze. After police returned fire, the terrorists retreated to their base and dug in at the Jashari family farm in that village... engagement with the terrorists lasted for 27 hours, with a total of 51 casualties. Unfortunately, it was later established that Jashari family members were among them. Terrorists physically prevented them from leaving the farm, despite the police invitation. The Interior Ministry expresses regret and bitterness that these victims were a direct consequence of cruelty and ruthlessness of Albanian terrorists... The fact that he personally shot his nephew to prevent him from surrendering testifies to Adem Jashari's cruelty. Two officers lost their lives in this action, and seven were seriously injured."
