Kosovars wait for news of the lost hero

War in the Balkans: Fugitive

DITA SURROI, a Kosovo Albanian refugee, lives in fear and hope. Her husband, Veton Surroi, long one of Kosovo's most prominent intellectuals and seen as a possible future leader of an independent state, has been missing in the Yugoslav province for eight weeks.

She does not know whether he is in hiding, in detention or dead but chooses to believe he is underground in Pristina or the countryside, hiding in a cellar or moving from house to house to avoid Serb police, troops and paramilitaries. Had the Serbs arrested him, she believes, they would have said so. Had they murdered him, they would most likely have announced he had been killed in a Nato bombing raid.

"If he was being protected by the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army], they would have got a message to me," she said.

Like many Kosovars, Mrs Surroi believes her husband, one of the signatories to the Rambouillet accord, has stayed in Kosovo by choice to show solidarity with the several hundred thousand fellow Albanians still in the province.

To many of those, and several hundred thousand others who have fled Serb repression to neighbouring Macedonia or Albania, he will be a hero if he survives, a martyr if he does not. While the exiled Kosovo leader, Ibrahim Rugova, has been discredited in the eyes of many ethnic Albanians as a "sell-out" to the Serbs, and the KLA, though popular, has been hindered by a lack of weapons, 45-year-old Mr Surroi is likely to be a key figure in, and very possibly the leader of any post-war Kosovo administration.

Unless the Serbs find him first. And Mrs Surroi, 37, is in no doubt that they are trying. She is certain she is being observed and followed in Skopje and that the phone in a relative's apartment where she is staying is tapped. By the time you read this, she hopes to be in a western European city with her two daughters, Rea, 11, and Zoya, nine.

As I interviewed her on the terrace of a Skopje cafe, she abruptly stopped talking. She glanced over my shoulder. "Hold on. Who are these men?" she asked me. Two heavily-built men in their thirties had moved to the next table, despite the fact that most of the terrace was empty.

She asked one for a light, confirmed from his reply that he was a Macedonian Slav rather than an ethnic Albanian, and continued the interview in a whisper. She believes the majority-Slav Macedonian authorities are co- operating with Serbia in "ethnically cleansing" Kosovo of ethnic Albanians and that Macedonian as well as Serb agents are likely to be watching her.

Was she afraid? "Yes, but I'm used to it. I lived in Pristina under these conditions. I've had threats on the telephone, saying things like `are your two lovely daughters home?' The other day, a woman sat close to me, reading a newspaper, then followed me around Skopje all day. But Veton wouldn't call me here even if he could. The Macedonian government is very close to the Serbs. They're the same."

Fearing reprisals against them, even in western Europe, Mrs Surroi did not want her daughters photographed. She also asked The Independent not to publish a photograph of her husband, concerned that it could put jeopardise his safety. She said she believed widespread rumours here that British diplomats, and possibly even the SAS, had tried to get him out. "He considered [Foreign Secretary] Robin Cook a good friend. He considered him very close," she said.

The son of Rexhai Surroi, a Yugoslav diplomat, Veton was born in Pristina but was educated around the world, including taking a degree in literary criticism at Mexico's Autonomous University. He speaks fluent English, French, Spanish, Albanian and Serbo-Croat.

His father died in Spain in what friends describe as a "mysterious accident" in 1989, one week before he was due to end a four-year posting. It happened only a few months after Serbia's then new President Slobodan Milosevic abolished Kosovo's autonomy, sparking the unrest that culminated in the current crisis.

To oppose Kosovo's minority but powerful Serbs, Veton Surroi founded a magazine, Koha (Time) in 1990 - the first independent newspaper in the Albanian language - but the Serbs, controlling printers and distributors, choked it off within two years. He helped found the BBC's Albanian service, became its local correspondent in Kosovo and also spent some time in England before returning to his homeland to press for Albanian rights and, eventually, independence.

In 1997, along with leading local journalist Baton Haxhiu, he launched Koha Ditore (Daily Times), a hard-hitting daily which not only attacked the Serbs but criticised the KLA and upset Mr Rugova - calling him weak, naive, a puppet of the United States and an obstacle to independence.

"Rugova is a big zero. He could have done something to get Veton released," Mrs Surroi said. Mr Rugova lost much of his popularity when he surfaced in Belgrade after Nato launched the air war and took part in a press conference alongside President Milosevic. Although he was apparently wheeled out under duress, his participation cost him credibility. And when Mr Rugova was later allowed to fly into exile, Mr Surroi's popularity soared as the man who stayed behind in his homeland.

His wife last saw him shortly before the air war began on 24 March. She had fled Pristina on 20 March, fearing the worst. He had met her in Skopje on his way back from Rambouillet but then went back to Pristina before the bombing began. "He knew the danger but he said he had to be there to protect the agreement he had signed," she said. "The last time he called, he asked to speak to the girls. He told them `I love you very much, everything's going to be okay and I'll see you soon'."

The night the Nato bombing started, the Serbs destroyed the Koha Ditore offices - its staff had earlier parted with the phrase "See you in free Kosovo" - and bayonetted its doorman to death. The paper's lawyer and his two sons were later detained and killed. Mrs Surroi learned from refugees that her apartment in Pristina had been occupied by Serb police or paramilitaries.

"When my neighbours went to see what was going on, they got rifles in their faces and the threat: `If you come back, you'll get one [a bullet] in the head'. They told me our local pharmacist had been killed and his head chopped off.

"Veton liked good food, good wine, Faulkner, opera, La Traviata, Tchaikovsky, Celtic music, jazz, blues, you name it," she said. "But he cared more about his people. He was an atheist but most Muslims still respected him," she said, before correcting her use of the past tense. "I mean he is an atheist. His favourite novel was Faulkner's As I Lay Dying but I believe he is alive. You have to believe that.

"Without his presence on the political scene, you feel a big vacuum. It's like Kosovo has been orphaned. I believe he stayed on to be a symbol, to protect his people. It's very possible he could have left if he wanted," said Mrs Surroi, whose first name is short for Aferdita. It's the Albanian version of Aphrodite but also means "the day is near". She believes the day of her husband's freedom, and of Kosovo's liberation, may not be that near but that both will come.

She said his last words to his daughters were: "`I want you to know that your papa is fighting for peace. He is fighting so that you can go safely to school, without humiliation, and that you can live a life of freedom'."