Are we taking the war in Kosovo personal here at the Deseret News? Yes we are. Very personal.

It might be just another growing pain in the new Yugoslavia you read about on the way to the sports page, just another regrettable skirmish going on halfway around the world.But it's not.

Because we know somebody over there in the middle of it. We know Agron Bajrami, who sweated out deadlines with us here for a month last fall as part of an editor's exchange program. We know him and we like him.

He was the real thing. A chain-smoking, dark coffee-drinking, rock-and-roll-loving, bad sweater-wearing Eastern European with an accent straight out of a Bogart movie. He'd say things like "I know these things" and "You people know any good blues joints?"

Agron told us about his homeland. He told us of life there when he was a boy and Tito was loosely ruling Albanian-dominated Kosovo and the USSR was loosely ruling Tito. Not perfect but workable. Then came the fall of the Iron Curtain and the reign of the Serbian Slobodan Milosevic, whose motto is "If you're not like we are, too bad."

Milosevic cut such gaping swaths through the provinces of Bosnia and Croatia that for a while nobody even paid attention to the swath he was cutting through Kosovo.

But Bosnia and Croatia have taken their lumps and made their deals, and now it's just the Kosovars Milosevic has left to kick around.

Agron told anyone who would listen that Milosevic is a bully.

He would look at the reports that President Clinton "was looking into negotiations," and he would scoff.

"Negotiation will do nothing," he would say, and then he'd recount this scenario: Milosevic would pull back troops in the fall and the West would see it as a concession to peace, when in reality it was merely a chance to rest for the winter. Come springtime, the killing and intimidation would resume.

Agron couldn't have been more right if he'd predicted Denver to win the Super Bowl.

While he was here he made many friends and worked hard, but still you could see that he brooded over what was going on, or wasn't going on, back home.

He stayed for a time in the home of feature writer Elaine Jarvik in Holladay. Elaine remembers Agron sitting on the banks of Cottonwood Creek, chain-smoking and staring out at the banks. He would do that, just sit there and look and smoke and think.

The last time I saw Agron was just before Halloween last October. He was coming out of the Eddie Bauer store in the ZCMI Center, carrying some new purchases. That night he would be flying to New York and then back home.

"This place has good deals," he said, his voice registering surprise.

He must have gone to Nordstrom before Eddie Bauer.

His family would be the hippest people in Kosovo, I said. He smiled and agreed.

It was a pleasant image then, but six months later it isn't so pleasant. NATO is bombing Milosevic and Milosevic is bombing the Albanians, and Agron's family could as we speak be again out of their homes, on the move. They could now be the hippest refugees in Kosovo.

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Agron wrote our photo editor, Tom Smart, this past Tuesday.

"Things look very bad here," he said. "A lot of villages burned and a lot of refugees . . . right now I am stuck in my office because it is very dangerous to go outside. Three people have been killed this evening in town. It is 2 a.m. and I just can't sleep so I decided to write couple of e-mails and say hello to my American friends . . . I hope everything is OK with you. Say hello to everybody out there . . . All the best. Agron Bajrami."

It makes it a lot harder when the people in the sights have faces you know.

Send e-mail to benson@desnews.com, fax 801-237-2527. Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.

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