Agron Bajrami is alive. He is OK.
The 30-year-old Kosovar journalist with ties to Salt Lake City has been in hiding. He is separated from his family. His newspaper office in Pristina, the Kosovar capital, has been destroyed, his printing house burned.He lives day to day in a rented flat with a half-dozen colleagues in neighboring Macedonia, unsure when the money to live and to do his work will run out.
But he is alive, although not entirely out of harm's way.
Bajrami is in Skopje, just over the border from his war-ravaged homeland -- and his story puts a very human face on the worrisome conflict in Kosovo.
"I am in Macedonia," he told a Deseret News reporter Monday from a telephone nearly 6,000 miles away. "I am working. We are a newspaper in exile."
Seven months ago, the deputy editor for Kosovo's largest Albanian daily newspaper was in Salt Lake City with an ear on the police scanner and an eye on city council meetings during a monthlong visit to the Deseret News.
He stayed with a West Jordan family, traded experiences with local reporters and editors, learned American culture.
But after a month, he was gone -- having returned to his tumultuous homeland and to his job as an editor at the Koha Ditore (which means the Daily Times).
When he left the Deseret News offices for the last time, a staff member stopped Bajrami to wish him well. "I'm sorry you have to go back to all that trouble," she said.
"It's my home," Bajrami said. "I have to go."
A few e-mails followed, but shortly afterward, Bajrami disappeared. Electronic mail went unanswered.
Utahns who met the pleasant, thoughtful man worried. Their concerns intensified with "official" reports that Bajrami's editor had been murdered by Serb paramilitary forces in a roundup of intellectuals.
For months there was no word.
On Monday, Bajrami told a reporter and editor at the Deseret News how he is managing life in the troubled region.
He talked about the newspaper he and his colleagues are struggling to put out every day. He spoke of his time in hiding and of the media manipulation by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic during his offensive against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
When Bajrami returned to Kosovo in early November, he spent each day working, putting out 60,000 copies of the newspaper and waiting for the political situation to boil out of control.
Tensions already were fierce and reports seemed to intensify of atrocities performed by Milosevic's paramilitary units trying to carry out ethnic cleansing of the region.
When first NATO bombs fell, Serbs retaliated in the country. In the fray, the small building that housed Bajrami's newspaper offices was "demolished." A night watchman was killed. Equipment and computers worth $200,000 were ruined.
The greater loss occurred when the printing house that published the newspaper also was burned, with damage exceeding $500,000.
Bajrami's colleagues weren't injured in conflict that occurred in those first days, but all went into hiding, fearing for their safety.
"Our newspaper was the greatest enemy to Slobodan Milosevic," he said. "We were not safe."
Bajrami and two others sought refuge in the flat of a six-person family, where he stayed for 30 days before he escaped.
"I had to leave. It was getting to be too much, just sitting there doing nothing, waiting for the paramilitary to come to your door. Psychologically, no one could take that."
He spent one day as a refugee in a camp before friends got him out.
Nearly immediately, Bajrami went to work.
Today he is part of staff of 40 writing and printing a newspaper distributed free to some of 790,000 ethnic Albanian refugees forced from their Yugoslavian homes and in camps across the border in Macedonia.
"It is dedicated to the same people it was in Kosovo," he said. "The issue is to keep the deported people informed of whatever has happened with Kosovo."
Ten thousand copies of the newspaper are distributed in the camps every day.
It is almost impossible to get information from inside Kosovo, Bajrami said, so the paper publishes mainly stories retold by the refugees.
"There are thousands of stories. We publish their stories . . . whatever has happened to them. They feel better when they read them."
His mother and father are still in Kosovo and are safe, Bajrami says. But members of his extended family have been driven out. His cousin was killed.
Work has been his savior.
"It is a way of surviving," he says. "If you can't work, you are nothing. You probably would want to kill yourself."
His work provides money for food, but life is far from worry-free.
The newspaper has two offices, both funded by the British and French governments; the one in which Bajrami works has one phone, one computer. Another larger office in western Macedonia has more equipment: 15 computers, for example.
But Bajrami worries money is going to run out before the conflict is over. He worries about the safety of sources and contacts identified on business cards he left behind in the Pristina office.
"Being a journalist in the Balkans is often more dangerous than being a soldier," he said. "This is not a safe haven."
It was believed Bajrami's Albanian-born editor, Baton Haxhiu, 33, had been killed, but those rumors turned out to be false.
His editor was harassed by police, but widely circulated rumors of his death were part of a campaign in Pristina to sow fear among the population.
It is unclear how the rumor started, but even a NATO spokesman reported Haxhiu's death, Bajrami said.
"It's another way of planting fear and making (refugees) leave."
Today Bajrami lives in a rented flat with six newspaper colleagues. They may be thrown out soon. He says he lives day to day, concerned only about getting today's newspaper out to some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who will read their own stories.
The temporariness of his situation is no longer distressing. "Once you are driven out of your house, it is easier to pick up and move again," he said.
Bajrami is back on the Internet. He has reconnected with the world.
He hasn't seen all of the media coverage coming out of Kosovo but believes most of it is accurate. "But I personally hate the analysis coming from some people," he said.
The recent talk of halting the conflict for peace talks won't work. "Some people are talking about 'give peace a chance' " Bajrami said.
"Are they forgetting what happened a few weeks ago?" he asks, referring to reports this winter of gruesome executions of ethnic Albanians.
"This is a war that should be fought to the end; otherwise, it will only arise again. Once and for all, it has to be over."