Cemerikic's own family exists on both sides of the conflict. His mother is in Belgrade, his son in Kentucky, a special forces soldier in the United States army, facing the possibility of being sent overseas if the conflict extends into ground troops - an idea, it was reported, that NATO is rapidly warming up to. Stanisic has three sisters, all in Serbia, including one who recently retired to her country of birth after living her adult life in Germany.
"We are not scared as much as nervous. It's nerves," says Cemerikic, who blames much of their uncertainty on the unreliability of American media. "[It's hard] to be watching this stupid television all the time. And I told to my wife, I don't want you to listen to CNN anymore, or NBC, I want you just to turn on the radio or turn on the computer and listen to the radio in Europe, hear something that's real."
Even more frustrated with war reportage is Milorad Ravasi, the voice of Serbian Radio in Chicago, whose Serbian-language station at AM-1080 has been dedicated since February to reports on the conflict. Ravasi and his daughter, Olga, won't answer any questions until I answer theirs: What do I know about the war? Why am I writing this? What are my biases?
"The reason I'm asking is that we've had American media not portraying the truth," explains Olga, a drama student at DePaul. "I've been on TV talking to people from CNN, Fox News. They take my time, and then what they show is thirty seconds of something that can go both ways, they leave out my whole main point. On one occasion, they even wrote that I was Albanian."
But what exactly is the truth of this war? Ethnic troubles in southern Europe have a long and storied history, but the current round can be dated to 1980, when the death of Josip Brosz Tito brought his thirty-five-year regime to an end. As a Communist dictator, Tito ruled Yugoslavia's six states - and all its religious and ethnic groups - with equal-opportunity ferocity. But the problems of Yugoslavia, a country slapped together in the aftermath of two world wars, could not be solved - only contained under Tito's iron fist.
After Tito's death, the swirling mass of resentment and centuries-old hatred erupted. As Communism began to fade, nationalism began to rise, its flames fanned by politicians like Slobodan Milosevic.
By 1989, amid fears of secession, Milosevic stripped Kosovo - by then nearly 90 percent Albanian - of its autonomy. The Serbian nation began actively rallying the cause of Serbians within the other republics, and in 1991 Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina responded by declaring independence from Yugoslavia. Fighting broke out among Croats, Muslims and Serbs, and in 1992 all-out war erupted in Bosnia. The Bosnian peace agreement ended the war in 1995, leaving the current jerry-rigged state of affairs: a Bosnian Serb Republic uneasily co-existing with the Muslim-Croat Federation.
Which brings us to Serbia, and the current round of violence. Many Serbians, both in the United States and overseas, will insist that NATO involvement is unjustified, because this conflict is nothing more than a civil war - two provinces in an autonomous nation duking it out. But even if you put aside the issue of ethnic cleansing, Kosovo's status as a Serbian province only goes back as far as Tito, and many scholars doubt whether Serbia has a valid historical claim to the region, though Serbs claim as a holy religious site. All of which begs the central question of the war.
"What is Kosovo exactly? Does Serbia have a legitimate claim? That is a core issue," says Jeff Harder, a communications professor at Loyola University. "Are we invading a country against its will, or are we aiding a nation escaping persecution? And most people have no understanding of that at all."
Though generally unsympathetic to Serbia's actions in Kosovo, Harder fears that American media are glossing over tangled political realities in favor of pictures that offer immediate impact-terrified refugees and screaming missile attacks, but little sense of history.
"We're trying so hard to get out there and tell people what's going on, and then someone who has that power to do it cuts and pastes around it and then we have nothing," Olga Ravasi says, "So much for freedom of speech, so much for democracy."
Like many Serbians, Milorad Ravasi and his daughter are suffering a mixture of anxiety and anger as the war continues. "We are extremely scared," says Olga. "This radio program is the only link with people from here to what's going on over there. The program goes on the air every day. It's portraying the other side. And I think more importantly, it's portraying the truth."
For the Ravasis and other Serbians, the truth means reporting that doesn't play into biases about the Balkan conflict as inevitable, or that paints the Serbs as villains. Of course, all-Serbian radio is bound to its own biases as well.
And of course, Albanian-Americans are suffering psychic tortures just as intense, if not more so. Reports of atrocities committed by Milosevic's forces are horrifying.
"The current figures of people who have been forced out of Kosovo are between 600,000 and 700,000, but the total number of people who have been displaced is 1.1 million," says Rudnick. "So within Kosovo there are something like 400,000 people who have been forced out, who are in hiding... who are just scattered about, hiding in hills, living in forests, living out in the open trying to avoid the Serbian military. There's another group who have been forced from their homes and whose fate we are not aware of."
These lost souls are the ones that local Albanians must worry for. "We have no connection with [the refugees], none at all," says Chicagoan Bedrije Limani, who has almost fifty blood relatives amongst Kosovo's scattered Albanian population. "Some members of my family are still inside Kosovo, [and] I don't know at all what's happened to them...there's a mountain where my cousin is, and [on the Internet] they say that sixty passed away there, but they don't give the names." Limani knows the camp in Macedonia where some of her family is, even knows which tent they are in. If she is successful in her efforts to bring them stateside, they will be among an expected influx of thousands of refugees to the Chicago area.
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copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.