In more peaceful times, Bujku (Farm Worker) was about what its name suggests -- farming. It was a monthly in Yugoslavia's Kosovo Province in southern Serbia, on the Albanian border. Kosovo has a population that is 90 percent Albanian, and in those days Bujku ran Albanian-language stories about crop harvests and farm machinery.

Today, Bujku is a daily political journal, covering such things as police brutality and underground schools and chronicling Kosovo's struggle for independence from the Serbs. One of the last surviving Albanian-language publications in the province, it is hanging on by a thread.

Bujku's transformation came in response to the Serb-imposed "state of emergency" in Kosovo. In July 1990, nearly a year before Croatia and Slovenia broke from the Yugoslav federation, Kosovo's parliament declared independence from Serbia. In response, Serb authorities abolished the Kosovo parliament and introduced apartheid-like restrictions. Albanian schools were closed, Albanian workers were dismissed en masse from their jobs, and Albanian villages were attacked in police raids.

In addition, Kosovo's Albanian-language daiily, Rilindja (Renaissance), was banned for allegedly inciting the independence movement. In response, journalists transformed Bujku into a daily. However, the authorities soon found a new way to subdue Kosovo's press. In December 1992, the Serbian state took over management of Rilindja Publishing House, publishers of all Albanian-language papers and magazines in Kosovo. They renamed it Panorama and began charging astronomical rents. The Albanians tried to resist, but finally gave in and paid the rent. The resulting financial squeeze forced all the publications but Bujku to shut down. (Recently, however, with the help of the Soros Foundation, two political weeklies were resurrected.)

The authorities do not censor Bujku but, through Panorama, wield absolute control over printing and distribution. Only 10,000 copies are printed daily, compared with Rilindja's former daily circulation of 120,000. Meanwhile, editors and reporters say they have been subjected to interrogation, arrest, and worse. In May 1992, reporter Behar Zogiani led three other Bujku staffers to the village of Leshan to investigate an incident that left a young Albanian man and a Serb policeman dead. On the second day of the Bujku team's visit, Zogiani says, police stopped the reporters' car and forced Zogiani to read out loud the story he had filed the previous day. Then they were taken to a police station, he says, and beaten for more than an hour.

"They told us, 'You can write about how the police are beating the Albanians,'" recalls Zogiani, who was bedridden for two weeks afterward.

Why does the Serb government allow Bujku to exist at all? Some Albanians, including Bujku reporter Evliana Berani, say that the Serbs are preserving the paper so they can claim that the Albanians have their own free press.

Editor-in-chief Ruzhdi Demiri, however, argues that Bujku is tolerated, despite its challenges to Serb authority, because it is "committed to a peaceful solution in Kosovo." Without the newspaper, he says, the Albanian independence movement could grow more extremist. The Serbs, Demiri suggests, want to avoid the potential result -- a war in Kosovo that might well spread, compounding the chaos in the Balkans.

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