Haxhiu, the editor in chief of Kosovo's leading ethnic Albanian newspaper, Koha Ditore, is more than a local celebrity. He is back from the dead. Two weeks ago, NATO reported at its daily press conference in Brussels, Belgium, that Haxhiu, along with four other top Kosovo intellectuals, had been killed by Serbian forces after attending the funeral of top Kosovo Albanian human rights lawyer Bajram Kelmendi. Haxhiu describes the surreal experience of watching the press conference announcing his own death via satellite television in the basement of the Pristina apartment where he was hiding from the Serbian police during the NATO bombing.

"I was frozen," Haxhiu recounts. "I was watching the BBC. Every half-hour they reported I was killed. On CNN, I was watching my friends crying for me. Foreign journalists were doing reports about how they met me. The BBC reporter said I was dead because I was strong and a very good journalist. German ZDF television said I was killed because a few days before I was seen wearing a T-shirt that said 'NATO: Just Do It,'" he recalled.

Haxhiu is well known to journalists and diplomats who have covered Kosovo. He and his wife frequently took their 3-year-old son, with his wide face and long curly blond hair, out to dinner at a popular basement restaurant in Pristina called Hani's.

On Tuesday, coincidentally, at the table next to Haxhiu's at Arbi's cafe sat the burly, dark-bearded owner of Hani's, Fadil Dragaj, and his raven-haired wife, Merita. Their presence was equally miraculous. On March 22, two days before NATO started bombing Serbian forces, Fadil was shot five times and received a leg and back full of shrapnel when Serbian terrorists sprayed automatic weapons fire and threw a grenade into the Magic Café -- next to his restaurant -- where Fadil was enjoying an after-hours drink. Four days later, with part of his fingers missing, three ribs broken and the shrapnel still in him, Fadil, Marita and their little boy packed the car and headed for the border. Now they sit a little awkwardly in Arbi's cafe, chatting with friends.

Tetovo, Macedonia's second-largest city, has become the base for refugees like Haxhiu and Dragaj, leaders of Pristina's intellectual and cultural community, now expelled from Kosovo by a deliberate campaign of "ethnic cleansing." Haxhiu and other Kosovo journalists, artists and political activists are trying to quickly mend their own war wounds to provide hundreds of thousands of Kosovo refugees with a desperately needed cultural lifeline: a new newspaper to be distributed for free to the refugees in their camps. They aim to provide not only news, but a sense of community that has been destroyed overnight by their violent expulsion from their homes, towns, habits and homeland.

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