The room was hot, crowded with the press. The air tasted of anticipation and sweat. On the screen, the parliamentarians voted, one by one. Ayes. Ayes. Ayes. Outside, Pristina’s streets were a river of red and black Albanian flags, a cacophony of car horns and chanting that had been building for days. But the pivotal moment, the legal transfer, happened somewhere else. It happened in an office.
After the vote, the text of the declaration was signed. Then it was fed into a fax machine. The mechanical whirr, the beep of a dial tone, the screech of transmission. The document traveled over phone lines to Serbia’s government in Belgrade, a formal notification to the state from which it was seceding. A modern severance, delivered by 20th-century technology. The sound of the fax was the sound of the point of no return.
Celebratory gunfire popped in the distance like faulty fireworks. The smell of roasting meat from impromptu street barbecues mixed with diesel exhaust. People wept, hugged strangers, their faces slick with tears and February chill. They waved flags so vigorously the fabric snapped in the air. But in foreign ministries from Moscow to Madrid, a colder process began. The fax forced a choice: recognize or reject. The streets felt the joy of a birth. The chanceries felt the headache of a precedent.