With a family who barely escaped persecution nine years ago in Peja, Kosovo, Luljeta Shanks is hopeful her home country’s declared independence will truly come to be.

Shanks, a 36-year-old Kosovo Albanian who moved to Lawrence two years ago, spoke with her family Saturday as they anticipated their independence from Serbia.

“That’s good, but are you sure?” she asked a cousin.

She watched Sunday on the Internet as thousands of Kosovo Albanians danced and cried in the streets. She said she’s excited but concerned for the future of her family and her homeland.

Now, just as her family rebuilt their home that was destroyed at the hands of Serbs, it is time for the whole nation to rebuild.

But it won’t be easy, and Shanks and her husband, Mike Shanks, a Lawrence police officer who worked for the United Nations in Kosovo for two years, know that all too well.

While Kosovo’s independence is formally recognized by a number of countries including the United States, the obstacles ahead are many. On Thursday, the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade was attacked by Serbian protesters who are against Kosovo’s independence.

Kosovo, formerly part of Yugoslavia, has been under United Nations control since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization drove out Serb forces in 1999. Historically, Serbs have viewed Kosovo as a holy land, which was lost to them in a 1389 battle, according to Marc Greenberg, professor and chairman of the Slavic Languages and Literature department at Kansas University.

“In historical retrospect, Serbs view this moment as a self-sacrifice in the service of Christian Europe by stopping the advance of Ottoman Islamic imperialism,” he said. “The immediate issue is an emotional one.”

Beginning in the late 1980s and into the late ’90s, Albanians were the target of nationalist sentiment under former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic. He allowed Serbian paramilitary groups to conduct an Albanian ethnic cleansing. On March 29, 1999, Luljeta Shanks was 27 when her family escaped an attack in her hometown. She said women and children were left alone and told to flee, but the men were killed. She witnessed a line of men shot in the woods behind her house and screamed to her family to run out the front. She said she gave her brother, who was 18 at the time, some clothing to make him look like a girl. Her father, who was 60, hunched over to look older and feeble.

“Everyone was walking and crying, saying ‘God help us,'” she said.

Hundreds of people walked to a gymnasium where they stayed for four days without food or water. She and her family, including her mother who was ill, eventually walked to Montenegro, a neighboring country to the west. The trek was mountainous and cold, and Luljeta Shanks was in tennis shoes walking in snow up to her hips, she said.

After three months, she and her family returned to Peja to rebuild their home, which had been destroyed. Her father and brother were two of eight men who survived and returned, she said. She continued work as a hairdresser at their family shop, which wasn’t destroyed, to help support her family.

The economic situation remains bleak, Mike Shanks said. The unemployment rate is high, wages are low and, Shanks said, human trafficking and prostitution are prevalent.