Ten years after thousands of young Kosovar Albanians risked their lives to fight against Slobodan Milosevic’s oppression and to win independence, Kosovo’s young well-educated professionals are holding back Kosovo’s future by fearing to take risks.

 
I just spent a week in Kosovo with Brad Faber, a member of the Illinois Bar and a former student who is using his education and experience in U.S. agriculture to develop a strategy for Kosovo to realize benefits from its thousands of rural acres and its thousands of family farms. As he and I talked to farmers, agricultural policy experts, NGOs, ministers of government, and young people who constitute civil society and a growing entrepreneurial class, my view was reinforced that independent Kosovo, 150-days after independence, faces the following reality:

1. The Thaçi Government is doing a very good job; forging a coherent leadership of public institutions under the firm direction of the Prime Minister. He is willing to take the risk of making himself accountable for results.
2. Actual construction of power plant Kosovo C remains the only credible action to deal with Kosovo’s ongoing energy crisis and to generate income from electricity exports. This has been studied to death. It is long past time to put the first shovels into the ground. The Thaçi Government can prove its mettle by sweeping aside the doubters and proceeding with construction forthwith.
3. Completion of Kosovo’s part of the road to Durres, Albania is overdue; construction on all segments should start immediately.

Kosovo’s cultural assets, especially, the breathtaking film-making work being done by Blerim Gjoçi at Prishtinafilm and his 911 festival, and the drama by Jeton Neziraj at the National Theatre and Florent Mehmeti and Lirak Çelaj at Theatre Oda deserve far more prominence, both within and outside Kosovo. In my last column, I explained why new states like Kosovo benefit from exporting their art, music, and sport to build a foundation for foreign support on political issues.
 
But an insidious threat to Kosovo’s future must be addressed as well, and it is a much more difficult challenge than building a power plant or roads or exporting movies, plays and songs because it lies in the hearts of some of Kosovo’ most important human assets: the young people who have benefited from good education. It is as though, as architect Toni Kukalaj put it last summer, “They put our fighting hearts in jail.” The jail doors opened on 17 February, but too many hearts are still inside.
 
Throughout Kosovo, young professionals complain about government and the political class, but resist getting involved in government or in a political party. A group of young men in a Germia bar playing pool with a young American talked about how they were good friends but would not risk a business venture with each other because they would not trust one another with their money.  Further south, 16 villagers told the story of forming an agricultural insurance cooperative only to lose all their money when four of their partners said the money was “gone” without offering any credible explanation. They planned to take no action to investigate further or to seek redress or impose punishment on those who had cheated them. They did not want to “make trouble.” A young designer railed about the difficulties of doing business in countries that have not recognized Kosovo but could not explain why he was not active in the forty-five that have. In far too many conversations about an idea for a new business, a policy initiative, or a young person’s career, the first instinct is that the government must do something: until the government acts—by granting a subsidy, eliminating corruption, limiting imports, getting more recognition—nothing is possible and there is no use to try.
 
This is manifestly false. To believe it is to undermine Kosovo’s future. The first step is not government action; it is individual initiative; an individual willingness to take risk; to confront the possibility of losing favor with one political party if one supports another; of jealousy from one’s friends if one succeeds; of losing investment in what seemed like a good entrepreneurial idea.
 
Or the discomfort in pursuing instances of corruption in one’s own village or extended family. If a group of twenty friends are not brave enough to go after four business partners who steal the investment made by the other sixteen partners, how can the government be expected to eliminate corruption at the higher levels of business and politics? Kosovars want foreign investors to risk investing in Kosovo but they are unwilling to take the risk of confronting their friends and neighbors who steal from them. If this remains the attitude, is there any hope that they would help a foreign investor protect his investment if their four friends steal it?
 
This timidity is not universal, of course. It was eclipsed by uncommon bravery and resourcefulness in the KLA and elsewhere during the war.  And it is not universal now. One thinks of Kastriot Jahaj, a reporter for Koha Ditore, whose fearlessness as a professional journalist was chronicled in a video documentary made on Independence Day. One thinks of Luan and Driton Dalipi and Ardian Jashari who left their safe and well-paying jobs at international and governmental organizations three years ago to start the now-highly successful and widely respected MDA strategic business consulting firm, or Petrit Kelmendi and his fellow AUK students who have already started Big advertising agency, or the Shala family, which runs the state-of-the-art Dea water bottling plant near Gjilan and is successfully pursing a carefully focused and sophisticated business development strategy.
 
The problem is not that no one in Kosovo is taking risk; some are. The problem is that too many have the talent but are afraid to put it on the line for Kosovo’s future.
 
The need for bravery did not end with the end of the war; bravery will continue to define Kosovo’s future.
 
 
Mr. Perritt is Professor of Law at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. You can find more about his work in Kosovo at operationkosovo.kentlaw.edu