On Sunday, tens of thousands of people marched silently past the hillside villa where Ibrahim Rugova  died of lung cancer. He'd been a writer, a professor, a politician, and since 2002 the interim president of Kosovo; he died just days before negotiations in Vienna could pave the way to fulfill his 15-year goal of statehood for his people.

Kosovo has been a United Nations-administered province of Serbia-Montenegro since 1999. Rugova quietly led a non-violent resistance to the Serb-led government in Belgrade starting in 1990. But his political platform of pacifism wasn't always popular, as evidenced by the pogrom against Serbs by Kosovar Albanians in 2004. Even now, on the eve of the Vienna talks, where Kosovo is expected to be given "conditional independence," some factions in Kosovo would rather fight than follow Rugova's pacifist example.

If the mourning outside his home is any indication, however, most people in Kosovo respect his memory. Rugova had been a professor and a literary critic. He entered politics after rising to the head of Kosovo's writers' union in 1989 -- a post he deftly transformed into a platform for opposition against the repressive (and then-Communist) Slobodan Milosevic regime in Belgrade. In the same year he was elected to the head of the Democratic League of Kosovo, the Albanians' largest political party, which went on to form a shadow government and even raise voluntary taxes for independent hospitals and schools.

German newspapers on Monday -- in a fit of sentiment -- were comparing Rugova to Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and even Moses.

"In spite of the violence of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Rugova organized his people behind his politics of peace," writes the right-leaning daily Die Welt. "It's mainly thanks to him that Kosovars have not become the Palestinians of the Balkans." Still, militants could still ruin everything Rugova managed to build, cautions the paper. "One can only hope that his politics are anchored deeply enough in Kosovo that none of the rivals in the current power struggle come up with any dumb ideas. Anything is still possible in Kosovo."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung agrees. Its commentator quotes Kosovo's UN governor, Soren Jessen-Petersen, at a memorial session of parliament for Rugova. "'Rugova's vision is in your hands,'" he told Kosovo's leadership. "But he had already made clear that this assumes good conduct by the Kosovars," writes the paper. "The pogroms against the Serbs in Kosovo (and their historical churches and cloisters) in March 2004 went unacknowledged ... And the negotiation process could suffer a setback if Rugova's death leads to a long power struggle or even more violence."

However, the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung finds reason for hope. "It's not irreverent to say Rugova's death might make the negotiations in Vienna easier," write the editors. "The man in the silk scarf became a kind of monument to himself, turned to stone by his stubborn demand for Kosovo's independence." In the wake of Rugova's death, the paper warns, any compromise ideas for Kosovo short of statehood -- say, a three-way confederation with Serbia and Montenegro -- may not be politically possible.

The left-leaning Berliner Zeitung agrees. Extremists might grab at Rugova's death as their chance to sow fear and instability; but Rugova himself casts a long moral shadow. "Whoever replaces him will have trouble convincing his people to accept a compromise," writes the paper. "Woe to anyone who loses sight of the goal! Rugova wouldn't have given up! The extremists would hurl accusations of treachery. Rugova kept his party and people from agreeing to any compromise while he was alive, and now such a solution looks even less likely."

-- Michael Scott Moore
1:15 p.m. CET

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Democracy In the Middle East

The final results of the December elections in Iraq were finally released last week. The result was, as expected, a majority for a governing alliance made up of Shiite religious parties. But the majority is not decisive, meaning the Shiites will have to share power in some form of coalition government.

The results may have disappointed some politicians in Washington -- who were hoping Iraq's secular parties would come out ahead -- but things were far from as bad as they could be the German business daily Handelsblatt argues on Monday.  The Shiites, at least, will have to share power, so "the latent risk of Iraq drifting toward theocracy has been dampened, even if it isn't extinguished."

But still, the Sunnis have every right to fear being shut out of a government dominated by Shiites and Kurds, writes the paper. But most Sunnis apparently want to play politics, rather than fight in the streets. "The election results are no democratic gold standard," the editors admit. "Grievances are piling up. But this could prove to be a small problem, especially if Kurd and Shiite leaders dedicate themselves to a unified Iraq. The alternative is easy to predict."