Saturday, February 16, marked the birth of my country: the Republic of Kosovo. I am elated that I will no longer be one of two million Kosovar Albanians who have been treading the thin line between refugee and resident of a United Nations protectorate. This has been long in coming.

Kosovo Independence ends a long and harsh journey for my people. When the NATO bombing started in March of 1999, and the Serbian forces ethnically cleansed my country, my family and I became refugees, fleeing over the mountains into Albania. We were the lucky ones. Our Albanian relatives accommodated us generously, and amid thousands of civilian deaths, our burned house and pillaged apartment seemed like insignificant losses.

As we rejoice in our newly earned freedom, we also must pay tribute to the innocent victims of this conflict. On this particular day, I will remember my 17-year-old friend, Ilir, who was among the thousands of Albanian civilians abducted and shot by Serbian police forces. I will feel afresh the agony of his mother, who for a long time hoped that her missing son was alive, only to be informed years later that a skeleton found on a massive grave in Serbia was his. Kosovo’s birthday should be a day when we evoke the memories of victims regardless of their ethnic background.

As we celebrate the long journey to freedom, this should also be a day of atonement, Kosovo’s own Yom Kippur. This is our opportunity to seek and offer forgiveness. I will mark this day by trying to forgive my Serbian neighbors for pillaging my apartment and the paramilitary Serbian forces for burning down the house that my father so patiently and stubbornly is trying to rebuild still. In turn, I ask for forgiveness for the moments when my own people, wrapped up in the idea of their victimhood, switched the role from victim to perpetrator, and so merely enacting the long known chronicle of revenge.

Even as we rejoice in our new state, we know that there is much work that remains to be done for Kosovo, if this state is to become a modern, liberal democracy with equal rights and opportunities for all. The new Kosovo will be the poorest country in Europe, with a 40% unemployment rate and with almost half of its citizens living under the poverty line. Retirees here will receive an equivalent of $50 a month.

My new country will remain deeply divided along ethnic lines. While we Kosovars rejoice at our newly found freedom, the Serbian government will continue to claim that “there is no Serbia without Kosovo,” and will do its best to defy the secession of a region it calls its “spiritual cradle.” Our country’s birth will not bring an instant end to conflict in this region that has been hardened by prejudice and mutual distrust among ethnic groups.

I remember when I went to a summer camp and a Serbian boy came up to me and casually asked where I kept my knife. I was 13 years old. His parents had told him that all Albanians walk around carrying knives lest they miss an opportunity to slaughter a Serb. All summer long he called me derogatory names, and allow me to confess, I retaliated in kind.

I came back to Prishtina after that summer only to find out that the Serbian government had closed my school under the pretext that Albanian children were being taught the wrong version of Balkan history. We bravely protested while the Serbian policemen threw tear gas and swung their batons at us.

My mother also lost her job as a government employee that summer. She had apparently committed an unforgivable blunder refusing to enlist in Slobodan Milosevic’s political party, the same organization that was spearheading the ethnic apartheid.

I experience these ethnic stereotypes to this day, constant reminders of the hatred ingrained within the Albanian and Serbian communities and harshened by economic and political tensions.

In my newly independent country there is a history that haunts our memory and lives like a stinging wound that, stubbornly refuses to heal. But we must make it heal. Having been on the receiving end of violence, I remind myself that suffering confers no privileges.

The future of the world’s newest country will depend upon what we make of our suffering. I hope we can be brave and wise enough to grasp this opportunity to put behind us the long chronicle of revenge that has marked the Balkan peninsula. It is how we exercise our newly won freedom that will determine our future.

Mr. Xharra is from Kosovo and is pursuing his graduate degree in business management at Boston University.