The town hall in Malisevo is now a bunker, the last Serbian outpost in the sea of destruction that is now most of central Kosovo.

It is blackened and battered with the main entrance blocked by sandbags and a wooden command post. Around it every single building has been burned, bombed or shelled. Some by the market have been utterly flattened.

Malisevo was where the rebels of the mostly ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army raised their standard.

This summer the Yugoslav Army and the Serbian paramilitary police stormed back, retook the little town and burnt and smashed every building in the place.

Now it is one of the key command posts on the vital highway linking the capital Pristina with the old capital of Prizren in the south-west of the province.

Hotel Serbia

The dilemma of the local Serbs, police and framers, hanging on here, is now the heart of the Kosovo crisis.

A Serb police reservist in the village of Orlate

"We had a lot of shooting earlier this month, but things have become quieter recently," says the blue-eyed square faced commander of the Malisevo outpost, which has the words Hotel Serbia scrawled over the front door.

"Two of my policemen were killed this summer, and another two in the auxiliary teams. It goes hard to lose your mates."

For 'auxiliary teams', read local militia who have been blamed for some of the worst atrocities committed in Kosovo this summer - though undoubtedly killers from both the Albanian and Serb communities have been involved in the gruesome rites of local spite and vengeance.

'We will have to work with the other side'

So, I ask, how does the captain think it will all end in this broken land?

He is diplomatic, for he is from Serbia itself and not a local. "It will end as these things always end, everything starts with politics and ends with politics. It doesn't depend what the people here do."

Finally I ask if the diplomatic policeman will give me his name.

"No, no name," is the terse reply. "We will have to work with the other side again some time soon."

'We love our land'

Velika Martic is a local Serb who is not sure that the Serbs and Albanians of Kosovo can ever live together again.

This May she was driven from the village of Bratotin, where she had lived from birth 65 years ago, by Albanians at gunpoint.

Grieving relatives of one of the killed policemen

I found her in a flat near the police base in Orahovac, the scene of another ferocious battle this summer. Three of her sons are paramilitary policeman.

"Life was wonderful in Bratotin, we had five hectares or orchard and vineyard. Until this year we got on really well with our Albanian neighbours. We used to celebrate together, and join in the parties for weddings and births.

"They demanded we handed over the weapons we were given to defend ourselves, and when we refused they took everything, the three cows and the horse. We lost everything. If I had the money I would leave, go far away now."

This brings a rebuke from her stern-faced daughter, Smiljana, 26: "Every one of us young people wants to stay because we love our land here."

Cradle of Serb nationalism

Kosovo has been sacred land to Serb nationalists for six centuries.

It was here that the Serb nation was baptised in the defeat of Prince Lazlo at the Field of the Black Birds at Kosovo Polje on 28 June 1389 by the Ottoman Turks.

This became the symbol of resistance to Turkish rule which ended in the last century with formal recognition of Serbia as an independent state in 1878.

But throughout the centuries the Serbs of Kosovo have trickled away, dwindling to about 150,000 now.

The Kosovar Albanians on the other hand are among the fastest growing ethnic groups of Europe - and demography is at the heart of many of the tensions in the Balkans today.

Families of 10 or 12 are quite common among them, and in the villages farms are worked by extended families of up to 40 close blood relations.

'It is up to God'

One of the loneliest Serb outposts in western Kosovo is the little 12th Century monastery of Svetic Vrac at Zostice. It sits in a hillside above a little village of walled farmsteads shaded by tall poplars and plane trees and watered by a clear mountain stream.

It must have been a prosperous little place, but now each farm is charred and burned. First came the KLA and then the Serbs, turning the village to a corpse.

In the monastery garden, over fiery rakia and honey, Brother Jeromonah Romilo - a 27-year-old monk with face and fingers as long and thin as a saint in an icon - tells me of the day he and his six fellow monks were taken prisoner by the KLA after a morning of bombardment in July.

After a month the Red Cross managed to get him released. He and four monks returned.

"This was more popular with the Albanians as a shrine for miracles," the monk tells me with a quiet smile.

"The Albanians always helped us here, with our harvests and our work."

What will happen now, will there be peace, I ask.