BBC News Online: Special Report

Eyewitness: Kosovo's divided communities

In some parts of Kosovo, ethnic Albanians have already come home, and towns are beginning to spring back to life. Others are still deserted.

In some places, Nato troops are everywhere, and the fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army are nowhere to be seen. In other places, you do not see much of Nato, but the KLA are everywhere.

War and messy peace

The peace in Kosovo is, perhaps inevitably, a messy one.

The Nato air campaign is officially ended, so is the state of war in Serbia. But here in Kosovo, it does not yet feel like a real peace. People are still being killed, mainly Serbs this time, and there are many who still fear for the future.

In Djakovica, a local doctor, Burim Gojani, told me he would never forget the fear he felt during the eleven weeks of war. And he said he thought it might be a year before the anger of Kosovo's Albanians had subsided sufficiently for the Serbs who have fled to return in safety.

In the ancient Serb religious centre of Pec, the traditional seat of the Patriarch of the Serb Orthodox Church, some local Serbs have sought sanctuary in the monastery, while a Nato tank stands guard outside.

One tough looking young man inside said that even if the Serbs do have to leave now, they will come back, perhaps not for a hundred years, but come back they will.

Fatema Boshnyaku, a teacher in Jacovica, told me how she had survived during the Nato air attacks. She was known to the Serb authorities as an Albanian political activist, so when she did venture out of her home, she could do so only disguised as an old woman, wearing her mother's clothes.

She used to feel much safer when she could hear the Nato war planes overhead, she said, because on the nights when Nato were in the air, the Serb paramilitaries stayed off the streets. "Those planes were my only company," she told me with a smile.

Reconstruction

Kosovo is now more divided than ever. Both communities have felt fear, everyone feels they are victims. One hundred thousand Kosovo Albanians have already returned to their homes, but 50,000 Serbs have moved in the opposite direction. There is an enormous reconstruction task ahead, and it is the international community which will have to pay for it.

Roads and bridges have to be rebuilt, power and water supplies have to be re-established, but the most difficult task will be persuading the people of Kosovo that there is a future here for both Serbs and Albanians.

Some are already looking back fondly at the days when President Tito ruled Yugoslavia, and Kosovo enjoyed a large degree of autonomy within a federal republic.

Those days are now long gone and they will not return. But somehow or other, a way will have to be found for a stable Kosovo to be created in a region notorious for instability.

The betting here is that the multinational K-For peace keeping force is likely to be in business for a long time yet.

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Internet Links

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Kosovo Crisis Centre
Serbian Ministry of Information

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In this section

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K-For 'lacks will' to protect Serbs
Nato chief: No single ethnic Kosovo
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Balkans environment 'seriously damaged' (From Sci/Tech)
UN chief makes first Kosovo visit
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Freed Britons arrive home
Violence flares in Kosovo
Draskovic attends crash victim's funeral
Kosovo mass grave unearthed
Kosovo Gypsies stranded on border
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Nato assesses Kosovo lessons
Montenegro sues for 'coup'
Babies die in Kosovo aftermath (From Health)
Pope calls for Balkan harmony
Kosovo Corps - an army for Kosovo?