Prisoners of liberation

Five years after Nato went to war, Serbs are being ethnically cleansed in Kosovo, and the Albanians feel trapped. Andrew Gilligan tests the mood on the ground

Pristina

The village of Babim Most is virtually next door to the main road between Pristina and the north, but none of the inhabitants has set foot on it for months. From the houses, you can see the traffic streaming past, close enough to read the writing on the sides of the lorries, but the village is in a different world. Hardly anyone drives in, and no resident now drives out. Babim Most is a Serb island in an Albanian sea.

Kosta Danic, aged 70, is seriously ill and spends most of his time in bed in his kitchen. He is supposed to see the doctor every week, but the UN is too stretched to provide an escort, so he has stopped going. He says he last saw his daughter, who lives four miles away, 11 months ago. He rather hoped that things could not get any worse. Last week, of course, they did.

Babim Most has not been attacked by its Albanian neighbours. All the residents are still alive, the houses untorched, even the school still open, with the help of a tank in the playground. There are no physical barriers to the rest of the world. But everyone in the village is now imprisoned by their own knowledge of what happened last week in Svinjare, another Serb settlement, a few miles down the road.

'It's partly a question of numbers,' says Mr Danic. 'There are about 800 of us here, which is slightly too many to attack at the moment. There were only about 500 in Svinjare.' Svinjare is now a burned-out shell, its residents sleeping on mattresses in a French army base. It was one of six Kosovo Serb enclaves ethnically cleansed last week in the wave of Albanian violence which killed 28, injured 600 and displaced 3,500 Serbs from their homes.

Babim Most's main problem this week, apart from fear, is food. The village shop, the only one the locals dare use, hasn't had a delivery for ten days and is down to tins, packets and a few sausages. Mr Danic only eats soup. which has run out. There used to be a special bus into the nearest Serb town, but last week it stopped coming. Some of the villagers do have cars, but they still have the Yugoslav number-plates which mark them out as Serbs. You could take those off, of course, but then the question is likely to arise: why did you take off your number-plates? You could apply for the new Kosovo plates, but you do not consider yourself a citizen of Kosovo. So what you probably end up doing is this: you drive your car up and down the halfmile of road that remains open to you, venting your anger by blowing your horn.

As I write, down the street from my hotel thousands of Kosovar Albanians are venting more happily, celebrating exactly five years since the beginning of the war that liberated them from their Serb oppressors. Straight after that war, the Albanians became the oppressors. and 200,000 Serbs, the vast majority, were expelled from Kosovo. Many have seen last week's violence, described by the Nato commander Admiral Gregory Johnson as 'orchestrated', as the beginning of the final act, an anniversary attempt to remove the last 40,000 Serbs from their remaining Babim Most-style pockets in the Albanian south of Kosovo. At least in part, it probably was.

But there was another dimension to it. In some ways, the Kosovar Albanians, too, are trapped in a kind of pocket. A much larger and better one, certainly, than that inhabited by those Serbs, but still a pocket, a pocket called Kosovo. Many Albanians feel imprisoned in a place which is politically and economically stagnant.

Returning here after a three-year absence, I am struck by how little real change there has been. In Pristina, Mother Teresa Street (named after the world's only famous Albanian) now boasts the ultimate in Euro traffic-management chic, a bus lane. There are even several buses to run in it. A few black-glass office buildings have appeared, and also the odd cashpoint, busy with British squacidies trying out their credit cards. Posters from Britain's Department for International Development warn of the dangers of child labour. But Kosovo's problem is that there isn't nearly enough adult labour.

The industrial areas around the province are still wrecked. Privatisation, which was supposed to create wealth, has stalled. Unemployment is about 60 per cent. The main growth industry appears to have been bad restaurants, in which Kosovo's jobless youth sit three to a drink. (There is an informal competition among the hacks to find the place with the crassest possible name. The Independent's Kim

Sengupta cleaned up by discovering an establishment called the Pizzeria Nazi.) At the Cafe Arse, right by the new barbedwire peace line in divided Mitrovica, four members of a handball team complain that there is no work. By the end of our conversation, they are speaking nostalgically of Communist full employment. I never imagined that I would hear Kosovar Albanians harking back, however indirectly, to the golden clays of Slobo. 'This violence was as much against the UN as against the Serbs,' said one of the team. Faruk Mujka. 'After five years, we expected more from them.'

The surprise and dismay of the 'internationals' who rule Kosovo as their compounds came under attack, their white four-wheel-drives going up in flames and two of their policemen were shot dead was poignant. Until last week, they thought they were doing all right. Nato was planning further troop cuts; many checkpoints which protected Serb areas had already gone. Rather as the Metropolitan Police did in the 1970s, boring old peacekeepers on the beat were replaced with periodic visits from KFOR's equivalent of the panda car. The EU thought it had a solution for the Mitrovica problem, though the people of Mitrovica, when asked, disagreed. The UN has a constellation of well-meaning bodies trying to develop 'civil society', but no number of regional information technology support units, ombudsperson training programmes and the like could compensate for the lack of a clear economic and political strategy.

It is easy to sympathise with the UN on the latter. What both the Serbs and Albanians want so impatiently is some kind of resolution of Kosovo's 'final status'. But there is simply no palatable option. Full independence within Kosovo's existing borders, the Albanian demand, would never be acceptable to the northern slice of Kosovo where Serbs are a majority. and would probably lead to the ethnic cleansing of the Serb pockets further south. It also has worrying implications for the stability of Macedonia, with its 25 per cent Albanian minority, and indeed for other borders throughout the Balkans. Belgrade's tacit position (dressed up as 'decentralisation' or `cantonisation') edges towards partition, with the north going effectively to Serbia and the south effectively becoming independent. But that would cause essentially the same problems with ethnic cleansing and Macedonia.

Partitionists have been growing in number since last week. The violence proves, they say, that Albanians and Serbs simply cannot live together, or even adjacently. The ethnic cleansing that has taken place in the last ten days in the southern pockets further tilts Kosovo towards de facto partition anyway, as it was intended to. But although nearly 4,000 Serbs have been displaced from their homes, that is still a small part of the total number remaining in the southern pockets. Tentative signs are emerging that some of the displaced are starting to return, or at least looking to return. Since last Thursday, there has been only one further incident — the killings of two UN policemen — and there has been a mass population movement of disappointed journalists in the direction of the airport. Things do not yet seem to have reached a tipping-point.

Nor would partition be an entirely painless operation for the Albanian camp. Cabra, the Albanian village where three boys drowned last week, setting off the violence, is surrounded by Serbs and would probably find itself on the wrong side of the line, ethnically cleansed for the second time in a decade. Every house in Cabra is post-Kosovo war: in the fields round the village, you can still see the metal shipping containers where people lived while they rebuilt their homes. But without some final status solution, can Albanian impatience be contained, or will it some day overwhelm the UN and KFOR? The UN should take comfort from the fact that the majority of Albanians are, at least at present, talking about jobs rather than political structures. It should try much harder to get the economic stagnation, at least, reversed.

The wish for clean, neat solutions is a bit of a Balkan curse, especially when they turn out less clean and neat than anticipated. The best approach in Kosovo might also be the weediest and most boring: to muddle along with an improved version of the mixture as before. Keep up the increase in troop numbers even after the newspapers have lost interest, work harder at stopping anti-Serb discrimination, pay more attention to detail and, frankly, cross our fingers and hope for the best. Not a great outlook for the villagers of Babim Most but maybe better than the alternatives.

Andrew Gilligan is defence and diplomatic editor of The Spectator.