Unease underlies `normality' as the world closes in on Belgrade

On Kneza Mihailova, Belgrade's equivalent of Grafton Street, the old man in the green homburg still fiddles - as he did throughout the war - and itinerant vendors still hawk "target" T-shirts and postcards of war damage. "Rat i Mir" is the headline on a magazine cover - the Serbian words don't have quite the ring of War and Peace. "Happy Peace", says another, with a photograph of a Serb soldier sticking his tongue out.

The brown tape used to protect glass from explosions is jokingly referred to as "Windows 99", after the computer programme. Many Belgraders haven't got around to taking theirs down yet; it requires a lot of rubbing alcohol and elbow grease to remove the sticky residue.

But a profound unease underlies Belgrade's superficial normality. The malaise has a name, of course - Kosovo. In the suburb of Cerak, where post-war reconstruction taxes have driven small shops out of business, laundry hangs in the shopfront windows. There is a chronic housing shortage in the capital, so the government has moved Yugoslav army officers and their families from Kosovo into whatever buildings are available.

The Yugoslav media reports every statement - either Yugoslav or from those countries formerly referred to as "NATO aggressors" - encouraging Kosovar Serbs to return to their homes. But people do not pile up their belongings on top of cars, tractors and trailers and leave en masse unless they fear for their lives; 70,000 Kosovar Serbs have done so in the past three weeks. At most only 7,000 have obeyed the Belgrade government's order to go back. The authorities banned a protest by Serb refugees in the capital and have offered food, water and petrol to assist their return.

Their repatriation is of existential importance to President Slobodan Milosevic's regime, which claimed it preserved Serb sovereignty and territorial integrity by accepting the peace plan.

Serb television has covered the problem in Orwellian style. The departure of the refugees from Kosovo was not reported in the first place, so television viewers must wonder just who are the bus-loads of returning refugees to whom so much air time is devoted. After NATO was compared to Nazi stormtroopers during the bombardment, it would be hard to convince Serbs that the NATO-led Kosovo Force (Kfor) has their best interests at heart, so government broadcasts invariably refer to Kfor as a "United Nations force" that guarantees the "full security" of Serbs in Kosovo. Needless to say, the widespread revenge looting and burning of Serb homes in Kosovo is not mentioned. Nor are the murders of 50 Serbs in Kosovo in the past two weeks.

In Belgrade's only surviving mosque, a handful of Muslims are also hoping the Serb refugees will go back to Kosovo. The Muslims fear they might vent their frustration on the only symbol of Islam in Belgrade. Early in the war, a few nights after I interviewed the Mufti of Serbia, Hadj Hamdia Effendi Jusufspahic, someone threw a hand grenade at his house.

The mufti and his son Mustafa have just returned from an Islamic conference in Moscow. "We have the impression that Muslims are treated as equals in Russia," Mustafa Jusufspahic said. "In Moscow, the government has built five new mosques." In Belgrade, Muslims have vainly sought permission for their own graveyard for years. Mr Jusufspahic jokes that a Russian takeover of Serbia might not be such a bad thing. Ironically, Russian mercenaries and volunteers are accused by the US Pentagon of committing atrocities in Kosovo.

Before Kfor troops arrived in Kosovo on June 12th, foreign journalists and a large number of Yugoslav army officers co-existed in one of the world's filthiest hotels, the Grand Hotel in Pristina. The army got the lower rooms - safer from bombardment - while the press were lodged on the upper floors. The Yugoslavs took advantage of the "human shield" unwittingly provided by the press to store army trucks, jeeps and a communications van in the hotel's underground parking lot.

It was only this week in Belgrade that I learned that the Tigers militia - responsible for some of the worst atrocities in Kosovo - had also camped out in the Grand Hotel during the war. The group's leader Zelko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan, denied that his militia were in Kosovo, protesting that, "my army never go anywhere without me." During the NATO bombardment, he went out ostentatiously and almost nightly in Belgrade with his pop-singer wife and bodyguards in tow. To strengthen his alibi, Arkan went to restaurants frequented by foreign journalists.

During a night of heavy air raids, the militia leader and his entourage sat next to my table in the Writer's Club.

Now the Serbs are paying for the misdeeds of Kosovo's killers.

As Pristina comes back to life, one of the saddest reminders that revenge is not the same thing as justice is the omnipresent photograph of Ivan Celic, a skinny, 40-yearold engineer and father of four children who disappeared in Pristina on June 14th.

Mr Celic's mournful face looks out from leaflets that his wife has posted all over the city. Serb authorities claim 300 Serbs have been kidnapped by the Kosovo Liberation Army over the past year and are still missing. This may be a small fraction of the number of Albanians killed by Serbs, but it is sufficient to make the Serbs flee in their tens of thousands.

Those Serbs brave enough to stay in Kosovo discovered a sudden affection for their Albanian neighbours. "This is my best friend, and he's Albanian," a local Serb official named Radovan told me one morning in a Pristina cafe, after British troops had entered the city. He seemed to cling to the muscular, middle-aged Albanian.

Radovan had intervened on behalf of journalists when they were threatened by Serb paramilitaries at the beginning of the war, and when KLA guerrillas took over his apartment, a British reporter appealed to Kfor to get it back for him.

Sandra, an employee at the Serb media centre in Pristina, had wept profusely and vowed to leave when the "NATO aggressors" arrived. I ran into her days later, chatting happily on a mobile telephone on the `TV terrace' of the Grand Hotel. "I'm earning 10 times as much working for satellite television," she said.

"Anyway, the Brits will protect us." One of her female colleagues - already a refugee from the Croatian "cleansing" of Krajina in 1995 - shrugged and told me, "I was frightened, but now I've seen them (British Kfor troops) and they're tall and handsome."

Serb radio this week quoted an unnamed "American analyst" as saying that Kfor will now take the Yugoslav army's place in fighting "the Albanian separatist terrorists". There was gloating in Belgrade when German Kfor troops discovered a KLA torture chamber in Prizren. "Just wait, the Albanians will be begging for Serb rule again!" a Belgrade police officer said. "NATO will be too efficient for them. Let's see how they manage without veza (contacts), without bribes! Let's see how they like paying taxes for water and electricity!"

The ethnic Albanians' 10-year-old boycott of Yugoslav public services is one of Belgrade's grievances against them.

For the first time in eight years of wars, the Serbs are now losing control not of another republic in the Yugoslav Federation, but of an integral part of Serbia.

The announcement on Wednesday that Swiss banking authorities would seize any of Mr Milosevic's assets in their country was yet another sign that the world is closing in on Belgrade.

Shrinking Serbia is the theme of a popular joke: the first lady, Mrs Mira Markovic, gets up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet. She looks out the window and sees uniformed men surrounding the house. Fearing a coup, she wakes her husband, Slobodan Milosevic. "Don't worry darling," he tells here. "They're our border police."

After the torment of the past three months, life can only improve for the Kosovar Albanians. For the Serbs, it is a different story. Vesna, a secretary in the northern town of Novi Sad, believes her fellow Serbs have learned nothing from the 1999 Yugoslav war. "I think our most serious problem is that people have nothing left to lose," she says. "They are so poor - materially and spiritually - that whatever happens they will go back to the way they were before the war."

A publisher in Belgrade describes the deterioration of life under Mr Milosevic's rule as "the cooked frog syndrome". "In biology class we learned that if you throw a frog into boiling water it jumps out and survives," he explains. "But if you put it in a casserole of cold water and slowly raise the temperature to boiling, it will die. That is what has happened to us."