They want the mines, the Trepca mines. How many times before and during NATO's bombardment of Yugoslavia I heard Serbs claiming that the West's "aggression" was a plot to seize the vast mineral wealth in and around Mitrovica.
On August 14th, soldiers from the NATO force in Kosovo, KFOR, acting at the request of the UN administrator, Dr Bernard Kouchner, marched into the lead and zinc foundry at Zvecan and took it over. Now that Slobodan Milosevic's rule appears to be finished, it may be easier to resolve the mines' future.
Mr Milosevic had kept the smelter running, although it spewed hazardous lead for miles around. Two French soldiers from KFOR had to be sent home with lead poisoning, and 76 were found to have reached the danger level of more than 40 micrograms of lead per 100 millilitres of blood. "The dust in the schools was pure lead," Dr Kouchner said. "Close to 200 people were hospitalised every year with saturnism (lead poisoning). There was lead in the salad and vegetables."
Cleaning up the environment of northern Kosovo was the stated goal of the raid on Zvecan, and it marked the first time Dr Kouchner exerted his authority in the northern Serb enclave. But it cannot have escaped Dr Kouchner's attention that the mines were an important source of revenue for Mr Milosevic. KFOR officers said Belgrade was extracting gold and silver from Zvecan but not the lead.
Nor has the tremendous economic potential of the mines gone unnoticed. At Zvecan, the miners of Mitrovica produced 175,000 tonnes of lead, 80,000 tonnes of zinc, up to 200 tonnes of silver, 122 tonnes of bismuth and 680 kilos of gold every year. The three foreign companies which have formed the a consortium to explore restarting the mines are treated as if they were charitable institutions for investing $16 million in the project.
They are not the first foreigners to take an interest. The British ran Trepca from 1926 until 1939, when it was taken over by Nazi Germany until the end of the war. Trepca became the most profitable business in former Yugoslavia, with thousands of employees. Dr Kouchner has put 3,300 of them on the UNMIK payroll.
Dr Kouchner calls Trepca "the only remaining Stalinist KOMBINAT in the world, a dinosaur with 23 activities all linked to each other". Only seven or eight will eventually be profitable, he adds. He emphasises the deplorable state of the complex - the dangerous air pressure at the bottom of the tunnels; the broken cables in lift shafts going 600 metres below the surface.
Sixty per cent of Trepca's miners were ethnic Albanians, until they went on a hunger-strike when Mr Milosevic revoked Kosovo's autonomy in 1989. Since then, the mines were Serbrun, and according to the Serbs the complex belongs to Beogradska Banka, Jugobanka, several small Serb companies, and a French and a Greek company.
The Albanian leader Mr Ibrahim Rugova claims Trepca belongs to Kosovo, more than 95 per cent of whose population are now Albanians.
"When you realise what the Trepca mines represented for all of Yuoslavia, you can't ignore this question (of their ownership)," says the French Gen Jean-Philippe Wirth. "Sooner or later it was going to come up; it has now."
So who will get Trepca's gold and silver? "Not me," Dr Kouchner responds. "We are in charge. Of course, UNMIK." Future profits however, will be "not for the benefit of UNMIK - for the benefit of the people of Kosovo".