Historic neglect threatens Kosovo's future

Trepca comprises a network of mines that tap into rich deposits of lead, zinc, gold, silver and billions of tonnes of coal, and huge smelters to process ore that lies beneath this main potential flashpoint for clashes between Albanians and Serbs.

Now a rusting hulk languishing beside the Ibar river, where the two communities live on opposite banks, Trepca has quite a history.

It was founded by the British in the 1920s and later supplied immense quantities of metal to the war machine of the

occupying Nazis. After 1945, it became one of the biggest and most lucrative industrial sites in Yugoslavia.

In a town built around Trepca's mines and foundries, unemployment is now more than 65 per cent, and the desperate need for jobs is one of the very few things on which its Albanians, Serbs and the few Roma who are now returning to the area can agree.

"You see the men filling the cafes - young men who have no prospect of finding a job," regional UN administrator

Gerrard Gallucci said recently. "There are middle-aged and older men who once were able to bring home the salaries and provide for their families, living on whatever they can find." The economic picture isn't much brighter

across the rest of Kosovo, a landlocked mini-state of two million people, 90 per cent of them ethnic Albanians.

Official unemployment is about 50 per cent, and more than one-third of people in Kosovo live on less than ¤1.50 a day. Electricity for many homes operates on the basis of three hours on, three hours off, and water supply is tight in the summer.

All these problems are exacerbated by the bitter rift that divides the Albanians and the Serbs, who have threatened to sever political and economic ties between their stronghold in northern Kosovo and the rest of the country.

A Belgrade-backed drive for economic sovereignty in Serb areas could trigger a major dispute over Trepca in northern Mitrovica and over the country's largest water reservoir, which is also in northern Kosovo.

Most of Kosovo's major infrastructure is on the brink of collapse, having been neglected by Belgrade through the 1990s and damaged during the 1998-99 war between separatist rebels and Serb forces, and in the Nato bombing that ended that onslaught.

Like Trepca, Kosovo's power station is antiquated, massively inefficient and poisonous to anyone working or living near it, not to mention the surrounding environment.

Huge investment is needed to realise plans to overhaul the transport network and revamp the power station to allow Kosovo's vast lignite deposits to be used to turn the country into an electricity exporter by 2015.

Kosovo is also starkly lacking in the tourist potential of neighbouring Montenegro, which broke away from Belgrade in 2006. While Montenegro has pretty historic towns, a magnificent Adriatic coast and Unesco listed mountain areas, Kosovo has a few medieval Serb Orthodox churches ringed by razor wire and Nato guards.

The EU is now planning a donors' conference for Kosovo, in the knowledge that continuing poverty will stoke tension and frustration with Brussels, whose officials will oversee the first years of independence.

"If the economic take-off which the Kosovars want after independence does not happen that fast . . . the EU is likely to be held responsible," said Gerald Knaus, of the European Stability Institute in Berlin.