The president, Mrs McAleese, arrived here last night from Sarajevo for a meeting this morning with President Hosni Mubarak in Sharm el-Sheikh and a sightseeing tour before a four-day State visit to Oman tomorrow.
Mrs McAleese spent yesterday in Sarajevo. After Mass with Irish Sfor, the stabilisation force in Bosnia, at Camp Butmir, she went on a helicopter tour of the valley and walked through the Old City, which has been reconstructed since the 1992-95 siege.
She passed the Archduke Ferdinand Bridge, where the assassination in 1914 started the first World War and the Romeo and Juliet bridge, where the bodies of two lovers from different ethnic communities who were killed by snipers, lay in the open for three days because attacks from Serbs in the surrounding hills prevented their retrieval.
Then, hand in hand, the President and Dr Martin McAleese walked through the old town. They viewed many massacre sites, including Market Square and the Bread Line, where hundreds were killed by shells as they tried to go about their daily lives. Mrs McAleese also viewed the vast graveyards on the hillsides and saw the still-active mine fields from a vantage point near the former front line. At the height of the war, she was told, victims had to be buried during the 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. curfew.
Along Sniper Alley near her hotel, the Holiday Inn, the bombed shell of a newspaper building remains as a memorial to the resilience of the people of Sarajevo. It missed only one day of publication.
On Saturday the President, Dr McAleese, the Minister for Defence, Mr Smith, the Chief-of-Staff, Lieut Gen Colm Mangan, and the Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Mr Padraic Craddock, spent the day with the 107 Irish Kfor troops from the Transport Company based at Camp Clarke outside Pristina.
Flying from Sarajevo to Kosovo and back, the presidential flight was made longer as it had to avoid Serbian air space by flying to the Adriatic over Croatia and back over Macedonia. The Serbs regard Kosovo as part of their territory and won't allow those travelling there to use their air space.
On the way into Pristina the numerous roofless houses of families who fled during the ethnic cleansing were clearly visible from the air. On the ground, the desolation was everywhere although the President was told there had been much improvement in the past year.
Her cavalcade, surrounded by jeeps from Kfor flying the Irish flag and escorted by heavily armed Italian carabinieri, drove past burnt-out houses, buildings and factories. They saw churches guarded round the clock by Norwegian Kfor troops to prevent them being burnt. Many of the areas and villages Mrs McAleese drove through were home to Serbs, Albanians and Roma gypsies. Without the presence of the international force there would be a return to chaos. Neighbours, the party was told, were waiting to exact revenge on each other for past atrocities.
Mrs McAleese's first call in Pristina was to the Kfor commander, Lieut Gen Carlos Cadigiosu. She then went to Camp Clarke, where she was briefed by the senior Irish officer, Lieut Col Brian McQuaid, and the officer commanding Transport Company, Comdt Tom Rigney, and Mr Michael Doyle, the EU agent for reconstruction in Kosovo.
Mrs McAleese later met the Irish troops and their guests from other battalions, including six RUC officers serving with the police force in the community.
The world cared deeply about what happened in Kosovo, she said. The changes in Belgrade raised hopes that the conflict in the Balkans was over, she added.
She said later that if one lived anywhere else but Belfast it would be hard to understand the tribal nature of the conflict, but healing was taking place in Ireland and it could happen here, too.