New bridge across `too much memory'

To get to the new bridge being built by French NATO troops over the river Ibar you first have to walk through a scruffy wood …

To get to the new bridge being built by French NATO troops over the river Ibar you first have to walk through a scruffy wood full of rotting cows' skulls.

This is where the inhabitants of the Albanian-dominated southern sector of the town go to dump their rubbish when they're not simply throwing it out of the windows of their communist-era high-rises or piling it on street corners.

Through the trees you come across the camouflaged bulldozers, the armoured vehicles and the uniforms that surround the latest NATO venture to calm the ethnic violence in this bitterly divided town, which in the last three weeks has seen 12 Serb and Albanian deaths.

It's the worst wave of violence to hit Kosovo since NATO-led peacekeepers entered the bombed-out Yugoslavian province last June, and it's providing a bitter test of international policy resolve.

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There are two bridges across the Ibar, which divides the Albanian community in the south from the predominantly Serb community on the north bank.

Now French NATO troops are building a third to allow Albanian families a heavily guarded access to their remaining relatives in the north.

"Why are they even bothering to do this?" asks 35-year-old Esma Aslani, a Kosova Albanian woman who, along with her two elderly parents, was forced to flee the north of the town 10 days ago. "If I go home today," she says, "Serbs will still try and kill me, with or without this new bridge."

"What do these people want," asked French general Pierre de Saqui de Sannes, "to live together or to live apart with us behind them for the next 10 years?"

Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic is using Mitrovica as a diversion under cover of which he is building up his troop presence in southern Serbia, poised to strike into eastern Kosovo, senior NATO and US officials say.

Hard-core gangs of paramilitary-style Serbs maintain "security" on the streets of the north, and are also responsible for much of the violence against Albanians, NATO claims.

"I'd really just like to live here in peace, without any Albanians, just doing my job, and having the things that everybody else has in life," says 31-year-old hospital worker Gordana Savic. "There is no place for Albanians here. There is too much history, too much memory," she says.

Mitrovica, say senior NATO officials, is a microcosm of Kosovo, and Kosovo is the blueprint for the future of NATO operations. "Get it wrong in Mitrovica, and we get it wrong in Kosovo. Get it wrong in Kosovo, and we get it wrong in the Balkans. Get it wrong in the Balkans, and we get it wrong in Europe," said a senior international official in Pristina.