BALKAN JOURNEY:There's no love lost between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo, but today the country is relatively calm as the government urges the UN interim authority to transfer more powers to it, writes Peter Murtagh.
SYLVAIN NICIC is sitting on the patio of his small holding in the village of Dubrotin in central Kosovo. A vine that is heavily laden with grapes and has been trained over the patio provides welcome shade as we sip thick, sweet coffee and water.
"Thank you very much for Kfor," he says to me as though I had personally installed Nato's Kosovo peace-keeping force in the locality. "Especially Irish Kfor!" he exclaims. "Irish build very good roads!"
The road resurfacing repairs are an example of what Irish commander Brig-Gen Gerry Hegarty calls "quick impact, low cost" measures that make life better for local people and help build relationships between them and the soldiers of Kfor.
Sylvain looks like farmers anywhere often do: by his build and his large hands, you know he works hard and for modest gain. He grows some vegetables and flowers in the neatly kept garden in front of his home. There's a small yard with farm machinery, and outhouses with a couple of pigs.
Away from the village, he has 10 acres of land and hopes for a good price this year for his bumper crop of corn, though he frets that a glut may force prices down.
But Sylvain Nicic has other problems that are very specific to who he is and where he lives. He is Serbian, part of an ethnic minority of just five per cent in a country where 90 per cent of other people are ethnic Albanians (the remaining five per cent being Roma).
Not that Sylvain would accept that Kosovo is an independent country.
"This is still Serbia," he says firmly. "I will never accept something different. Serbs in Kosovo will never accept it. It is temporary madness."
Sylvain and the people he represents are a community that feels threatened and is deeply uncertain about what the future holds. With Kosovo now independent, they feel marginalised and fear there is no place for them in what is developing.
The presence of Kfor troops reassures them. The Irish run regular vehicle and foot patrols through villages, getting to know people in simple, practical ways - chatting to them, listening to their concerns, helping where possible. Separate liaison and monitoring teams stay in touch with community leaders and politicians.
Lieut John Boylan is a platoon commander with C Company, part of the Irish contingent that, along with Finns, Swedes, Czechs, Slovaks and Latvians, comprises the 1,500-strong multinational taskforce in central Kosovo, an area that includes the capital, Pristina, and about 45 per cent of Kosovo's total population.
He has a warm, easy friendship with Sylvain, who clearly likes him. As the patrol moves through other villages, people wave in greeting and children chase the vehicles, laughing and shouting. There is no doubt but that the Irish troops are liked and are not seen in any way as an occupying force.
Comdt Tom Fox runs a liaison and monitoring team, and one of his points of contact with the Serbian community is Dr Rada Tradjkovic, a surgeon in Gracanica, a town of some 8,000 Serbs and about 600 Roma where she runs the health centre. Dr Rada is also a member of the Kosovo parliament and deputy president of the Serbian National Council.
Comdt Fox is welcomed into Dr Rada's office and she explains how she sees the future. She wants greater local government for Serbs, as envisaged in a report to the UN earlier this year by the UN Special Envoy Martti Ahtisaari, a member of the Decommissioning Commission in Northern Ireland.
Echoing bygone attitudes there, Dr Rada has difficulties with many Albanian representatives.
"We have a problem that most of the Albanians elected came from the KLA [ the Kosovo army which fought for independence]. [ They are] like other illegal organisations doing criminal activities . . . They were elected in a democratic way but for Serbs, they are not democrats."
But unlike many other Serbs, Dr Rada seems willing to engage and expresses views not articulated in Belgrade, the Serbian capital.
"The Serbian parts in Kosovo cannot be a lonely island in Kosovo and Kosovo cannot be a lonely island [ itself]," she says. "Serbia as a country should promote a new idea for solving the problem of Kosovo."
At present, Serbia simply refuses to acknowledge what has happened, but is being tempted by the European Union offering the possibility of eventual membership.
What Dr Rada regards as Albanian slights on her community - the tearing down of posters advertising Serbian cultural events, the perception (of hers) that Albanians want to claim Orthodox monasteries as of Albanian heritage - irritate intensely. More seriously, she and other Serbs do not trust the police (all police in Gracanica are ethnic Albanian, since Serbs walked off the job) and fear government resources - for roads, water and other services - are being deliberately withheld from their community.
Sylvain Nicic agrees. "We want nothing, just jobs and our own money and security," he says.
While there's no love lost between the two sides and tensions occasionally run high, Kosovo today is relatively calm and in a period of transition, as the government urges the United Nations interim authority to transfer more and more powers to it.
The calm wasn't always there and is due in substantial measure to the presence of the Nato-led forces and other international agencies.
Lieut Boylan directs his patrol to a hill overlooking Slovene, an Albanian village near the Serb cluster we have just visited. From our vantage point one can see a Serb village perhaps no more than a kilometre away.
The land hereabouts is fertile and provides a good living. Slovene used to have about 600 Albanian homes and 80 Serb homes, concentrated in two clusters. Inter-ethnic relations were better than average.
"What was unusual," says Lieut Boylan, "was that the Serbs also spoke Albanian, and everyone got on very well."
But back in 1999 when Serbian forces loyal to Slobodan Milosevic and allied to Kosovo Serbs were trying to ethnically cleanse north and northwest Kosovo of Albanians, Slovene's Serbs did something which to an outsider is inexplicable, especially given their minority position in Slovene.
In April 1999, some of the Serb villagers, aided by Serb paramilitaries from outside, started to attack and burn the homes of their Albanian neighbours.
Two groups of Albanian men and women, aged from 16 years to 87, were rounded up in two separate incidents and shot dead. Some of the bodies were never recovered.
Amazingly, the Serb villagers made no effort to conceal their faces as they assembled people from the village and led them away to murder them.
When Nato responded to events in Kosovo and launched its bombing campaign against Serb forces there as well as against Serbia proper, the Albanians in Slovene took their revenge.
Today all that is left of the 80 Serbian homes that were part of Slovene's mixed community are a few broken down walls.
"Two groups of Albanian men and women, aged from 16 to 87, were rounded up in two separate incidents and shot dead. Some of the bodies were never recovered. Amazingly, the Serbs made no effort to hide their faces
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BALKAN BIKERS
Read Peter Murtagh's blog as he travels through the Balkans on a motorbike at www.irishtimes.com/blogs
CHANGE OF COMMAND
Tomorrow: Irish command passes to the Finns