- - - - - - - - - - - -

Also Today

For a full list of today's Salon News stories, go to the News home page.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

In the northern city of Kosovska Mitrovica, it is not the burned houses and business districts that tell the story -- although burned houses and businesses are plentiful -- but a long bridge that was built over a river to connect the city's northern and southern halves but now serves as the dividing line between the city's Serbs and Albanians instead.

Kosovska Mitrovica could have been an example of a Kosovo city that worked. With the Sitnica River winding through its center, and its easy proximity to Kosovo's most valuable asset, the Trepca coal mine, which provides power for southern Serbia, Macedonia and Greece, it seemed to have what many cities lacked: the material resources to provide employment and a standard of living that could allow the city's ethnic Serbian and Albanian populations to live side by side in peace, even as the rest of the province went to war.

But now the war has laid waste to so much of what people value -- their families and property and communities -- that this pretty river, the Sitnica, serves as the Berlin Wall between Mitrovica's Serbs in the north and its Albanians in the south. Both groups have staked out their places on the bridge, looking with envy and longing at the other side to which they dare not cross, at what they have lost.

Although "partition" is a dirty word among NATO policy makers and peacekeepers in Kosovo, French peacekeeping forces (KFOR) are enforcing a de facto partition of Kosovska Mitrovica for now. They stand at checkpoints on either side of the bridge deciding who can cross or not, their checkpoints swirled with rolls of barbed wire and cement blocks that keep the two sides apart.

The French KFOR troops say their goal is to calm tensions between the two groups, and then gradually decrease the partition.

"The final goal is to maintain the multinational composition of the town, and to avoid partition," said French KFOR spokesman Lt. Bertrand Bowweau Tuesday at headquarters in Mitrovica. "But the French troops arrived only 12 days ago. And the ethnic troubles have been here for 10 years. It's obvious such a problem cannot be solved in 12 days."

Bowweau says that finding a way to prevent tensions from flaring between the two groups while allowing them to co-mingle will take a long time. Both groups -- ethnic Albanians and Serbs -- look at each other with suspicion and bitterness. But their mutual unhappiness at the partition of their city more than anything makes them sound alike.

Next page | Serbian paramilitaries still have their weapons?