Coming to Kosovo

An ethnic Albanian boy stands along the road in Vucitrn, Kosovo, scene of some of the fiercest fighting between Serb forces and the KLA before NATO entered

By Steve Nettleton
CNN Interactive Correspondent

(CNN) -- A train of trucks stretched for two kilometers along a narrow, snow-covered road carved from the bald white face of Mount Kula. It was January 29, 2000. The traffic jam heralded to us that the border between Montenegro and Kosovo was ahead.

Like a steel python stranded on the mountainside, the line of trailers and minivans moved forward at a maddeningly slow pace, its progress measured in hours-per-kilometer.

Some drivers began sheltering for the night, realizing they would not make the crossing before morning.

Our car made its way to the head of the motorized serpent and stopped before the barrel of a machine gun mounted on an Italian armored personnel carrier. An Italian soldier screamed at us, ordering our car to take its place at the end of the line.

My Montenegrin driver and I got out of the car, much to the chagrin of the excited Italian. I explained I was supposed to meet an Albanian driver here who would take me the rest of the way to Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital.

I asked if I could cross the border on foot to see whether the driver was waiting. The Italian, still angry about the car, radioed his lieutenant.

"Sta mangiando," the soldier said. "He is eating. Wait a few minutes."

Though cold and impatient, we decided not to argue. I took advantage of the pause to admire the view of the western frontier of Kosovo.

From the checkpoint where I stood, the road descended sharply in a series of hairpin curves to the Kosovo plain below. It seemed as if all of Kosovo was spread before me.

It was difficult to believe this peaceful countryside was part of the province that had fueled the religious and nationalist passions that tore the former Yugoslavia apart -- and the place where a brutal campaign against ethnic Albanians later triggered Europe's largest refugee exodus since World War II.

Dusk closed in, yet few lights appeared on the hazy gray terrain. A dim yellow glow revealed the nearby city of Pec. Everything else faded into the coming darkness.

"You probably won't believe me when I tell you. But I've been here before," said my Montenegrin driver, Momir, who now wouldn't dare enter Kosovo for fear of Albanian revenge attacks.

"I came last May with an American newspaper reporter. We hid over there," he said, pointing to a valley to our left.

In May 1999, when NATO air strikes were at their peak and Serb and Yugoslav forces were murdering and expelling ethnic Albanians, international journalists were scrambling to get into Kosovo.

A burned out house in Vucitrn

"From there we watched the Serbs going from house to house, kicking out the Albanians," Momir said. "I remember seeing one Serb wearing a fuel pack and a flamethrower. He walked to the doors of the houses and opened fire."

Most Albanians had only minutes to gather their belongings before their homes were torched.

I looked up the steep precipice of Mount Kula. For the refugees, the relative safety of Montenegro lay beyond its hostile ridges.

"Did they follow the road?" I asked Momir, remembering TV pictures of refugee columns clogging highways to Albania and Macedonia.

"No," Momir said. "They crossed up there." His hand gestured straight up the mountainside.

Such a trek in winter would be dangerous even for experienced hikers. It probably terrified the entire families who braved the journey. They must have survived out of sheer desperation.

"I stayed on that mountain," my taxi driver told me as he navigated the treacherous Pec-Pristina highway later that evening.

REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK • Reporter's journey reveals the prospects for peace are as elusive as ever • Macedonia struggles to avoid Kosovo's deadly legacy • Still missing: Albanians seek relatives in Serbian jails • Mitrovica: Symbol of divided Kosovo • A sprawling enclave of Americana in Kosovo • House arrest: Kosovo's segregated Serbs feel stranded, abandoned • The Coca-Cola patrol: On the beat with U.N. police in Kosovo • New tragedies burden historic Serb city • Montenegro press avoids Belgrade's big chill • Montenegro president: We will not compromise with Serbia • One faith, two churches: Religion splits again in Yugoslavia • Sarajevo: A city searches for its lost soul

Unable to locate my appointed driver at the border, I had hitched a ride to Pec with a Kosovar Albanian family, then hired a taxi to take me to the capital.

Learning I was an American, the driver unleashed a harangue of thanks for NATO intervention in Kosovo. Then he described his own experience.

"I hid on the mountain for four days," he said. "My wife went on to Montenegro, but I snuck back into Kosovo. I didn't want to leave. But I soon realized I had no choice."

He fell silent. The car bounced along a road pitted with potholes, its underbelly groaning as it scraped the cracked pavement.

On either side of the road once-ruined houses showed the pride of their occupants. Lamps burned inside spotless new windows. Bright red tiles reproduced across tattered roofs. Concrete walls blackened with soot disappeared underneath an expanding shell of plaster and mortar.

Even deep in the heart of winter, Kosovo was undergoing a rejuvenation. But the scars were never far away.

Some buildings lay crumpled where they had died. One village was abandoned, its roofless structures home only to blackbirds and orphaned children who scrambled for any morsel left by passing motorists.

Pointing to a demolished police station, the driver explained how three young Albanian men were gunned down by Serb police on this very stretch of highway. They were shot in the back last year, he said, and they were unarmed.

A few kilometers along, the driver pointed to a fence line away from the road. More than 150 Albanians were buried there, he said, massacred by the Serbs.

"Every centimeter of this highway is covered in blood," he said. "For 100 kilometers of highway, there were 10 police stations? Why?"

Our car entered a fog so dense that it obscured even the front bumper. My glimpse of Kosovo was cut off, leaving me alone with the driver and his anger.

"The Serbs are parasites," he said, spitting at the dashboard. "They lived off of us for years. We did all the work."

"But now, they will have to work," he said, his eyes lighting with the spark of a freed prisoner who now guards the cell of his former captors.

"And not only that," he said with obvious joy, "they will also have to speak Albanian!"

A week later, on February 4, 2000, anger erupted into violence. In the northern city of Mitrovica a mob of Kosovar Albanians charged a bridge guarded by French soldiers and Italian police. The Albanians hurled rocks and bottles. The soldiers responded with tear gas and percussion grenades.

Police and ethnic Albanians clash in Mitrovica on February 5, 2000

At least nine people had been murdered in violence the previous two days. Two Serbs had died on February 2 when a rocket-propelled grenade hit a U.N. bus outside Mitrovica. Then seven Albanians were shot dead in the predominantly Serb district. Grenades thrown into Serb cafes wounded more than a dozen people.

The city seemed ready to explode.

NATO forces announced a curfew, beefed up patrols and sealed off the two bridges connecting the mostly Albanian southern half to the majority Serb north.

The military response enraged ethnic Albanians, who saw it as an attempt to prevent them from reaching the north side and defending their families.

"It is out of control," one Kosovar Albanian man told me that day. "Armed people are still active up there. There is no control and there is no sign that there will soon be any control."

Getting to northern Mitrovica was not going to be easy. The French and Italians were allowing no one to cross the main bridge. The smaller eastern bridge, manned by a company of Danes, proved more approachable. But my Kosovar Albanian translator refused to accompany me. I had to travel alone.

After passing through the Danish checkpoint, I felt as if I had left Kosovo and entered Serbia.

A woman walks across a bridge in Mitrovica that runs across the Ibar River that divides the majority Serb north from the mostly ethnic Albanian south

Street signs and shop banners were lettered in Cyrillic, not Latin script. Streets were deserted. I saw a handful of people buying bread or meat, but most residents evidently remained indoors.

Two charred U.N. vehicles were proof of the previous night's tumult when scores of Serbs marauded through northern Mitrovica smashing shops and burning cars.

I passed an apartment building cluttered with French troops conducting a security sweep. Soldiers stood at the entry, their guns at the ready.

Their commander asked me to pass on the other side. When I asked what was going on, he brushed me away: "I don't know."

I approached three young Serbs chatting on a corner and asked whether anyone spoke English. They all did. And they were eager to express their views.

"We are living in a big lie and no one can do anything to change it," said Miroslav, the only man in the group. "They say Serbs are massacring Albanians. They say we are doing all these horrible things. It's not true."

"Some of our friends were hurt in that cafe," said Bratislava, referring to one of the grenade attacks of the previous night. "We were going to that café. Now we are too scared to go out. The U.N., KFOR [the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo], they are not doing for us what they do for the Albanians."

This Orthodox church in the mostly Albanian half of the industrial city of Mitrovica is guarded 24 hours a day by KFOR police

"Three or four soldiers [escort] one Albanian woman when she comes across the bridge," she continued. "But we cannot go to the other side at all."

After two days of clashes on the bridge, the chief of the U.N. Mission in Kosovo, Dr. Bernard Kouchner, cut short a fundraising trip to Japan and returned to Kosovo to call for an end to the violence.

"We will transform half a defeat into half a success. We will not give up," he said.

Such words did little to soothe public anger.

"It's just going to get worse," one Albanian man told me.

When asked if he wanted the former Kosovo Liberation Army to return and take up positions in Mitrovica, he replied: "Albanians are in danger and need protection. Whoever would bring that protection, I would support."

For most citizens of this northern city, international buzzwords words like "ethnic reconciliation" and "peaceful coexistence" rang hollow.

For them it seemed the centuries-old battle for control of Kosovo was still undecided.