No escape for the peacekeepers

Around Pristina, a grubby town at the best of times, there are builders' skips filled with rubbish. Beside each of them is a neatly-stencilled sign reading: "Garbage was removed by the European Agency for Reconstruction, Higjena Teknika and K-For. Dumping material outside the container is a public offence." Each skip lies - unsurprisingly - like a beached whale in a surf of more stinking rubbish. It's not a bad metaphor for the job of reconstructing Kosovo, where good intentions are so frequently drowned in brutal realities.

Signs and rules don't get paid much attention in today's Kosovo. The ethnic Albanians on whose behalf Nato bombed Serbia are, it's commonly said, like ungrateful children - quick to take advantage of their benefactors, slow to take responsibility for the country the Western powers have so expensively handed to them.

As a result Kosovo, 14 months after the war, remains a dangerous, ugly place - lots of fun for the profiteers, grim for the 50 per cent of the population that is unemployed (many still without real homes), potentially lethal for the remaining Serbs. For all of these things, Unmik, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, gets the blame.

Unmik's civil administrators, and KFor, the 50,000-strong Nato force that provides the muscle in Kosovo, move slowly. Ordinary Kosovars look at the gaps in their lives and demand action.

Why do they still have power cuts every day? Why can't they have passports? Why are the roads not repaired? Why doesn't the telephone system work? Why are gang violence, drugs and prostitution part of daily life in Pristina? Why do car thieves, or anyone arrested for any crime less serious than rape or murder, get let out of prison after a day? Why - and this is the most serious complaint - can't they be given their country to run as they please?

It is not just the Kosovars who complain. Unmik comes under increasing fire from humanitarian groups for its admitted failure to protect Kosovo's minority populations - most notably the Serbs, subject to continual intimidation and now fewer than half their pre-war numbers.

The aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres announced last week that it was pulling out of Kosovo - unwilling to be a "passive accomplice" to the "ethnic homogenisation" of Kosovo caused by the international community's inaction.

Though there are good answers to all these complaints, some of those in the administration are appalled at the loss of confidence in the UN, hailed hardly a year ago as liberators.

"The really frightening thing," says one senior official, "is that, come the autumn, we're going to have to do some of the hard things. Like repossessing property that's been illegally seized [many returning Kosovars, finding their homes destroyed, simply moved into abandoned Serb houses] and acting against buildings that have been put up without permission.

"We're going to have to make people pay phone and electricity bills, restart income tax."

What some wonder is at what point Unmik will become as hated as the Serb rulers it replaced.

Unmik's next task is municipal elections, now set for 28 October - a first step in restoring democracy to the province. Preparations for these have been as fraught as you'd expect. Despite brave efforts by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the body charged with setting up the system, almost all the 80,000 or so remaining Serbs decided to boycott the elections.

That is a savage blow for the dream of a multi-ethnic Kosovo. Meanwhile, the ethnic Albanians who will comprise the electorate have already divided into 24 different political parties or groupings.

Though the elections are still 11 weeks away, political aggression between the parties is already frightening.

The daily news of violent crime and ethnically-motivated assaults is now spiced with stories of armed attacks on politicians. There have been at least six in the past fortnight: one moderate election candidate was kidnapped, his body later found mutilated and burnt.

Few people have doubts about which party is responsible for the attacks - Kosovo waits to see if the UN will dare act against them.

The most optimistic of observers say that we all - Kosovars and the rest of the world - must be patient. The people here suffered over a decade living as unwanted, disenfranchised citizens of a police state - you can't expect an instant transformation into responsible citizens.

The machinery of a democratic state is being prepared - the OSCE-run police academy, with its team of 35 British officers, passed out another batch of 318 cadets last weekend, 438 Kosovar judges were appointed a week ago. A welfare system is now in place - families with no income can get a grant of £30 a month.

After the elections, it's said, a new, robust Unmik can move the country forward surprisingly fast. With moderate politicians emerging, it will no longer have to work with the extremists who tried to move straight from running the Kosovo Liberation Army to running the country. It's widely hoped that Bernard Kouchner, the current head of the mission, will be replaced at the end of the year - the favourite candidate for the job, here at least, being Paddy Ashdown.

Two significant problems remain, however tough a new leader Unmik gets. The first is that the UN will have to continue to run a country where the huge majority wants what the UN cannot give - independence from Yugoslavia.

For that reason many Kosovars are fervently praying that Slobodan Milosevic wins Yugoslavia's September elections and remains in power - they see the arrival of a moderate regime in Belgrade, one the West can do business with, as the greatest threat to the ethnic Albanian dream of a free Kosovo.

But it's hard to see how the United Nations will ever bring itself to sanction the breaking up of Yugoslavia, a sovereign state. So, however well Unmik runs Kosovo, it will always frustrate the Kosovars.

The other problem is that every-one's leaving.

Many young Kosovars who have education and ambition have already - like their counterparts in Bosnia - taken off for the better prospects of life in northern Europe or the United States. Those who remain do so chiefly because of the tasty salaries to be got working for the aid industry.

That leaves Kosovo bereft of new blood, of a generation to take the land out of the old politics of tribal hate, and into the 21st century.