Some impressions of the last week and a half…
How quickly life begins to get back to normal after a war, some shops reopening, people in the streets, cars on the roads. Fresh tomatoes and cucumbers to supplement all of the canned food we bring from Macedonia. The big problems in Pristina are the lack of water and petrol. The Serbs damaged the waterworks before they left and NATO is trying to fix it. We’re carrying hundreds of liters of gas in jerrycans and Coca-cola bottles.

Driving through the dirt roads in Drenica, seeing the mine strikes on Serb APCs, big craters in the road and pieces of Yugoslav Army green vehicles. The KLA got pretty good at ambush warfare it seems, all those holes in the ground made us nervous, but then some guy in a tractor comes down the other way and you know it’s OK.

Mass exodus of the Serbs, pulling out with their army, every bit as pathetic as the Albanians were a few months ago, tractors and broken down cars, withdrawing VJ trucks with huge pornographic posters and thugs giving the Serb three-fingered salute. Albanians moving into abandoned Serb villages and burning and looting them. Not a pretty sight, understandable though it may be. Tragedy and fear become farce as we saw these Serb peasants put pigs in the trunk of their Volkswagen, one pig gets loose and these yokels run after it.

A KLA guy from the Bronx was disarmed by British Paras in front of my door as I walked home one night. I overheard the perfect English, “yo, man, it’s OK, you take this gun, I got another one just like it.” Para, “that’s fine, just don’t let me see it. Right. Carry on, now.”

Serbs in Mitrovica setting up checkpoints right in front of the French who do nothing. One guy tried to stop me as I drove through town. I had no idea who he was so I rolled down the window and shouted “and who the fuck are you” as I swerved around him. The Albanian parts of town completely looted and destroyed, burnt out buildings, a coatrack stuck in a door, the Serbs used it as a battering ram. No military purpose, just plain crime.

The British a great army, the Americans just dumb, the French absolutely useless, Foreign Legionnaires standing by no matter what happens, no matter who’s causing the trouble, not wanting their pictures taken, a bunch of criminals no doubt. The British are fair in enforcing the rules on everyone, the Americans worry only about not getting killed, the French are fair in NOT enforcing the rules on anyone.

Ridiculous Russians still entrenched at the Pristina airport, getting their water from the British, young Russian paratroopers at the checkpoint muttering “stoj” whenever anyone tries to get in, their old armored vehicles looking incongruous with KFOR painted on them. All that geopolitical brinkmanship of planes turning around in mid-air, panicked phone calls down the line in Washington and Moscow, and it boils down to a couple hundred underpaid Russians stuck at a bombed out airport.

People coming down from the hills and woods where they hid, the same places they fled to during last year’s Serb offensive. Tractors and more tractors chugging down the roads towards destroyed homes. Shooting off guns in the air to celebrate; traffic jam at the Macedonian border as refugees queue up to return. The Macedonians were so bureaucratic about letting them in and now they’re bureaucratic about letting them out.

Bodies everywhere, not just the mass graves but a body here and a body there, in a ditch, in a river, various states of decomposition, the smell of death, dead cows and dead animals and dead people. Always you go somewhere and someone comes up to you and says, “you have to come look at the bodies,” with the same intonation and enthusiasm of a local booster tour guide.

So the war’s over. A few obstacles here and there, but that’s it. Some kind of peace in Kosovo, all the politics and economics a mess, the dreams and memories of multi-ethnicity and brotherhood and unity as dead as if they never were, but the war’s over.

And maybe the parallel is 1919 and not 1945, a substantively undeafeated Serb army going home, maybe there’ll be more trouble in Belgrade and Montenegro, maybe another act to follow, but for now it’s peace again in this country formerly known as Yugoslavia.