Students' union politics are generally a subject of ridicule for the average student. Unions are too-often populated by political wannabes and megalomaniac, yet deceptively earnest, extremists of various forms.

Yet in Kosovo, idealism and an extremely politicised student body ring a lot more true - for there, third-level education has been part of the battleground between ethnic Serbs and Albanians.

In 1991 Albanians were excluded from the University of Pristina as the Serbian government tightened its stranglehold on the main organs of power. Showing remarkable resourcefulness, the Albanian students and their teachers formed their own parallel university underground. But with few resources and no buildings, this effort to continue education for the Albanians was always a struggle.

Classes were held in people's houses; what little wages academics received came out of donations from the Albanian community; and students were often subject to police harassment.

The end of the war has changed things profoundly. Most of the Serb population has fled Pristina, and the university has been reclaimed by Albanian students and academics as their own.

In July the National Unions of Students in Europe (ESIB) sent a working group to Macedonia and Kosovo to meet Kosovan students. The "Looking to the Future" project explored the problems students faced in the past and at what their plans were to regenerate the higher education system in Kosovo.

Among the seven-person delegation was Amy Iggulden, an English and history student at Trinity College Dublin, who found that student life for Albanian Kosovans lay in stark contrast to her own.

"The people I saw had never once in all their student life been inside a university building, had never once been able to go out after 7 p.m. and socialise with their friends in the union bar," she says, alluding to the curfew which operated for Albanians in Pristina.

The group first spent three days at the University of Skopje in Macedonia speaking to displaced Kosovan students still living in refugee camps or with relatives. The group then headed to Pristina and through advertising in local media made contact with a further 80 students.

The university buildings were not damaged by the NATO bombings. Inside, however, there has been a lot of vandalism, allegedly perpetrated by fleeing Serbs. Their unclaimed academic files still line the walls of one of the rooms.

Workshops were held in the Economics faculty, which was still in reasonable condition. For one of the Kosovan participants, entering the building was an emotional moment. "I have studied economics for five years," she said, "and this is the faculty of economics and I have never sat here before."

Since August 2nd, lectures have started to help students catch up on the education they missed out on during the war and to prepare them for the new academic year, which starts on October 15th.

From their workshops the ESIB representatives learned of the great desire among Kosovans to continue their education and start to rebuild their lives. Proposals generated by the workshops include a plan to set up a job centre at the university and a to establish a counselling service to help students who may have suffered mental trauma during the war.

Alongside a will for peace and reconciliation with their Serb neighbours, there still remain huge divides. "There was no kind of bubbling hatred against the Serbs, it was more like a quiet resigned `I'm not going to live with them and you can't ask me to'," says Iggulden. The majority of the young male students had joined the KLA during the war, and the scars this left run deep.

All this makes ESIB's message of peaceful co-existence and a desire to build civil society and democracy look like an uphill struggle. The United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK) has been involved in negotiations with Serb and Albanian academics about the future of the University of Pristina. It recently announced a plan which envisions "fair, secure, and practical sharing of university public facilities, according to time-sharing arrangements to be worked out by the parties themselves".

UNMIK intends to appoint an international rector of the university to oversee its regeneration. The leader of the Albanian academics, Dr Zenel Kelmendi, has promised that the university will never again be ethnically pure and that the campus will be "free, open and democratic". Standing beside him as he said it was Hasim Thaci, political leader of the KLA.

The reality on the ground is that the Albanians have claimed the university which fleeing Serbs deserted. There are virtually no Serb students to be found in Pristina and the ESIB group felt it unlikely that any would return in the current climate.

For the Serbian students, life is also difficult, as the Milosevic regime refuses to let them register in universities in Serbian territory. Milosevic wants to encourage them to return to Kosovo to maintain a Serbian presence; however, fearing they are in danger from Kosovan reprisals, few are happy to oblige.

The director of the ESIB group, Manja Klemencic - who because she is from Slovenia shares the Serbian language - said she did not feel comfortable speaking her language on the streets of Pristina. The one Serbian the group met was a young graduate of the university who is working for the UN. She has erected a sign outside her house which says in seven different languages "this is a UN house, anyone entering un-invited will be arrested" - her parents have not left the house for weeks.

THE ESIB group plans to return in October to help oversee the students' union elections for the university. The previous union group for Albanians, the UPSUP, was an overtly political organisation closely linked with the KLA. ESIB hopes that in the new student body energies will be more directed at basic student needs like funding and accommodation, with an inclusive attitude which will allow Serbian involvement as well.

The funds being offered by international organisations to help redevelop the university, including a €4.4 million commitment from the European Union, are conditional on an integrated open system developing.

While ESIB discovered a positive mood amongst students for the future, it remains unclear how a process of reconciliation and forgiveness can take place. The university situation appears to represent a microcosm of Kosovo's wider problems, in which Serbian dominance has been replaced by Kosovan triumphalism.

Given that these Kosovan students are the politicians and leaders of the future one can only hope ESIB's good intentions rub off somewhere.