Irish troops are on the frontline between Albanians and Serbs in newly independent Kosovo, writes Daniel McLaughlinin Rubovc.
The dusty village of Rubovc appears to be a great rarity in Kosovo, a place where Albanians and Serbs live and work side-by-side, and feel little of the fear and mistrust that poisons this new-born country.
"We've always got on fine here," insists Esat Regica in the tiny office of the school where he has taught for 40 of his 62 years.
"I speak fluent Serbian and most of the Serbs speak some Albanian. My Serb neighbour even came over to congratulate me on independence," he said, a couple of days after the 90 per cent Albanian province had proclaimed its sovereignty from Belgrade.
Regica is one of about 450 Albanians in this village of 700 people, where the headman of his community lives next door to his Serb counterpart, and locals say they strive together to preserve their small patch of peace in a fledgling state that crackles with ethnic tension.
Serb forces killed some 10,000 Kosovo Albanians and forced 800,000 more from their homes in a 1998-9 crackdown on separatist rebels, which was only ended by Nato bombing and the introduction of a United Nations administration to run the province. In the aftermath of the war, most Albanians returned to their homes and mobs sought revenge against Serbs and Roma, killing more than 1,000 and expelling perhaps as many as 220,000 from a region that Serbia regards as its historical and spiritual heartland.
Now Serbs in northern Kosovo, where they are concentrated close to the border with Serbia, are threatening to cut all ties with the new country's Albanian government and establish their own parallel institutions, which would answer only to Belgrade.
Such plans reassure Serbs in northern Kosovo that they will not be subject to leaders that they neither recognise nor trust to protect them, in particular Hashim Thaci, a former leader of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army who is the first prime minister of independent Kosovo.
But for the rest of Kosovo's 100,000 or so Serbs, who mostly live in small, isolated enclaves, the vision of partition is a terrifying one, in which they would be left to fend for themselves in an almost entirely Albanian state angered by the loss of its northern portion.
Even in Rubovc, where some Albanians and Serbs seem to pride themselves on their good relations, people are starting to doubt whether the ethnically mixed village has a future.
"It's very tense and we are frightened at night when we hear gunfire from other villages around here," says one elderly Serb man who refuses to give his name.
"We have no trouble from Albanians in our village but with others, who knows? It might be hard to stay here - we might have to leave for Serbia or at least Gracanica," he says, referring to a large Serb enclave nearby.
KEEPING THE PEACE in Rubovc, and 81 other villages over a 500sq km area, ultimately falls to about 250 Irish troops stationed here under a Nato-led mission.
Rumbling along potholed streets and dirt tracks in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks that stud the border with Macedonia, several 10-tonne Irish armoured personnel carriers and military jeeps provide powerful reassurance to locals that trouble will not be tolerated.
But Irish responsibilities currently extend much further than Rubovc and the region.
Kosovo's declaration of independence fell during Ireland's 12-month spell in command of a 1,600-strong multinational force tasked with maintaining security across a swathe of the country that includes almost half of its two million residents and its capital city, Pristina.
"We worked very hard before the independence declaration to let all the communities know that we would provide a stable and secure environment, and to tell them what we expected of them," says Brig Gen Gerry Hegarty, commander of the Irish troops and their Swedish, Finnish, Czech, Slovak and Latvian colleagues based in central Kosovo.
"We're delighted with the way it has gone so far in our area," he says in his office at Camp Ville, a predominantly Finnish base some 15km south of Pristina.
"All the local Albanian leaders did what they said they would do and helped ensure that independence was celebrated in a dignified way. We did lay down the law to them though, and warned them about 'happy shooting'. But it's hard to stop everyone firing their guns in celebration in a place where there are maybe 400,000 illegally held weapons."
While several grenades were hurled at EU and UN offices in Serb-populated areas of northern Kosovo in the first days of independence, and Serb mobs burned down two border posts between Serbia and Kosovo, the Irish-controlled area has not suffered any violence.
Gen Hegarty said his staff had tried both to allay Serb fears of a repeat of ethnic riots in 2004 and to discourage provocative acts from Albanian and Serb radicals in his region.
"The Serbs are very cowed at this stage - they are outnumbered 30 to one around here. We did work hard with Serbs but people living on the 'front line', who suffered badly in 2004, were difficult to bring on board. They need checkpoints outside their towns and villages to reassure them, and we are currently patrolling 24 hours a day.
"We also have an intelligence capability to keep an eye on potentially dangerous elements, and I've met leaders of the so-called sleeping KLA - senior Albanian war veterans who fought in 1998-9. They wield huge influence here which goes right to the very top."
Gen Hegarty's eyes and ears on the ground are people such as Corporal John Hurley (25), who has special responsibility for relations between the Irish troops and the village of Rubovc.
He has used some Irish aid allocated for social projects to improve a playground at the village school, but halted the plan pending a post-independence decision on whether to move the children to a new building.
It is not clear that a new premises would cater for both Albanian and Serb children, however, and, looking around the existing school, Rubovc's image as a model of ethnic harmony starts to crack.
THE ALBANIAN AND Serb children are separated from each other by a wall that the Serb authorities built during the summer holidays of 1989, after nationalist Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic turned the screw on Kosovo by rescinding its autonomy within Serbia. Now, almost 19 years on, the children are taught different curricula in different languages, and they even have different playtimes.
"The young generation of Albanians and Serbs don't speak each other's language," says the veteran teacher, Regica. "I used to make jokes to encourage the kids to play together," he recalls disconsolately. "But it doesn't work anymore."
He doesn't even know how many Serb teachers work on the other side of the wall, or how many children study there. He guesses about 20-30 children, compared to the 180 Albanians on his side of the school. All the teachers earn just €200 a month, he says.
Walking with an Irish patrol past the village's small, yellow Orthodox church, Corp Hurley points out a concrete football pitch laid by Serbs. The people who paid for it wouldn't let Albanians use it, until they got so sick of their ban being ignored that they came to a compromise and agreed on separate times for Serbs and Albanians to play: such accommodations are considered precious tokens of ethnic tolerance in Kosovo.
Knowing Rubovc's harmonious reputation, Thaci came here just before his independence declaration to urge Kosovo Serbs to stay in a country in which he insisted they would be safe.
Thaci chatted with local Albanians and Serbs, hugged children and kicked a football around, before sharing home-made plum brandy with Slavisa Slavkovic, a Serb farmer.
Slavkovic said he trusted ex-guerrilla Thaci but complained about Kosovo's grinding poverty and joked grimly that his tractor was older than the 39-year-old premier.
Thaci delivered a new tractor to Slavkovic a few days later, but the gesture backfired. Some of Slavkovic's neighbours accused him of treachery, their anger exposing Serb fears for their future in a Kosovo where their population and birth rate are dwindling and which Irish and other peacekeepers will eventually leave.
"I really cannot understand how my neighbour was able to do such a thing in the present situation," one Rubovc Serb reportedly said of Slavkovic and his tractor. "He should have not accepted Thaci's gift."