The United Nations yesterday unveiled the first post-war report into the damage inflicted in recent months on Kosovo, detailing heavy damage to homes and agriculture.
The report, Rapid Village Assessment, makes sobering reading. Of 140 villages surveyed, all of them in war-affected areas, 64 per cent of the housing stock was found to be severely damaged. In the worst affected town, Pec, almost half the housing stock is wrecked , while in two other "front line" towns, Djakovica and Mitrovica, damage is 30 per cent.
Outside the towns, ethnic cleansing in the spring has led to the loss of 40 per cent of the livestock, either killed or removed, and almost the whole province has missed the spring planting season.
The report says that the immediate dangers to returning people have been overcome - aid agencies and NATO are providing food and the weather is warm. "There is the very real danger, however, that the situation could rapidly deteriorate during the autumn and winter months if the measures necessary to ensure adequate shelter and food supplies are not taken now," it says.
The UN will run out of cash to fund its relief effort later this month unless more money is donated.
Present plans by the UN will cost $389 million, but the UN has been given only $155 million, and is expected to empty its coffers by the end of July. "They have spent billions on this military campaign which was aimed at ensuring these people go home. Now that it is possible we can't even get a few hundred million dollars to complete the task," said a UN spokesman, Mr Ron Redmond.
Aid officials have been staggered by the eagerness of refugees to return home. When NATO first drove into the province, a key objective was to encourage the 800,000 who had been deported to come home.
Instead the alliance has been trying to stem the flow, fearing the effects of mines and the strain on aid agencies. In less than four weeks, 580,000 have returned to the province.
The French Health Minister, Mr Bernard Kouchner, takes over later this month to run Kosovo in line with UN Resolution 1244 which instructs the UN to set up an interim administration for the province.
Meanwhile, gunshots rang out yesterday in the southern Serbian town of Prokuplje as more than 4,000 people gathered for a rally against President Slobodan Milosevic. There were no reports of injuries.
The shots were fired into the air from the balcony of a building occupied by Mr Milosevic's Socialist party (SPS), not far from the demonstration. Witnesses said they were fired by an SPS official.
Protestors had gathered for the rally in response to the call of the opposition Alliance for Change, headed by the Democratic Party of Mr Zoran Djindjic.
Opposition and church leaders also demanded democratic change in Serbia yesterday but were jostled by angry crowds as they tried to deliver their message at a Kosovo monastery.
The Serbian Orthodox Bishop Artemije and Mr Vladan Batic, co-ordinator of the opposition Alliance for Change coalition, expressed their deep concern for the future of Serbs in the region in a joint statement.
"We agree to unite all our efforts for the protection and survival of the Serbian people in Kosovo and Metohija," it said.
"We jointly declare that the only way towards the salvation of Serbia and Kosovo and Metohija is in the urgent and thorough transformation of Serbia into a democratic country."