Sometimes in Kosovo, you can even laugh. Take the Serb graffiti on the wall near Gllogovch. "Clinton Peder" reads one large red daub ("Clinton is gay") and directly underneath in the same hand, "Clinton Fac you Monica". To some Serbs at least, Bill is clearly a man for all seasons.
Around Gllogovch, every little bit of humour helps. To anyone interviewing traumatised refugees in recent months, the whole Drenica region had grown in the mind to monstrous proportions, a place where tens of thousands of ghosts haunted the land and the living were condemned forever to search for them.
Earlier this week, 20,000 of Drenica's dispossessed finally felt safe enough to emerge from their hiding places in the mountain forests. The occasion was the first aid convoy to the area by the UNHCR, but this mass gathering was about much more than supplementing the unmilled wheat mash that many had been living on for weeks. The roses, the quiet weeping, the passionate, wordless handshakes and embraces symbolised a great, collective outpouring of release from fear, from abandonment, from months of running and living like rats. Now as they reclaimed their own streets, warily at first, too accustomed to terror to believe that it could be over, the easing of tension was palpable; from watchfulness and whispers to euphoria and celebration.
Two days later, we travelled again to Gllogovch. The long trek home to Drenica was gathering pace. Starving, thirsty and terrified of mines, ragged little family groups lined the roads, walking purposefully with their broken shoes and walking sticks, or riding along in decrepit old tractors or horses and carts, many clutching the precious bread donated by other poor Albanians along the way. In the town, while the same gentle manners and exquisite courtesy prevailed, the festive mood had dissipated. Now that physical survival was no longer the imperative, minds had been freed to roam at last, leading into long-buried realms of such unbearable suffering that it seems impossible for a whole world to contain it, never mind little Kosovo.
In sombre silence, a group of young people led us for half a mile across grazing lands and meadows to a ridge alongside a river. Below the ridge, in a small sheltered green area lay 35 fresh mounds of earth. The people beneath them ranged in age from one month to 65 and all, we were told, died in the past month. At least 20 were killed by Serbs, they said; the others died of fear or hunger.
Shukrie Bylykbashi's 14-year-old son Nehat, lies here, beneath a mound which, like the others, is marked with just two crude wooden stakes. His name is scratched in pen on one stake - all that remains of a beloved little boy shot so many times in the face and body that his mother couldn't bear to look at his corpse. Nor could she bear to follow the brave little procession to his final resting place when - like all the others here, even the babies - he had to be buried swiftly, silently in a shallow grave at dead of night.
The Serb military accused Nehat and his 17-year-old brother Esat of being KLA soldiers, before battering them senseless and pumping them with bullets in front of their mother and two little sisters, then leaving with Shukrie's gold and the 1,000 DMs she had offered in exchange for their lives. Esat survived and is receiving treatment in Albania. His small sisters no longer sleep at night. WHAT is so deeply unnerving about Shukrie's terrible story is that in all the thrashed and burnt villages throughout Drenica - an area of about 100 square miles encompassing the seat of nationalism and birthplace of the KLA - there is virtually no one without an equally wrenching tale. And yet, with their courtesy and reserve, there is no clamorous rush to tell their story. They stand and listen sympathetically and patiently to others, reluctant to speak themselves.
We asked about the grave with the two big plastic daisies. An exquisitely pretty 20-year-old called Ajmona Elshani said softly that it held the body of her 10-year-old cousin Donjeta, whom she had seen die at 5 a.m. one morning, after three months of running in terror from place to place.
Donjeta had become so traumatised that she stopped eating. Left unexplored are the horrors that Donjeta saw and experienced, but the implication is clear as Shota Kadriu links Donjeta's death to another incident, the time when soldiers invaded Shota's house and took away her 16-year-old daughter-in-law. She was missing for seven hours and insisted that they had only wanted her to clean their car. But since then she has been waking every night, screaming and shaking in fits that can last up to an hour. Women tell us that many girls in this village were raped, but the truth of their violation may never be known. The shame runs too deep.
A solemn 14-year-old boy called Genc Rama leads us back across the meadow and to the ground floor of a street-side apartment block in town. He points to a blue rubber hose on the floor, and says this was one of the weapons used to beat him, his father and his 15-year-old brother Flamur who were imprisoned here with at least 400 other men a few weeks ago. After several days, Genc and 79 others were released; the rest, including his father and brother, were driven away in tractors and trailors. Prolonged shooting was heard soon after they left. The 300-odd men - who included boys as young as 11 - have not been seen since that day, May 28th.
Hamid Ulaj, a 30-year-old accountant, had just returned to his town-centre home after several months hiding out in the mountains. The house, a fine bright, comfortably-furnished home for himself, his sisters and parents, had been totally thrashed by the military who occupied it in his absence and had left only 24 hours before. Furniture was dumped in the garden or smashed to pieces; broken glass and tiles, papers and books covered the floors. An attempt to burn the house down as they left was partly successful. But there was even worse news than this. They had just learned that Hamid's father, Adem, a major in the KLA, was killed by police a month ago and buried in a field. Hamid's eyes were brimming as we said goodbye.
Stories like this - of people hearing shattering news months after the event or finding a loved one again in a town just an hour away but totally inaccessible - give the lie to the smug notion that modern technology means that no one is truly isolated in modern wars. Here in Kosovo's capital, the mobile-phone system for example has been functioning perfectly since the day before NATO's entry, but only as far as the city borders. When we accompanied a refugee to his home in Vuchitrn this week, a town in rubble, still swarming with murderous paramilitaries and well beyond NATO's reach, the sense of total isolation brought on by the disappearance of the mobile-phone signal was easily the most frightening aspect of the journey. The reality of such utter abandonment for tens of thousands of defenceless people over many months can hardly be imagined.
Even for the odd few who manage to hoard batteries and try to monitor respected independent news services, there is a downside. As if there wasn't already enough horror piled on horror, rumours are wild in the Balkans. A small incident relayed up the chain of locals, interpreters and journalists can become so distorted that in minutes, it assumes the status of a third World War. The competition between TV crews in particular, even TV crews working for the same organisation, is cut-throat. The BBC alone, for example, has six television and five radio crews out here.
On Monday evening this week, the station was leading its bulletins with news of reports from "an Irish journalist" of a "massacre" near Vucitrn. The "Irish journalist" turned out to be me. Minutes after returning from Vchitrn I had had a two-minute conversation with a couple of unidentified journalists during which I described the road from Vchitrn as being "littered with MUPs" (the Ministry of the Interior's loathed police) and of a murdered body on the road. Without further reference to me, this was broadcast as "reports of a massacre". Within hours, on one wire service, the toll had climbed to 50 bodies.
Again, one can only imagine the terror of defenceless Albanians trapped in Serb-controlled villages on hearing such reports - or indeed, the horror for people like Miran Letifi and his family, refugees from Vuchitrn currently in Kildare barracks.
Meanwhile, the level of gunfire rattling around the neighbourhoods is easing. Trucks and cars are still being loaded up by departing Serbs; one being loaded below my window has its sound system defiantly blasting out thunderstorm Serb folk music. At a nearby apartment block, NATO have just stopped a BMW driver and searched his trailor to find it stacked with weapons and ammunition. As British troops unloaded the stash, one by one, Albanian residents who had been terrorised by the BMW driver for months on end, came out to watch and celebrate.
Out the road, petrol stations are besieged by endless queues of Serb cars trying to fill up (a fairly hopeless aspiration) for the journey north. All through the earlier part of the week, Serb military convoys as long as 15 kms were pulling out in dazzling displays of might and bravado. Checkpoints manned by courteous but unyielding Serb officers continued to restrict media movement up to the last moment, although aid convoys allowed through reported fleets of soldiers twisting wildly around them, yelling insults with their guns cocked out the window. On the road, these combined tank and personnel movements presented a curious mix. Smartly-uniformed regular army stood aloft in tanks flying enormous Yugoslavian flags and laden with flowers, giving the recognised Serb salute of thumb, index and middle fingers and looking happy to be heading home; behind them, trucks of orderly looking soldiers waved at friendly faces; and at intervals in between came the paramilitaries, the ones who history may well show carried out the most brutal atrocities. These Mad Maxlike figures hanging on to the sides of uncovered civilian trucks in their lurid mix of camouflage and huge wrap-around bikers' sunglasses looked to be in dangerously high spirits as they waved their rifles wildly and flashed the victory sign or the one-finger insult depending on who they encountered. By an odd co-incidence, Pristina's water supply dried up the evening of their departure and is still dry two days later.
But water is such a small detail in the scheme of things. As NATO troops move further up the zones, life begins to feel more secure. Ahead of us on the road to Prizren this week where three German journalists were shot dead on Sunday, two KLA men did a lap of honour for the entire hour-long journey, one head out of the sunroof, the driver's out the window, flashing the victory sign. Car drivers honked horns and were honked in return. Every man, woman and child - including returned refugees crouched outside their burnt-out houses - raised the two-arm victory sign, accompanied by delighted smiles.
To many Kosovar Albanians, NATO troops are gods for now. Their tanks are strung with roses and gifts of fruit arrive by the hour. But as so often in this confict, one is reminded of Northern Ireland and in particular, the euphoric nationalist welcome for the first British troops to arrive there.
Expectations here are so high, they must be doomed. At one town where NATO troops were being feted this week, their commander was meeting a constant stream of villagers with requests that could not be met. One old man - terrified by news of a child of a returning family blown up by a mined doorway - was asking that they come and check his house for mines. A family wanted them to help find their kidnapped father. The local clinic wanted an armed KLA guard on the door.
Expectations are so high, they must be doomed. At one town where NATO troops were being feted this week, their commander was meeting a constant stream of villagers with requests that could not be met. One old man - terrified by news of a child of a returning family blown up by a mined doorway - was asking that they come and check his house for mines. A family wanted them to help find their kidnapped father. The local clinic wanted an armed KLA guard on the door.
In vain did he explain that mine-clearing was for specialists - who were all presently occupied clearing vital routes; that they hadn't the resources to locate missing persons; that NATO was there for all Kosovars and therefore couldn't possibly countenance another armed military presence.
Down in Prizren, where German troops hold the line - and have much less experience in such matters - the dilemma regarding KLA rule is particularly acute. The challenge of maintaining local support while standing up to their local KLA heroes promises to be a tough one. British troops who served in Northern Ireland constantly refer to a startling sense of deja vu. They - and Jean McConville's children - remember when the adulation ended, the cups of tea stopped and the local guns were turned on them.
Whatever the outcome, the context for all this should never be forgotten. The terrible reality of the burnt-out houses smoking across the countryside, the cowering Albanians of Vuchitrn, Nehat and Donjeta - the murdered, starving and traumatised children of Drenica - lying in their shallow graves in a cattle pasture . . . and the Serb BMW driver with his mobile arsenal. What the future holds is impossible to guess. It is difficult to be optimistic about this beautiful, wretched country.