The backlash has begun. Before the last residue of ethnically-cleansed Kosovo Albanians arrived across the borders of Macedonia, telling of the final spate of mass murder by Yugoslav police and paramilitaries, the attention of the pundits had already shifted. That is to say, the forward-looking spin on events is to focus sympathetically on the plight of the Serbs when the dispossessed Albanians return home.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees pointed out on Wednesday that "there is a strong possibility . . . that a large-scale return movement may be accompanied by a concurrent exodus of Kosovo Serbs from Kosovo". Accordingly, UNHCR warns that an international agency should be established to protect the security of Serbs and other vulnerable groups in the region.
It is a short step from this self-evident truth to the pronouncement of Robert Fisk, in the Independent of London, that "first the Kosovo Albanians were `ethnically cleansed' by the Serbs. And in a few days - two weeks at most - the Serbs will be ethnically cleansed by NATO's Albanian allies".
This extraordinary attempt to establish parity of victimhood for Serbs and Albanians is echoed by other commentators. Jim Judah, author of The Serbs, a well-regarded analysis of Serbian identity, has warned that NATO must fill the vacuum left by the departing Serbian militia lest "Albanian paramilitaries" commit revenge attacks. This, then, is the downside of the right of return, as English Tory opponents of the war, like Sir Archie Hamilton, are keen to point out.
The headline in the Washington Post on Wednesday was "Fear of Suffering Rises in Kosovo - Among Serbs". The New York Times put it thus: "At Site of the Serbs' Identity, Fear of Albanians' Wrath". You get the picture. In a piquant reversal of received ideas, the ethnically-cleansed become the ethnic cleansers, the victims become the aggressors.
This analysis is none the less false for being true. What I mean is, there is a real likelihood of an exodus of Serbs from Kosovo in anticipation of the Albanians' return. And these are the Serbs who, before the demography of Kosovo was bloodily changed by Slobodan Milosevic, amounted to up to 10 per cent of the population of Kosovo and are every bit as indigenous to the region as the Albanians.
Further, the dispossessed Albanians are undoubtedly angry.
Several weeks ago, when I travelled with a group of refugees from Djakova on their way to Tirana, I asked one of them, a nurse, whose husband had been hunted like an animal by Serbian paramilitaries during the unutterably bloody sacking of the town, whether she could live with the Serbs again.
"I would like to kill them", she said simply.
It was the same with other refugees. Asked whether they could live with Serbs again, they said, simply, "No". But it is one thing to acknowledge that the Albanians who return to their ruined and ransacked houses are going to be unwilling to live as before with their Serbian neighbours. It is quite another to demonise them for that reason as being no better, given a chance, than those who initiated the ethnic cleansing.
Because the grim truth is that very many ordinary Serbs were complicit in that cleansing. I have spoken to innumerable refugees who were expelled from Kosovo, and in those stories the rule rather than the exception was that their Serbian neighbours had helped the paramilitaries identify the prominent Albanians who were killed, or had actually participated in the cleansing.
THERE were, of course, individual Serbs who did try to help. One young dentist from Pec said that when Serbian soldiers cleansed his town, some of them had wanted to beat him, but he had been protected by a policeman, a Serb from the Croatian Krajina, who was himself a refugee. But such stories are the exception.
Having said as much, it should go without saying that innocent Serbs have the right to remain in their homeland. But how to help them to do so, short of a de facto partition of Kosovo which would in itself be a victory for ethnic cleansing? A heavy NATO-led protection force, including Russians, which will impartially protect all the communities in Kosovo, and supplement a hands-on police force, is one obvious way.
Another is the International War Crimes Tribunal. If justice is seen to be done against those who planned as well as executed the bloody atrocities which characterised the cleansing of Kosovo, my own view is that ad hoc retribution by the returning Albanians will be far less likely.
What is in no one's interest is that we should try now to establish a dishonest symmetry between the fate and the moral responsibility of the ethnically-cleansed and the cleansers, returning Albanians and fleeing Serbs.
It is a distortion of reality which is, perhaps, least of all in the interests of the Serbs themselves.
Melanie McDonagh is an Irish- born journalist in London who has written extensively about the conflict in the Balkans.