Despite recent intensive talks, Kosovars have long memories, reports Daniel McLaughlinfrom Racak
Crawling down a rough crease in the Kosovo hills, we found the streets of Racak full of thin, watchful men, who moved carefully aside to let our vehicle pass through the village.
A funeral was ending and, as Muslim tradition dictates, no women accompanied the body to the grave. Only the men felt the cold, clean wind that stiffened the red-and-black Albanian flags over the mosque and on the hilltop high above.
Between the village and the ridge, a portion of the brown earth is studded with dozens of points of red that stand proud from a gaudy carpet of flowers and ribbons.
The red headstones mark the graves of people whose death made Racak infamous, and who many Kosovars call martyrs for the cause of independence from Serbia.
Images captured here on January 16th, 1999, appalled millions of people around the world and galvanised western powers to bomb Slobodan Milosevic's soldiers out of Kosovo. A tangle of dead bodies in a frozen ditch, all gouged by bullets, some mutilated by knives, prompted William Walker, head of an international mission to monitor a non-existent ceasefire, to deliver a verdict that would pursue Mr Milosevic to the UN war crimes court at The Hague.
"I will not hesitate to say, based on what I saw, that this was a massacre close to crimes against humanity," the US diplomat said. "I will not hesitate to accuse Yugoslav security forces for it."
The killing was done the day before, on January 15th, when Serb forces entered this stronghold of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the most potent force in a fight for independence from Belgrade that was backed by most of this region's ethnic-Albanian majority.
The KLA had recently killed four Serb policemen in an ambush that was typical of their tactics - hit-and-run operations that chipped away at the Serb forces, rendered redundant their superior firepower and exploited their unfamiliarity with the rugged highlands of Kosovo.
Villagers say KLA fighters had left the area by the time Serb forces arrived, and only civilians were in Racak when Belgrade's men exacted revenge - killing 21 people as they tried to flee, and executing 24 more on the hillside overlooking their homes. The headstones in the cemetery show the oldest victim was 99-years-old, the youngest 14.
The scenes and stories from Racak shook President Clinton's White House into action, after it had spent months dealing with fallout from his affair with Monica Lewinsky and hoping Kosovo would not become another Bosnia.
Ten weeks after Racak, Nato bombers were pounding Yugoslavia; five months after Racak, the bombing was over, and Nato and Russian forces were in Kosovo watching Mr Milosevic's troops withdraw from a region that was under UN control.
Most Serbs now have little time for Milosevic, and admit that he wrecked their country. But they also deeply resent Nato bombing that killed hundreds of civilians, destroyed much of Serbia's infrastructure, and paved the way for the independence of a province that for centuries was the religious and cultural heart of their nation.
Many Serbs also accuse the West of launching a propaganda war against them, and call Racak its key campaign. Until his death last year, Mr Milosevic insisted the KLA had dressed its own dead fighters in civilian clothes and dumped them in the ditch above the village to discredit Serbia in international eyes. The "massacre", so a strand of the theory goes, gave Mr Clinton a pretext for a small war that distracted some attention from his impeachment over the Lewinsky affair.
"There are still people saying that Racak was a conspiracy, a fantasy invented by Nato, OSCE, CIA and the Pentagon," William Walker said when he returned here last month to mark the anniversary of the killing. "But the truth was that a terrible tragedy had taken place here. Racak remains the most living memory for me, the most important and the most dramatic moment in my career. Racak citizens are my family."
Irish troops now monitor Racak and 80 other villages in the region, patrolling, operating checkpoints and helping communities - Albanian, Serb, Roma and Croat - move slowly and peacefully into an uncertain future.
They are part of a Nato-led peacekeeping force that is alert to the threat of violence as Kosovo prepares for a form of statehood, supervised by EU administrators and foreign soldiers, and the subject of debate as recently as yesterday as EU leaders met the Russian government in Moscow, and the political parties squabbled in Belgrade, unable to form a government capable of facing tough decisions, such as Kosovo.
In Racak, the locals demand nothing less than full independence.
"The Serbs burned our villages and houses. Our life was totally changed, and we still have people missing," says Metush Mustaja (46) in the doorway of the village shop.
"Kosovars would rather die than go back to being part of Serbia - we would lose everything."