NATO troops will encounter a web of competing militias, many dug in waiting for battle, when they move today into Kosovo to enforce the peace deal.
Reports from the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army say that, while Serb army and Interior Ministry troops are leaving, local police and militia units are staying put, in some cases digging in to defend their Serb villages.
Elsewhere, bands of KLA guerrillas are roaming the countryside, though commanders say they are obeying NATO requests for the units to stay out of towns and to avoid contact with Serb units.
"Some units of police and paramilitaries are staying," said a KLA spokesman, Mr Pleurat Sejdiu. "The Serbs are very angry. They are looting, breaking houses and so on."
The Serbs are worried. For the troops from elsewhere in Yugoslavia, the order to pull out is welcome, but for local forces it is a dilemma. Many have nowhere else to go yet fear that to stay behind, without the support of armour and artillery, may leave them vulnerable to the KLA.
NATO is hoping the KLA and Serb units can be kept apart as the peacekeepers, led by British paratroopers and Gurkhas, come in. And the alliance has also warned rebel force to stay out of certain areas which may become free-fire zones for alliance air strikes in the event of a Serb breach of the peace agreement. "We've been warned by NATO to stay away, not to go into the cities," said Mr Sejdiu.
This will not be easy. Serbs may form a minority in this battered province, but they are widely dispersed, typically in clusters of villages which are unlikely to welcome NATO.
The KLA commander, Mr Hashim Thaci, on a visit to Italy, said the KLA would stop fighting provided it is not itself attacked. "We have made a commitment to refrain from attacking Serb troops, but we reserve the right to self-defence and the defence of our people if necessary," he said.
But the KLA also warned it would interpret liberally the commitment to disarm as set out in the peace plan, made at Rambouillet in France last February.
The KLA "Deputy Defence Minister", Mr Bislin Zyrani, said yesterday that the KLA would shrink, but would remain in being as an army. "Demilitarisation of an army means you reduce the numbers but you do not eliminate the force," he said.
Fierce fighting with artillery exchanges broke out on the western border with Albania, where the KLA has gouged two enclaves into Serb territory, leaving the problem for Serb forces of how to disengage without seeing KLA units they have been fighting push forward.
Elsewhere in Kosovo there are reports of sporadic looting by Serbian units, with many shooting into the air in the streets of Pristina.
Here in the Macedonian village of Jazhince, we stood on a rocky outcrop 50 metres from the border with Kosovo, as Serb police arrived in the abandoned ethnic Albanian village of Globovica at the bottom of the hill and began loading fridges from the houses on to a tractor trailer.
"They are going from house to house, piling in the fridges," said a young farmer. "We've seen them lots of times, looting, taking things out."
Here, too, we could see the signs of the Serb pull-out, with ammunition boxes being loaded into a truck as the forces holding Globovica prepare to pull back.
Jazhince is otherwise quiet. There are none of the NATO troops and tanks and trucks which are elsewhere jamming the roads of northern Macedonia, heading for the main crossing point 40 km away at Blace.
In a field outside Globovica there are about 100 cars and half as many red tractors coupled to battered trailers parked amid the long grass. They have been abandoned by the refugees forced to cross the border on foot during the exodus of April and May, and many of the cars had their bonnets and boots open after some freelance looting. The only sign of life was a pack of wandering dogs.
Jazhince people are cautious about standing on the hilltops to look. Serbs have in the past fired at them, and two days ago several shells landed near the village shortly after one of the many hiccups in the NATO peace talks with the Serbs.
Globovica is a tiny slice of what NATO troops can expect to find: houses looted of anything that can be moved, including doors and window frames. Cars - the best ones have been taken, the worst stripped of wheels and engine parts, now fit only for scrap. But apart from the roaming militia bands, the landscape, once a rich farming belt, is now deserted, the fields overgrown.
Aside from a lone policeman, and a lone shot from a Kalashnikov assault rifle, nothing stirred in Globovica yesterday. "Nothing is moving down there now," said a Macedonian soldier guarding the border. "No pictures are allowed."
The ethnic Albanian refugees here in Macedonia have mixed feelings about whether the peace plan will work. "It's a first step to freedom," said 17-year-old Rita, from Kosovo's capital, Pristina, now a NATO translator. "I am getting my life back."
Others are more cautious. "I'm not very optimistic about all this. There are still so many problems," said Ms Aferdita Pacarada, a former Miss Kosovo.
Meanwhile there were scenes of jubilation among Kosovar refugees living in the Macedonia capital, Skopje, in the early hours of yesterday as news filtered through of the peace deal, though some remained cautious. "I'm still afraid," said Rita. "I'm not used to seeing things going good for Kosovo."
Bars in the mostly ethnic Albanian Old Town stayed open well into the early morning with Kosovar refugees singing and dancing. At around 2 o'clock NATO jets roared invisibly high overhead, on strike missions that the alliance said were cancelled with the jets already in mid-air near their targets.
Among the Kosovar revellers doubts about the future peace plan were banished. "If this is a lie, lie some more," said Rita.
Rita was one of several dozen young translators called in the evening by NATO and told to report to British and German bases by 3 p.m. yesterday in preparation for moving into Kosovo. Another translator, Arta (20), a former film student from Pristina, said: "Even if it is not perfect, it's our first step to freedom."
The news editor of the main Kosovar newspaper, Koha Ditor, Mr Ardean Arifaj, was more cautious.
He and his staff fled Kosovo after Serb paramilitaries attacked the Koha office killing a security guard, and they now run the newspaper from a cramped single-roomed office in the Macedonian town of Tetovo. "It's too early to say if this deal is a success", said Mr Arifaj. "I will believe people are going back when they are going back."
Mr Arifaj said many must brace themselves for long delays, with the programme which snow will curtail in October likely to stretch well into next year. It took two months for approximately one million people to be expelled, and aid officials say getting them all back with roofs over their head will take much longer.