NATO won the war but did we lose the peace? The situation in Kosovo is an unlovely advertisement for the Millennial World Order.
Opponents of the Nato intervention against Belgrade have made much of the recent report from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which describes the situation in Kosovo since October last year. Its second part catalogues a grim sequence of revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians in Kosovo against Serbs and other minorities since Kfor entered Kosovo in June.
Over 340 Serbs and gypsies have been killed. At least half the original population of Serbs in Kosovo - some 100,000 people - are now refugees. Is this what humanitarian war means: that the ethnically cleansed become the cleansers? Did we make things worse?
Not to my way of thinking.
I was not surprised by the revenge attacks by returning Albanians, because I had spoken to many of the refugees after they were cleansed - there were, remember, at least 875,000 of them according to UNHCR figures.
On Good Friday this year I watched that heartbreaking stream of humanity as they walked across the border from Kosovo to Albania. And in their grief and rage, they were perfectly explicit about their feelings towards the Serbs.
When you asked them whether they could live with the Serbs again, the answer was bleakly uniform: not now, not after everything that has happened. In an article for this paper written as the refugees prepared to return, anticipating the revisionism that would equate revenge killings with the original ethnic cleansing, I recalled one Albanian nurse who replied simply to the same question about the Serbs: "I would like to kill them".
And so it has happened.
One obvious problem is that the number of UN police in Kosovo is a fraction of the number needed to protect minorities from vengeful returnees, and from the criminal mafia from across the Albanian border which has ruthlessly exploited the unrest. Bernard Kouchner, the effective governor of Kosovo, asked for 6,000 international police; he got 1,400.
Another problem is that there has been no apology by the Serbs for what was done to the Albanians, no recognition of guilt. A further factor is the apparent inability of Albanian politicians to give principled leadership to the people: Fehmet Agani, perhaps the best of them, was killed by the Serbs.
But if disorder and revenge hold sway in Kosovo, why do supporters of the Nato action, like myself, have no regrets?
It's not for ignorance of the situation. The Serbian family I knew best in Pristina has fled from Kosovo. I spoke to them before they left: the father was too afraid to leave his flat. This was a man who, nearly a decade ago, when the Belgrade regime sacked practically all Albanians in Kosovo from state employment, stood up for his Albanian workers and was himself sacked for his pains.
But his son, an ebullient artist, was a conscript in the Yugoslav army. When I met him he asked me would I hand his ammunition from the Yugoslav army over to Kfor. I found myself taking part in the decommissioning process - handing over two bags full of bullets late at night to a soldier from the parachute regiment.
Later, my friend told me what he'd been doing in his unit in the Yugoslav army since he was conscripted early this year. He'd been cleansing the Catholic villages in the Has area. He would go into people's houses, and tell them they had 10 minutes to leave their homes or be killed.
If this young man cannot live in Pristina now, who is to blame?
FOR all the wrongness of the Albanians' actions now, there is no comparison between this situation, and the situation since October last year, when hundreds of thousands of Kosovan Albanians were expelled from their homes by Yugoslav forces, or since March, when the campaign of systematic dispossession escalated after the Nato bombing.
The OSCE report is explicit on this point: The Albanian attacks on Serbs and other minorities happened after ethnic cleansing had been reversed. And they happened because of that ethnic cleansing, in which some 10,000 Albanians were killed, according to the estimate of the International War Crimes Tribunal.
Blame for what Serbs and other minorities are enduring lies with the Belgrade government. To understand the second part of the OSCE report regarding Albanian revenge attacks - read part one, which documents the campaign of terror which was conducted by the Yugoslav Army since the summer of last year.
The critics of NATO who imagine that the conditions of the Rambouillet agreement, or the Allied bombing, somehow caused this crisis need only cast their minds back a year, when 300,000 people were driven from their homes by Serbian forces.
It would, I suppose, be asking too much of them to remember the condition of Kosovo since its autonomy was taken away by Belgrade in 1989, when the Albanians were reduced to a condition of quasi-apartheid in their own country, which included the sacking of Albanians from state employment in 1991, or the precedent for Serbian ethnic cleansing in Bosnia from 1992.
In considering the former Yugoslavia, the trouble most of us have is thinking only in the present tense. The moral of the Kosovo conflict is not that humanitarian war is a contradiction in terms. If NATO had not bombed Serbia, nearly a million Albanians would still be refugees - an angry, destabilising presence in the countries into which they were forced.
The policies of Slobodan Milosevic which had already dismembered Bosnia, would have been vindicated. We can all find grievous fault with the way the campaign was conducted and the way the peace has been handled but it was a war worth fighting. Even now.
Melanie McDonagh is an Irish-born free- lance journalist living in London