Time for some beer between burning houses

Serbian Kosovo will cease to exist today, if not in law, at least in fact.

NATO gave Serb forces a last-minute extension of their withdrawal deadline but by this morning the last Serb soldiers, policemen and militiamen are to have left the southern half of the province, from Pristina down to the Macedonian border.

Once the capital is relinquished, Kosovo remains Serb in name only.

For all its might, NATO could not prevent the Serbs torching Kosovo in their wake. Along the road north from Pristina, dozens of houses burned. To the west, towards Obilic, a whole village was on fire. The brown-black exhaust of hundreds of T-72 tanks mixed with the smoke and dust, leaving Kosovo's green fields under a blanket of smog.

On a knoll just south of Pristina, we happened upon what journalists call a microcosm. Three British armoured personnel vehicles belonging to 5 Regiment Royal Artillery faced an estate of two-storey houses, their machineguns trained on three houses where 50 Yugoslav army soldiers lounged on balconies and in gardens.

In satellite television parlance, it was a stand-off. In reality, Antonetta, the Albanian owner of one of the houses - knowing the Serbs' penchant for burning the discarded homes they have requisitioned - had called Kfor. She watched nervously as Cpl Ian Thorpe, from London, walked into her living room, where a Yugoslav army colonel, captain and a handful of soldiers sat drinking beer.

Cpl Thorpe also looked a little nervous, taking off and replacing his red beret.

"Do you understand?" He kept asking the colonel, a shrewd bear of a man named Slobodan from Novi Sad. The colonel was in a jolly, back-slapping mood and wanted Cpl Thorpe to have a beer, which he declined.

"The houses which you have left you are not to go back to," said Cpl Thorpe. "You must not touch them."

"No fire, no fire," one of the Yugoslav soldiers repeated.

"You must leave here by six o'clock in the morning," Cpl Thorpe said, and the colonel looked like he might eat the redheaded Englishman for breakfast.

"Seven o'clock," countered the colonel, in a deep, dead-pan voice.

"Well, between six and seven," Cpl Thorpe relented. "We will be here, waiting. The buses and cars are coming for you? Do you understand? You must leave. If you are still here at seven we will . . . " The corporal's voice trailed off in search of a threat. "We will come and see you."

A fat reservist stood behind me, a woman's bracelet watch on his wrist. Someone had drawn a giant Serbian cross with its four Cs signifying unity in charcoal on the living room wall. "Kosovo Serbia," it said. Box upon box of empty beer and wine bottles littered the entry and garden of the Albanian woman's villa, along with discarded UNHCR ration packets. The soldiers had dug a trench between two rose beds.

A few minutes later, as we started our walk down the garden path towards the road with the British machine-gun mounted armoured vehicles, a Yugoslav soldier asked me, half plaintive, half defiant: "What do you think of the Serbian people?"

Antonetta was a lucky woman. There wasn't much that the British Kfor contingent could do against the militiamen I saw riding out of the city on flatbed trucks. They brandished heavy machine-guns and wore an odd mix of goggles, head bands and nets over their faces as they cursed and screamed: "We'll be back."

At Podujevo, half-way out of the province, British paratroopers watched a pullout of monumental proportions - more than 200 tanks and 5,000 men in one day, intermingled with fleeing Serb civilians. However, the Yugoslav army and interior ministry police still blocked access to Podujevo which, under their agreement with NATO, does not have to be evacuated until Sunday.

Only four more days to loot and burn before leaving.