Last summer the impoverished village of Kijevo in the heart of Kosovo was deemed the most dangerous place in Europe, its Serbian population living in daily terror of bombardment.
Today the villagers are no less fearful - but this time at the prospect of life surrounded by troops of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).
Under proposals being debated in France, NATO may deploy as many as 28,000 soldiers to underpin a peace deal for the secessionist Serbian province. Yet in the eyes of many inhabitants of the crossroads village the soldiers would not be peacekeepers, but a foreign army of occupation.
"There will be terror against Serbs if there are NATO troops here," said Mr Radisa Pesic, a father of two, as he looked over Kijevo's jumble of rundown stone houses. "If the international representatives were thinking clearly, they would achieve something" at the Rambouillet talks, he said. "But they're only blaming everything on Serbs, and Serbs are not to blame."
Just off the strategic Pristina-Pec highway, Kijevo made headlines in June when it was besieged by Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas armed with mortars and rockets. While helicopters brought in food and took out the sick, and the security forces rolled in heavy weapons, US Balkan troubleshooter Mr Richard Holbrooke declared the village "the most dangerous spot in Europe".
The siege lasted more than two months. But yesterday the only visible police presence was three uniformed officers on foot, armed with no more than pistols on their hips.
Kijevo is still ringed by the ethnic Albanian guerrillas. The inhabitants say they fear going out of the village at any hour, preferring to stay inside their houses.
Mr Ljuban Simic, a municipal councillor who blames "outsiders" for provoking the Kosovar rebellion, said he put more trust in European peacemakers than in Washington, which he suspected of ulterior motives.