Unfair to say looters took everything but kitchen sink (Irish Times)

Chris Stephen returned to his flat after three months

It Would be unfair to say that whoever looted my Prishtina apartment in the three months I was away has taken everything but the kitchen sink - because they managed to steal that too.

Picking my way over the papers and books strewn over the floors, I found a hole and a pile of broken plaster where the sink once was. It disappeared together with the kitchen table, our rickety chairs and the disintegrating sofa. Our landlord escaped to Macedonia, but there is little left of his three floor house, looted like thousands of other places in this city. Gone too of course was the TV and video in the flat shared with four other journalists, together with my snowboard. I can get some of the cash back from the insurance company - if I can produce a police report. This is a problem not just because it was probably the police who took the snowboard, but because there is now a big hole made by NATO where the police headquarters used to be. Like the information ministry and army headquarters, this building has been hit by a titanic explosion. But contrary to those censored television pictures, there are comparatively few such holes across this town. It is not the destruction which surprises you, graphic as it is, but the emptiness.

Yet this is the Prishtina the hardline Serb nationalists made their dream. The dream of ethnic purity. Most of the cafes, restaurants and shops are looted and burned, and covered in graffitti proclaiming the realisation of that Serbs-only dream. The few shops owned by Serbs are mostly empty.

The cinema is closed, the handsome modern sports stadium deserted, the central square where teenagers once eyed each other up is home only to black crows looking for food among the cracks in the paving stones. At night the only people on the streets are the paramilitaries, shooting in the air and still frightening the few Albanians who have clung on. Some dream. And some price to get it.

But reality changes so fast in Prishtina that being here is itself dreamlike. Walking to the apartment in the morning sunshine with a Dutch colleague, I wandered, scared, through the back roads, fearful of the paramilitaries - typically they are portly, dressed in a mix of jeans and uniforms, well armed and driving cars with no licence plates.

By the time we left, the armoured personnel carriers of the Irish Guards were thundering down the main street and the mood changed. Albanian women and children ran from their apartments to wave at the British, and the fear vanished, at least until the tanks raced away around a corner. "How long will they stay?" asked one teenaged boy. In the town centre, the entire glass wall of a bank has been destroyed by the blast of a nearby bomb, leaving only a concrete platform. Yet the door frame has been dusted off and set up, standing on its own, at one end of the platform. And just inside, in a space cleared of the glass and debris, sits a man on a chair in front of the desk, the caretaker. "I work as normal, of course," he said as we took his picture.

The next task, after visiting the apartment, was to find the parents of my former translator, Afirdite. She escaped early in the war, but they were unable to follow, spending 11 terrified weeks closed into their apartment.

Their faces show tension, but also great relief. "We spent seven days on the border, they would not let us go, so we came back," said her father. When they got back, the Serbs gave them a new identity card, telling him: "You can take this, but we will still shoot you." Nevertheless, bureaucracies being what they are, the identity card is helpfully written in both Serbian and Albanian.

Instead, they kept as low a profile as possible, with only Afirdite's mother going out to buy what food there was. From their kitchen windows they watched in the streets as some Serbian neighbours paraded in their new paramilitary uniforms. Then, the night the British arrived, they watched the same neighbours go to a skip at the car park, drop the uniforms in and set fire to them. "For the Serbs, now, it will be difficult to stay," said her mother. "And for anyone who was in uniform. . ." she fell silence, and shook her head.

There were 28 Albanian families in their block. Only two were not able to flee. There were also three Serb families, and a police unit living part-time in the basement for protection from bombs.

Two of the families have already fled, and nobody knows, or dares to look, to see if the police are still downstairs.

Another family arrives to ask if we are really British, and to rent us their battered car for a few days, and to ask how long the tanks will be here.

From the apartment we can also see wisps of grey smoke, a reminder that NATO is having a race against time to impose its will on a town much of which is descending into anarchy.

The house of the local imman was set on fire, as was that of an Albanian family only 500 metres from the main British base at a petrol station on the edge of town. A massive Challenger tank sat nearby, but its crew could do nothing but watch, saying the fire was started by two men in a black Golf car. Three kilometres outside town, Kosova Liberation Army guerrillas materialised, capturing three Serb police before letting them go. Fighting raged to the west around the town of Suva Reka between the KLA and Serb units, and in the late afternoon everyone got a jolt when news came through that the Paratroopers, now on foot patrol in the town, had come under fire, returned fire, and killed a Serb.

More reports of near-clashes came in, and by early evening the paramilitaries were back on the streets driving too fast and shooting in the air. The Albanians, officially liberated, went back inside and locked their doors.