Kosovo Reliving The Horrors

President Clinton isn't seeing much of Kosovo. It isn't the kind of place most people want to stick around.

It's cold, the power goes out for hours, sometimes days at a time, the water shuts off, there's mud everywhere. After a year of steady military traffic, the roads are a mess of broken asphalt.

The people are not as gloriously grateful as they were when NATO troops first rolled in to their province five months ago. Every day, Kosovars hear new revelations of alleged Serb atrocities during the spring-summer NATO air strikes. And they see the accused, protected behind NATO lines ringing Serb enclaves.

Kosovars hear the United Nations apologizing once again for not getting the justice system up and running; for not getting more international police onto the streets -- then again, the donor countries have been slow to send them.

CBS

CBS News Correspondent Kimberly Dozier covered the crisis in Kosovo.

A Kosovar acquaintance has installed four locks on two doors blocking his fortress-apartment from the outside world. It isn't, any longer, to protect his family from the Serbs he once feared.

"They're gone," he says.

Now, Kosovars in Pristina just feed on each other.

In the middle of it all, you go to brush your teeth after a blurry night in a Pristina bar where you got together with friends you made when they were all refugees and you were a reporter trying to make sense of it all.

The bar was chosen because it had a generator -- no electricity means no music, making the bar is too quiet, the conversation inevitably too intense to bear. You can't have a serious political conversation, or describe the mass grave you just saw exhumed, over the loud din of the Cranberries or Aerosmith. That's a good thing. Forgetting.

So...back to the mouthful of toothpaste. That's when you realize the water is off...again. Then you think of the further horror -- no shower before work in the morning, because you forgot to fill all the pails and plastic bottles while the water was still running.

But the discomfort of urban misery doesn't compare to the villages we visited in the mountains, some with one warm room to shelter in, but many with only tents. Many of them had a winter like this last year, before most of us were paying attention to th conflict.

But after all the misery this summer, this winter is going to be the one that knocks many people flat -- like the man I met whose neighbors tried to execute him. His son died in the pile of bodies on top of him, as he played dead. Will he finished repairing the roof in time, on the home he watched his Serb neighbors torch?

Much of the winter aid -- plastic sheeting, temporary roofing materials, blankets -- is stuck in a five-mile backup at the Macedonian border. The Macedonians are charging about $120 a truck, even aid trucks. That's slowing things down.

So people sit and wait, in the mountains, and the cities. And they tell stories over and over again of what they've been through, and the new horrors investigators are uncovering, and they stoke and store the hate. When they hear someone has been beaten or even killed for speaking Serb in the street, they just nod.

Serbs, sitting in their NATO-protected conclaves, or north of the border, refugees from their former homes in Kosovo, are doing the same thing. Storing up the hate, biding their time. A Russian official announced in Belgrade that Yugoslav troops would be back in Kosovo in "two-to-three months."

When I told this to one former Kosovar rebel, he said, "Let them come. We've got even more weapons now than when NATO troops started confiscating them five months ago. We just replaced the old stuff with better ones."

Another, formerly moderate Kosovar listening in added, "Sure, let them come. All the better for target practice."

The cold is hardening both sides into extremes. The extremes are drowning out the moderates. When Kosovar leading intellectual Veton Surroi denounced the revenge killings of Serbs, he was threatened with assassination, by elements of the Kosovo Liberation Army -- the force he once championed in his newspaper.

One international observer, who has watched every step of this process firsthand over the past year-and-a-half -- once shot at by Yugoslav troops while trying to protect Kosovars, once responsible for tracking and mapping every imaginable alleged Serb atrocity -- says the Kosovar Albanians have changed.

"I almost wish the Serbs were back," he said. "These guys have turned into real jerks."

Written By Kimberly Dozier