Eve-Ann Prentice gets through to Kosovo's stricken capital to find ethnic Albanians cowering in the ruins My nights under fire in Pristina
BY night, the only place Dragana Milic says she feels safe is a damp, rat-infested cellar with only a couple of candles for heat and light.
By day, an elderly ethnic Albanian wanders dazed among the rubble of what used to be his home. Dragana is a bright, 25-year-old Serb, with model-girl looks, who took to sleeping in the cellar with her family after their apartment was badly damaged during a night of heavy Nato raids on the Kosovo capital Pristina.
Just yards away are three large craters, excavated by the bombs which shattered windows and dislodged the roof of Dragana's apartment block and reduced the old man's home to rubble, along with those of his ethnic Albanian neighbours in the heart of old Pristina.
Blast-burnt Albanian separatist books and leaflets lay half-buried among the ruins of the buildings yesterday. Just yards away I watched as about 200 ethnic Albanians were stirred from lethargy as a bus pulled into the rubble-strewn square between the bombed-out Kosovo parliament and post office. The elderly man began to scuttle around in what seemed certain to be an ungainly scrabble for space on the bus before it left for a long and dangerous journey to Macedonia.
There are still plenty of ethnic Albanians to be seen on the streets, but they stay together. There is little sign of them mixing with the Serbs. I had been braced for the worst as I arrived for my first view of the Kosovo capital after six years' absence, but nothing had prepared me for the initial shock of seeing an outline of the city from the distance - looking largely unchanged. That was until we reached the first buildings of this city of 150,000.
Pristina was always slightly unnerving - the frisson of surly tension between Serbs and ethnic Albanians almost palpable.
Yesterday, though, anxiety was directed towards the sky. The regular thump of exploding bombs in the middle distance occurred morning, noon and night, unlike the usually nocturnal Nato visits in Belgrade. A large number of buildings have been smashed and disfigured by the bombers, yet Pristina is far from being a ghost town, at least during daylight.
Shops and bars are open until 5pm or 6pm although alcohol has been banned since the beginning of the week, under a decree reportedly aimed at curbing drunkenness among the security forces.
There is food aplenty in those shops not destroyed: the rural economy ensures a bomb-proof supply of bread, cheese, meat and vegetables. Cigarettes, as in Belgrade, are almost non-existent except on the black market, where they sell for about DM30 (£10.70p) for 20. Electricity and water supplies are usually connected and the authorities have managed to repair some phone lines to Belgrade; satellite dishes once again scoop up television signals from abroad. Traffic on the pock-marked street seems, if anything, even heavier than six years ago. At least by day. By night, though, when Dragana heads for her cellar, few come out to risk the wrath of Nato.