Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Il Kossovo indipendente e' anche questo

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7534255.stm
Ivan Radic is one of nearly a quarter of a million people from Kosovo
still classified by the UN as internally displaced persons (IDPs) nine
years after the war.
The vast majority are ethnic Serbs, now scattered across Serbia with a
minority living in Kosovo's enclaves. Most of the hundreds of
thousands of wartime Albanian IDPs were able to return home long ago.
"I am in Urosevac almost every night - when I dream," Ivan tells me,
remembering his birthplace as we stand on the central bridge in the
town of Mitrovica.
The north side of Mitrovica is now the only large urban area in Kosovo
where Serbs live in any numbers and Ivan, 32, has settled there.
Urosevac (Ferizaj in Albanian) lies 62km (39 miles) to the south but
it is a journey he rarely makes, and only then in the company of
friends from the international organisations in Kosovo.
Ivan, who moved to Mitrovica in 2003, is wary of setting foot across
the Ibar river which divides the town.
After the war, he tried to live in the Kosovan capital Pristina. One
day, however, an Albanian gang identified him as a Serb and beat him
up.
Only a passing Norwegian K-For patrol saved his life, he believes.
Today he has walked on to the bridge from the north with a friend from
central Serbia, coming with us at Ivan's request.
A taxi with an Albanian driver awaits us on the south side, behind the
K-For base.
On the highway, Ivan is initially reserved, reluctant to speak within
earshot of our English-speaking Muslim driver Adem (not his real
name).
A devout Christian, he points out Serbian Orthodox churches. Ruined
Serb homes and roadside shrines to dead Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)
fighters are passed without comment.
But his friend in the front soon strikes up a lively chat in Serbian
with Adem and the atmosphere eases.
By nightfall, we will have all shared a meal at a cafe and, in the
car, Ivan and Adem will have sung folksongs to one other in each
other's language.
Now, in the heat of the afternoon, we turn off the highway and pull up
beside what looks like a fenced-off fallow field in the village of
Babus, 12km from Urosevac.
This, Ivan explains, is what remains of the graveyard where his
grandfather was buried in 1985 and that, he says pointing to the only
grave visible among the tall grass and weeds, is his broken headstone.
We cannot enter because of the real danger of mines.
"It was a beautiful graveyard before the war," Ivan says, recalling
how he and his grandmother would visit, bringing candles and sweets.
He is glad his grandfather, who lost a leg fighting in World War II,
did not live to see the flight of the Urosevac Serbs.
A stranger might think Serbs had never lived in Urosevac, which has a
population 160,000, were it not for the central church.
As we cruise around the streets of this bustling town of shops and new
cafes, some built on the sites of demolished Serb houses, I see no
trace of the Serbian language in the street signs.
Ivan, who grew up in an Albanian district where he spoke the language
of his friends and neighbours, recognises nobody.
Just 70 Serbs live in the area. The town's other Serbs make up the
bulk of the 12,800 IDPs from Urosevac counted by the UN.
The events of June 1999 are an open wound for Ivan, who feels betrayed
both by his Albanian neighbours and K-For.
During the Nato bombing, he says, his father and another Serb had
stood up to Serbian paramilitaries, telling them if they wanted to
harm their Albanian neighbours, they had to harm them first.
But when the KLA moved in after Serbian security forces withdrew and K-
For arrived, his Albanian neighbours locked themselves in their
houses, he says.
KLA gunmen were going from "house to house giving people five or ten
minutes to get out" and he, his brother and his parents left their
house with only the clothes they were wearing, he says.
US soldiers in the town, Ivan believes, did little more than escort
them out. Ivan was one of some 5,000 Serbs who left the town in a
convoy on 17 June.
The family house was burnt down like hundreds of others.
Ivan eventually lost touch with his old Albanian friends and
neighbours after keeping in contact by phone just after the war.
He does not blame politics, but the pressures of everyday life, and
says he has made new Albanian friends since then.
His close Serb friends from Urosevac mostly live outside Kosovo, as
far afield as Australia, Canada and Russia.
"My Christian beliefs tell me that if I am expelled from one place I
should make my home in another because everywhere is God's land," he
says.
Starting from scratch, all he has of Urosevac today is memories and
dreams:
"I'm back home with my friends, in my grandmother's house eating
pancakes, playing with the snow, smelling the spring, and it's so
specific and unique. That's only in the home town."
After we leave Ivan and his friend safely back in Mitrovica that
night, Adem speaks:
"I feel sorry for the guy. But I felt sorry too for the Albanians who
suffered under Milosevic."
He points out houses along the road to Pristina where, he says,
Albanians were evicted in the 1990s to make way for Serb refugees from
the former Yugoslavia.
We reach the city close to midnight. I go to my hotel and Adem goes
home.

 The family house was burnt down like hundreds of others.
Affermazione che lascia il tempo che trova.
-Stefano