When we tried to leave the old man in the black beret – Nartila’s father -

When we tried to leave, the old man in the black beret – Nartila’s father – tried to pull me back into the house again, tugging desperately at my shirt sleeve. “The gunmen have just gone but they said they would burn us all tomorrow,” she said in hesitant English “They fired at our houses and in the air. But I’ve seen pictures of the Polish ghettoes and I thought, briefly, of Anne Frank in her garret. Goran sat in the car, loyal as ever, not for a moment asking to leave.Then three children appeared Nartila, we said. It was not a country whose name I had said very loudly in Serbia these past two months. This was an abandoned city, a place already pillaged by the Serb gunmen of Kosovo.

I found a group of K-For troops, just arrived in Pristina, and asked for a British officer. We told every journalist we could find in the restaurant of the Grand Hotel. Kosovo is not a great place to play the role of Good Samaritan but we did our best. End of discussion.”The Serb officers then gave the order and 70 young Serb soldiers emerged from a hillside path, including snipers cradling their rifles. “We need a receipt for the ammunition we’re leaving behind,” said Col Jozef “The paperwork will be done in Prizren That’s an order,” said the general “Time’s running out You’ve got 28 minutes left.

With Serb forces still dug in on the southern border, across from Morini, Albania, he flew in by helicopter to land on Kosovo soil behind Serb lines.A few German vehicles had already arrived at the scene.Colonel Delic was there with two other Serb officers and all shook hands. But Serbs were still living in the Dushanova suburb and in the hills above the city centre. It was an ironic sight to see so many Serbs – men, women and children – about to become the region’s new refugees. Then we ran into groups of Serb soldiers and civilians lined up along the roadside in convoys, their vehicles packed with the contents of the looted village homes. It was a kind of massive, group tango, involving the complex movement process of debouching one army – Nato – into the country, while allowing another – the Yugoslav VJ – to make their escape north.”It’s all been a bit chaotic, mostly due to you bloody chaps,” said a grinning Major Julian Moir, second in command of the King’s Royal Hussars, a man with a healthy sense of the absurd who fully understands the difference between the big media showpiece and the real thing. He added: “Their forensic skills will be used to prepare evidence for the War Crimes Tribunal to bring the perpetrators of these vile crimes to justice.”David Gowan, the Foreign Office’s war crimes co-ordinator, said the scale of offences by suspected war criminals in Kosovo is “enormous”.