In a Hollywood movie, the script would have ended with the joyous scenes on the road to Pristina last June 12th. Tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians - they had not realised themselves that they were so many in hiding - showered triumphant Kfor troops with roses.
Yet even as the Albanians celebrated, the grisly reality of the Balkans was already taking over. Within hours, the first of 550 suspected mass graves of Albanians massacred by Serbs during the 11-week bombardment were discovered. By the end of November, 2,000 bodies had been found in the 159 graves that investigators had opened. Albanians turned on the few Serbs who remained in Kosovo, murdering some 300 of them and forcing the rest out of the province or into a few NATO-protected enclaves.
For if the West won the war, it is finding it difficult to win the peace. Like Saddam Hussein eight years before him, President Slobodan Milosevic has defied predictions that he would be forced from power. At the end of November, his Information Minister Goran Matic "revealed" a French assassination plot against him. Paris denied the story, but the alleged plan gives an inkling of what Western leaders might like to see happen to Milosevic: death by a sniper's bullet, a grenade or a car-bomb - or a 10-man commando raid on the presidential residence.
Meanwhile, Serbia is an impoverished pariah, with 25 per cent unemployment and the burden of close to a million refugees from Milosevic's lost wars. The country has been under sanctions since 1992, and this winter its citizens are hungrier and colder than ever. Serbia plods on in this limbo, somewhere between resignation and unrest.
Opposition to Milosevic is fragmented: a handful of towns and cities with rebel mayors defy the central government. The Serbian Orthodox Church has called for him to resign, and the West seems to be hoping for a Yugoslav army take-over. At least two high-ranking generals have defected to the opposition, and western officials in Kosovo are careful to point out that atrocities in the province were carried out by Serb police and paramilitaries - not the army.
HOW long will 10 million Serbs be held hostage to Milosevic's fate? At an inter-parliamentary colloquium on the Balkans at the French National Assembly in late November, the French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine and the UN administrator of Kosovo, Dr Bernard Kouchner (who formerly served in the same cabinet with Vedrine) showed how ill-defined the Western position is. Vedrine advocated easing sanctions that harm the Serb population, while Dr Kouchner agreed with Albanian participants that there should be no change as long as more than 2,000 Albanians are believed held in Serb prisons.
Velimir Ilic, the Mayor of Cacak, a heavily-bombed industrial town in central Serbia, pleaded for help at the colloquium. "We are a democratic city," he said. "We have been fighting the Milosevic regime for 10 years, and we suffered great destruction . . . The EU won't help us. Everybody says, `we'll help you when Milosevic leaves power'."
Vonko Obradovic, the deputy mayor of Kraljevo, said that although his town was struggling to care for Serb refugees from Kosovo, "we are being described as traitors in Serbia, as representatives of the fifth column".
Last summer, donors pledged €2 billion in aid for the region, but already the cash is slow in coming and there is concern that the West may be distracted from its commitment to "Europeanise the Balkans". By October, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNmik) had received only $37 million of the $150 million promised - and it needed $200 million to finish the year.
Of the 6,000 international policemen Kouchner requested to bring order to the province, only 1,700 have arrived. "If the Serbs leave Kosovo," Kouchner said in August, "then we shall have lost. The war will have been fought for nothing." By the end of November, he admitted that hopes for a multi-ethnic Kosovo were unrealistic.
The most poignant condemnation of the Albanians' reverse ethnic cleansing of Kosovo's Serb minority has come from the Albanian newspaper editor Veton Surroi, who participated in the Rambouillet negotiations and remained in hiding in Pristina throughout the NATO bombardment. Recounting Albanian atrocities against Serb civilians, Surroi wrote in August: "I cannot hide my shame to discover that . . . we the Albanians of Kosovo are also capable of carrying out such monstrous acts."
Implicitly accusing Hashim Thaci's Kosovo Liberation Army, Surroi insisted that the revenge killings were more than a simple emotional reaction.
"This is organised, systematic intimidation of all Serbs, simply because they are Serbs and are therefore held collectively responsible for everything that happened in Kosovo."
The number of murders is declining, because there are fewer Serbs left to murder. But, Surroi warned, "those who think the violence will end as soon as the last Serb is chased out are fooling themselves. The violence will simply be directed against other Albanians. Is that really what we fought for?"
In response, the KLA's press agency called Albanians who criticise violence against Serbs "Serb spies" and "men who stink like Slavs".
Seven months after the bombardment of Yugoslavia, it has become apparent that while NATO achieved its military goal, and while the West labours away at Balkan reconstruction, it is failing politically. Milosevic's Serbia has been relegated to the deep freeze, for want of a better solution. And the fundamental question of Kosovo's status has not been addressed.
UN Security Council resolution 1244 grants Kosovo "substantial autonomy" from Serbia, but its Albanian citizens demand nothing short of independence - and increasingly resent the UN administration that is meant to govern it as a part of Yugoslavia.
The UN special rapporteur on Yugoslavia and Czech Foreign Minister Jiri Dienstbier summarised the impasse last month: "No initiative has been taken with a view to a political resolution. Yet again, it is the civilians of Kosovo and of the entire Federal Republic of Yugoslavia who are the victims of this situation, and of the violence and the uncertainty that flow from it."