On one side of the bridge at Mitrovica a crowd chants slogans and taunts the French Kfor troops keeping guard. On the other, a drunken mob sings nationalist songs and waves the Serbian flag.
It's the old language of taunting and abuse, so frequently the preamble to violence. The symbolism of the bridge is probably misplaced, but it still evokes images of Burntollet or Martin Luther King's civil rights movement.
An hour north of the capital Pristina, Mitrovica is one of the main flashpoints for Serb and Albanian tensions in the new Kosovo. If NATO's notions of a multi-ethnic Kosovo are to have any substance, they had better start working here.
Most of the town's Serbs live in the flats complexes north of the Ibar river. Their numbers have been swollen in recent months by the arrival of 2,000 more fleeing for protection from other parts of the town and many more from the surrounding countryside.
South of the river, the main shopping streets and the Albanian living quarters are in ruins. Shop after shop has been razed. Thousands of families are living with relatives or in tents. The task of reconstruction has barely begun.
Tensions have been high over the past few days as Albanian demonstrators demanded access to the northern enclave. On Saturday several hundred protesters tried to force their way over the bridge, but were pushed back by the French troops.
In response, a small group of Serbs yesterday staged a noisy picket in front of the soldiers. A mother dressed in black, who says her only son was killed six months ago, screamed abuse at the Albanian "terrorists", Serbian shorthand for the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Dalibor, a medical student until the war broke out, shows me bullet marks in the walls of the flats blocks, which he blames on the "terrorists".
"We say, `If you give them a finger, they will take the whole hand'. They want to take over this part of our town. They want a greater Albania," he says.
The peacekeepers have done their best in a tricky situation. When Albanian militants launched a rocket and grenade attack across the river at the weekend, they fired on the attackers and hit one. A few days ago they seized a large cache of weapons stored by the KLA.
But again the parallels with Northern Ireland suggest themselves. How long before Kfor ends up in serious conflict with the people it was sent in to protect? As the KLA flexes its muscles, it comes more and more into conflict with the troops of the Western alliance.
For the wheel has turned full circle, and the Serbs, the perpetrators of the most vile human rights abuses here and in other parts of former Yugoslavia, are now on the defensive and most in need of protection.
While the Albanians of Pristina breathe the deep air of freedom for the first time in their lives, more than 160,000 Kosovar Serbs have fled their homeland. In Pristina, for example, the Serb population was about 45,000 before the conflict, but now is less than 5,000. In Prizren to the south-west, fewer than 300 Serbs out of a pre-war population of 8,000 remain, according to the UN High Commission for Refugees. Those left face shootings, death threats, kidnappings, arson and murder, and 182 have taken refuge in the Orthodox monastery in the town.
Roma gypsies, too, have felt the brunt of aggression, as many Albanians perceive them as willing collaborators in Serb atrocities. The Roma community in Pristina has all but left following threats, and their houses were subsequently burned and looted. Only 500 out of an original 10,000 remain in Mitrovica, and only with the protection of a Kfor guard.
The worst single atrocity against Serbs since the end of the war was the killing of 14 farmers near the village of Gracko, in central Kosovo, last month. They were shot at close range at the end of a day's harvesting.
NATO still dreams of a multiethnic Kosovo, but even before the war this was not a reality. Between 1966 and 1989 an estimated 130,000 Serbs left the province because of harassment by the Albanian majority.
Now the future for the remaining 40,000 Serbs in Kosovo looks even bleaker. Western governments are pulling down the hatch on asylum-seekers from former Yugoslavia. Even Belgrade, already struggling to cope with Serb refugees from Croatia and Bosnia, has been hostile.
In the absence of a reliable police force or meaningful local administration - the first civilian police have been deployed in Pristina only in the past few days - the protection afforded Serbs and Roma has been weak.
A French soldier was seriously hurt in clashes with ethnic Albanians trying to storm the bridge at Mitrovica yesterday.