As the United Nations Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, prepares to report today on the Kosovo crisis, Kosovo Albanians fear the two-month Serbian offensive and the humanitarian catastrophe it has caused have weakened Washington's resolve, writes Jonathan Steele, in Pristina.
One politician said the American plan for a political settlement "could have been drafted by the Serbs". Another asked: "Why didn't they just print it in Cyrillic script?"
Besides the plan's formula for keeping Kosovo within Serbia, they are particularly upset by its proposal for giving the province's "national communities" their own councils to run their affairs while also ensuring that each community has veto rights in the provincial assembly.
Albanians say this amounts to a kind of partition of Kosovo. It would not be on geographical lines like the Dayton peace agreement, but would effectively create a patchwork quilt of ethnic cantons. The Albanians have offered the Serbs, who form only around 10 per cent of the Kosovo population, political and cultural guarantees, but they did not expect the Americans to try to dilute Albanian power so dramatically.
"Maybe the Americans saw how difficult it is to change [Slobodan] Milosevic's position and thought it would be easier to get us to change," said one negotiator.
The focus of the Albanians' disappointment is a working paper drawn up by Mr Christopher Hill, the US special envoy to the Balkans, and Mr James O'Brien, a senior State Department lawyer. Both men were heavily involved in negotiating the Bosnian constitution for the Dayton peace agreements three years ago.
Mr Hill's proposal describes Kosovo as "the territory", carefully avoiding the word "republic". Its leader is described as "The Representative", and he will be allowed to travel and "conduct foreign relations consistent with the constitution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia".
This clause seems designed to please Mr Ibrahim Rugova, the senior Albanian politician in Kosovo, who is often criticised by colleagues for excessive foreign travel and hob-nobbing with diplomats.
But the heart of the document is its proposal to dilute majority voting in both central and local government by a series of blocking measures for "national communities", if they felt any decision affected "the vital interests of their national community". Kosovo would have seats in the Serbian parliament as well as the Yugoslav Federal Assembly, and judges on the Serbian Supreme Court.
"The plan is an attempt to legalise Kosovo under Serbia and do it with international support," said a member of Mr Rugova's first negotiating team, which was disbanded this summer.
According to Fehmi Agani, the head of Mr Rugova's current negotiating team, the plan goes back on the Contact Group's proposal, which Britain drafted two months ago. This offered Kosovo the same status as Montenegro and Serbia, Yugoslavia's other federal units, but without the right of secession.