Angry Serbs still holding out on joining independent state

The threats came quickly over the phone and on the street when Jelena Vojinovic took the plunge and decided to work for the "enemy" in Mitrovica.

"They called me at home," said the 27-year-old former medical student, "and they confronted me when I went out. They were saying: 'Why are you working for the foreigners? Why are you acting like a traitor?' They were the hardliners of the town, paid by Belgrade, and they were protecting their pay packets."

Vojinovic had, in the eyes of her tormentors, performed an act of betrayal by taking a job with an international organisation that was committed to an independent Kosovo.

Ten years after the war with Nato, most of her Serb neighbours still believe that Kosovo has no future other than as part of the motherland - Serbia.

"Only a small minority," she said, "think, like me, that Serbs must engage with the new reality. And most of those are too frightened to say that publicly - to think like I think and say it is risky."

North Mitrovica, home to about 20,000 Kosovo Serbs, has become the "town that says no" to the combined efforts of the European Union, the United Nations and a host of satellite organisations that are spending €67 million ($134 million) a year to build a postwar Kosovo.

Today, south of the Ibar River that divides north Mitrovica from the Albanian side of the town, voters will go to the polls. With great fanfare, the first Kosovo elections since a unilateral declaration of independence was issued in February last year will take place in a country that is now 90 per cent Albanian.

More than 6700 candidates from 37 parties are standing as mayors or councillors. As a concession to Serbs living in the south, newly created southern electoral districts have been set up, designed to turn Serb minorities into majorities.

An army of international observers will staff the polling stations.

Thirty-five kilometres from Mitrovica, in Pristina, the capital, billboard sites are plastered with posters for the first elections that Kosovans have organised for themselves.

In Mitrovica there are flyers, too. But they relate to last year's Serbian national elections, the only ones that voters here recognise.

Representatives of the one Serb group to take part in the poll are terrified to walk the streets and Serb turnout is expected to be close to zero.

After the declaration of independence, the riots in Mitrovica were heavy and intense. Discontent is still simmering - in September there were violent protests against the construction of new homes for Albanian returnees.

But in general a sullen desperation has taken hold among Serbs. In the central square, a gathering place for protesters, a banner proclaims: "Russia is with us".

But the diplomatic facts on the ground are multiplying. Sixty-three countries have recognised Kosovo's independence. And Belgrade is running short of the funds and the will to bolster the fight of those Serbs who chose to stay after the war.

A growing sense of isolation is palpable.

"For 10 years we have lived in a kind of hell here," said Aleksander Stojanovic, a 33-year-old lawyer who came to Mitrovica after his family was displaced from the south during the war.

"We are not wolves or monsters. We are people in a predicament. If our only strategy is to boycott the elections and everything else, so what?

"We don't trust Pristina. We believe Pristina wants Kosovo to be part of a greater Albania. There are lots of nice words about equal rights and integration. But the words are never matched by actions."

The Kosovan Government, under pressure from the international donors on which it depends, has pledged radical autonomy for Serb enclaves. But for many in Mitrovica autonomy is not the issue.

"We want Kosovo - all of it - to remain a part of Serbia," said Srdjan Radulovic. "I will never accept an independent Kosovo."

In May the EU will try again in Mitrovica, dividing the town into municipalities, one in the Serb north, the other in the Albanian south.

Then there will be another vote. Stojanovic believes that maybe "60 or 70" Serbs will turn out.

Among EU officials, the hope is that a high turnout today in other Serb enclaves in the south will inspire Mitrovica to take its second chance in the northern spring.

The stakes, it is universally acknowledged, are high. If the north remains, literally, a law unto itself, the spectre of partition and a new wave of population displacements in the western Balkans is real.

PATH TO FREEDOM

1989: Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic strips Kosovo of autonomy.
1990: Ethnic Albanian leaders declare Kosovo's independence from Serbia.
1991: Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia declare independence from Yugoslavia.
1992: War breaks out in the Balkans.
1998: Amid claims of ethnic cleansing, Nato demands Milosevic stop Serb violence against Kosovo Albanians.
1999: Nato launches air strikes against Serb forces. Milosevic withdraws troops and 200,000 Serbs flee Kosovo.
2008: Kosovo declares independence.
2009: Local elections held.

- OBSERVER