Back to the Balkans on the long road to peace

In 1999 and 2000 I returned repeatedly to Kosovo, first under Slobodan Milosevic's increasingly brutal Serbian regime, then after Nato and Russian forces occupied the territory and found themselves struggling to curb reprisals by the Albanian majority against their former oppressors. For all the country's natural beauty, my memories of this corner of the Balkans, slightly smaller than Northern Ireland, were of burning homes and bloodshed.