A gun pointed at your head?

Dinner the other night with a Kosovar friend of mine who told me a little more about the Serbian threat in 1999. His neighbour then, a Serb, who he had known for a number of years, came up to him one evening, out of the blue and pointed a gun to his head and asked him what he done to his wife. He took my friend outside and my friend feared for his life. Suddenly this man's wife called out to him. She had been out all day.

A few weeks later my friend was at the Macedonian border trying to get across the border to escape the murderous Serbian army - as were a million others. Near the border he came across a Serbian soldier who again put a gun to his head and this time I think my friend thought his number was up. At the moment a large number of US planes under the guise of Nato flew overhead. My friend's life was spared as the soldier deemed it prudent to get away as fast as he could.

My friend bears no ill will towards the Serbs - he just thinks that there was a huge, collective brainwashing going on there. That doesn't stop him being passionate about Kosovar independence. We are now very close to this happening. Kosovo will be fine. The Americans are committed here for fifty years having built their biggest army base in central Europe in the middle of it. Kosovo is massively important to them and Clinton (and Blair) are gods for setting NATO troops against the Serbian army. It would be just about the only place that Bush could walk down the main street and be cheered.

There is a book waiting to be written about Kosovo that takes its history up to the moment of it's independence. I would quite like to be the person to write it.