SUPPORT was growing this weekend for radical proposals to partition the troubled province of Kosovo after a week of rioting and ethnic cleansing in which at least 28 people have died.

The arrival of 700 British troops and thousands more from other Nato countries yesterday appeared to have stopped the rampaging Albanian mobs, but their presence came too late for many Serbian families.

While condemning the cleansing, most diplomats concede that Kosovo’s final status — either remaining a province of Serbia or becoming an independent country — has to be resolved urgently for any chance of lasting peace.

Without any internationally imposed solution, both sides are likely to push for drastic action. Boris Tadic, the defence minister of the Serbia-Montenegro federation, has warned that if Nato could not protect the Serbian minority, then the Serbia-Montenegro army would.

“Both sides are trying to show how tough they are — it’s a bit like the Greeks and Turks on steroids,” said one worried diplomat.

The week’s violence — which began when two ethnic Albanian children drowned in the Ibar river, which cuts through the divided city of Mitrovica, while apparently being pursued by Serbs — has revealed what diplomats admit are glaring inconsistencies in international policy in the Balkans.

In Bosnia, Serbs and Muslim Bosniaks are kept divided — and the Serbs are effectively given their own mini-state in Republika Srpska — but in Kosovo the Serbs are told their only future is to live with the majority Albanian population.

Vojislav Kostunica, the Serbian prime minister, has repeatedly told the United Nations administration running Kosovo that the formula cannot work, and demanded that the Serbs be given their own territory within Kosovo.

By contrast, the Albanians, under the leadership of Bajram Rexhepi, the Kosovan prime minister, reject any such territorial concession to the Serbs and are pressing for the province to become an independent country within its present borders.

Matters are further complicated by the fact that the most important shrines of the Serbian orthodox church in Kosovo are in areas near the Albanian border which are now, in ethnic terms, purely Albanian.

“The silver lining, sad as it is, is that this week’s events should peel the scales back from the eyes of some people who have simply never understood Kosovo,” said another diplomat with 20 years’ experience in the province. “They have never had a multi-ethnic society and they never will.

“I personally think the planners will sit down and confront the reality, and that is you have to forget about Serbs living in fortified enclaves. De facto, we are looking at partition.”

Under one plan for partition, Mitrovica and its surrounding areas, which border Serbia proper, could be joined to it. Serbian enclaves within a Kosovo Albanian state could be created around the central monastery of Gracanica, and the eastern town of Gnjilane. A string of mountain villages in the south, bordering Macedonia and including the ski resort of Brezovica, could also remain predominantly Serbian.

A long-term solution for the medieval Serbian monasteries in the western towns of Pec and Decane, close to the anarchic lands of northern Albania, could be to protect them as world heritage sites, guarded by international troops.

While committees pored over maps in far away capitals, on the ground in Kosovo life was grim this weekend for the hundreds of Serbian families who will probably never return home. Among the towns that may have been cleansed for ever is Kosovo Polje, on the outskirts of Pristina, the capital.

Twenty Serbian houses were burnt on Thursday night, after they had been looted. The new United Nations-trained Kosovo police force — which is almost totally Albanian — did little to stop the mob.

The overwhelming majority of the 28 people who died were Serbs, although at least six Albanians were killed during rioting in Mitrovica. A French peacekeeper also died and dozens more international soldiers and police were among the 600 wounded. In all, hundreds of Serbs have been left homeless, and a Serbian population already reduced to 100,000 looks likely to shrink further.

“Local police did not interfere in this systematically organised event,” said one of the displaced Serbs, now sheltering in a base of the Nato-led Kosovo force. “What you see is ethnic cleansing.”

Yesterday many houses were still smouldering, along with a newly built school that the UN had hoped would encourage the Serbs to stay.

In Pristina, itself, none of the new generation of Albanian politicians was prepared to condemn the cleansing directly. Other Albanian leaders, such as Bujar Bukoshi, the former prime minister of the Albanian underground state that existed under Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader indicted for war crimes in Kosovo, said he was “shocked by such criminal acts”.

One planner in the Balkans claimed that the genie of Albanian nationalism, released by the 1998 war against Milosevic, would prove unstoppable. His recommendation for Kosovo was simple: “Split it, cordon it off and pray to God,” he said.

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