SOMETIMES it is possible to imagine Kosovo as a pure place where nothing bad happened. The ruined villages have been rebuilt and the landscape has changed so much in the past eight years that it obliterates memories of the murder, rape, looting and destruction that once shocked the world.

But there is no chance of the passage of time allowing Hafiz Mustafa to forget. In 1999 his son Muhamet and 44 other ethnic Albanians were cut down in a hail of gunfire in the village of Racak in southern Kosovo. They are buried on a hillside above the village.

Muhamet died on his 21st birthday. The massacre was so savage that it shocked the West into launching the Nato air campaign to halt the atrocities against the province’s Albanian population as Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian forces tried to crush the guerrilla army fighting for independence.

About a million Kosovo Albanians were driven from their homes and thousands were massacred. Since then, the United Nations has administered the breakaway Serbian province while its final status is determined. Security is guaranteed by 17,000 Nato troops.

Now, however, Kosovo stands at a crossroads again. Two years of UNbrokered talks between Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, and Belgrade over the province’s future ended in failure last week. All eyes are now on December 10, the deadline set by the UN for a settlement.

Last week, in Racak, snow covered the red tombstones of the dead, and village children slid down the steep slopes on toboggans. A sombre Mustafa, 67, stayed indoors with his bitter memories. “We paid with blood for our freedom,” he said. “But we still don’t have it.” Mustafa has not spoken to a Serb since the day of the massacre.

Eight years on, the Albanian and Serbian communities regard each other with fear and suspicion and live apart as much as they can. Memories are too recent for them to come together, and the minority Serbs, becoming fewer by the day - there are estimated to be 100,000, less than half the prewar number - feel unsafe. In two days of violence against Serbs in 2004, 19 were killed, nearly 1,000 were injured and more than 700 houses were burnt or damaged.

As independence approaches, there is a sense that the greatest failure of the Kosovo mission has been ethnic reconciliation. Partition is the great unmentionable. In most of Kosovo’s towns and villages, the ethnic Albanians - 90% of the population - are firmly in control.

But their struggle to build a nation independent from Serbia and forge a national identity is desperately hard. There is almost no manufacturing, 50% unemployment, a broken infrastructure, poor education, organised crime, corruption and the highest birth rate in Europe.

Hashim Thaci, the former guerrilla leader, won Kosovo’s parliamentary elections last month, pledging to deliver independence soon. He is expected to declare it in the new year.

As the date looms, Kosovo’s remaining Serbs wonder how long they can hang on in a land in which their families have been rooted for hundreds of years. For most of them independence is a cause of anguish.

Typical is Ljubisa Vitosevic, 33, a Serb from the town of Orahovac, in the heart of Kosovo’s wine-growing district. He is one of 500 Serbs left from a prewar population of 2,500. Feeling unsafe, most have abandoned or sold their homes and retreated to a small area above the town, a jumble of bleak houses and cobbled streets, separated from the bustling Albanian centre with its bright shops and brand new mosque. Coils of barbed wire line the ghetto.

In 1999, two days after Nato forces arrived, Albanians kidnapped his father, who was refusing to leave his home, saying he had never harmed anyone. His body was never found. Twenty-eight more Serbs have been kidnapped from Orahovac since.

It is a miserable existence. The Serbs’ cemetery is on the Albanian side of the town, so they bury their dead behind the church. Their children cannot go to school, and classes are held in homes. The Serbs are afraid to leave their ghetto except to travel twice a week to the Serbian-dominated northern part of Mitrovica, where they feel safe because it abuts on Serbia itself. It is a two-hour journey.

To make matters worse, the sick have to be evacuated to Mitrovica. The local Albanian hospital will not treat them.

“The majority of Serbs in the enclaves will leave after independence is declared,” Vitosevic predicted. “There is no future in Orahovac, and I don’t want my small son to grow up in this environment.”

Not far away, Velika Hoca, one of the only all-Serbian villages to survive intact, lay in stygian gloom. Electricity was intermittent. There are 13 churches there; the oldest, St Nicholas, dates from the 12th century and is rich in icons.

Jovan Djuric, who can trace his ancestry in the village back 500 years, said: “We cannot live here after the Albanians declare independence. Even now, under international control, we barely survive. When I leave with my family I will want to get as far away as possible from here.”

Some in the Serbian community believe they have been ill served by Belgrade, which has done all it can to undermine the integration of the Serbian community into the new Kosovo.

Vojislav Kostunica, the prime minister of Serbia, has said Belgrade will never recognise an “illegal and rogue” independent Kosovo, which will deprive it of 15% of national territory. But, short of ordering his army to invade Kosovo and take on Nato again, which his defence minister has ruled out, he is not going to be able to stop it.

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