Pardon me, therefore, if I have forgotten Radovan's full name. A proud, even an arrogant Serb, he was introduced to me as the director of the Press Club, located on the first floor of the Grand hotel in Pristina. He was possibly in his '40s, of medium height, but tough, like a lightweight pugilist, with leathery skin, except that his horn-rimmed spectacles imparted to him a slightly professional look.

There was a whole network of intermediaries who located you as you entered the hotel. It was all quite elegantly done. The bright young woman with flashing eyes navigated you to Radovan's room, lined with maps of Kosovo.

The big story, even before the NATO crackdown, were ethnic Albanian refugees. Every time the Serb police went on a rampage in a village of their choice, the villagers took to the mountains on foot andrickety, wooden carts pulled by worn-out tractors. It was an unspeakably painful sight. But it was a sight you might well have been deflected away from if you were swayed by Radovan's rhetoric.

He, in fact, trotted out a little theory of his own: western electronic media needed pictures to support all the advertising. To cope with this demand a whole cottage industry had sprung up organising a simulated flight of refugees into the mountains. Once the sun set, the actors, set designers included, trekked back to their villages to resume their happy lives until the next day's TV performance.

Gutted villages, burnt libraries and hospitals, old women and children sleeping in the open -- these were the scenes one saw and which one would have missed if one had fallen prey to Radovan's plausible manner.

Radovan, of course, was paid to do his job. But quite apart from him and from his paraphernalia, every Serb one met in Pristina had some grievance against somebody: Mussalmans, (Albanians), Roman Catholics,Germany, and, above all, the United States. If the Serbs hated the American (at that stage exemplified by the repeated appearance of Bill Clinton's special envoy, Richard Holbrooke in Bel-grade), the ethnic Albanians adored them. In fact there were special thanks giving prayers in Pristina's mosques for the wonderful support the Americans were providing the ``Mussalmans''.

The junior school in the heart of Pristina is divided. A thousand Albanian students are educated in the more dilapidated half of the structure and about 200 in the better maintained half. The principal of the Albanian half has no telephone in his office and receives no grant from Belgrade. His opposite number on the Serbian side is much more comfortably placed. He leaps to his telephone to have the police scrutinise our credentials before he grants us an interview. No such hesitation on the Albanian side, each one of whom had reposed faith in ``Allah'', of course, but also in the Americans. This Americanism of Kosovo's ethnic Albanianshad reached a point where it was an irritant to some of us. It was easier to reach Ibrahim Rugav if your affiliations extended to some American networks.

This was the story of the Americans among ordinary ethnic Albanian Kosovars before the NATO airstrikes. Across the border, in Albania, gripped by chaos after decades of Stalinism, Americans were likewise well regarded. Macedonia was a peculiar case: here was a country with a population consisting of 25 percent Albanians. the remainder were Slavs, having strong bonds with the Orthodox Church. This latter fact should normally have locked Macedonia and Greece in a tight embrace. But there has persisted between these two states an extraordinary quarrel over the name Macedonia. The Greeks claim a copy right on that name: part of their country carries that name. How, then, can they tolerate an independent republic named Macedonia across the border?

Turkey, whose animosities with Greece run deep, has found this an occasion to embarrass Greece and moved in asMacedonia's special friend. Just consider the paradox: civilisational adversaries, Turkey and Macedonia, are tactical allies. Americans have been alerted Macedonia's sensitive location from the beginning of the Bosnian civil war in 1992. In fact at that stage an American battalion was posted in Macedonia to prevent the Bosnian conflict from spilling over into Macedonia and triggering a wider conflict carrying the threat of two NATO allies, Turkey and Greece, aligning themselves on opposite sides.

It was this kind of foresight that caused the Americans to post ground troops in Macedonia soon after Bosnia had exploded. Why was this foresight absent in the case of Kosovo? After all, when the gruesome Bosnian tragedy, rape camps, ethnic cleansing, mass graves et al, was playing itself out, it was clear as daylight that Kosovo too would explode, simmering as it was under Milosovic's tyranny. For a decade the west has been aware of Kosovo's tragedy. Surely remedial measures could have been more cleverly devised?And look what NATO has gone and done -- precipitated the greatest humanitarian disaster in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Also, it has helped forge a consensus in influential world capitals against a world order sought to be imposed outside the UN framework. Limits to American power did not have to stand out in such bold relief.