He was just one of a crowd that gathers daily outside the offices of the United Nations and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) here and in Pristina, the Kosovo capital, looking for a job, any job.

``If I'm not selected I can't feed my family because the humanitarian aid is not coming,'' said Beqti, who survives like so many others by selling petrol or cigarettes smuggled in from Albania.

Even for those who were used to years of Serb repression and international sanctions against Yugoslavia, the recent upheavals have brought new hardships.

In the countryside around Kosovska Mitrovica, in northern Kosovo, ethnic Albanian families of 15 have only a cow, a few hens and an allotment. In some cases the young men have been killed by the Serbs, and the old have to scythe the hayand transport in on horsedrawn carts.

According to the United Nations, more than 40 percent of the livestock are dead and the wheat harvest will be half the normal quantity. Before 1998 agriculture represented about a quarter of the province's output.

Half the gross national product came from minerals and energy production, but many plants have been destroyed in the war. Those that remain are obsolete, environmentally harmful and inactive.

``The communist system and the policy of `Serbisation' of industry and the administration have ruined the economy,'' remarked economist Enver Hodja.

Over the past ten years, since Belgrade took away Kosovo's autonomy, the authorities dismissed more than 200,000 of the majority ethnic Albanian population from senior posts in state firms and the administration, replacing them by Serbs or Montenegrins.

The rise in the jobless was boosted by other Albanians who refused to work for Serb managers, while many others fled abroad.

From 1992 the Albanians tried toorganise a parallel administration, but jobs were badly paid. Others started up private firms or lived on the black market, selling illegally imported mobile phones from Hungary or electronic equipment from Turkey .

``We were in a stranglehold, we had no alternative,'' said Amre Berisha, who was trying to resume his special contacts with Albania and Turkey.

But as the Albanians try to pick up the pieces, Kosovo's Serbs are feeling the pinch as well. Momcilo Ritic, a former magistrate who earned around 1,000 marks (500 dollars) a month, was ousted last week from his job.

But he dare not leave his apartment for fear of it being taken over almost instantly by homeless returning Albanian refugees.