In the summer of 2001, I was staying at a hilltop farmhouse in a NATO-protected Serbian enclave in rural Kosovo. Two years earlier, Serbian forces drove hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians out of their homes, burning and killing along the way. Approximately fifty KFOR soldiers were protecting about twenty-five mostly elderly Serbs from possible violence from the surrounding Albanian population. The soldiers’ local headquarters was located across from my hosts’ farmyard. Chickens pecked the ground around armored vehicles and jeeps, barely noticing a short column of armed soldiers passing through on their way to a nearby lookout point. Young soldiers casually came and went from the kitchen of my hosts, whom I will call Dragan and Mira. The elderly couple's two adult sons, whom I will call Nikola and Dusan, now living across the line in Serbia with no future in Kosovo, sat at a picnic table and conversed and joked in the shade of a large tree.

Neither the mood nor the topic of conversation was representative of recent local history. The nearest significant city, Podujevo, had been the scene of fierce fighting and cleansing two years earlier. The hostility had pervaded the countryside as well. This enclave was the last pocket of Serbs in the region. Down the road, all other nearby Serbian populations had been driven out, many of their houses destroyed, and their graves desecrated.