Leading Article: Now for the task of bringing Serbia back into the fold

IF THE Serbian troops do leave as agreed and the Nato forces go in, then the hard part begins. The Prime Minister promised that he would not let the Kosovar refugees down, and Britain must redeem that pledge. When Nato troops escort the first caravan of refugees back over the border to their burnt-out homes, there will be a global wave of relief, uniting Muslim and Western Christian worlds. That sense of relief will be justified, as one thoughtless assertion - that "refugees never return" - joins another - "wars cannot be won from the air" - in the dustbin of end-of-century history. But it will be qualified by the search for mass graves and the collection of evidence for the war crimes tribunal. Returning to Kosovo will be like a scene from a horror movie, where we can see blood seeping under the door as it is pushed open.

If the vast majority of the refugees do return home, as now seems likely, they must not be forgotten. An entire people will have been traumatised. The British Government has so far been among the least generous in taking in refugees from Kosovo - never mind that the Kosovar people regard our Prime Minister as their hero (so much so that a baby born to a refugee in Glasgow was named Tony). But the generous response of the British people, including the readers of this newspaper, to the plight of the refugees has been extraordinary, and that spirit of solidarity must be sustained. It would be too easy to assume, once the tent cities start to empty and the television pictures of happy returnees fade, that Kosovo, like Bosnia before it, can be left simply to get on with normal life. It will cost a great deal, in both money and time, to restore anything resembling normality.

Beyond the immediate requirement for food, roofs, tractors, bridges, water and electricity, there is the larger question. There is nothing so unusual about these hills and valleys that makes the Balkans inherently "unstable". Just because the Serbs lost a big battle in Kosovo in 1389, just because the region has been criss-crossed by Slavs, Croats, Turks, Albanians, Magyars and Bulgars forever, just because the First World War started here and just because it is now inhabited by two kinds of Christian and one kind of "westernised" Muslim, does not mean it cannot live in democratic, tolerant peace.

The Balkan problem has at least been reduced to a basic, and basically soluble, conundrum: What To Do About Serbia? It seems inconceivable that Slobodan Milosevic can survive long in power. Even on the day of his capitulation, ordinary Serbs were asking why they had had to suffer so much, when they could have surrendered Kosovo to foreign control at the start. When money and contractors from the US and the European Union start to flood into Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria, while Serbia suffers under sanctions, the pressure to topple Milosevic will become irresistible. The poisonous sense of grievance nursed by the Serbian people will take longer to remove. It was what sustained Milosevic, and it will continue to find expression after he has gone. But ethnic and religious hatreds have scarred many other parts of Europe and have been overcome - they are being overcome even in Northern Ireland. So a sober sense of optimism is justified.

The one thing the Balkans do not need is a grand conference, as has been suggested. The idea that representatives of all the groups in the region should sit around a large, round table and arrive at "a settlement" that would then be guaranteed by the "great powers" sounds like something out of the 1860s or, at the latest, the 1920s. It would be like trying to cross a bridge that has already been bombed. The settlement has been arrived at already. The former republic of Yugoslavia has been carved up into a number of statelets, larger than cantons but smaller than most modern nation states. Some of them, such as Kosovo and Montenegro, are still technically part of "Yugoslavia", but from now on they will be effectively independent of its largest constituent, Serbia.

This settlement will not be guaranteed by the great powers, but by an overlapping network of international bodies, the United Nations, Nato and the EU foremost among them. Of these, the EU is the most important, because all the statelets of the Balkans are candidate members. Although the war was a symptom of the EU's failure, it has also acted as the spur to the creation of a stronger European bloc within Nato, a common European defence force and the appointment of Javier Solana, currently Nato's secretary general, as a "foreign minister" for the whole of the EU.

The security, democracy and prosperity of these mini-countries can best be guaranteed within the EU, a unique form of supra-national government that is more than mere co-operation and yet less than federation. Eventually we should prepare to welcome the peoples of Bosnia, Kosovo - and Serbia - as fellow European citizens.