Tim Judah: After a decade of war, what has all the violence achieved in the Balkans?

'Imagine, just 10 years ago, Yugoslavs went on foreign holidays and their country stood at the gates of the EU'

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West starts to evacuate diplomats as Macedonia defies calls for restraint

Hatred, fear and a stench of death in the village that symbolises a nation slipping into civil war

A decade of bloodshed in the Balkans

Leading article: Our most effective weapon for preventing bloodshed in the Balkans is money

You are damned if you do and damned if you don't. After the deal permitting the withdrawal of Albanian guerrillas from a strategic village outside the Macedonian capital of Skopje, Macedonian nationalists rioted, burned pictures of Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, and ripped up Nato flags. Ever since, interviewers have taken up a line of questioning implying that the fact that Macedonians chanted "Albanians to the gas chambers" was all the fault of these two Western organisations.

Let's imagine another scenario. That is that Mr Solana and Nato had done nothing. Then, a few Macedonians were killed, their security forces managed to advance on besieged villages, the first large group of Albanian civilians were killed, Albanian guerrillas shot down a passenger plane coming into Skopje airport, a wave of bloody pogroms began and a convoy of Nato troops was attacked by unknown gunmen.

So you see the point? Damned if you and damned if you don't. And, of course, the nightmare scenario may yet be tomorrow's news. So far the conflict has been relatively low level, but it has already produced 100,000 refugees who represent 5 per cent of the population.

Because we are polite people, our diplomats always repeat the mantra that "there is no solution through violence". On one level that is true, but on another, the lesson of the last 10 years of war has proved to some that just the opposite might be the case.

Exactly 10 years ago, I saw the remains of one of the very first casualties of the Yugoslav wars. Slovene forces had shot down a Yugoslav military helicopter. It crashed killing its two pilots, who happened to be Slovenes. But, even more shocking than this first act of violence was the fact that the helicopter had been carrying loaves of bread which now lay scattered all over the street.

And so it has been ever since. The wars have been like that. Some have got what they wanted, independence for their little countries but poverty too, not to mention tens or hundreds of thousands of dead, millions of refugees and millions of shattered lives. Imagine, only 10 years ago Yugoslavs went on foreign holidays and their country stood at the gates of the EU!

But, as I say, some got what they wanted. Violence was the solution for Croats who wanted to drive out the Serbs so they would never be a problem again. Violence was the solution for Albanians who wanted to get rid of Serbian oppression. And now hardline Macedonians think that violence will rid them of their troublesome Albanians. And hardline Albanians think that, by pushing this conflict to the brink, they will effectively partition the country and end up running their own little fiefdom.

But, it won't pay. In the long run the hardliners won't get what they really want. They'll just end up with isolated, poverty-stricken little scraps of land full of refugees and angry people nursing grievances.

What can we do? No one must lose their nerve, and the EU and Nato and everyone else with clout must continue to put pressure wherever they can to drag Macedonians and Albanians back from the brink. And, once the story is off the news agenda, we can't afford to let things slide.

With the exception of Slovenia, none of the former Yugoslav republics or entities has any prospect of joining the EU or other Western institutions in the near future. But, still, cajoling and, frankly, interfering, waving big sticks and big carrots, has helped both Croatia and Serbia take tremendous strides forward in the past few years.

But, while forcing Serbia to send Milosevic to The Hague or ending an insurrection in southern Serbia or plotting the future of Kosovo may be career-enhancing glamorous work for some, there is little doubt that Western governments cannot afford to shy away from the boring work, too. It is all very well pontificating about the future of Kosovo but it won't have a future unless someone helps it construct a civil service. Luckily British officials have begun thinking about this problem, but it is only one of dozens of similar dull jobs that have to be done.

Organised crime and its cancerous effects have to be tackled as well, and the organic connection between crime and politics across the region has to be broken.

In the end, then, 10 years of war have not solved the problems of the Balkans. They have just created new ones. Some people, such as Lord Owen, think that the only way to resolve Balkan conflicts once and for all is to redraw borders, in a kind of grand rerun of the 1878 Congress of Berlin. But not only would that just create yet more problems, but it would open the Pandora's Box of border changes from the Caucasus to Timbuktu.

In fact, even airing such ideas is spurring on the extremists in Macedonia today, who believe that because he is a lord, David Owen is only saying what Mr Blair, President Chirac and President Bush have already been secretly plotting but can't afford to admit publicly.

What is really needed then is continued political pressure, the use of our economic clout both for that end and to help to create jobs and the encouragement of all sorts of regional co-operation, from free-trade areas to local visa-less travel. To this end some progress has been made in Serbia and Croatia, but Bosnia, Kosovo and, of course, Macedonia remain, to varying degrees, problems that remain to be solved.

In a recent closed-door meeting, I heard a senior Serbian politician say to a former Kosovo Liberation Army leader – now a politician – and other senior figures from Kosovo that Serbs and Albanians should "solve now what can be solved, leave what cannot until later, and never forget we are dealing with the lives of people". The Kosovars nodded in agreement. They would never do that in public.

Next step, then? More closed-door meetings where Serbs, Macedonians, Albanians and everyone else just gets down to the dull stuff that has to be done. After all, although we can mull over the lessons of the Balkan wars until the cows come home, I would like to suggest that that our time might be better spent mulling the lessons of 50 years of the EU and its predecessors. That is to say, 50 years of stultifying meetings about fish'n'euros, rather than the previous tried and trusted world-war approach to problems.

Tim Judah is the author of 'Kosovo: War and Revenge', published by Yale University Press