KEY POINTS:
Leonard Cohen's graveyard voice pumps out of the bar on to the inky dark of the pavement where the cement is broken, where the street lights don't shine, where the thin, thin youth of Pristina stride past in their threes and fours ...
Nothing left to do when you know that you've been taken
Nothing left to do when you're begging for a crumb
Nothing left to do when you got to go on waiting
Waiting for the miracle to come.
Kosovo has been living in limbo for eight years, since the end of the war, waiting for the future to start. It is as ready as it will ever be.
I have just come from meeting one of the many human dynamos with which the Kosovo capital is thickly populated: Berat Buzhala, the 31-year-old editor of Gazeta Express, one of nine daily papers with which this would-be nation of two million is lavishly served.
He was one of the people who set it up, after all the staff deserted a previous newspaper when it became obvious the proprietor was calling the tune.
The editor's long working day is drawing to a close, but the adrenaline steams off him like sweat.
"What's your splash?" I ask.
He throws a tabloid paper down on the table. The front page is filled with a picture of Anton Berisha, the man appointing a company to run a second mobile phone network for Kosovo, to offer competition to the present, exorbitantly expensive monopoly.
A hit-man went after him with a pistol: he dodged the bullet and was awarded a bodyguard and two squad cars full of police.
Next time they tried with a mortar - missed again. But when a false rumour spread that they had kidnapped his daughter, he fled the country with his family.
Organised crime, Russian style, is a Kosovo problem, and it is a result of years of living in limbo. Armoured personnel carriers from the Nato-led international force, KFOR, responsible for establishing safety, still grind along the narrow potholed roads even though it's eight years since the violence came to an abrupt halt.
But problems you cannot address with a tank have proliferated. First among those problems is a legal system that does not function, with all the consequences that flow from that.
"We have a mountain of problems and nobody wants to solve them," Buzhala says.
"Politicians are used to living in limbo. They've had it this way for eight years now.
"They're used to not taking responsibility for anything: the provisional government passes the buck to the United Nations' mission and it passes it back to the politicians.
"Politicians like it this way, they will be happy for it to continue.
"I blame the political leaders for failing to build trust between the Serbian and Albanian communities. Because it was not their first priority - that was to get rich."
Limbo means that Kosovo's 90 per cent Albanian population has yet to win its independence - while Serbia has not budged on its insistence that Kosovo is no more than a province of Serbia, and the semi-mythical heartland of the Serbians to boot.
The Serbian constitution states that Kosovo has no right to secede - even though it is blindingly obvious to anyone travelling around the place that the status quo changed permanently with the war.
In pursuit of its claims on Kosovo, Serbia has continued to subsidise the Serb communities and the local Serb governments that rule in Serb enclaves.
The price Serbs pay for the subsidies is loyalty to the Belgrade party line, to the fiction that Kosovo remains part of Serbia. Thus relations between the racial communities are frozen in a state of permanent estrangement.
Mitrovica, for example, a gritty mining city in the north, 40km from the Serbian border, is divided down the middle, like Mostar in Bosnia.
And as in Mostar, the river is the dividing line, and the bridge - one of many hideous relics of Yugoslavian modernism - is a no-man's-land, patrolled by KFOR and crossed only by people with international credentials.
To the north are the Serbs, to the south the Albanians.
Divisions forged in the brutality of civil war, with bloody expulsions on both sides, have hardened into an ugly normality.
Miranda took me to see what it is like. An Albanian, she was born and raised in a multi-ethnic community - Albanians, Turks, Serbs, Roma - in north Mitrovica, in a house built on a hill overlooking the city centre with a sloping green garden and a white picket fence.
Driving up from Pristina, we stop and she borrows a friend's car. It has international licence plates, enabling her to cross the bridge.
We drive over the bridge, along the main shopping street crowded with shops which are nothing more than prefabricated metal kiosks, up through residential streets where house after house is still in ruins, destroyed by the communal frenzy.
No one would call the town beautiful or charming but for Miranda it is the land of lost content.
"When I'm here I am where I spent my childhood, my school was here, I went out with my friends. I just love this place, it's perfect."
Childhood memories and flashes of wartime horror alternate as we drive around.
"That burned-out house - the girl who lived there was in America when they destroyed it. On the walls they wrote, 'American bitch, come back if you dare'."
When the ethnic cleansing of Mitrovica began in 1998, Miranda lived in the family home with her brother and sister and parents.
Her father died in his 50s of a stomach disease brought on, she is sure, by the stress of crossing the bridge every day, through groups of thugs, to go to work. He was beaten three times.
Then her mother fled. Finally, it was just Miranda and her sister. "In the end we were kicked out of the house in the middle of the night, during a curfew."
They fled to the south of the city, where she has lived since. The family house is now occupied by Serbs.
Miranda works for a Scandinavian non-governmental organisation where one of her colleagues is Deyan, a young Serb.
His story mirrors hers. He lived with his family in a Serb enclave south of the river, a peaceful green spot a couple of kilometres outside the town.
Incessant attacks by Albanians drove them out during the war. A large French Army barracks now stands between the enclave and the city, and the houses of the enclave were rebuilt soon after the conflict stopped.
"But nobody's living there now," he says. "The bus to and from the city was stoned and shot at. People travelled in their own cars till one was ambushed and two people were killed. After that the only transport was a KFOR truck, one a week."
The last residents gave up and moved north and now the enclave is abandoned.
"It's obvious that the Albanians and the Serbs in Mitrovica cannot live together," says Zeljko Tvrdisic, a Serb who runs a radio station in the same block as Miranda's employer. And the same is true in much of Kosovo today.
In the southern town of Shterpce, for example, a Serb majority area where the American Mercy Corps is helping to build a village school for both communities, chief executive Radica Janicevic, a Serb, is all smiles until the question of the future is raised.
"A one-sided solution to the problem," says Janicevic. She means independence. "People will leave their homes. Yes, all may move to Serbia, though perhaps not all at once."
Diplomats and others intimated later that she was saying what Belgrade required her to say, refusing to concede one jot to the Albanian claim on Kosovo.
Bitterness and rancour and suspicion are inevitable after a civil war, just as they were inevitable and are still present in Bosnia.
But the continual prolongation of the state of uncertainty over what happens to Kosovo next makes efforts at reconciliation still-born. The milk of human kindness curdles.
And there is so much to be done to make this place work.
The legacy of eight years of dysfunctional international supervision is everywhere.
The justice system scarcely functions. Because there is no fear of legal retribution, only 20 per cent of people pay local taxes, 30 per cent of electricity is stolen, buildings are thrown up everywhere without planning permission because there is no one to say stop.
The Government rejoices in the name of the Provisional Institutions of Self Government, and because its remit may last a week, or a month, or - God forbid - another year or two, it has no remit and no stomach for the tasks of building a robust little state that can outface the organised criminals and impose its will.
And the longer the uncertainty prevails, the more daunting the task will become.
Bujar Bukoshi, a surgeon, was one of the founders of the Democratic League of Kosovo, the party which under Ibrahim Rugova put the Kosovars' claim to independence on the world agenda.
Still deeply engaged in Kosovo's politics, he is one of the people whose presence in Pristina gives a measure of hope for the future.
But he is bleak about the immediate prospects: "Of course there is no other way except independence, and my impression is that this is the final phase. Independence as an issue is terminated. But I am concerned with what happens after independence.
"A huge amount of problems have accumulated in the past eight years. And we have a very bad Government, a very scandalous Government - they are thieves and rogues."
He enumerates the problems: a ruinous economy, with imports running at 95 per cent, exports at 5 per cent; and a jobless rate of 70 per cent, the highest in southeast Europe.
"We have a very frustrated youth," Bukoshi says. "More than 60 per cent of the population is under 25.
"We have a small army of young people who are frustrated, who don't see their own future.
"And the first and last condition is to get the rule of law: there is no rule of law in Kosovo.
"We need Europe's best prosecutors and judges to put some very problematic people in jail. Because, as long as they will have a say in this country, there is a big question mark over Kosovo."
But question marks, with vehicle graveyards, unfinished buildings and abject young people, are among the things that Kosovo has in abundance.
A constitution? A flag? A political system? All these must emerge from the present limbo. And fast.
- Independent
