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In a dusty back street in the burnt and battered northern Kosovo town of Mitrovica, French gendarmes have pulled up three Albanian men in a red hatchback.
They demand answers: name, address, registration details. Their suspicion is further aroused by the discovery of a wooden baseball bat under the driver's seat.
But the replies they get weave a complex trail, which is as impossible to verify as it is to believe, offering a stark illustration of the difficulties of policing postwar Kosovo.
The car, originally imported from Germany, apparently belongs to the driver's cousin from Pec. But the driver has attached Dutch licence plates, and says he is selling the vehicle anyway. And the bat? It belongs to his young son.
The language barrier adds to the confusion. Nobody in this roadside drama, typical of those being played out dozens of times a day, speaks English. The gendarmes rely on a passer-by to talk to the suspects in German and then relay the information in broken French.
In the end, all that the law enforcers are able to do is note the make of car and its plates. But keeping tabs on the occupants in a town that is fast becoming the crucible for continuing Serb-Albanian hostilities is wishful thinking.
Mitrovica is in a mess. It remains a town divided - segregated physically by the River Ibar and by the determination of local Serbs, who no longer enjoy the protection of Yugoslav troops, to retain the northern sector of the town as a Serb-only enclave.
Local ethnic Albanians claim paramilitary thugs and Serb police, who gravitated to Mitrovica in the purge that followed NATO's triumph over Yugoslavia in June, are forcing them out and across the river into the southern sector of the city of about 80,000 people.
They say that Albanian Kosovar refugee families cannot return safely to their homes in northern Mitrovica because Serbs have moved into them.
Serb minorities in the south are being attacked by Albanians who, in just two or three days, destroyed a neighbourhood of Gypsies, accused of collaborating with their Serb oppressors.
The stalemate that has emerged has provoked clashes between protesting Albanian Kosovars and French troops attached to the Kosovo peace-keeping force, Kfor, on the bridge between north and south.
Before the war, the northern part of the town was dominated by Albanians and the south by Serbs. Religious sites and graveyards are located in those traditional neighbourhoods. But the postwar reversal means that, for most ethnic Albanians, the hospital and university are out of bounds.
Albanian doctors and medical staff are bused across the river under Kfor protection. There are also proposals to give Albanian students similar armed security.
But the local Albanian mayor, Dr Bajram Rexhepi, appointed by Mr Hashin Thaci's provisional government of Kosovo, is critical of the French protectors and sceptical about the intentions of Serb leaders, with whom he has sought a compromise. "We are constantly giving Kfor information about those people who were directly involved in the war - names, even nicknames - but we get very little result," he says, from the former government social welfare offices in southern Mitrovica. "There were some arrests but most of the people Kfor let go."
Although he condemns the bridge protests, Dr Rexhepi says Kfor needs to be more pro-active, especially after his own negotiations with the Serbs failed. "We proposed that 100 families a day - Albanians and Serbs - be allowed to return to their flats on both sides of the river.
"But they [Serb leaders] prefer 20 families a month and only from December.
"That's a huge problem for us because we have more than 20,000 refugees in this town who have come from surrounding villages. They need to be housed."
Meanwhile, Kfor has closed the bridge and invited Albanian families wishing to return to the north of the town to register their names. "A French soldier and gendarme will accompany those people on a visit to their flat," says Captain Betrand Bonneau, speaking for the French peacekeepers.
But he concedes that evicting squatters is almost impossible. He defends Kfor's role in the process and says it cannot be expected to have all the answers.
"It's a community problem too," he says. "Let's face it, these people aren't going to live together - that's not going to happen for a long, long time - but they have to learn to co-exist ... Right now, a minority of people are confusing democracy with anarchy. Democracy is not about us coming in here and doing to the Serbs what they were doing to the Albanians."
He says most allegations being made against alleged paramilitaries and others did not stand up for lack of evidence.
Captain Genderic Cantournet, one of 120 gendarmes attached to the French military unit, adds: "It would be very easy to fill our prisons, but our job ultimately is to present people to a judge and for the courts to decide whether these people are guilty."
In the flurry of meetings that have ensued as the resolve of wary Serbs to hold out in northern Mitrovica has hardened, heavyweight leaders are being consulted.
On Thursday, Dr Rexhepi met the Kosovo Liberation Army's top commander, the Croatian General Agim Geku, and the local KLA chief, Mr Rrahman Rama. But neither civilian nor army leader disclosed details. "We simply like to talk," says General Geku, with a grin.
But, while the talking drags on, the pressing problems of Mitrovica, a mining town on the edge of Kosovo's vast deposits of lead and zinc, continue to run counter to the euphoria that swept the province just two months ago, as liberating Kfor troops stormed into Kosovo.
Students, waiting to meet the mayor, say there needs to be swift action to allow them access to the university.
Ms Naxhie Mripa, a 25-year-old chemical engineering student and member of the student union, says ethnic Albanians have been denied proper access to the campus for the past decade. There is much catching up to do and the new academic year is just days away.
"But it is not realistic to say that the students will simply have Kfor protection," she says. "A lot of us live in the north side of the town. The soldiers cannot protect us all day. All Serbs involved in the war must be made to leave Kosovo. Kfor knows who they are."
And people continue to be ejected from their homes. Mr Hakif Ademi, a 62-year-old pensioner, and Mr Namik Nishliu, a surveyor, 48, have arrived to seek refuge in the south after a fresh bout of intimidation by paramilitaries in the north. The threats were reminiscent of the tales told four months ago by Kosovar Albanians, fleeing to neighbouring Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro. But now there's a sting in the tale.
"Masked men with Kalashnikovs burst in and told us to get out," Mr Ademi says. "My daughter recognised one of them. It was the son of a woman she once worked with. So she told Kfor and they eventually came and took some of those men away. But they were released later according to French laws. Some laws; what sort of justice is that?"