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PRISTINA, Aug 22 (Reuters) - The torrent of Serbs, Gypsies and other non-ethnic Albanian minorities that poured out of Kosovo during and immediately after NATO's 11-week bombing campaign may have slowed to a trickle, but it hasn't stopped.
Where chaotic queues of refugees once jammed roads to flee to the rest of Serbia and to Montenegro, those now leaving are so few and far between they're often difficult to spot.
The recent history of Peja street, just a few hundred metres (yards) long near the centre of the Kosovo capital, Pristina, illustrates how an abrasive mix of ethnic hatred and criminality grinds away at prospects for a multi-ethnic future for the southern Serbian province.
Jelica Jovanovic, a 68-year old Serb, had just sat down to lunch at a cousin's house in Pristina on Friday when word came that her home on Peja street was burning.
A foot patrol of British ``KFOR'' peacekeepers had happened along just in time to see two men fleeing as the building burst into flame.
The soldiers radioed the local fire brigade and checked to make sure the house was empty. Then they tried in vain to tackle the fire with a garden hose.
When the fire brigade arrived the house had been consumed. Jelica Jovanovic, surprisingly composed, said she would be leaving Kosovo to live with her sister-in-law in another part of Serbia.
International officials assume the attack was carried out by ethnic Albanians intent on driving another Serb from Kosovo.
But some ethnic Albanians living in the area said the woman had decided on her own to leave and had arranged to have her own house burned so no non-Serb could use it.
Whatever the truth, one of the roughly 20,000 non-ethnic Albanians still remaining in Kosovo was lost, and one of 10 homes on a short street that had been ethnically mixed -- four Serb houses, three Moslem, a Gypsy and two Albanian -- was gone.
It was not the first ethnic incident on Peja street, nor will it be the last. Two ethnic Albanian men knocked on Slobodanka Marinkovic's house on Saturday and asked her if she wanted to sell.
This seemingly innocuous overture is often intended in Kosovo as a sign to occupants that it's time to move on.
Given what had happened the day before to Jovanovic's house next door, that's how Marinkovic interpreted the visit. ``I have to leave soon. I'll go to the bus station or the train station and go to Serbia. It's not safe for us here,'' she told Reuters.
``It's true that KFOR patrols this area, but it doesn't make any difference. The bad men are careful. They come when KFOR leaves,'' she added.
Last Monday, armed ethnic Albanian thugs burst through the door of the Serb house next door to Marinkovic's, locked one elderly Serb woman in her kitchen and took her 30-year old daughter-in-law into the living room where they beat, robbed and tried to rape her.
Both women were reported to have left Pristina and Kosovo the next day. Two doors farther down the street, a house occupied by a Gypsy family until KFOR arrived on June 12 now has ethnic Albanians in it.
The blue gate has a painted message on it: ``Don't touch. This property is Albanian.''
Ironically, such signs are often found painted over messages of ownership that Serbs placed on their properties, when Serbian security forces were still in control in the province, to ensure they weren't mistaken for ethnic Albanians and burned out.
One Serb house destroyed; another abandoned; a third about to be abandoned; and the only Gypsy household on Peja street gone, their residence now occupied by ethnic Albanians.
That leaves just one Serb house on the street. Neighbours say it is still occupied but no one answers the door or leaves.
The three Moslem houses on Peja street are as yet untouched. Hard-line ethic Albanian nationalists view the Moslems with suspicion, but they are better regarded than Gypsies who are universally branded as Serb collaborators here.
Ermine, a 45-year old Moslem who lives quietly in one of the houses on Peja street, is optimistic that she and her family will be able to remain. She treats attacks that occurred just a stone's throw away from her front door as though they took place in a distant city.
``This is the way things are after a war. There is turmoil. But the turmoil passes and things return to normal. We have to look to the future, not to today,'' she explained.