She is my first daughter Miljana and she is just 18 months old he said

"She is my first daughter, Miljana, and she is just 18 months old," he said.And I thought of other family snapshots I had seen in Kosovo, in "cleansed" Albanian villages and beside the road to Djakovica. Here on this road on which I was driving, The Independent's Albanian interpreter had undergone her moment of terror with Serb paramilitaries just seven weeks ago.And all those gutted homes among the poppy fields have created a terrible legacy of contempt as well as hatred. Most accounts talk of execution and rape by the paramilitaries and by the drunken "Whitegles" gunmen from the Drina river. But those murderers contaminated - if only by association - every Serb who held a gun in Kosovo And that includes the Yugoslav Army. I know Yugoslav soldiers who have been sickened by these crimes But they could not - or did not - stop them. Military officers were talking yesterday of 800 arrests of paramilitary men by the Serb authorities, of sentences of up to 20 years for murder.

They talked of one Serb gunmen sentenced for killing an Albanian family of 15. A bit late, I thought.And I'd like to know more about all those court cases and all that Serb justice meted out to the killers of Kosovo.The Serbs of Kosovo tried to give their soldiers their support as they drove away from Serbia's most sacred soil. On a road bridge someone had strung a banner which said "We live for freedom."At Luzane the Prizren Brigade fired into the air with their Kalashnikov rifles, a spray of golden cartridge cases falling like rain through the brown dust of the trucks. One army lorry carried a photograph of a young and half-naked woman on its bonnet Another bore the red, white and blue flag of Yugoslavia. A pretty Yugoslav soldier sat in the back of one truck, her blonde plaits hanging over her tunic.At just one point on the highway three Albanian women in scarves watched the Third Army in retreat Thanks to Nato, these soldiers are going.

Thanks to Nato, those three women will no longer have the chance of independence from Serbia in three years' time - as they were led to believe after March's Paris "peace" talks. For them, too, this may not prove a famous victory.Yugoslavia's heavy armour and tanks and anti-aircraft missiles will be hauled up this road in the coming days and then will come the Serb police and the paramilitaries (those of the latter who have not already made it back to what is now called "Serbia proper").And there will follow, too, the thousands of Serbs abandoning the land of their fathers, just as the Serbs fled Krajina and eastern Croatia and eastern Bosnia. I saw them yesterday, their little Yugo cars hugging the back of the last convoy from Pristina, women in the back, men in the front The world is not going to care about their dispossession. Serve them right, the world will say.And what message will they take with them to Nis and Novi Sad and Kraljevo and Belgrade and the other bombed cities of Serbia? I came across a smart young machine-gunner guarding his army's main supply route in the shadow of an ancient Serbian church yesterday. His black beret and camouflage tunic and webbing were spotless, his English almost as clean How did he feel, I asked "I am a soldier," he replied.