London — With little international publicity and a great deal of pessimism on all sides, the world's most ambitious nation-building campaign got under way this week in the Balkans.

Nobody has ever believed that the United Nations plan to turn Kosovo from an embattled province of Serbia into an independent, multi-ethnic nation would be easy. Those who are attempting to hold Iraq together, for example, point to the expensive and lengthy diplomatic struggle in Kosovo as an example of how such efforts should be managed -- and how impossible they still can be.

Yet as they spoke in the Kosovo capital of Pristina yesterday, surrounded by an unusually heavy phalanx of armed guards, the UN officials struggling to negotiate the province's separation from Serbia are expressing optimism that Europe's latest nation-state could be created some time next year.

The former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, who was appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to lead talks on Kosovo's status, has spent the past week travelling to the capital cities of the Balkan nations in a preliminary round of discussions. He will present his findings in a dinner speech tonight.

There seemed to be little cause for optimism as Serbian and Albanian groups refused to budge from their positions this week, most observers said.

On Monday, Mr. Ahtisaari blasted the Serbian government for urging Kosovo's ethnic Serbs to boycott the political process, and criticized its ethnic-Albanian leaders for failing to address Serbian grievances.

"The negotiating parties are still massed in Belgrade and here in Pristina, trying to find a mutual understanding, but their positions haven't changed from five years ago. It's very difficult to say if they will end up moderating when it comes down to actual talks," said Besa Shahini, director of the Kosovar Stability Initiative, a neutral think-tank in Pristina.

"However, this is a period of calm and sanity in both Belgrade and in Kosovo, so everyone has a desire to get things going. The economies of both places are completely dead because of the uncertainty, so people want to get results so they can start working again."

The talks are doubly poisoned. First, they face the history of the region: the slaughter of more than 10,000 Albanian Kosovars during Serbian ethnic-cleansing campaigns that began in 1998, and the retaliatory killing of at least 1,000 Kosovo Serbs by Albanians following the NATO war against Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic in 1999.

As a result, Serbian residents of Kosovo, who are Orthodox Christians and make up one-tenth of its two million people, live in heavily guarded enclaves with almost no contact with the mainly Muslim Albanians, and refuse to participate in the region's elected legislature.

The war's embers keep flaring up. Yesterday, there were angry accusations and threats of violence across Kosovo after two Albanian leaders were acquitted of war-crimes charges at the Hague; that led leaders in Belgrade to accuse the court of partisanship, and to threaten to shut down the talks.

And the talks are equally poisoned by the mixed agenda of international forces in the region.

Many Serbs see hypocrisy in the current international effort to unite Bosnia's ethnic factions while dividing up Serbia into what will effectively be two states, one Serbian and one essentially ethnically Albanian.

But the UN and the European Union still believe that independence is the only way to bring stability to Kosovo, and most international observers, including U.S. leaders, agree.

However, UN officials quietly acknowledge that, if talks get tough, they may end up giving into a Serbian "plan B" in which the Serb-majority northern part of Kosovo, including the city of Mitrovica, would become part of Serbia.

In statements this week, Serb and Albanian parties showed little sign of tolerance.

"The Albanian people of Kosovo will never again risk living under Belgrade's rule," Hashim Thaci, the former Kosovo Liberation Army commander who now runs the Democratic Party of Kosovo, said in a statement on Monday.

And the Serbian government, considered a moderate alternative to the ultra-nationalist parties founded by Mr. Milosevic, has refused to accept any notion of an autonomous Kosovo, at least publicly. Yesterday, Belgrade officials announced their plan for a "free land of Kosovo" that would be controlled by Serbia.

That would not be very different from Kosovo's current status, which is carefully guarded by thousands of UN officials and international peacekeepers.

The road to independence

After 15 years of nationalist independence movements, ethnic slaughter, outright war and peacekeeping operations, what was Yugoslavia until the early 1990s is now five countries at various stages of independence.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Three years of bloody ethnic war between Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs ended with the 1995 Dayton peace accord. The agreement set up two separate entities, a Muslim/Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Bosnian Serb Republic. Overarching these entities is a central Bosnian government. Ultimate authority, however, rests with the EU-run Office of the High Representative as the country continues toward becoming a viable, peaceful, fully independent state.

Croatia

Croatia declared its independence in 1991, but endured nearly five years of sporadic and often bitter fighting with the Yugoslav People's Army and the army of the internationally unrecognized Republic of Serbian Krajina. The Croatian army prevailed and integration of the separatist territories was completed in 1998 under UN supervision.

Macedonia

Its current borders were fixed shortly after the Second World War when it was recognized as a separate nation within Yugoslavia. Although it is quite diverse, with a majority of ethnic Macedonians but a large population of Albanians as well as Turks, Roma and Serbs, Macedonia seceded peacefully in 1991.

Serbia and Montenegro

Serbia and Montenegro held on to the name Yugoslavia after the breakup until 2003, when its parliament voted to create a new, looser union. The two republics are semi-independent states in an arrangement that is to remain in place until at least 2006, after which the two republics can hold referendums on whether to keep or scrap it.

Kosovo province

In 1998, violence flared in Serbia's province of Kosovo after it was stripped of its autonomy. The Kosovo Liberation Army began an armed rebellion, which was brutally put down by the Serbian army until international forces intervened and the United Nations took over administration. It is now a de facto international protectorate but legally part of Serbia. Its status remains the subject of a bitter dispute between the Albanian majority, which seeks independence, and the minority Serbs.

Slovenia

A stable and independent country, Slovenia is the only former Yugoslav republic to join the European Union and NATO. Its independence was relatively bloodless, aided by Western European recognition of the Slovenes' aspirations and the low proportion of other ethnic groups.

SOURCE: BBC.CO.UK