SOUTH MITROVICA (Serbia-Montenegro): In spite of tensions that still threaten to boil over seven years after war, a train service has come to symbolise harmony between Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians and Serbs.

“No one asks you about your nationality. You just sit down and take a ride,” says a 57-year-old from the Serb enclave of Slovinja, Milorad Trajkovic, as he lugs two heavy bags on board.

“There were gangs which used to mistreat passengers at first and police were needed to secure the train, but it is better now,” adds Trajkovic, before taking a seat on the train from Kosovo Polje to visit his wife and children, who are refugees who fled Kosovo for the Serbian town of Kraljevo.

Chatting away in his carriage were Albanians, Roma and Serbs — a rare sight in Kosovo where minor violence still occurs on an almost daily basis between the southern Serbian province’s main ethnic groups.

But Trajkovic refuses to breach the subject of politics, not even about the ongoing UN-backed talks between Belgrade and Pristina that the international community hopes will resolve the future status of the province by the year’s end.

“I only want my family to be returned home to Kosovo but my sons don’t want to,” he says, looking out of his window across the fields of Kosovo Polje, the scene of a 1389 battle that defines Serbian attachment to Kosovo.

The ‘Train of Freedom’, as it was first dubbed by a multi-ethnic team of engineers, was established by the UN mission (UNMIK) that has run Kosovo since the war between Albanians and Serbian forces ended in mid-1999.

Travelling from the province’s southern border with Macedonia to the northern boundary with Serbia proper and back twice a day, the train service was launched by UNMIK to enhance the movement of minorities, particularly Serbs.

Despite the early troubles, the train has also become highly popular among the ethnic Albanians that make up about 90 per cent of Kosovo’s population of around two million people, and other minorities including Roma, Bosniaks and Gorani, or Slavic Muslims.

“To me it is absolutely normal to travel with people of different ethnicities for we are all human in the first place,” says another passenger, Avdi Syla.

“Everybody in the train travels for their own business,” says the 20-year-old ethnic Albanian student.

The ‘Train of Freedom’ offers passengers Kosovo’s safest and cheapest mode of transport, with a ticket for an average journey costing as little as 50 euro cents (62 US cents).

The euro is the official currency in Kosovo, but in order to make the train service more attractive to Serbs, its operator UNMIK Railways has allowed the minority to pay for their tickets using the Serbian dinar.—AFP