and Kosovo as a place sliding into anarchy. Although UNMIK was understaffed and lawlessness persisted, the crime rate was diminishing. Kouchner is running a new international protectorate in Kosovo guarded by 36,500 mostly NATO peacekeeping troops. His tall task is to restore public services and build democracy in a brutalised Balkan backwater that has never known it. U.N. war crimes tribunal investigators who have fanned across Kosovo estimate that 11,000 ethnic Albanians lie in mass graves that they have begun excavating, Kouchner said. The early bane of UNMIK has been ethnic Albanians‘ thirst to avenge Serbian atrocities against civilians in a 16-month conflict between Kosovo‘s separatist majority and Belgrade‘s security forces – and a lack of police to reinstate law and order. Scores of Serbs have been murdered and many more have had their homes burned or seized by returning ethnic Albanian refugees since Serbian troops and police withdrew after being bombed by NATO for 11 weeks. About half Kosovo‘s 200,000 Serb minority have fled Kosovo instead of waiting for the axe to fall. Gangsters coming over a now porous border from chaotic Albania have compounded Kosovo‘s disorder. They appear to have expanded stolen car rackets and try to seize flats for profit. Kouchner said NATO troops at road checkpoints were detaining up to 15 Albanians a day for weapons and other offences and dispatching them back across the border. But many more have probably slipped through the net. There have been reports of the Kosovo Liberation Army, now grudgingly disarming under the U.N. mandate, forming shadowy illegitimate „ministries“ and, in the absence of policing, expropriating offices and flats and levying „taxes“. Kouchner said he had heard of such abuses but believed they we- re committed by „individuals acting in the name of the KLA“ but not with the approval of its political chief Hashim Thaqi. Kouchner said the rate of murder, kidnappings, arson and loo-ting targeting mainly Serb inhabitants had declined dramatically since NATO‘s KFOR peace force arrived in June. Kosovo‘s lawlessness was not as bad as it was in other early post-war societies including Bosnia, Lebanon, El Salvador and his own France after the 1944 Allied liberation, he said. But Kouchner acknowledged UNMIK‘s efforts to establish an authoritative presence were being hampered by the slowness of the international community to provide civil administrators and a promised 3,000 armed police with powers of arrest. UNMIK has received only 155 so far and they will not start patrolling until next week. He conceded that Kosovo might have no more Serbs in a few months‘ time if vengeful violence kept up, defeating an important goal of UNMIK – to foster a modern multi-ethnic democracy. But policing alone could not arrest the exodus, Kouchner said.