President Clinton greeted American peacekeeping troops during his Thanksgiving trip to Kosovo -- and urged Kosovars to forgive the Serbs. After a background report, Gwen Ifill leads a discussion on the visit.

JIM LEHRER: Gwen Ifill has the Kosovo story.

GWEN IFILL: Arriving in the decimated Yugoslav province today, the President was greeted by the two men now running Kosovo, a United Nations administrator, and the German general in charge of more than 40,000 peacekeeping troops. But it was in a chilly sports hall in an ethnic Albanian town of Farizai after the President had met with local Serb and Albanian leaders that Mr. Clinton directly addressed the ethnic tensions still dividing Kosovo. The President was cheered by the Kosovar Albanians when he criticized Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, architect to the ethnic cleansing campaign.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Mr. Milosevic wanted to keep control of Kosovo by getting rid of all of you, and we said no. (cheers and applause) Now he has lost his grip on Kosovo, and you have returned. No more days hiding in cellars, no more nights freezing in mountains and forests.

GWEN IFILL: But when translators relayed Mr. Clinton's appeal to Albanians to seek peace by forgiving the Serbs, the cheers died down.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: You can never forget the injustice that was done to you. No one can force you to forgive what was done to you. But you must try. Do not let the children's spirits be broken. Do not let their hearts harden. The future we fought to save for you is the future we see here today, smiling, cheering, happy children. Give them the tomorrow they deserve.

GWEN IFILL: Since NATO bombing ended in June, more than 100 local Serb civilians have been killed in revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians. And as many as 100,000 Serbs have fled the province. While in Kosovo today, the President also visited the massive 755-acre Camp Bondsteel. The installation, home to the largest American encampment built on foreign soil since the Vietnam War, is still under construction. A more painstaking construction task -- rebuilding homes for the civilian population -- as U.N. peacekeepers struggle to put even the most basic services in place before winter begins in earnest. President Clinton thanked the American military contingent, 6,000 strong now, telling the soldiers they have a special role to play.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: The most important thing you can do besides keeping these people alive and having security, is to teach that to the children and to their parents by the power of your example and your own testimony. The power of our weapons could win the military battle in Kosovo, but the peace can only be won by the human heart. And every day they see you, every day these little kids see you working together, even if they don't speak our language, even if they never met any African Americans or Hispanics before, even if they don't know any Asians before, they can see. They have eyes. They'll get it. When they are secure enough in who they are that they don't have to put anybody else down, hurt anybody else, torch anybody else's church or mosque, just to feel they matter, this is the most important issue in the whole world today. And the power of your example can do more than anything else to help us to win the peace. Thank you. God bless you. And Happy Thanksgiving.

GWEN IFILL: For more on Kosovo, we turn to Michael O'Hanlon, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is writing a book on the Kosovo war, and recently returned from Kosovo. And Charles Ingrao, professor of history at Purdue University, he also returned from Kosovo, last Thursday. With the President basically saying today, "We won the war for you. Now you have to win the peace," who is he speaking to, Mr. O'Hanlon?

MICHAEL O'HANLON, Brookings Institution: Well, he's speaking to the ethnic Albanians, the population that he's afraid is too bent on revenge. And this is really the problem he's focused on. The peace in one sense is pretty secure. NATO's there. Serbia's not going to attack. So in broad military terms, we're in very good shape, but we know there are these reverse ethnic cleansing activities and crimes being committed, churches being burned down, Serbs being driven out of their homes, relocating sometimes either back in Serbia proper or in different parts of Kosovo where they're more secure. This is obviously regrettable. I'm not sure it's preventable, but it probably makes sense for the President to say something against it.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Ingrao, is it at all realistic for the President to be saying in this kind of audience essentially forgive and forget?

CHARLES INGRAO, Purdue University: Well, I think it's necessary first of all. And I think it's realistic if you give it a long enough time frame. A lot of these people are nursing terrible wounds right now that are going to take maybe years to heal. We're going to be there for quite some time, looking at what we're doing at Bondsteel. And I think what we have to do at this point is put our confidence in the amount of time that we're going to invest in the region and we have to meet, as the Serbs see it, three basic conditions that we've already promised. The first is to provide security. The second is to get the return of refugees who have fled to Serbia. And thirdly, we have to settle the problem of where is Kosovo going to be five years from now.

CHARLES INGRAO: Well, it is definitely not as workable in Kosovo as in the United States. In fact, even there in Bosnia you had essentially one ethnic group with three religions, people speaking the same language. Here in Kosovo you have two separate societies. That does not mean they can't live together. The experience we see in multiethnic settings throughout Central Europe is that however different people's cultures are, they are essentially apolitical. And they will learn to coexist in a rather easy way in many cases -- so long as politics aren't inserted in order to split them off from one another. So I think it is doable.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. O'Hanlon, you returned from Kosovo about three weeks ago. Tell me what it was like there.

MICHAEL O'HANLON: Well, it actually looks better than you might expect in some regards. One hears a lot of talk of poverty of the region. There certainly are a lot of problems with unemployment and obviously homes that have been destroyed, but there's an energy in the streets that to an American or a westerner I think is very gratifying, because people are very happy to be back. And they're appreciative of what we did to help them get back. There obviously are things we need to ask them to try to do in the future, things they can expect us to do better. We're not doing very well at funding a lot of the operations there. A lot of people aren't being paid for their work. We need to get better at supporting them. But generally, it's in some ways, despite all the negative news reports that one sees in places like the New York Times yesterday, a fairly positive, happy place. There are a lot of problems. And it's going to be a tough winter, but this is a lot better than war and it's a lot better than life under Milosevic.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Ingrao, Mr. O'Hanlon just referred to the fact that we're hearing a lot of the bad news, especially a lot of the reverse ethnic cleansing, if you want to call it that.
You got back from Kosovo last week. What was your sense?

CHARLES INGRAO: Well, right now you have two totally segregated societies. KFOR forces - it's 40,000 men, but I think they could use a lot more than that. They're separating the two societies. When nightfall comes, it's like a lockdown. The Serbs stay in their communities, the Albanians in theirs. That is probably good and it's probably the only solution we have at this particular point. I think if we look at the amount of time it's going to take, we're doing the right things right now. Let me say one other thing, though. And that is, as we're somewhat impatient about the need to restore Kosovo, to rebuild people's lives to, bring about coexistence between these two groups, I think we have to recognize that what has happened in Kosovo, and what happened before that in Bosnia is part of a much longer process that has taken this whole century. Since the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913, about 40 million people, civilians, have been either expelled or executed because of their ethnicity. This summer for the first time in this 80-year period, 85-year period, a large number of expellees got a chance to come back to their homes. We have to build on that. Now it's the Serbs' turn to help them to come back to their homes. But if you look in the long-term over this century of ethnic cleansing, this is major step in the right direction.

GWEN IFILL: But if the Albanians, Mr. O'Hanlon, are striking back, are involved in revenge attacks and are visiting the same kind of horror on the people they hate as the people they hate visited on them, how do you move forward?

MICHAEL O'HANLON: Well, first I put it in perspective. This is very troubling. However, the level of violence in Kosovo today is comparable to what we see in many American cities. In other words, this is no longer a society at war. It's still a troubled society, just as many parts of our own are, but it's not a society at war. Trends are in the right direction, partly because the communities are segregating themselves. And they're not living in a situation where there will be revenge attacks quite as easily because the mobs no longer have access to the Serbs. And as the professor just mentioned, this may be in the short term a good thing.

GWEN IFILL: Separate but equal.

MICHAEL O'HANLON: A little bit of that I'm afraid.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Ingrao, what is it that the international community can do? What is the responsibility right now?

CHARLES INGRAO: I think in the short term, we need a restoration of the rule of law. Right now Albanians beating up Serbs, bushing down their homes, when they're apprehended, they're retained; they're held for a couple days and then they're released. There is no court system functioning. There must be deterrence. So the first thing we have to do immediately is establish the rule of law. It goes both way, but I think now it's the Albanians who are doing most of the damage to the Serbs.

GWEN IFILL: Isn't the rule of law in part supposed to be enforced by the U.N. peacekeepers? And the Serb minority, have they been adequately protected by the U.N. peacekeepers?

CHARLES INGRAO: Well, yes, they have been adequately protected when you consider there are 100,000 Serbs on the ground and there is massive effort by KFOR and the IPTF, the International Police Task Force, which is only seventeen hundred or so men now, to protect them. And most of them are receiving adequate protection. But when that breaks down, and individuals do commit crimes, they are not being jailed. They're being released after a couple days without a trial. So there has to be that kind of deterrence. So on the one hand, we're accomplishing a great deal. The number of deaths, as my colleague has pointed out, has really declined. But we can do better. And we're going to have to.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. O'Hanlon, are they on the path now to an eventual democracy? It was an 11-week air war; it ended six months ago. Is democracy the ultimate goal? Or is that still a ways off?

MICHAEL O'HANLON: Democracy has to be the goal, but, as you know, one of the main political groupings is essentially the military that fought this war and that we called a terrorist organization at some levels of U.S. government only about two years ago. So to transform that sort of force into a viable, democratic political institution may take some time. I think we can live with the fact it's going to take some time, and we're probably going to be there for five or ten or maybe twenty or thirty years. But that's probably okay. Germany is now at peace. NATO can direct some of its efforts away from Germany and towards the Balkans. I think that's not a major concern. We can be patient.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Ingrao, Slobodan Milosevic, he's still the de facto - he's certainly the head of Serbia. He denounced the President's visit today as is to be expected, I imagine.

CHARLES INGRAO: Yes.

GWEN IFILL: Does he have any say in any of this, or does he just stand by and yell?

CHARLES INGRAO: Unfortunately he does. The leaders of the Serbian opposition in Kosovo - Bishop Artemia and Momcilo Trajkovic -- have since the very beginning, and this is unique for Kosovo, since the very beginning, the early 90s, they have been condemning Milosevic, they have been urging coexistence; they have been urging a democratic society with equal rights. They have been marginalized, because since the war, Milosevic has invested a considerable amount of money and also has sent people into places like Mitrovica where there is a sizable Serb population and winning them over to his tack, which is I think very unfortunate. It underlines the problem in Bosnia and Kosovo that until Milosevic is out of power, there really is no lasting solution. But once he's out of power, I think then we have a lot of opportunities in front of us.

GWEN IFILL: Speaking of lasting solutions, Camp Bondsteel is made of concrete, not canvas. It looks like we're going to be there for a while, doesn't it?

MICHAEL O'HANLON: Yes. And the ethnic Albanians want us to stay even when Milosevic is gone. As much as he is the short-term problem and the worst problem, the Albanians don't really want to be part of a Serbia anytime soon, even if Milosevic is out of there. They'd like us to stay indefinitely.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Ingrao?

CHARLES INGRAO: If I could add one point, during the meeting today between Trajkovic and Artemia with President Clinton, they reiterated the problem of intimidation against Serbs and the continuing flight of Serbs. And one thing he said I think was very instructive. He expressed his own frustration and perhaps anger that the Kosovo leaders, the Kosovar leaders, are on the one hand making public speeches that have virtually been dictated or recommended by our people talking about ethnic coexistence, talking about forgiving and forgetting, an end to violence, but when they meet separately away from the cameras they are saying something else. President Clinton expressed a certain amount of frustration that the KLA and the other Kosovar leaders have to really make that commitment. We're probably going to have to play a role in making sure that they live up to what they're saying publicly.

GWEN IFILL: Charles Ingrao, Michael O'Hanlon, thank you very much.