In Real Estate, Serbs Find, What Matters Is Location : Yugoslavia: Kosovars seek property swap with Albanians in Belgrade, cementing ethnic split in province.

Each Friday, as the muezzin calls Muslims to prayer at a medieval mosque in old Belgrade, a few Serbs wait outside with the beggars, watching for ethnic Albanians.

The Serbs are refugees who fled Kosovo after a NATO-led force took control of Serbia’s southern province in June and the ethnic Albanian majority began to drive Serbs from their homes.

Kosovo Serbs don’t come to Belgrade’s mosque looking for revenge. Real estate is on their minds.

They are trying to find ethnic Albanians willing to swap apartments or houses in Belgrade for the Serbs’ abandoned residences in Kosovo, as Serbs continue to leave the province that their security forces fought so brutally to keep.

In a few cases, the Serbian refugees have been helped in their search by ethnic Albanians who are suddenly anxious to leave Belgrade, the capital of both Serbia and Yugoslavia, after receiving threatening phone calls.

The deals done in the street outside the mosque add to fears that the United Nations is failing in its effort to rebuild Kosovo into the tolerant, multiethnic society it once was.

On Friday, a gray-haired Serbian woman and her daughter sat on a concrete planter outside the mosque. The two women have no jobs or homes of their own and fear that they never will again.

In Pristina, the provincial capital of Kosovo, the mother and daughter had separate apartments in the same building. The woman’s son also had his own apartment in the building. They all fled the province July 15.

“Several times, we had Albanian name tags pasted on our entrance door. This meant that we were ‘tagged,’ ” said daughter Slavica, 32, who did not want her last name used for fear of reprisals. “This culminated in four ‘terrorists,’ middle-aged strongmen, coming to our door, giving us two hours’ notice to get out.”

Her mother, Slobodanka, 55, an accountant who lost her job in Kosovo just two years short of retirement, said her family asked for help from the NATO-led peacekeeping force, known as KFOR. They gave up after being passed on to five different offices.

“In our building, all 20 Serbian families had already gone,” Slavica said Friday through a translator. “Only we and an 80-year-old woman remained.”

Before leaving Pristina, Slobodanka, her daughter and son gave keys to their apartments to an ethnic Albanian neighbor who agreed to keep an eye on the units in case squatters tried to move in.

The neighbor was returning a favor, Slobodanka said. A Serbian woman had minded her place after Serbian security forces expelled thousands of ethnic Albanians from Pristina during NATO’s 78-day air war against Yugoslavia.

Since the Yugoslav government agreed to NATO’s peace terms in June, almost 219,000 Kosovo Serbs have fled to other areas of Serbia or to Montenegro, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates. Serbia and Montenegro are the two republics that make up Yugoslavia.

The U.N. estimates that less than 10% of Kosovo’s minority Serbs still live in the province, which Serbs claim as the cradle of their culture and ethnic Albanians want to make an independent state.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has tried to stop the exodus from Kosovo by forcing Serbian refugees to live in cramped shelters in southern Serbia.

School officials in the southern Serbian city of Kraljevo forced about 350 Kosovo Serbs to leave their refuge in a school when classes started Sept. 1, so the angry refugees tried to march in protest on Belgrade, 75 miles north.

The group doubled in size as sympathizers joined in. Police finally persuaded them to turn back after the protesters spent a rainy Thursday night sleeping in vehicles near the city of Cacak, about 20 miles northwest of Kraljevo.

An estimated 200,000 Muslims live in Belgrade, said the mosque’s imam, Mustafa Jusufspahic. But he wasn’t able to estimate the number of ethnic Albanians here.

The imam may share the Muslim faith with most ethnic Albanians, but he opposes their demand for independence.

“Now Kosovo is going to be 100% Albanian,” he said. “This is not democracy, that’s for sure. Now the Europeans are seeing they made a big mistake by supporting one side in Kosovo.”

So many Kosovo Serb refugees are trying to exchange apartments with ethnic Albanians living in Belgrade that the Muslim Society has started listing swap offers in its free newsletter, titled Salaam Aleikum, or Peace Be With You.

In this week’s issue, the 15 Serbian offers range from the flatly desperate to the slightly more choosy.

“I’m trading an apartment in [the Kosovo town of] Obilic for Belgrade,” wrote one Kosovo Serb. “Any deal is possible.”

Pitched another: “I’m trading a two-bedroom apartment in Pristina--70 square meters--for Belgrade, Novi Sad, Vrnjacka [Banja, a spa resort], Pancevo [or the] Montenegrin coast.

“Nobody has moved into the apartment,” the owner added as a deal sweetener.

With more Kosovo Serbs fleeing by the day, ethnic Albanians in Belgrade are enjoying a buyer’s market and are only willing to trade apartments half the size of the ones Kosovo Serbs are offering.

That may be because few Albanians are in any hurry to leave, said Imer Mehmeti, a leader of Belgrade’s Muslim community.

Mehmeti’s three children are in Saudi Arabia attending Islamic schools, which are prohibited in Yugoslavia, but he plans to stay in Belgrade, no matter what may come.

“Why should I leave?” he said. “We Muslims do not fear anyone, except Allah.”