NEPROSHTINA, Macedonia — A bus rumbled down the dirt road Friday that cuts this ethnically divided village in half and dropped off several dozen Macedonian families displaced by the fighting earlier this summer.

It was the first time the Macedonian Slavs were able to return to see what was left of their homes — burned, looted, and, in some cases, reduced to rubble.

Reina Zafirovski, 55, broke down when she saw the place where she raised her four children.

"Everything is gone! Where are we supposed to go? What do we do?" she said, collapsing on the threshold of the charred frame of her house and sobbing.

Her home, and most of the homes of her extended family and neighbors in the Slavic side of this Macedonian village, were destroyed, presumably by Albanian rebel forces.

The rebels attacked in retaliation for an earlier shelling by the Macedonian military on the ethnic Albanians who live on the other side of the main road.

This small village, where Macedonians and ethnic Albanians once lived together as neighbors, stands as the latest example of simmering ethnic hatreds, deep mistrust, and bitter divisions left over from fighting that flared in July and early August before a shaky cease-fire was announced Aug. 13.

It is a stark illustration of the difficulties that lie ahead for NATO forces as they set out on a new mission to collect weapons and try to stop the momentum toward another spiraling ethnic conflict in the Balkans.

NATO forces and international monitors escorted some 500 Macedonians to a string of villages in the hills northeast of Tetovo, which are now under the firm control of the rebels of the Albanian National Liberation Army. It was the first time the residents, who were brought in a convoy of four buses, had been able to return to the area since July, when intense fighting broke out and prompted many of the Macedonian families to flee.

The cease-fire was violated here Thursday night when Macedonian paramilitaries positioned across a hillside in the village of Reiyeh strafed Albanian homes with gunfire. NATO sources said it was one of the most dramatic violations of the cease-fire in the past four days and a glimpse of the quagmire that they face in Macedonia.

Both sides of the divided town stress the crimes committed by the other, and ignore the brutality that their side commits.

The ethnic Albanians, who are overwhelmingly Muslim, pointed to the dome of their mosque, which was punched by a mortar shell on Sunday. They showed the burned barns, the houses damaged by mortar shells and helicopter strikes. A sign hanging from a tree read, "Beware Snipers!"

The Macedonians, who are predominantly Orthodox Christians, pointed to the nearby 13th-century monastery of Leshok where their church was bombed earlier this week. They walked through their ravaged homes and wept and shouted angrily at the destruction.

The Macedonian families, many of whom came here with the hope of returning, left several hours later clutching what belongings they could find, shaken by the reality that they probably never will return. At least, not for a long time.

A group of Albanian neighbors who live less than 75 yards away from the Zafirovsky family watched Reina's agony from a street corner. They did nothing to help her.

An Albanian father and son returning from the fields walked past her and looked away as she gathered what was left from a heap of her family's belongings in the front yard.

"We can never live with them again," she said, nodding to the Albanian side.

The ethnic Albanians say that they have lived for too long without equal rights in Macedonia and that the country will never return to calm until their rights are guaranteed.

The National Liberation Army, which before the fighting had no more than a few hundred members, now has a membership well into the thousands, observers here estimate.

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The Albanians, who make up about 25 percent of Macedonia's 2 million residents, have been emboldened by the fighting. They expect that the Macedonian government will amend the constitution, guaranteeing them equal rights and recognizing Albanian as an official language of the country.

"If the political process goes forward, we will not have a war," said Elias Islami, 52, an ethnic Albanian farmer whose cattle sheds have been destroyed by Macedonian paramilitary bombing. "If it does not, then war is inevitable. . . . I didn't used to support the NLA, but now I support them all the way."

NATO commanders have placed a 30-day deadline for carrying out their weapons collection mission, although exactly how many weapons they will collect beginning next week is still unclear.

Diplomatic sources said NATO officials had set a target of slightly more than 3,000 weapons to collect from the rebels, who had earlier said they had 2,500. But the figure was far less than the government's estimates of between 8,000 and 80,000 weapons.

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