PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- While the world's attention was focused on whether NATO would launch air strikes against Yugoslavia in early 1999, about 700 ancient artifacts were brought from Pristina to Belgrade for display at an exhibition on Kosovo and have been kept there ever since.

Many rare ethnological items such as jewelry and national costumes, presented at an earlier Belgrade exhibition in late 1998, have also not found their way back to Pristina.

These exhibits and others, which departed along with the museum's Serb management as the United Nations and NATO forces entered the province in June 1999, are now in the vaults of the ethnographic museum and the national museum in Belgrade.

A dispute is now simmering over the thousands of museum items in storage in Belgrade, reflecting poisoned relations in all aspects of society -- even among old colleagues in the world of archaeology.

The new ethnic Albanian leadership of the Pristina National Museum has appealed to the international community to help get the treasures back, saying they are part of the Yugoslav province's cultural heritage and belong there.

Kosovo's UN Governor Michael Steiner has backed their call. But he has also cautioned against making the fate of the relics an ethnic or political issue.

"All the artifacts should go to the place they belong to," Steiner told Reuters in an interview.

Officials in Belgrade last month gave Steiner a 6,000-year-old stone figurine previously held in Pristina to take back to the Kosovo capital in an apparent sign of goodwill.

"What I would try to avoid is any form of politicization," steiner said. "This should be dealt with on its own merits.

culture should not be used for national means." Kosovo Albanian archaeologists say up to 3,000 artifacts which belong in the province are currently held in Belgrade.

They include items from different periods in Kosovo, spanning from the sixth millennium BC to the 15th century.

Kosovo expert Exhlale Dobruna-Salihu said her research was suffering because of the missing artifacts.

"Every archaeological piece is unique," she said.

"The value of the items that are missing is priceless." But Branko Jokic, former director of the Pristina Museum who along with roughly 180,000 other Serbs fled Kosovo after the conflict, said the artifacts in Belgrade had been brought there purely for exhibition or safekeeping.

"No one brought out materials with some ulterior motives.

These were important exhibitions prepared jointly by Albanian and Serb experts," he told Reuters in Belgrade.

Asked about returning the pieces held at Belgrade's National Museum to Kosovo, he was cautious. "Access to this material and its security would have to be ensured," he said.

Jokic said that who inherited the ethnological pieces was a different issue, as most were linked to the Serb community in Kosovo, some from the Ottoman era. "The pieces had been collected for years and all the works were financed by Serbia." That argument may ring hollow for Kosovo Albanian archaeologists, who say Serb authorities withheld funds to prevent them carrying out their own work in the past decade.

Mirjana Menkovic, curator at Belgrade's ethnography museum and earlier for 15 years in Pristina, said the international community should mediate if the two sides were unable to find a solution to what she called an "extremely delicate problem." "No one has stolen anything, the material is stored in adequate depots. But are the Albanians also asking for their Serb colleagues to return together with the exhibits, or do they just want the material back?" she said.

Kosovo was placed under UN administration in 1999 after 11 weeks of NATO bombing. The air war drove out Serb forces responsible for a campaign of killings and expulsions of majority Albanians under autocrat Slobodan Milosevic, ousted by reformers in 2000.

Ethnic Albanians targeted Serbs in numerous revenge attacks after the war, sparking an exodus of Serbs and other Kosovo minorities. Few have dared return.

The smoldering hostility makes it difficult for Serb archaeologists to work there. "Right now a Serb expert can't just come to Kosovo," Jokic said.

But while the debate goes on, ethnic Albanian experts are busy working at the site of what is seen here as the most important archaeological discovery in Kosovo in the last decade, when a lack of funds hampered such scientific activities.

A local man came across the remains of a Stone-Age dwelling as he built a house by the village of Bernica outside Pristina.

"We hope to reconstruct the way in which this particular community lived," said supervisor Tomorr Kastrati.

Kemajl Luci, in charge of the archaeological works, said many valuable items had been unearthed at the site, believed to date from 3,500 BC, including rare human-like idols.

"This site is the richest in terms of findings in a wide area of the central Balkans," he said.