A handful of the refugees from Kosovo have the choice of leaving overcrowded camps and reclaiming their Turkish heritage. Indeed, given the history of the region, their return to Turkey is only a part of a century-long trend. PNS correspondent Thomas Goltz has been traveling through eastern Europe and Asia Minor covering the effects of the NATO action. He is the author of "Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter's Adventures in an Oil-rich, War-torn, Post-Soviet Republic" (M.E. Sharpe, 1998).

ISTANBUL, TURKEY -- It was their first trip on a plane, and the excitement seemed to take the edge off a rather more important fact -- Bekim Konstantini and his wife and daughter were taking a short ride from Tirana, Albania to Istanbul into what is likely to be a very long exile.

"I've been to Istanbul seven or eight times on business, but always by road," said Bekim, 28, a successful shoe merchant from Prizrin in southern Kosovo. "The man I usually do business with still owes me 500 Deutschmarks. I hope I can find him and collect."

Bekim needs the money (about $300) because he doesn't have any of his own anymore. On May 1st, Serb paramilitary gunmen came pounding on the door of his house and gave him one hour to pack his bags.

His story mirrors that of almost one million citizens expelled from their homes during NATO's bombing campaign. Gunmen took the keys to his two cars, robbed Bekim of all his cash, stripped his wife Fulya of her jewelry then forced the couple and their three year old daughter to join a caravan of refugees from nearby towns, and shunted them across the Kosovo/Albanian frontier at Morino, where they became wards of the U.N. at its sprawling refugee camp at Kukes.

"It was hot and then cold and when it rained it became a pigsty," said Bekim. "The aid-workers tried to help but my daughter was getting sick. And there were no showers. We could not wash for 12 days."

So he made a decision that only a handful of refugees in the camp could make. Rather than wait for NATO to force Slobodan Milosevic to remove his military from Kosovo and allow repatriation of the refugees, or queue up for temporary placement in the USA, Germany or Britain, Bekim decided to re-assert the fact that he and his family were a minority within a minority -- ethnic Turks.

Their forefathers arguably started the current disaster when they vanquished the Serbs in 1389. But the 50,000 odd ethnic Turks in Kosovo, like their erstwhile enemy the Serbs, have long become a minority in the contested province, which was overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian at the start of the current troubles.

It was not always so. After the defeat of Serbs, much of the Balkans was opened to Ottoman settlement -- the heterogeneous Muslim population of the growing empire (Turks, Arabs, Persians, Circassians, converted Jews and Christians of all types) was allowed to seek its collective fortune in the fertile lands.

But in the 19th century, the rise of ethnic nationalism in Europe and the slow splintering of the Ottoman Empire brought that to an end. With the re-assertion of the "Christian" ethnic nation-states of Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria, wave after wave of "Turks," meaning Muslims, began a huge reverse migration toward the Ottoman heartland of Thrace and Asia Minor.

Istanbul itself is dotted with neighborhoods that reflect this trend: there are two locales called Albanian Village and several named New Bosnia on the European side of the city and even a "Polish Village" on the Asia side.

"The present campaign in Yugoslavia might be best seen as a logical extension of a century-old trend to rid southeastern Europe of its multi-ethnic, Ottoman past," said Professor Mete Tuncay, a leading Ottoman scholar at Istanbul's Bilge University.

One might ask what possible threat the remaining ethnic Turks in the former Yugoslavia posed for the Milosevic regime. And one might well ask just how "Turkish" people like Bekim Konstantini really are -- although they have maintained an antique Turkish language, most speak Albanian (or even Serbian) among themselves. This is not so easy to explain unless one faces the fact that in the Balkans, no one is a "pure" anything.

One reason for this is that conversion from Orthodox Christianity was very common in Kosovo (and elsewhere in the Ottoman Balkans) mainly because converts to the primary religion of the realm were granted better tax status and upward mobility.

"The point is that the multi-ethnic peoples of the huge land mass from the Balkans through Asia Minor to the Middle East and even the former Soviet Caucasus not only have six hundred years of shared, multi-ethnic history under the Ottomans but one thousand years of shared history under the Byzantine Empire before that," said Professor Tuncay. "The last 100 years of ethnically based, national states is an aberration from the historic norm."

For Bekim Konstantini and his family and 60 friends (including three amputees, fighters who joined the Kosovo Liberation Army) the prospect of political unity through ethnic diversity is a long way off. As the new arrivals to Istanbul queued up with the other foreigners, a policeman moved over to separate the refugees from the rest.

"Kosovars, over here," he said, indicating some manner of special treatment (such as the exemption from the visa fee) for the group.

"We are in Turkey now," whispered a 12-year-old girl in the group to a friend. "Speak only Turkish, not Albanian!" Or Serbian, for that matter.

Another ripple of the great wave had washed up on the beach.