Perhaps no one expected the end of the war in Kosovo to bring peace, but few members of the U.N. force that drove back the Serbians seem prepared to deal with the smoldering aftermath of resentment, retribution and death. This violence of a smaller scale persists, however, and has been meticulously documented in an important new report.

As Seen, As Told, Part II is the followup to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s report on the Serbian attempted genocide in Kosovo against ethnic Albanians. Rather than large-scale state-sponsored acts of horror aimed at a people, the second report finds a rise of violence that has sprung from attacks against participants in the war’s atrocities, spread first to suspected indirect Serbian collaborators and then to anyone who simply wasn’t persecuted by the Serbs during the war.

The report’s catalogue of crimes was summed up in its introduction. From June to October 1999, human-rights violations “include executions, abductions, torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, arbitrary arrests and attempts to restrict freedom of expression. House burnings, blockades restricting freedom of movement, discriminatory treatment in schools, hospitals, humanitarian aid distribution and other public services based on ethnic background, and forced evictions from housing recall some of the worst practices of Kosovo’s recent past.”

Certainly, there is a difference between the long-term, systematic violence brought by the Milosevic government against Kosovo and these crimes. But the report finds good reason for the United States and Western Europe to care more deeply about the recent events than they have been, especially as the crimes relate to the new generation carrying out these attacks. The OSCE found gangs of 10- and 12-year-olds attacking elderly Serbs; 14-year-olds with grenades; young people who have suffered through years now determined to make their perceived tormenters suffer in turn.

The next turn in this cycle of violence is predictable, and requires a far more difficult solution than sending in fighter jets to bomb the enemy. The OSCE offers some solutions — none simple — but its report gives world leaders ample reason to step in before the local crisis again becomes the inevitable war.