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The Economist January 26, 2002
SECTION: EUROPE
HEADLINE: A ghastly job
DATELINE: pristina
MICHAEL STEINER may have worked in tough places before: he
once served in Zaire. But overseeing the UN's protectorate of
Kosovo from its capital, Pristina, will certainly be the hardest task
the
abrasive, clever German has ever faced. Indeed, the rude behaviour
(including demands for caviare) during a stop-over last year in
Moscow that cost him his last foreign-policy post, as adviser to
Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, will soon be forgotten if he
can do a half-decent job in the Balkan province. After two-and-a-half
years of relative peace and intensive international care under the
eyes of up to 40,000 armed peacekeepers, Kosovo ought by now to
be on the way to economic and political health. But as Mr Steiner will
find, there is still an uneasy stand-off between criminals-cum-extreme
nationalists and NATO soldiers trying to enforce law and order, and
there is no guarantee that the latter will prevail.
Like his predecessors as UN proconsul in Kosovo (first, a
Frenchman, Bernard Kouchner, and most recently Hans Haekkerup,
a hastily departed Dane), Mr Steiner will have to make very hard
choices between cracking down on the region's armed ethnic- Albanian
groups and looking the other way for the sake of a quiet
political life.
Turning a blind eye, as Mr Kouchner often appeared to do, may be
even harder if the toughest ethnic-Albanian factions in neighbouring
Macedonia (where Albanians are a large minority) launch a fresh
offensive this spring, using Kosovo as a base. These groups are
understood to have spent about $4.5m over the last four months on
new weapons, including ground-to-air missiles. But standing up to
armed bullies, as Mr Haekkerup tried to do, also carries high
personal risks. His young family apparently left the tense atmosphere
of Pristina with much relief.
Mr Steiner's most immediate task will be to break Kosovo's political
impasse. Ibrahim Rugova, the moderate leader who did best in last
November's election, has failed to persuade the province's 120 new
assemblymen to elect him as president, because his main rivals,
Hashim Thaci and Ramush Haradinaj, veterans of the war against
Serb forces, want a bigger slice of power. Amid the ferment, a pro-
Rugova assemblyman was killed last week.
GRAPHIC: Run Kosovo? No thanks
Copyright 2002 The Economist Newspaper Ltd.
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