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UN effort to rebuild Kosovo loses
steam |
By Nicholas Wood The New York
Times
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30,
2005
| PRISTINA, Kosovo For more than six
years, this small Balkan province has been home to one of the most
ambitious nation-building projects in recent history.
Armed with near absolute
authority, and backed up by a NATO-led peace keeping force, a UN
mission has tried to forge a modern democratic system from decades
of bitter ethnic tension between an ever expanding and more
assertive Albanian majority, and a Serbian minority that clings to
Kosovo as the heart of Serbia's medieval empire.
At the cost of an
estimated $1.3 billion a year, international civil servants and
policemen - about 11,000 at their peak - helped to build ministries,
a Parliament, local councils, authorities, courts, customs and
police services as well as media.
From June 1999, when the
United Nations first arrived in the wake of NATO bombs that helped
drive Serbian forces from Kosovo, through to 2001 or so, their
achievement was held up as an example for building democracy
elsewhere.
But then, by common
agreement at least among the international officials and observers
and Kosovo's Albanians, the process started to stall - hamstrung, in
this view, by the inability of foreigners to adopt solutions that
addressed the needs of the people who live all their lives in
Kosovo.
Enmity between the Serbs
and Albanians still runs deep, frequently with lethal results.
Underneath everything runs the unanswered question of Kosovo's
future: while under UN control, it is still formally part of Serbia,
whose leaders cannot be seen to give the province away to the
Albanians.
Consequently, the region
remains in limbo - the poorest part of the Balkans, and the most
unstable.
"The focus has been on
buying time, and that's the only focus there has been," said Veton
Surroi, a member of Kosovo's regional Parliament and a veteran
Albanian journalist and publisher here.
Larry Rossin, a retired
American diplomat who is deputy head of what is formally known as
the UN Interim Mission in Kosovo, conceded: "I think the development
of their institutions is somewhat retarded by our continuing role."
In next few days, a
report by a senior UN envoy, the Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, is
expected to pave the way for the mission's withdrawal.
Diplomats who insisted
on anonymity said that although there is some evidence to the
contrary, Eide will, in effect, say that the Albanians have done
enough to meet standards set by the international community to
recommend talks on its future status.
The ethnic Albanians,
who make up more than 90 percent of Kosovo's two million people,
hope this will be the final step toward seceding from Serbia and
creating an independent state.
For Serbia, the
negotiations threaten the loss of a region that is still home to
some of the most ancient and treasured Serbian Orthodox churches and
monasteries.
The negotiations between
the Albanians, Kosovo Serbs and Serbian government will require
international oversight, and almost certainly result in some kind of
international presence remaining in the province.
The expectation among
international officials is that negotiations on Kosovo's sovereignty
will solve many of the problems, both political and economic, that
the United Nations has been unable to tackle.
Others warn that while
the failure to resolve the region's future has fermented unrest, the
model of nation building adopted here has been too narrow in scope
and too authoritarian in nature to leave institutions and leaders
capable of sustaining peace and democracy.
"The focus of the
international mission from the start was on security and politics,"
said Gerald Knaus, director of the European Stability Initiative, a
non-governmental political research group with offices in Kosovo.
International
bureaucrats, he said, had chosen to ignore economic needs - the
World Bank estimates that 37 percent of the population lives on less
than $1.75 a day - and were primarily concerned to "build
institutions almost as an end in itself."
Even Rossin noted that
the talks on status might have been held two years ago, but added
that would have presumed similar international support, and a more
cooperative approach between the mission with local politicians,
"instead of competition and constant criticism of the provisional
institutions."
Senior UN officials also
said there was doubt as to whether Western governments wanted to
invest the political capital associated with any kind of resolution.
Certainly, Kosovo's
Albanian politicians accuse the mission of being deliberately slow
to transfer power to local authorities, thereby increasing unrest.
At first glance today,
Kosovo appears relatively thriving - particularly when compared to
the war devastation of 1999. New houses can be seen everywhere, the
result of a post war construction boom. In the regional capital,
Pristina, the streets are filled with cafés, restaurants and stores.
Only the ubiquitous
white four-wheel drive vehicles of the UN mission, and the
infrequent military checkpoints hint at another reality.
That ugly division
boiled over in March last year, when the UN's claims to have brought
stability were shattered as up to 50,000 ethnic Albanians took part
in a three-day wave of attacks on Serbs and other minority groups,
as well as UN buildings and property. Nineteen people were killed
and 4,000 forced from their homes.
Most Kosovo Serbs remain
in enclaves, fearful of venturing forth. Albanians, too, steer clear
of the north of the province, where Serbs are clustered in and
around the town of Mitrovica, for fear of attack. Late on Wednesday,
gunmen shot and injured the province's most senior Serbian police
officer, Dejan Jankovic, near the town of Gnjilane just two weeks
after he was appointed as regional commander.
On Aug. 27, two Serbs
were gunned down in the car they were traveling, a reminder of how
violence can resurface without provocation.
Severe economic
difficulties increase the tension. Estimates of unemployment range
between a minimum of 30 percent, and 70 percent. The regional
government is also close to bankrupt as the local economy fails to
produce enough revenue to support basic needs.
"We are in a situation
where we are living off almost entirely customs revenues and
donations from donors," Rossin said. "The budget is extremely tight,
school construction is nearly nil in the year 2005 because there is
just no money in the capital budget to do it in a place that has
crying needs in a whole range of social areas."
Economic policy consists
of "short term thinking, short term approaches, projects and
international consultants," Knaus said. "Kosovo institutions don't
have any idea, they don't know what to do."
UN officials here note
that Kosovo was the poorest part of the old Yugoslavia before
tensions exploded in the late 1980s and Serbia's then leader,
Slobodan Milosevic, rode nationalist tensions both to seize and
consolidate power and to bring Kosovo under direct rule from
Belgrade.
Ethnic Albanians went
underground during those years, founding their own schools in
garages and private homes and claiming enormous and violent
harassment from Serbia's then ubiquitous police.
Eventually, an
underground guerrilla movement - the Kosovo Liberation Army - formed
and started attacking the Serbian forces in 1998. Serbian
retaliation was so fierce that NATO decided in 1999 to bomb
Milosevic's men out of Kosovo.
Hundreds of thousands of
Albanians who fled returned, while thousands of Serbs abandoned
Kosovo - their heartland for centuries.
All this makes for
difficult terrain when trying to sow democracy. For the past three
years, that has been the UN's main mission.
Billboard campaigns and
TV advertising exhort Kosovo's citizens to sup- port the policy,
which the commercials imply will eventually enable Kosovo to join
the European Union.
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