http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/09/kosovo.serbia1
GUARDIAN (UK)
Analysis
The EU is about to land in Kosovo. But will it take off?
Mark Tran visits Europe's newest capital city as Serbia goes to the polls to
find Kosovo's biggest problem may be that there are too many cooks
Mark Tran in Pristina
Friday May 9 2008
Albanians pass a banner which reads "Free Kosovo" in Tirana. Photograph:
Hektor Pustina/AP
As we sip beer at an internet cafe, Albin Kurti, the leader of Kosovo's
self-determination movement, slips me a document that purportedly shows
Serbia's spending plans for Kosovo, put together even though the former
Serbian province has broken away from Belgrade.
The document lists projects such as sewage works, nursery schools, road
building and the restoration of some of the world's finest orthodox
monasteries. Kurti tells me Belgrade - hardly in the best financial shape -
plans to spend €800m (£630m) on projects in Kosovo this year.
"To the extent that we are moving away from Serbia, Serbia is entering
Kosovo," he said, only half in jest.
Serbia's meddling in Kosovo, which unilaterally declared independence on
February 17, will take a new twist on Sunday when Serbia holds parliamentary
elections that are expected to strengthen ultra-nationalist, pro-Russian
parties at the expense of politicians that favour closer ties with the EU.
While attention is focused on Serbia, Belgrade – with what can only be
described as chutzpah - has decided to hold parliamentary and municipal
elections in Kosovo as well.
The UN mission in Kosovo (Unmik), in charge of the province since 1999, gave
the green light to parliamentary elections to honour the "dual citizenship"
of Kosovan Serbs but drew the line at local elections, declaring them
illegal. However, Unmik and the Kosovan government decided not to force the
issue and are allowing the illegitimate municipal ballots to go ahead.
"It's like telling someone they can't build a wall, but allowing them to
build a house," says Kurti.
Kurti wants the authorities to confiscate all Serb election documents, stop
Serb politicians from coming to Kosovo to campaign and ban public buildings
from being used as voting places. In the past few days, he has been
hurriedly trying to organise protests today that could attract hundreds of
people to Pristina's streets. When I ask him how much public support his
self-determination movement has, he cites a figure of 16%.
Shpend Ahmeti, an economist, tells me many Kosovans support Kurti's stance
that their government should be more assertive towards the alphabet soup of
international organisations in the country - Unmik; the election monitoring
body, OSCE; and Kfor, the Nato force that will soon include 600 British
troops. The presence of these "internationals" is most evident from the
white 4x4s with black logos that navigate Kosovo's pot-holed roads.
In theory, when the new constitution kicks in on June 15 a new batch of EU
organisations will take over from Unmik and play second fiddle to Kosovo's
government. The EU's International Civilian Office (ICO) has already
arrived. Housed in a glass building protected by a tall blast wall of blue
concrete blocks, the ICO overlooks Pristina's battered town centre.
Headed by an EU special representative, Pieter Feith, the ICO's main job is
to ensure the protection of Kosovo's Serbs - 120,000 out of the total
population of 2 million - and other minorities. The EU will also have a rule
of law mission, Eulex, to "monitor, mentor and advise Kosovo's
institutions". But instead of making way for the ICO and Eulex, Unmik is
showing no sign of packing its bags.
In fact, the respective roles of the UN and the EU are taxing the best
diplomatic and legal brains in New York and Brussels. One diplomat in
Pristina said Kosovo had leapt up the list of priorities of the UN
secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, from "28th to third, behind climate change
and Darfur", because of the ongoing international legal mess.
Unmik was set up by UN security resolution 1244 after the Kosovo war. Under
the blueprint for Kosovo's supervised independence devised by the Finnish
diplomat Maarti Ahtisaari, Unmik's authority would expire once Kosovo's
constitution took effect and supervision was assumed by the EU. But Russia,
Serbia's ally, had other ideas and blocked a new UN resolution that would
have given the Ahtisaari plan an international stamp of approval.
In the absence of a new resolution, the UN is likely to stay in a reduced
capacity to work alongside the EU; but the question is how, and who does
what. So the embattled Kosovan government will have to deal with even more
layers of bureaucracy. UN officials shake their heads in weary resignation
when asked about the future shape of Unmik. They simply don't know, and will
have to wait and see. But the body language already points to a turf war,
with one UN diplomat openly wondering what the ICO will actually do.
Belgrade and Kosovan Serbs are having a field day over this deadlock. In the
divided town of Mitrovica in the north, local Serbs are refusing to work
with the EU, putting the bloc's deployment plans on hold.
What the UN and EU are desperate to avoid is the nightmare of an
international presence split along Kosovo's ethnic and regional lines, with
the UN in the north and the EU in the south.
As for the Kosovans, the surfeit of international organisations in their
tiny, landlocked country has provided some benefits: there is no shortage of
business for Pristina's plentiful bars and cafes.
In contrast, local men can sit nursing a coffee for hours because there is
little work; the unofficial unemployment rate is 40%, although a parallel
economy flourishes. Many male and female security guards have been hired and
there is an extraordinary number of taxis for such a small place, many of
them forming a long queue outside the Grand hotel, once an important hub for
the Serbian police.
But Kosovans also resent having so many highly paid international civil
servants with too much time on their hands in their midst. That is why many
people sympathise with Kurti, although they wonder about his penchant for
public demonstrations. He was thrown in jail in February 2007 after
organising protests in which two demonstrators were killed by Romanian UN
guards, though he was later cleared of any responsibility.
As Kosovo awaits the arrival of the EU, which sees Kosovo as an important
test of its new foreign policy, Kurti jokes: "The EU is about to land and
Unmik is not taking off."
He argues that there has been a top-down approach to Kosovo's independence
that has not worked. Real power lies in the hands of international
organisations, rendering the governing class compliant and docile. Kosovans
admit, however, that their politicians and civil servants currently lack the
experience to run the country effectively.
Kurti favoured a referendum that would have lent legitimacy to the fledgling
state and to its army – important for as long as Serbia does not recognise
Kosovo. He also strongly opposes the Ahtisaari plan for matching territory
to ethnic communities, which will produce municipalities where Serbs form
the majority. "Yes to minority rights, but no to territorial rights," says
Kurti, who believes the "dysfunctional" Ahtisaari plan will deepen ethnic
divides by herding Serbs into cantons or ghettos.
One diplomat ventured that the Serb minority issue will resolve itself in
the long term. Serbia will only support the Kosovan Serbs for so long, the
argument goes: they will either leave or throw in their lot with the
Albanian majority as economic development picks up. The EU and the US will
keep pumping in money since they do not want to see a failed state here.
"Belgrade knows it will never get Kosovo back," the diplomat said. "On the
other hand, no Serb politician can take the responsibility of giving it up
as that would be political suicide. It's all about internal politics in
Belgrade and it boils down to a racist and nationalist attitude that says
Serbs can't be under the rule of others."
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Serbian News Network - SNN
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http://www.antic.org/
