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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Lacelle who wrote (13139)	6/29/1999 8:29:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

U N I T E D N A T I O N S (AP) THE TOP civilian and military officials in Kosovo are veterans of Bosnia who are again trying to rebuild a ravaged country and cope with ethnic hatred, revenge killings, and shattered lives. By any measure, it's a daunting task. For the first time, the United Nations and NATO are working together to redesign a single province of an independent country, to make it conform to European democracies. The job, by all accounts, will take years. Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who ran the international peace-building operation in Bosnia after its 3 1/2-year war ended in 1995, has called Kosovo the most challenging, complex, peace operation "ever undertaken by the international community in modern times." The U.N. Security Council resolution June 10 that ended the Kosovo conflict created an international military force to oversee security and a U.N. civilian administration to run the province and build a new government and economy. That gave the U.N. authority two days to get its civilian operation moving in a region that had been at war since February 1998. In the two weeks since the NATO-led force commanded by British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson moved in, nearly half of the 840,000 ethnic Albanians who fled Kosovo have returned - the largest spontaneous return of refugees in U.N. history. The mass return sparked revenge killings and violence in an area where the systems to deter violence were not yet in place. The biggest day-to-day challenge for the military and civilian operations has been dealing with lawlessness. The Kosovo Force, known by its initials KFOR, is only at about half its intended 50,000-man strength. Yet, it must cope not only with its military role - including demilitarizing the Kosovo Liberation Army - but with civilian police activities like handling murders and ethnic-related evictions. Even when KFOR has been able to make arrests, many alleged criminals have been freed: They can only be held for 48 hours under European Union laws, and there are no judges to hear charges. The U.N. advance team, headed by U.N. humanitarian chief Sergio Vieira de Mello, moved quickly into Kosovo but has been slower to gear up the civilian administration - with good reason: It is starting from scratch and remains short of money and key personnel, including police and local administrators. Nonetheless, Vieira de Mello has set up a council to consult with Kosovo Albanian and Serb leaders to deal with health, sanitation and the media. He has started to re-establish the nonexistent judicial system, naming six legal experts to select a panel of judges, hopefully this week. The judges will use Yugoslavia's 1976 criminal code, except where it might contradict human rights standards adopted by the European Commission, said U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard. As many as 3,000 civilian police will be needed in Kosovo but on Tuesday the United Nations had less than 1,300 pledges, including 400 from the United States, and just 35 officers were in Kosovo. U.N officials have established a timetable to move about 1,000 police into the province by early August. The European Union has been put in charge of reconstruction and the 54-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe will oversee the development of democratic institutions and the holding of elections. The United Nations is pleading for staff and funding from its 185 members. The appeal is expected to be repeated loudly Wednesday when Secretary-General Kofi Annan's "Friends of Kosovo" - 16 key countries - meet at the United Nations to discuss the growing pains of the Kosovo operation. At U.N. headquarters, there is concern that people are expecting too much, too soon from the U.N. operation, which is just 16 days old. Bildt, who is one of Annan's special envoys to the Balkans, said it was an advantage that he, Jackson and Vieira de Mello all worked together in Bosnia. "We speak the same language," he said. "We've gone through the same things. We don't need to discuss very much. We know what to do."