Insurgency many miles from Iraq
By Hans Nichols - The Hill
PRISTINA, Serbia and Montenegro — <font size=4>Five years into an indefinite mandate, the United Nations’ occupation of Kosovo — backed by the boots of NATO peacekeepers — is rapidly losing support among both Kosovar Albanians and ethnic Serbs.<font size=3>
The U.N. attempt to midwife a democratic nation here in the rump of the former Yugoslavia and NATO’s fractured and inconsistent response to ongoing ethnic violence offer a cautionary tale of nation-building elsewhere on the globe, especially Iraq, say seasoned diplomats, local journalists and aid workers in Pristina, Mitrovicia and Belgrade.
Some analysts also worry that the eruption of violence in mid-March, which left 35 Orthodox monasteries in ruin, claimed 19 lives and forced an estimated 4,000 Serbs from their homes, is but the first act of a simmering Muslim Albanian insurgency that will target the international community, including U.N. officials, the next time it explodes.
But diplomats and aid workers in this quasi-capital of a quasi-state caution that comparisons between Iraq and Kosovo, while apt in many ways, should not be overwrought, especially because the American contingent of NATO’s 18,000-strong force remains overwhelmingly popular with the local population. Most of the Kosovar Albanians’ ire is directed toward the U.N. administrative body, UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo), which has a $200 million annual budget for civilian and operational costs.
In addition to Albanian criticism of UNMIK, the handful or Orthodox Christian Serbs still living in Kosovo, a region roughly the size of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, accuse some NATO peacekeepers — especially the German and the French — of complicity in what Serbs regard as reprisal ethnic cleansing. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), who visited the region in May, told The Hill, “The French didn’t protect the local Serb population and the monasteries, and the Germans didn’t either. The Greeks did, and the Italians did. Same with Americans and British.
“It wasn’t until Admiral [Gregory] Johnson came and took charge did NATO troops act together.”
“It was a total break down in command,” Murtha said.
Several internal reviews are under way to assess both NATO’s Kosovo force and
UNMIK’s response to the violence.
UNMIK officials still insist that Albanians need to demonstrate their respect for minority rights before there can any kind of discussion about Kosovo’s “final status” — a euphemism for independence.
“People like us are the perfect guinea pigs for nation-building,” said Dukagjin Gorani, an ethnic Albanian who negotiated on behalf of the Kosovo Liberation Army at the Rambouillet conference in 1999.
“The Bush administration can’t fail here because they need to point to a success in the Muslim world,” said Gorani.
But Gorani, who also set up Kosovo Television after the war, said that UNMIK is still paying for its initial reluctance to stamp out radical elements in both the Serb and Albanian communities. Instead, U.N. and European diplomats are trapped in an “endless debate about how to foster civil society and the endless loop of human-rights discussions.”
“What has taken UNMIK five years now is to fix the mistake of not disarming the radicals immediately after the bombing, of not imposing martial law,” he said.
Finally freed from the yoke of Serbian nationalism, ethnic Albanians — most of whom are nominally Muslims — long for the official independence they thought the 1999 NATO air strikes promised them. Many of them blame UNMIK and its roughly 5,000 bureaucrats for an unemployment rate holding steady at 60 percent and a host of administrative problems from flagging public utilities to an unresponsive government agencies.
“The domestic legitimacy of the U.N. is being subordinated,” said Albin Kurti of the Kosovo Action Network, a nonviolent group seeking Kosovar independence.
“It is not really an ethnic conflict. People here have no jobs. Unemployment is at 60 percent. Fifteen percent of the population lives in extreme poverty,” said Kurti, citing World Bank reports.
But Kurti, who spent more than two years in a Serbian prison for protesting against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, also admitted there is a strong ethnic component to the conflict and he blamed the United Nations for not recognizing it. “UNMIK wants to make Serbs and Albanians fall in love with each other. That is not going to happen. It is a chemical impossibility.”
Ethnic Serbs are no less harsh in their assessment of UNMIK, but they also blame some NATO troops for failing to protect their monasteries from what appeared to be a coordinated and methodical plan of destruction and intimidation last March.
Next summer, the United Nations is scheduled to review how much progress Kosovar institutions have made, with a heavy emphasis on the majority Albanian population’s respect for Serbian rights.
“It’s understandable that they would start blaming the U.N.,” said Willem Houwen, a Dutch diplomat who was seconded to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Pristina and now works on training local journalists.
Part of the problem with the international organizations is a general lack of institutional knowledge, said Houwen, who has been in the region for eight years and is writing a book about nation-building with Gorani titled After the Bombing.
“Because people are seconded, diplomats come and go and there’s no accountability and no institutional memory, so the next person has to reinvent the wheel.”
“I don’t think this country can wait so long, there will be violence again,” warned Houwen.
James Lyon of the International Crisis Group also said that the prospect of more violence was one of “when, not if.”
“Next time, the Serbians won’t be quite as restrained,” said Lyon. He also predicted that Kosovar Albanians will start attacking UNMIK intuitions and internationals, noting that the violence in March caught most Western diplomats by surprise.
Indeed, at the U.S. Embassy at Belgrade, on March 17, the first night of rioting, officials were celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, unaware of the violence raging less than 300 kilometers south. Officials were summoned back to the embassy in the early morning.
That surprise was also widespread at UNMIK headquarters in Pristina, said Mechthild Henneke, a spokeswoman for UNMIK.
“We were taken by surprise. We were aware that there are extremists groups, but we had no intelligence on their actual state,” Henneke said.
Serbians and Albanian, however, were less shocked by the outburst of violence in a situation they have watched grow more combustible each year.
“I was only surprised by the scale,” said Dejan Anastasijevic, a Serbian journalist based in Belgrade, who also has spent extensive time reporting in Kosovo.
“It will happen again because the problems that has led to these riots have not been addressed. They’re young, they’re jobless, they can’t travel,” he said.
Anastasijevic added, “There are important differences with Iraq. Iraq was only invaded last year. They are still trying to figure out how to deal with such a big problem — and in the Middle East. Kosovo is a small armpit in Europe and they still haven’t figured it out.” |
