By Lesley Abdela
The Guardian (London)June 13, 2000
The UN secretary general's special representative in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, plans municipal elections this September or October. "When will they e-e-ever learn?" say the despairing words of the 60s anti-war song.
Early elections are likely to be a dagger at the heart of democracy in Kosovo. Picture it. Just 16 months will have passed since the bombing stopped, the Serb army and murdering/raping paramilitaries withdrew, and several hundred thousand exiles returned to burnt-out houses and broken-down power stations. Before that, decades of autocratic rule from Belgrade under Milosevic and Tito. Before that? Hundreds of years of autocratic rule under the Ottoman empire.
These elections will further democracy in Kosovo just 16 months since the bombing stopped? To quote John McEnroe - "you cannot be serious!"
"The tendency of the international community after conflict has been to cut and run," says the Ford Foundation's Michael Edwards, author of a new book Future Positive, "pushing through early elections instead of staying for the long term and consolidating conditions for an emerging democratic polity."
Dame Pauline Neville Jones, who led the British delegation at the Dayton negotiations, says bluntly: "We should have learnt from the Bosnia experience where elections were held prematurely for the same reason - the US desire to get out fast. The elections went ahead with predictable results - the return to power of nationalists. There is even less excuse to commit the same error twice."
Kosovan society is still too wounded, too riven with fresh hatreds, too economically insecure, fundamentally too unstable to sustain pluralist politics. Right now Kosovans have other priorities. Top of their list are the 4,000 missing persons plus 2,000 hostages held in Serb jails, including the women's rights campaigner Flora Brovina.
Albanian Kosovans still wait to open mass graves to find their loved ones. The province lacks the basic election infrastructure. Even King Solomon would have lifted his toga and run rather than preside over the quagmire of Kosovan voter registration. The pre-bombing population of the capital Pristina was 250,000. Now it has swollen with internal displacements to around 600,000. Many villagers cannot return home because their houses remain gutted, farms and villages in thrall to anti-personnel mines and unexploded ordnance.
Credible rumour holds that some 200,000 Albanians have crossed the border into Kosovo, faking residency. Last seen going the other way, at least 150,000 Serbian Kosovans have fled as refugees.
The ruling UN mission has decided that only citizens resident in Kosovo on January 1, 1998 will be allowed to register to vote. A Kosovan community leader says this makes a mockery of voter registration. "There were 40,000 Serb military police and paramilitaries in Kosovo on that date. Will they be registered to vote? Between 300,000 and 500,000 Kosovan Albanians had already fled to safety by then. Many will not be back in Kosovo in time to register."
UN security council resolution 1244 is committed to a multi-ethnic Kosovo. Even if the 95,000 Serbs still living in the province want to register to vote, it has become too physically dangerous for them to venture out. Just a few days ago, a car of Serbs, including small children, on their way to a market was blown up by a freshly placed mine.
Kosovan political parties are mostly no more than clans led by young warriors who fought with the UCK (Kosovan Liberation Army). These ambitious young men see politics as a route to personal fame and fortune - especially fortune. Other than wanting an independent Kosovo they have few policies.
Certain Kosovan party leaders are well-known to international police as gangsters and mafia leaders with links to organized crime throughout Europe, Asia and North America. "They are extremely dangerous," a US police officer with the international police in Kosovo told me. "It would be laughable to turn an entire country over to such a gang of thugs if it wasn't so sad for the common people who have to live here."
Almost from the moment the bombs stopped raining down from 15,000 feet last June, leaders of UN and OSCE missions endorsed these criminals by dealing with the first self-appointed Kosovan leaders they came across. They did not take the trouble to include and consult with the wider range of readily available moderate and representative Kosovan community leaders. Moderate Kosovans, both Albanian and Serb, watched in growing horror as the charade unfurled.
As another senior UN police officer quoted in the Observer admitted haplessly: "I think we all - aid workers, diplomats, journalists - made a mistake. We didn't speak to the right people."
The British journalist Ian Mather, an experienced defense correspondent, has just completed six months in Kosovo as media development coordinator with the OSCE. "The chances of an election being covered fairly by the media are virtually nil," he says. "Radio TV Kosovo, run by the OSCE, broadcasts for two hours each evening when there is electricity. Koha Ditori is the only independent newspaper. Other newspapers are owned by or beholden to political groups - a number are mafia protected. Some even border on incitement."
It has taken other European societies centuries to develop key components of democracy and inclusion - law, order, free expression, political parties with developed election manifestos, freedom to register to vote and to place your votes in safety and secrecy, without fear of intimidation.
From a US perspective, Kosovo was always likely to be a minor problem in a faraway place, a tiny province in a tiny nation tucked away in the cockpit of Europe, or a Somalia in the making. Holding elections must seem a reasonable and honorable way to restore democracy. Holding them so prematurely, as part of the not-so-hidden agenda to get the heck out, is not especially honorable. Indeed, it dishonours democracy. It dishonours the taxpayers who funded the estimated Dollars 35bn to free Kosovo for democracy and entry into the European family. It dishonours the forces that rescued Kosovo from Milosevic's maw.
The last helicopter is revving up on the roof-top.
Lesley Abdela served in Kosovo in 1993 as deputy director for democracy at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
