Global Policy Forum

By Michael Ignatieff

Bernard Kouchner is smaller than expected, tanned like a 60's rock star settling into lithe middle age. He's wearing a lime-green open-necked shirt, a well-cut sport jacket, trim slacks and dark glasses. He's walking along a dusty road between wheat fields in Kosovo with Lt. Gen. Juan Ortuño, the Spanish commander of the NATO troops, and two Kosovar politicians beside him, while a TV crew retreats slowly backward, recording their advance. Although it has been about a year since NATO called off its bombing campaign and the Serbian Army trooped out of Kosovo, Finnish soldiers keep telling the camera crew to stick to the path: the benign-looking fields may be mined.

At the place where the dirt road crosses a railway track, a team of soldiers, some of them wearing latex gloves, is bent over combing between the railway ties; others are measuring distances with tape; still others are taking pictures. Just across the tracks, wrenched sideways, are the fire-scorched remains of a rusty red van. Where the engine used to be, there is a hole; where the driver's seat used to be is another hole; and where the driver's door used to be is a twisted flange of metal. Tumbled about on the ground are crates of bottled beer that have spilled from the side door of the van.

Bernard Kouchner, special representative of the United Nations secretary general in Kosovo, removes his dark glasses and stops in front of the wreckage. Kouchner runs the U.N. mission in Kosovo. His job is to rebuild a land seared by war and hatred and to get Kosovo's Albanian majority to live side by side with the remaining Serb minority. The charred and twisted van is yet another proof that this objective still remains out of reach. Brig. Richard Shirreff, a British commander of multinational troops in central Kosovo, scans the computer printout from his battalion incident room and reports that his patrol heard the explosion at 10:50 a.m.

"But I was told the mine was planted at 5 in the morning," Kouchner says with a French accent. "Most likely, sir," Brigadier Shirreff replies. "Professional job. Not an amateur drive-by. It would have taken someone 10 to 15 minutes to dig the mine. No wires or timer. A pressure detonation."

When Brigadier Shirreff's patrol reached the scene, there was nothing left of Zlatko Delic or Bojan Filipovic, two Serbs who had been in the beer delivery van. Bojan's brother Borko, who was also in the van, was still alive, though one of his legs had been blown off and what remained of the other might have to be amputated.

And who was responsible? The brigadier couldn't possibly speculate. Kosovo is crawling with undercover intelligence agents from a dozen countries, but they report to their agencies, not to the local NATO commanders. The one certainty is that the dirt track linked two Serb villages, and the only people using it were Serbs and NATO patrols. The still photographers are now in position. The TV cameras are rolling. Kouchner puts his arms firmly behind the backs of Ibrahim Rugova and Hashim Thaci, two Kosovar Albanian politicians, and nudges them forward so that they can all be photographed looking at what is presented -- without a word being said -- as another Kosovar Albanian attack on Serbs. This is the first time Thaci and Rugova, inveterate enemies and rivals for power, have appeared together to denounce what Kouchner calls "a terrorist attack upon the peace process."

It is widely believed that Thaci, also known as "the snake" when he was a guerrilla commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, may know more about who is behind this and other similar attacks than he lets on. Most Serbs believe his ex-K.L.A. men are in fact responsible. Thaci knows what Kouchner expects of him, so he runs through his lines with a solemn face, condemning, regretting, affirming and so on.

Rugova, looking ill and shrunken, stares glumly down at the dirt, and when it is his turn, only mumbles: "We need to work in order not to have another tragic occasion. We need to change opinions in Kosovo." The speeches are meager and perfunctory, but Kouchner pronounces himself satisfied. "The fascists must not prevail," he says, in his Maurice Chevalier English. When he was France's minister of state for humanitarian action in the 1980's, the media used to call Kouchner "the minister of indignation." In this bare field in the south Balkans, his indignation sounds as if it has all been said once too often.

As soon as the show is over, Kouchner works his way through the small group of journalists, with an arm around the shoulder for one, a quiet word for another. Thaci, too, briefly strokes the local press before jumping into his car and racing off through the howls of furious men lining the roads of the nearby Serbian village. As Kouchner passes these crowds, behind the tinted windows of his armored jeep, the Serb men look at him in angry silence. "You've heard of virtual war," one member of his staff whispers, wearily. "Well, that was virtual peacemaking."

Getting Thaci and Rugova to the scene of the crime is supposed to "isolate" the terrorists, to demonstrate that violence does not represent the will of the Kosovar people. Yet there is a willing or unwilling conspiracy of silence in support of these acts among ordinary Kosovars, and the politicians' condemnations in front of the cameras seem less convincing as a political message than the dirty red van with its guts ripped apart.

In the walled precinct of the Serb monastery at Gracanica, where Kouchner's convoy appears next, he and General Ortuño are not expected. The only person there to greet them is the bishop's "chief of protocol," an apologetic Serbian woman in her 20's, who says that the bishop is away but that his deputy, the Rev. Sava Janjic, is on his way. Kouchner whiles away the time in a high-timbered refectory, decorated with pictures of all the Serbian churches dynamited or rocketed by the Kosovars since the "liberation" of the province in June 1999. Today, the minarets of the Kosovar mosques are being rebuilt, brick by brick, while Orthodox churches remain in ruins.

In repose Kouchner is different from Kouchner on show: he looks deflated, wanders to and fro, cadges a cigarette from an aide, frets a pair of black worry beads between his fingers. Will virtual peacemaking of this sort work? "Not by itself," he says with that Gallic shrug the French have perfected for moments when they are forced to admit a fact but don't want to take responsibility for it.

Father Sava, as he is always called, a bespectacled monk with the distracted air of a bright but harried graduate student, rushes in, sweating from climbing the flight of stairs. He beckons Kouchner and Ortuño to be seated. A spare chair is kept empty between the two of them for Bishop Artemije, Father Sava's superior. The two men are the leaders of the "monastery moderates," the U.N.'s wishful phrase for the Gracanica Serbs. Moderation in Kosovo is a complicated thing. In the case of Father Sava, it simply means that he has been willing to talk to Kouchner and even take part in meetings with the Kosovar Albanian majority. But Father Sava represents only a minority of Serbs. The majority live in the enclave of Mitrovica, and their leadership won't have any part of Kouchner's attempts to create dialogue between the two sides. Kouchner tells the monk that he has come to express his condolences at the latest attack. The Spanish general chimes in with a promise in his broken English "to increase the tempo of our operations."

None of this means much to Father Sava. Only a week before, NATO patrols had failed to stop a grenade attack in a Gracanica market. And the attacks on Serb churches continue despite NATO's efforts. Kouchner tries to soothe the monk's nerves with promises of continuing political support.

"We are trying to endure the pressures," Father Sava replies, looking bleak and uneasy. The pressures are not just from Kosovar hit squads with grenades; they also come from Serbian hotheads outside the monastery walls who don't think the father should be talking to Kouchner at all. "I can only say where it hurts," Father Sava says plaintively to Kouchner. "You will have to find the cure. You're the doctor."

He is a doctor, an M.D., and in this case, his patient is a rugged, south-Balkan province the size of Connecticut that remains on life support a year after the NATO intervention. Getting Kosovo to stand on its own feet again -- in truth, building its entire political and economic infrastructure from nothing -- is the most ambitious project the U.N. has ever undertaken. Kouchner and a staff of several thousand have restarted the schools, found shelter for hundreds of thousands of returning refugees and established an official currency -- the German mark. Their signal failure, so far, has been to get Kosovars to live with the remaining Serbs.

Kouchner is not just another international politician making a second career in the Balkans. He sees Kosovo as the culmination of everything he has ever worked for. Thirty years ago, as a young doctor working for the International Red Cross in Biafra, he rebelled against the doctrine of silent neutrality. He ripped off his Red Cross armband and helped found Doctors Without Borders, the organization whose noisy denunciation of rights-violating regimes marked a revolutionary departure from the silent discretion of the Red Cross. Though he separated angrily from Doctors more than 20 years ago, when the group won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, his French critics -- and they are legion -- observed sardonically that he behaved as if he had won the prize himself.

For the past three decades, as a militant doctor, Kouchner has been campaigning for le droit d'intervention humanitaire, the right to intervene when states oppress their own citizens. He is criticized for talking as if he invented the doctrine of humanitarian intervention all on his own. But certainly as Mitterrand's minister for humanitarian action in the 1980's, he did a spectacular job of publicizing the idea with dramatically staged media operations.

His most notorious coup was to wade ashore on the beach in Mogadishu in 1992, television cameras rolling, bearing a sack of rice on his back for the starving children of Somalia. His French critics thought the sack of rice was one coup too many, but he insists, to this day, that it was his "best operation." Every schoolchild in France gave small packets of rice, and it raised consciousness about Somalia throughout the country.

He claims with a certain disingenuousness that he seeks publicity not for himself but for victims: "Without photography, massacres would not exist. Nothing can be done without pressure on politicians." It is Kouchner, more than anyone else, who taught nongovernmental aid agencies to use the political and fund-raising power of the media. Where Kouchner led with Doctors Without Borders, all modern humanitarian agencies now follow.

When the French insisted on his candidacy for the Kosovo job last year, many veterans of the Balkans rolled their eyes in disbelief. Kouchner is one of those handsome and verbally adept politicians whose courtship of the media seems only to gain the media's contempt. As a government minister in the 1980's and the early 1990's and as the husband of a beautiful and able television host, Christine Ockrent, he was almost too easy to caricature as "la gauche caviar," Champagne socialism at its attention-seeking, self-obsessed worst.

Certainly, he has been seeking attention since he pushed his way to the front of the French student left of the 60's. He did this among a generation that included such shrinking violets as Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the May 1968 demonstrations in Paris, and Régis Debray, who set out to become a guerrilla hero in the mold of Che Guevara and got himself thrown into a Latin American jail. Now 60, Kouchner has stayed closer to the action -- and the power -- than the others, and even his harshest critics in Kosovo concede that he has stamina.

Those in Pristina who predicted he would be on the plane home to Paris every weekend have been proved wrong. "He lives the job 24 hours a day," says Gen. Klaus Reinhardt, the German who until recently served as the commander of the NATO-led Kosovo force, known as KFOR. "That's his strength, and also his weakness." Why weakness? Because he takes everything personally.

"Of course I do," Kouchner retorts. "I've been a human rights activist for 30 years, and here I am unable to stop people being massacred." Which is why when U.N. headquarters in New York is calling Kosovo a success -- compared with the U.N. mission in Sierra Leone, Kosovo is bound to look like a success -- Kouchner refuses to use the word. "Politically maybe, we are a success, but in human rights terms, no."

In his office in Pristina, he shows reporters a graph of inter-ethnic killings: from a high of about 50 a week last year, they have declined to 1 or 2 a week. There are more murders in Washington than in Kosovo, Kouchner insists, but he must know that this is beside the point. The Kosovo killings are political, and they are a direct challenge to the 19-nation coalition that intervened in Kosovo to stop ethnic cleansing and finds itself unable to prevent cleansing in reverse.

Wait a minute, Kouchner says in his sternest finger-waving style, don't deal in false moral equivalencies. The systematic use of Serbian state terror to kill thousands of people and expel nearly a million others from their homes cannot be compared to individual acts of terror, like the bomb placed under the beer van. True enough, but terror is terror, and its intent is clear: to force the U.N. and KFOR to give up their struggle to keep a Serb minority in Kosovo.

Certainly, the ferocity of the hatred in Kosovo took Kouchner by surprise. He arrived in July 1999 talking about European values, tolerance and multiculturalism. By Christmas, though, as the tide of killings kept rising, he had scaled back his rhetoric of reconciliation. The word he uses now is coexistence. Even that seems a distant goal, with Serbs barricaded in their enclaves, most of the Roma, or Gypsies, still in camps outside Kosovo and only the Kosovars free to walk the streets.

Yet coexistence is not unattainable. It just has nothing to do with any Western ideal of multicultural tolerance. Coexistence means going back to the way Kosovo was between 1974, when Tito gave the Kosovars autonomy, and 1989, when Serbia's Milosevic abolished it. In those relatively good old days, at least if memory is not lying, there were Serbs on one side of the main street in Pristina and Kosovar Albanians on the other. One street, two languages, two ways of life. Now there is just one language and one way of life in the cafes, and ordering a beer in Serbian is a distinctly bad idea. When a newly arrived U.N. official went out into the streets of Pristina last autumn and having been asked the time replied in Serbian, he paid for his mistake with his life.

This kind of hatred gives Kouchner a huge political problem: donors won't pony up the money for rebuilding and countries won't send contingents of soldiers and police because they don't want to be seen aiding and abetting a nasty new ethnic majority tyranny in Kosovo. As Veton Surroi, the sardonic publisher of Kosovo's best daily, Koha Ditore, puts it, "Morality was your investment here, so you expect morality as your payback." But instead of moral payback, there is just revenge killing.

Already, the U.N. operation is chronically underfinanced, and Congress keeps talking about pulling Americans out of their huge fortified compound, Camp Bondsteel. But the hatred is more than understandable if you go to a village like Celine, among the lush fields that border the road between Prizren and Djakovica. A year after the Serbs laid waste to the village, the roofs are back on the houses; bright zinc drainpipes run down the sides of new brick buildings; the glass is back in the window frames; the children are back in a makeshift school. Up on the hill overlooking the village and the valley, 18 Kosovar Albanian bodies have been rescued from the squalid anonymity of a mass grave.

Two of them in particular, mixed in with the grown-ups, remain impossible for the village to forgive or forget: Razmazen Ferik Selihu, 1992-1999; Servete Ferik Selihu, 1987-1999. Children's graves in places like Celine explain why Western sermons about tolerance are met with stony silence among the Kosovar population. There may be as many as 500 other Celines, mass grave sites where forensic teams from the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague are still pulling bodies from the ground. Despite revisionist claims to the contrary, original NATO estimates that more than 10,000 Kosovar Albanians were killed in Kosovo by Serb police and paramilitaries between March and May 1999 will be proved right. In addition, there are more than 1,500 detainees in Serb prisons, as well as thousands still missing. This ensures that the past in Kosovo remains a wound that will not heal.

In the courts that Kouchner has managed to set up, mixed panels of Kosovars, international judges and Serbs are trying the few perpetrators who did not flee to Serbia. The defendants are charged not with murder but with genocide. And while foreign observers, notably Israeli reporters, have been incredulous that there can be a genocide trial with only one named victim and one perpetrator, Kosovars remain convinced that they were all potential victims of a crime against humanity that failed only because both NATO and the K.L.A. came to their defense.

This new identity as intended victims of genocide helps to explain, if it does not justify, the lack of affect with which people tell you, for example, that there had been Serbs in their apartment blocks in Pristina but they were all in Serbia now -- except, of course, the old lady who had been thrown into her bathtub in her clothes and drowned by a young Albanian couple looking to take over her two rooms.

But Kouchner's problem is not just overcoming the cold fury of the Kosovars. There is also the huge obstacle of Serb denial, the refusal to admit either the crimes done in their name or their historical defeat. In Mitrovica, a Kosovo city divided by the Ibar River, the Kosovar Albanians live in the south while the Serbs live in the north. These Mitrovica Serbs along with those living in other towns north of the river total 55,000. They are effectively living in Serbia, drawing pensions and salaries from Belgrade, using the dinar rather than the mark and effectively frustrating any attempt by the U.N. to return Kosovars to the region.

The Serb leader there, Oliver Ivanovic, is an ingratiatingly fluent English speaker, a former factory manager in his 50's who taught karate on the side. When NATO rolled into Mitrovica last summer, Ivanovic organized his karate class into the "bridge watchers," the men in dark glasses with walkie-talkies and concealed weapons who guarded the north side of the river and made it impossible for the small number of Kosovar Albanians to return to their homes.

Ivanovic denies that he is Milosevic's man in Mitrovica. Indeed, he claims to be his own man and insists that Milosevic made a mistake in taking on "the international community" over Kosovo. His job, Ivanovic says, is to get the Serbs to cooperate with the internationals. So he will tell you that he can do business with the American general who runs the U.N. operation in Mitrovica and how he is willing to work with the Kosovar Albanian mayor on the south side of the river. But when he strays from his script and talks about the local zinc and tin mines, the cooperative language fades.

Look what has happened to the mines since we retreated in 1999, he says, waving his arms. The Albanians have ruined them. They're all flooded. And look at the electricity generators. Now that the Serb managers have left, the power keeps shutting down. Two decades of Serb underinvestment and neglect are bypassed in an argument that ends, inevitably, with the suggestion that everything would be fine if the old Serb managers were put back in charge.

Besides, Ivanovic says, Kouchner is really here to prepare Kosovo for independence. He's not here to protect us. He's here to give the Albanians what they want. When this is reported to Kouchner, he shrugs again with fatalistic patience and fingers his worry beads. "I never talk about independence," he says. "It has nothing to do with me. My mandate is purely and simply to prepare Kosovo for substantial autonomy."

The problem is that 1244, the U.N. resolution he has been sent here to enforce, is political science fiction. It reaffirms the sovereignty of Yugoslavia over Kosovo, and it also calls for the Kosovars to enjoy "substantial autonomy and self-government." Which sounds fine, except that no Kosovar will ever accept Belgrade's sovereignty in Kosovo and no Serb in Kosovo wants to accept Kosovar majority rule.

Faced with a minority that still believes it is in Serbia and a majority that wants a state, Kouchner and his team have gradually given up talk of tolerance. They have focused instead on hard politics -- assembling a Kosovo Transitional Council to force the local leaders to sit down together, enrolling voters for municipal elections in the autumn and helping to draft a blueprint for self-governance. Changing hearts and minds will come later. For now, Kouchner's job is to force Serbs and Kosovars to cooperate, to make them practice Western values, if not at gunpoint, then under the implicit threat that if they don't, the internationals will go and leave them to their Balkan hatreds.

But the threat is a weak one, because most Kosovars understand that the Western troops cannot withdraw as long as Milosevic is in power in Belgrade. So the locals have the internationals over a barrel. As a result, the progress of coexistence is agonizingly slow. Kosovars and Serbs sit in Kouchner's large office, a former government headquarters, and they fight over every comma and semicolon. At the end of the meetings, Kouchner's shoulders hurt from the strain of simply keeping victim and victimizer from stalking out. But this is the core of his job: to create political trust where none exists, to create democracy where none has ever taken root before.

Kouchner has a reputation as a terrible administrator, and out in the small towns there is a constant rumbling of discontent at the lack of direction from the center. But expecting administrative finesse from Kouchner is like expecting secular liberalism from the pope.

Kouchner is not there to administer but to do politics, and he is a political animal through and through. He clearly loves the imperial governor side of the job: he bans newspapers when they print the particulars of a Serb employee of the U.N. whom Kosovar Albanians suspect of being a former ethnic cleanser; he bars a politician from nearby Albania from crossing the border; and in perhaps his boldest stroke, he decides that the mark should become the official currency of the province. He affects not to remember whether he consulted U.N. headquarters on the currency decision, just so it will be clear that he, and not New York, calls the shots.

His critics often remark, half wistfully, that what the place needs is not a veteran of the human rights movement but a General MacArthur, who rebuilt Japan and implanted a kind of democracy there after 1945. Here the claim is not that Kouchner is autocratic; it's that he's not autocratic enough and that the U.N. is too politically correct, too consultative, too eager to involve local politicians when it should simply lay down the law in classic imperial fashion.

For example, why bother with courts staffed by local judges, painstakingly selected from each local ethnic group, when you could run the whole judicial system with internationals? Many of those who say this do so not because they actually want imperial occupation but because they don't happen to like the Kosovar politicians -- Thaci and Rugova -- who benefit from Kouchner's politics of inclusion.

But Kouchner's style is the political style of a whole generation, including Clinton and Blair, which cannot just exercise power but endlessly has to justify it. Kouchner himself says that he could have been a dictator in Kosovo but didn't want to be. All the political signals of his administration are appropriately post-imperialist. As Jock Covey, Kouchner's American deputy puts it, "Everything we do here is to work ourselves out of a job."

But the style is contradictory. In reality, the "internationals" run everything. Pristina's streets are clogged with the telltale white Land Cruisers of the international administrators, and all the fashionable, hillside villas have been snapped up by the Western aid agencies, which number more than 250. The earnest aid workers, with their laptops, modems, sneakers and T-shirts, all preach the mantra of "building local capacity." In practice, they are confiscating responsibility from locals rather than encouraging them to take it themselves .

Kouchner is staying until after municipal elections in October. Then, so the rumors go, he will put his name in for the top job at the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. He will probably be replaced by another European, possibly the British liberal politician Paddy Ashdown, who carries a useful past in the British Royal Marines.

By then, Kouchner will have done a lot to disprove the charge that he is all style and no substance. Thanks to his often infuriating publicity-seeking style, there will be achievements: a whole people returned to their homes and rehoused, the creation of a basic macroeconomic framework, a justice system and the first steps toward institutions of self-government. The process has been agonizingly slow and illustrates all the contradictions of liberal good intentions in a post-imperial era that wants to do good in faraway places without taking up the burdens of empire.

With his flair for self-dramatization, Kouchner sees the Kosovo experience as a culmination of his whole generation's experience of politics. He was born just too late to have been in World War II, "too late to stop the Holocaust," as he puts it, so he grew up, like most of his generation, in search of a cause equivalent to the French Resistance. As leftist dreams of revolution died out after the 60's, humanitarianism -- noisy, self-promoting and interventionist -- took its place.

And Bernard Kouchner, he very firmly wants you to know, is the author of that transformation of the European left. If you ask him what he has learned from Kosovo, he says it is something he knew all along: that humanitarianism is political. It means abandoning specious kinds of neutrality, taking the side of the victim and making enough noise to rouse the powerful and indifferent from their slumbers.

But as practiced by Bernard Kouchner, humanitarianism owes more to Machiavelli than to Mother Teresa. Not that he would want it any other way. Having called for intervention all his life, suddenly at 60 years of age he's staking his reputation on the proposition that he can actually make one work.

Right now, the auguries are not promising: daily shootings between Serbs and Kosovar Albanians, walkouts on his transitional council, the petty feuding among the Kosovar princelings and, above all, the stubbornly unchanging reality of Kosovar backwardness. If you present Kouchner with the evidence that his mission is not succeeding, he does that Gallic shrug and says: "But of course. You" -- meaning the media -- are only interested in failure. If we were succeeding, you would not be here." It is not said with a chip on the shoulder, merely with that lucid refusal to pretend otherwise, which makes it possible to believe that this most publicity-seeking of men might just be the last one to be taken in by his own stories.