Global Policy Forum

By Jeffrey Smith

A huge poster behind Bernard Kouchner's desk here in Kosovo portrays three men--an ethnic Albanian, a Serb and a Gypsy--sharing a cup of coffee above the words: "Let's talk about us; the future starts with tolerance."

The poster was crafted for a U.N. campaign of tolerance in Kosovo's schools, but it is a fantasy for this Serbian province at large; it is the kind of conversation that never occurs here, even after 18 months of international peacekeeping and nation-building under Kouchner's leadership as the top U.N. official in Kosovo.

It has been a wearying and frustrating assignment for Kouchner, who plans to resign next month; Danish Defense Minister Hans Haekkerup will succeed him.

For Kouchner, today was hardly different from any other over the past year and a half. There were frantic morning phone calls from the U.N. representative in the northern Kosovo town of Leposavic about rioting Serbs, an overnight arson attack on the U.N. police station and the seizure of some Belgian soldiers for seven hours at a NATO base. He also heard from an aide in the northern city of Kosovska Mitrovica that an ethnic Albanian was found shot to death in a Serbian neighborhood.

Serbs in Leposavic, he learned, were angry about two things: the death of a Serbian nationalist who was injured during ethnic riots in Mitrovica nearly a year ago, and the arrest Saturday by U.N.-hired Serbian police of a former member of a Serbian militia, who was charged with speeding and possession of illegal communications equipment. In the resulting riot, two Serbs reportedly were killed; the Belgrade government blamed NATO soldiers for firing irresponsibly, while NATO blamed the Serbs for interfering with law enforcement.

Those reports came in before U.S. troops assigned to the NATO peacekeeping operation here reported being shot at around lunchtime, purportedly by ethnic Albanians. The soldiers were in the process of blowing up a road used by ethnic Albanian militants to smuggle arms from Kosovo into southern Serbia, where they have been challenging government security forces. No Americans were wounded in the incident, the first use of force against the militants since the U.S. military promised to seal Kosovo's eastern boundary early this month.

There have been many ethnically inspired shootings, arsons and riots throughout Kouchner's tenure, during which he and his U.N. colleagues have struggled to obtain adequate financing and manpower to stabilize Kosovo--a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic. Lacking sufficient numbers of trained police and impartial judges, they have failed to halt a succession of violent attacks by Kosovo Albanians on the province's Serbs and other minorities--an ethnic cleansing in reverse by those whom the Serb-led Yugoslav government sought to drive from the province at gunpoint, leading to NATO military intervention and the present U.N. administration.

Kouchner has endured furious criticism from the Yugoslav government and its Russian allies with each step the United Nations has taken to help Kosovo govern itself, including municipal elections in October that brought political moderates to power and displaced ethnic hard-liners. And Kouchner said he and other U.N. officials here have watched with amazement as the Western countries that fought to protect Kosovo's majority ethnic Albanian population from the Yugoslav government last year have rushed to embrace its newly elected leader, Vojislav Kostunica. Kouchner said he expected more reticence until Belgrade granted amnesty to ethnic Albanians in Serbian jails or made other efforts to atone for its bloody repression of the Kosovo Albanians.

But Kouchner said in an interview that he remains optimistic a better future awaits Kosovo, the only U.N. protectorate in Europe and a territory that is neither independent nor subject to the dictates of Belgrade, capital of both Serbia and Yugoslavia.

"It is a dream to make peace right now," Kouchner said when asked what message he wanted to send President-elect Bush and his advisers, who have expressed skepticism about keeping U.S. troops in the Balkans for a long time. "It is our common dream. But we need to be realistic. . . . It is not possible for Serbs to have freedom of movement at the moment [because of security risks]. . . . This is a long run and not a sprint."

"We need the Americans," Kouchner said. "We need the forces we have. . . . This [peacekeeping] is a common aim for all those involved in fighting [former Yugoslav president Slobodan] Milosevic," whose policies of Serbian nationalism stoked animosities and led to a decade of bitter divisions and human rights abuses. Milosevic, defeated for reelection by Kostunica in October, was ousted in a subsequent popular uprising.

Those who think that Kosovo's residents will be adequately protected by the arrival of democracy in Belgrade after Kostunica's victory are naive, Kouchner said. "I'm sorry, that's not the way it works," he said, calling such notions disturbingly "colonial." Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo demand independence, and their bitterness over the war remains so great that any of their leaders who try to talk with Kostunica's government would risk being killed by extremists, he said. "Intolerance is a . . . political fact," not easily or quickly remedied, he said.

Kouchner, a physician who helped found the humanitarian aid group Doctors Without Borders, says he is leaving Kosovo because he is restless. He unsuccessfully sought the position of U.N. high commissioner for refugees and is now headed for an unspecified French government assignment in Paris. His obvious empathy for human suffering and openly emotional style have won him many supporters among Kosovo residents, but many locals and Westerners have accused his team of being disorganized and faulted its slow repair of utilities and other basic services.

Kouchner says he has made mistakes but feels the United Nations performed better in Kosovo than in other peacekeeping assignments, particularly because its territory and citizenry were so damaged by the fighting here. He added that he hopes his experience will guide the United Nations to do a better job in similar circumstances in the future.

The first and most important lesson to be learned from Kosovo, he said, is that peacekeeping missions need a judicial or law-and-order "kit" made up of trained police officers, judges and prosecutors, plus a set of potentially draconian security laws or regulations that are available on their arrival. This is the only way to stop criminal behavior from flourishing in a postwar vacuum of authority, Kouchner said.

"We did not succeed with the police," Kouchner said, noting that more than 50 countries contributed officers to the 4,000-member force but that they never trained for the mission. He acknowledged that his own staff had repeatedly spurned proposals to bring in foreigners who could prosecute crimes impartially. His staff was "absolutely wrong," he said, adding that Kosovo needs more such foreign judges and prosecutors now.

Kouchner says he has no regrets about moving as quickly as possible to organize elections and begin handing power back to the citizens of Kosovo.

After decades of authoritarian or communist rule, he said, they needed to learn it was their own responsibility.

With backing from the Clinton administration, Kouchner has been pressing for additional elections soon after he departs, this time for a Kosovo-wide parliamentary assembly. Belgrade has opposed the idea, arguing that the balloting would make Kosovo Serbs feel even more excluded from the political process, but Kouchner argues that if such an election is postponed, ethnic Albanian militants will stoke new violence.

Kouchner says that peace will be more secure in Kosovo after new elections are held, more jobs are created, ethnic Albanian prisoners are freed from Serbian jails, and missing Kosovo Serbs are accounted for. But he also says that Serbia needs to see Kosovo's majority population not simply as terrorists but as people "like they are, normal people."