Global Policy Forum

By Peter S. Green

The intersection of Bill Clinton Boulevard and Mother Teresa Street has so many accidents that it is called "Suicide Junction" by drivers here. It seemed a fine place for a pair of newly minted Kosovo police patrolmen to park their shiny cruiser on a recent evening and set up a checkpoint, to look for stolen cars and hidden weapons. "Could you step out of the car please, sir, and turn off the ignition?" Officer Ilir Xhemajli asked Labinot Rrahmani, the young driver of an aging red Nissan Micra. He was driving without his license, but Officer Xhemajli let him off with a stern warning.

The scene would be unremarkable to any American driver. But in Kosovo the mere existence of an indigenous police force, built from scratch by the United Nations in the four years since the end of the NATO-led war against Serbia, is an extraordinary accomplishment.

Serious crime, from murder to kidnappings, has significantly decreased in the three years since the police force, the Kosovo Police Service, began operating. Killings are down to 68 last year from 245 in 2000. Traffic fatalities, which the police here say is a direct measure of how well officers enforce laws, dropped to 132 last year from 250 in 2000.

After NATO's bombing campaign in 1999 to stop Serbia's military action against the ethnic Albanians in its Kosovo Province, the Serbs pulled out completely. The province's entire Serbian police force left with them. NATO-led peacekeepers and the ethnic Albanian rebel group, the Kosovo Liberation Army, patrolled the province and kept an uneasy peace for the first year after the war.

Meanwhile, the United Nations, which has administered the province ever since, assembled an international force of more than 6,000 police officers from dozens of countries. Their mission was both to patrol Kosovo and to train a new local police force. "The basic lesson of everything we have done is that you cannot have the basis of democracy if you don't have the rule of law," said Simon Haselock, spokesman for the United Nations Interim Mission in Kosovo. "We have factionalization, mafias, and all these other problems because we didn't start by establishing a rule of law."

Mr. Haselock was a British Army officer with the international peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. He recalled that in Bosnia a decade ago, 70,000 ethnic Serbs were forced out of their homes in Sarajevo by ethnic Muslim police and vigilantes after Bosnian Serb fighters withdrew. "The reason that happened is because NATO said it will not be a police force in that area, and where do we hear that again?" he said. "They sat by in Sarajevo while people looted, stole and burned."

Today, there are 4,400 international police officers in Kosovo. Some patrol the streets jointly with the new Kosovo force, who carry guns and arrest suspects. Other members of the international force shadow Kosovo's newly graduated police administrators to teach them the ropes. The internationals, as they are called, also run the crime laboratory and the organized crime squad.

The mixed police patrols are generally popular with residents, who call the United Nations police officers, in their red-and-white vehicles, "Coca-Cola Cops." Capt. Taibe Canolli, a 29-year-old former law student who is the commander of the new force at Pristina's central station, has mixed feelings about the arrangement. "Of course I am the commander" of the police "in this station," she said. But she acknowledged that even though most decisions were made through discussions, she still answered to a foreign boss. "In the police we have to follow the chain of command," she said, "so all I can say is, `Yes sir,' or, `I don't understand, sir.' "

The international officers praise the twinning system, saying it allows them to combine their expertise with the local knowledge of the Kosovo officers. "It's not our environment, it's not our society," said Heinz Kronegger, a 35-year-old Austrian policeman, explaining that being from the outside "minimizes our success, but that's why we work with the K.P.S."

Being an outsider can also help, though, particularly when it comes to organized crime, where local knowledge can make a Kosovo police officer vulnerable. "It's an obstacle for them," said Mr. Kronegger. "Here everything is very family oriented and everyone knows everyone, and in some cases they can't act. They can be in danger because they live here with their families."

Barry Fletcher, a United Nations police spokesman and an 18-year veteran of the New Orleans Police Department, said the United Nations' police work in Kosovo offered the lesson to American forces in Iraq. "In Iraq you see on TV that it's the imams who got the traffic going," Mr. Fletcher said. "People will look to authority to make decisions like that and if they get used to looking at the religious leadership for that, having them look to the civilian leadership will be impossible. Building that trust takes time, he added. "If we'd kept saying that we were only going to be here for a little while, we'd have no chance of finding the war criminals or the mafia bosses," he said. "The bad guys would just tell people, `The internationals will leave in a year and we'll still be here.' "

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