Global Policy Forum

By Nicholas Wood

The United Nations mission in Kosovo and local Albanian leaders have been extensively criticized in an annual report on human rights in the internationally administered province.

The report, a 96-page document, was released by the Ombudsperson Institution in Kosovo, a branch of the mission. The report says that the United Nations and the local authorities that have run Kosovo for the past five years have failed to achieve even a minimal level of protection of rights and freedoms, in particular for the province's Serbian minority.

The report, issued Monday, was published four months after thousands of ethnic Albanians took to the streets across the province to attack Serbian communities. The violence left 19 people dead and more than 800 injured. The head of the United Nations administration, Hari Holkeri, resigned his post last month, citing fatigue. His replacement, Soren Jessen-Petersen, a Danish diplomat, has yet to begin the job.

The annual report is the fourth to be published since the United Nations took responsibility for running the province in June 1999 and covers security and social rights issues. The United Nations mission was established after Yugoslav and Serbian security forces, accused of committing wide-scale atrocities, were forced out of the region by a two-and-a-half month NATO bombing campaign.

The United Nations and NATO troops were widely praised for helping to return more than 800,000 ethnic Albanian refugees to Kosovo at the end of the war in 1999. Since then, the United Nations has established a provincial police service, courts, a parliament and local councils, and has devolved some governing powers to local politicians. At the same time, both NATO and the United Nations have been criticized for failing to protect the province's minority groups, especially the Serbs.

The report lays much of the blame for the human rights failings on the international community for failing to resolve Kosovo's final status.

A large part of the report focuses on the inability of Serbs and other minorities to live, travel and work freely in the province. They have been confined to their homes, relying mostly on escorted transport for occasional visits to other places populated by minority ethnicities, the report's author, Marek Antoni Nowicki of Poland, said in a foreword to the document. He said that both United Nations and ethnic Albanian leaders were responsible, but he also noted that the international community's policy in the province was compounding the problem.

In an interview, he said many areas of human rights were unlikely to improve until the province's final status had been resolved, a question that international policy makers have put off until at least next year. Kosovo is still nominally a part of Serbia, but ethnic Albanians - who make up more than 90 percent of the population - want independence. "We cannot wait too long a time for the moment in which final status is decided,'' Mr. Nowicki said in a telephone interview. "It is not only the Albanian community, but my impression is that also Serbs have been quite exhausted by this uncertain situation. Clarification for the future would be helpful in many respects, including the protection of basic rights of people.''

The failure to resolve the status has helped to sustain distrust between the communities and has delayed the return of Serbian refugees, forced out of Kosovo in 1999, he said. It has also prevented the economy from growing and has helped to keep unemployment levels high.

A United Nations spokesman, Niraj Singh, declined to comment about Mr. Nowicki's statements.

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