Global Policy Forum

By Steven Erlanger

Bernard Kouchner, the chief of the United Nations administration in Kosovo, has made it through a tumultuous year. Last November, when the province's water and electricity were almost nonexistent, the West was not providing the money or personnel it had promised and the cold was as profound and bitter as the ethnic hatred, Mr. Kouchner was in such a deep depression that his staff thought he might quit.

He spoke darkly then of ''how hard it is to change the human soul,'' of the quick fatigue of Western leaders who prosecuted the war with Serbia over Kosovo and had no interest in hearing about the problems in its aftermath, of the impenetrability of the local Serbs and Albanians with their tribal, feudal passions. ''I've never heard an Albanian joke,'' he said sadly, looking around his dreary office, the former seat of Serbian power here. ''Do they have a sense of humor?''

Now, in a blistering summer, Mr. Kouchner's mood has improved. A French physician who founded Medecins Sans Frontieres because he became frustrated with international bureaucracy, he is now an international bureaucrat, who sometimes feels uneasy deep inside. He goes up and down with the vagaries of this broken province, with its ramshackle infrastructure, chaotic traffic and lack of real law or justice. And without question, he admits, some of those problems can be laid at his door.

''Of course I'm not the perfect model of a bureaucrat and an administrator, '' he said. ''But we have succeeded in the main thing'' - stopping the oppression of Kosovo's Albanians by Belgrade, bringing them back to Kosovo from asylum abroad and letting them restart their lives amid freedom. And yet, he said, ''I have not succeeded in human terms'' with a traumatized population. ''They still hate one another deeply.''

He paused, and added: ''Here I discovered hatred deeper than anywhere in the world, more than in Cambodia or Vietnam or Bosnia. Usually someone, a doctor or a journalist, will say, 'I know someone on the other side.' But here, no. They had no real relationship with the other community.''

The hatred, he suggested, can be daunting and has plunged him and his colleagues into despair. ''Sometimes we got tired and exhausted, and we didn't want a reward, not like that, but just a little smile,'' he said wanly. ''I'm looking for moments of real happiness, but you know just now I'm a bit dry.'' He is proud that everyone persisted nonetheless.

As for himself, he said, ''My only real success is to set up this administration,'' persuading Albanian and some Serbian leaders to cooperate with foreign officials and begin to share some executive responsibility.

When the head of the local Serbian Orthodox Church, Bishop Kyr Artemije, and the leaders of perhaps half of Kosovo's Serbs decided to join as observers, ''we were very happy then,'' he said. ''We were jumping in the air. We believed then that we were reaching the point of no return.'' But even those Serbs left the Executive Council set up by Mr. Kouchner, only to return after securing written promises for better security. These promises have in turn prompted Hashim Thaci, the former leader of the Albanians' separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, to suspend his own participation.

Bishop Artemije's chief aide, the Reverend Sava Janjic, said carefully: ''Kouchner has not been serious in his promises, and the efforts to demilitarize the Kosovo Liberation Army are very inefficient. But he is sincere, and this written document is important on its own.''

A senior Albanian politician who insisted on anonymity said Mr. Kouchner was ''the wrong man for the job,'' which he said required more forcefulness and less empathy. ''After a year, you still can't talk of the rule of law,'' he said. Still, he added, ''Kouchner's instincts are good - he knew he had to co-opt the Albanians, that the UN couldn't run the place alone.''

Less successful, most officials and analysts here think, is Mr. Kouchner's sometimes flighty, sometimes secretive management of the clumsy international bureaucracy itself. Alongside are the 45,000 troops of the NATO-led Kosovo Force, known here as KFOR. They are responsible to their home governments, not to Mr. Kouchner or even to the force's commander.

And while Mr. Kouchner was able to convince the former commander, General Klaus Reinhardt of Germany, to do more to help the civilian side, they both were rather less successful with Washington, Paris, Bonn, Rome and London.

The affliction known here as ''Bosnian disease'' - with well-armed troops unwilling to take risks that might cause harm to themselves - has settled into Kosovo in earnest, say Mr. Kouchner's aides and even some senior Kosovo Force officers. Consequently, some serious problems - like the division of the northern town of Mitrovica into Serbian and Albanian halves that actually mark the informal partition of Kosovo - are not going to be solved, but simply ''managed,'' no matter how much they embolden Belgrade or undermine the confidence of Kosovo Albanians in the goodwill of their saviors.

It was on the bridge dividing Mitrovica - not in Paris - that Mr. Kouchner chose to spend his millennial New Year's Eve, offering a hopeful toast, so far in vain, to reconciliation. Nor will the peacekeeping troops do much to stop organized crime or confront, in a serious fashion, organized Albanian efforts to drive the remaining Serbs out of Kosovo and prevent the return of those who fled, the officials say.

The discovery last month of 70 tons of arms, hidden by the former Kosovo Liberation Army and not handed over, as promised, to the peacekeepers, took no one here by surprise. ''It was a success,'' Mr. Kouchner said, ''not a surprise.'' In fact, senior UN and NATO officials say, the existence of the arms cache was known; the timing of the discovery itself was a message to the former Kosovo fighters, who had recently used some of the weapons, to stop their attacks on Serbs and moderate Albanians.