By Fisnik Abrashi and Christian Jennings
ScotsmanAugust 18, 2004
Kosovo's new United Nations administrator yesterday outlined plans to steer the ethnically divided and disputed province away from its violent past by improving security and reviving the dilapidated economy. Soren Jessen-Petersen, a Danish refugee expert and former European Union representative to Macedonia, outlined his priorities during his first news conference in Kosovo since being appointed to the post on 16 June by UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.
He insisted that security must be in place before talks can start on how Kosovo will be governed in the future. The province is governed by a UN Security Council resolution that leaves Kosovo's political status undetermined. "Kosovo cannot move forward if... it is not a safe place," Mr Jessen-Petersen said. "Every time violence prevails it is a setback in our efforts... to bring Kosovo toward status discussions."
One of Mr Jessen-Petersen's first tasks will be to try to persuade the dwindling Serb minority to participate in general elections on 23 October. The Serbs have threatened to boycott the election, citing lack of security. "They do a great disservice to those whose interests they are supposed to serve," Mr Jessen-Petersen said.
Serbia's president Boris Tadic yesterday offered to help resolve Kosovo's problems, which he said included a lack of security for minorities, violence and organised crime.
Five years after a NATO air war against former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic ended a Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanians seeking independence, Kosovo is at a crossroads. It can either find itself on the long road towards democracy and EU accession, or there will be an increase in ethnic violence, and Kosovo will become, in the words of the International Crisis Group, "Europe's West Bank".
Kosovo faces an uphill struggle, the UN Security Council was told recently by Hedi Annabi, its assistant secretary general of peacekeeping operations. The province faces challenges to end divisions between Albanians and Serbs, he said, adding that Kosovo's Serbs still live in "precarious conditions".
Divisions are also developing between Kosovo's 1.9 million Albanians and the UN and NATO, who have effectively run the province since 1999. "Five years ago the Albanians saw us as saviours - now they see us as an obstruction to their independence," said one senior international official in the regional capital, Pristina. "The question is whether or not they will fight the international community for that independence," said another UN staffer. Some 35,000 NATO troops and a huge UN mission took control of the former Yugoslav region five years ago in 1999.
Today, fewer than 20,000 NATO troops remain, the UN mission is widely accused of being out of touch with the place it governs, the economy is in dire straits, and former Kosovo Albanian rebel fighters warn darkly of a war against the international community.
Solutions must be found to the political economic stagnation that will consign Kosovo to a future of violent poverty and criminalised politics, where it has no future but as the new Europe's worst nightmare - a failed state in its midst.
At the heart of the province's problems are political economics. In a survey conducted this March by the Institute for Development Research, 65 per cent of Kosovo's approximately 1.9 million Albanians say that uncertainty about the future status of Kosovo and the parlous economy (unemployment is at 55 per cent) are their main worries. Seventy five per cent of both Serbs and Albanians say they are dissatisfied with the economic situation and blame the province's international overseers, the UN Mission in Kosovo, or UNMIK, for this state of affairs. Tough and ambitious economic plans are, however, afoot. A new power station is to be built, generating massive international investment and jobs, while an open-cast lignite mine outside Pristina will enable the province to become an energy exporter.
The IDR report should have sounded alarm bells. In March this year Albanian mobs embarked on an orchestrated three-day ethnic cleansing operation against Serbs and other minorities that led to the worst violence seen in Kosovo since before NATO arrived. The clash left 19 people - eight Serbs and eleven Albanians - dead, 900 injured and hundreds of Serb houses and churches torched. Some 4,000 people of all ethnic minorities were forced to flee their homes.
To understand why NATO came into the province in 1999 one can do worse than visit the village of Bela Crkva, a farming hamlet 30 miles south-west of Pristina. Two children's Wellington boots, one black, one pink, hang inside an elm thicket on the banks of a small stream that runs through the fields of water-melons, maize and peppers outside the village.
The boots belonged to two Albanian children, aged four and seven, and they are all that is left of 61 ethnic Albanians machine-gunned at, or near, the spot by rampaging Serb paramilitaries and policemen in March 1999. The tiny boots were hung inside the elm bush on the day after the massacre by Sabri Popaj, 45, a Kosova Albanian farmer from Bela Crkva who witnessed the killings from a hiding-place in a maize field adjacent to the stream. He returned to the spot to help bury the bodies after the Serbs had departed to carry out another massacre. "If NATO hadn't come into Kosovo we Albanians simply wouldn't be here any more," said Mr Popaj, who lost three brothers and two sons in the massacre in March 1999.
KOSOVO TIMELINE
- 1989 Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic strips Kosovo of its autonomy, prompting violent protests.
- 1990 Clashes between police and ethnic Albanians lead Yugoslavia to deploy troops in the province. Serbia dissolves the Kosovo assembly after ethnic Albanian legislators declare independence.
- 1991 Albania recognises Kosovo as an independent republic.
- 1992 Ibrahim Rugova is elected president of Kosovo. Serb and ethnic Albanian leaders hold peace talks.
- 1997 Separatist group Kosovo Liberation Army carries out a string of attacks on Serbs.
- 1998 Dozens are killed in Serb police operations against suspected Albanian separatists, prompting mass protests. Rugova demands outright independence for Kosovo. Fighting between Serbs and ethnic Albanians escalates. UN calls for a ceasefire. NATO backs military action against Yugoslavia if Milosevic fails to comply with the UN. International observers begin training to monitor the ceasefire. Fresh fighting breaks out in north Kosovo.
- 1999 The bodies of 40 Albanians are discovered in southern Kosovo after what appears to have been a mass execution. Serbian and Albanian delegates attend Paris peace conference. International monitors are ordered out of Kosovo as the peace talks break down. Serb offensive continues. NATO carries out its threat to bomb Serbia, attacking a sovereign European country for the first time in the alliance's history.
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