Global Policy Forum

by Barbara Crossette

Five months after the Security Council imposed an arms embargo to quell the fighting in Kosovo, no international organization has volunteered to do intensive monitoring of the ban, Secretary-General Kofi Annan told council members on Monday. "The international community risks once again being placed in a position," he said, "where it is only dealing with the symptoms of a conflict through its humanitarian agencies."

The Security Council begins debate on Tuesday on a resolution aimed at stopping the fighting, an issue that the "contact group" of nations most closely involved in negotiations has largely kept out of the council. The secretary-general was head of the UN peacekeeping department several years ago when the Security Council passed an ambitious resolution on Bosnia but then did not authorize troops to protect "safe havens" or carry out other tasks.

In a report that circulated to council members Monday, Annan warned of the consequences for the Balkans if ethnic conflict is not contained. "The continuation or further escalation of this conflict has dangerous implications for the stability of the region," Annan wrote, referring to Kosovo. "Given the responsibilities of the United Nations in the wider region and the ethnic makeup in neighboring countries, I cannot but express my alarm at this prospect."

A Security Council resolution in March called for an end to arms sales to the former Yugoslavia as Belgrade began stepping up a campaign against an ethnic Albanian separatist movement in Kosovo. The resolution asked the secretary general to recommend how an embargo could be monitored so that arms did not reach either the Yugoslavs, primarily Serbs, or the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

But substantial arms have continued to flow to rebels from across the Albanian border, and Serbian troops remain well-armed. Annan told the council soon after that resolution was passed that the United Nations, already deep in debt to nations that contribute to its peacekeeping forces, could not afford to monitor the embargo. He said he would ask for help from European regional organizations.

Now he has told the council that NATO, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Union, the Western European Union and the Danube Commission all said they would enforce the ban, but are reluctant to provide the level of support that is needed. "At this stage," Annan wrote in his report, "the overall resources pledged by those organizations would not allow for the establishment of a comprehensive monitoring regime."

The situation in Kosovo is of special interest to the current Security Council president, Danilo Turk of Slovenia, the first nation that emerged from the breakup of greater Yugoslavia to hold a council seat. In a briefing for reporters on Friday, Turk, a former professor of international law, said that the contact group's only success has been in preventing the Security Council from having a role in the crisis. The Slovenian delegation had tried and failed in the past to get the Security Council to pay more attention to Kosovo, but the Clinton administration and the Europeans and Russians in the contact group preferred to work on the issue among themselves and through their own envoys to the region.

Diplomats here wonder whether that will change when Richard Holbrooke, who has been President Clinton's envoy in talks with President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, moves to the United Nations as US representative in the fall.