(english)
Il Kosmet dai pogrom alle nuove elezioni-farsa (4)
1. Kosovo Five Years Later. Is intervention better than cure?
(By Aidan Hehir / Zmag, May 2004)
2. Kosovo protectorate “on point of near collapse” after March riots
(by Paul Mitchell / WSWS, 15/9/2004)
=== 1 ===
Z Magazine Online
May 2004 Volume 17 Number 6
Europe
Kosovo Five Years Later
Is intervention better than cure?
By Aidan Hehir
No military campaign in history was so heralded as “the right thing to
do” by Western political leaders before, during, and after its
initiation, as NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. The unprecedented
moralistic rhetoric that accompanied Operation Allied Force suggested
that NATO was forging a peaceful era for the inhabitants of Kosovo and
the wider world. It was, according to Tony Blair, “A war fought for the
values of civilization.” However, the recent riots in Mitrovica (and
the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq) illustrate that not only has
the immediate aim of the intervention failed utterly, but also that the
template established in Kosovo facilitated the escalation of aggressive
Western hegemony in the post-Cold War world.
In March 2004, amid the scenes of renewed violence, smouldering
churches, and huddled refugees, bewildered UN officials witnessed the
re-emergence of the Western theory that “ancient ethnic hatreds”
ultimately determine events in the Balkans. In assessing the periodic
violence in the Balkans, George Kennan stated, “Deeper traits of
character inherited, presumably, from a distant tribal past” continue
to plague the region and “seem to be decisive as a determinant of the
troublesome, baffling and dangerous situation that marks that part of
the world.” This ultimately racist outlook is echoed by chief UN
officials currently “administering” Kosovo. While touring the province
in the aftermath of the recent carnage that left 31 people dead and
over 850 injured, the head of the UN mission in Kosovo, Harri Holkeri,
solemnly declared, “The concept of multiethnic Kosovo that the
international community has been persistently attempting to implement
in recent years is no longer tenable.” In other words, the incompatible
ethnic identities endemic in Kosovo have triumphed over the West’s
“earnest” efforts to instill a culture of multi-ethnicity. This is
simply untrue. The international community, in the guise of NATO,
accentuated the ethnic fissure in Kosovo through its intervention in
1999 and the record of the UN since the cessation of Operation Allied
Force has been marked by a tolerance of low level ethnic oppression
more so than by any genuine attempts to reconcile the communities.
Western diplomatic efforts in the Balkans throughout the 1990s were
consistently predicated on the flawed logic of ethnic hatreds. Violence
in the region was portrayed as the consequence of embedded ethnic
prejudices, rather than Western interference. Whenever Western
diplomatic initiatives failed, as they invariably did, it was because
the locals couldn’t extricate themselves from their primitive ethnic
identities and genetic predilection for violence. If the region were to
ever become civilized, the argument went, order would have to be
forcibly imposed by the West.
This contemporary variant of the “white man’s burden” has engendered
among Western actors in the Balkans a psychological detachment from the
consequences of their actions and imbued the myriad “internationals”
who wield enormous power throughout the region with a sense of cultural
and political superiority. It is, therefore, not surprising that
Holkeri could survey the wreckage of the March riots without seeing any
correlation between the violence and Western actions. In reality, the
violence did not occur despite Western involvement in Kosovo, but
because of it.
Where, then, did it all go wrong? Throughout the 1990s the EU and the
U.S., at the behest of then-ally Miloševic, declared Kosovo an
“internal matter” and the issue was consciously ignored. The lack of
any provision relating to Kosovo in the Dayton Accords enflamed the
Kosovar Albanians and support gradually shifted from the pacifist LDK
party to the Kosova Liberation Army. By 1998, the conflict had
escalated dramatically and Western politicians became concerned that
the conflict might spread to Macedonia where it could potentially
engulf key NATO allies Greece and Turkey. After a number of initiatives
failed, the Kosovar Albanians and the Yugoslavs were ordered to peace
talks at Rambouillet, France in February 1999.
Despite the lofty rhetoric proffered at the time, it is now clear that
Rambouillet was not a genuine attempt to achieve a settlement. In April
2000, Madeline Albright’s personal secretary James Rubin admitted, “Our
internal goal was not to get a peace agreement at Rambouillet.” The
real internal U.S. goal was “to get a war started with the Europeans
locked in,” by orchestrating a situation whereby the Yugoslav
delegation would be made to appear intransigent and beyond diplomatic
reason. This was achieved through the dismissal of repeated compromises
suggested by the Yugoslavs and the determined courting, by U.S.
officials, of the Kosovar Albanian delegation and, in particular, KLA
leader, Hashim Thaçi.
According to Pleurat Sejdiu, a Kosovar press spokesperson at
Rambouillet, “It was an open secret that while sequestered with Hashim
Thaçi, Albright was telling him that his delegation had to sign because
otherwise NATO could not carry out its threat.” In a press statement on
April 21, Rubin admitted, “All of the officials who have worked on this
have made very clear that in order to move towards military action, it
has to be clear that the Serbs were responsible.” On April 23, Albright
declared, “It’s now up to the Kosovar Albanians to create this black or
white situation.”
During the two-week break in negotiations, increased U.S. pressure was
exerted on the Kosovar Albanians and the KLA in particular. Nightly
broadcasts of “Agreement for Peace,” comprising interviews with senior
U.S. officials urging the Kosovars to sign, produced by the United
States Information Agency, were aired on Albanian television. No
similar effort was made in Serbia. When the talks resumed Albright
assured the Kosovar Albanians, “You’ll get NATO to protect your people.
Don’t mind the small print because you will be running the show and
many of the problems in the text will be irrelevant.” The U.S.-led
propaganda campaign worked and as LeBor writes, “The Albanians signed
in much the same spirit that the Bosnian government had agreed to
various peace plans—knowing that as the Serbs would reject them, they
might as well take the diplomatic credit.” The Yugoslavs refused,
largely on the basis of the provisions of Annex B, which sanctioned the
deployment of an implementation force comprised exclusively of NATO
troops. In addition to immunity from prosecution, the annex stipulated,
“NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels,
aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded
access throughout the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, including
associated airspace and territorial waters.” This was tantamount to
asking Yugoslavia to surrender its sovereignty as there was no logical
reason why any implementation force deployed to oversee political
transitions in Kosovo should have had the right to travel throughout
Vojvodina and Montenegro.
In 2000, Lord Gilbert, minister of state in the British Ministry of
Defense from 1997-1999, outlined the West’s motives at the negotiations
when he stated to the Defense Select Committee of the House of Commons,
“I think certain people were spoiling for a fight in NATO at that
time.... If you ask my personal view, I think the terms put to
Miloševic at Rambouillet were absolutely intolerable; how could he
possibly accept them; it was quite deliberate. That does not excuse an
awful lot of other things, but we were at a point when some people felt
that something had to be done, so you just provoked a fight.” The
Yugoslav delegation had consistently stated they were willing to
“discuss the scope and character of the international presence in
Kosovo,” but would not agree to an exclusively NATO force. The proposed
security provisions afforded to NATO were more expansive than even the
Kosovar Albanians had sought. The Independent International Commission
on Kosovo concluded that compromising on this aspect of the deal was
“an obvious negotiating opening that might have broken the impasse.”
NATO, however, insisted the provisions were non-negotiable, thereby
deliberately choosing war over diplomacy. Significantly, the deal
brokered by the EU and Russia that ended the air strikes omitted the
contentious provisions rejected at Rambouillet.
Humanitarian Bombing
The immediate consequence of NATO’s bombardment was to escalate the
suffering endured by the Kosovar Albanians. NATO’s Supreme Allied
Commander in Europe, General Wesley Clark, warned his political
superiors that without a ground contingent reprisals against the
Kosovars were “inevitable.” However, fearing a backlash against U.S.
casualties, President Clinton insisted that the intervention be limited
to air strikes. NATO pilots were instructed to fly at 15,000 feet to
avoid anti-aircraft fire, while a refugee crisis of unprecedented
proportions erupted on the ground. NATO’s priorities were obvious. The
wholly inadequate provisions made for the “inevitable” exodus further
exacerbated the plight of the Kosovars. Neither the UN High Commission
for Refugees nor the governments of Albania or Macedonia were readied
for the crisis, prompting Macedonian Prime Minister Ljupco Geogijevski
to lament, “The people in Brussels started this war then left for the
Easter holidays.”
The manner in which the military campaign was prosecuted belied its
humanitarian motives. As detailed by Amnesty International and even the
normally pro-U.S. Human Rights Watch, NATO dropped cluster bombs and
depleted uranium, bombed television stations, hospitals, and water
treatment facilities, purposely targeting civilians. Yet the bombing
impacted negligibly on the Yugoslav security forces responsible for the
expulsions. Robert Hayden, Director of the Center for Russian and East
European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, noted, “The
casualties among Serb civilians in the first three weeks of the war
were higher than all the casualties on both sides in the three months
that led up to the war, and yet those three months were supposed to be
a humanitarian catastrophe.” When asked if he was worried about an
investigation into NATO war crimes by the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea
stated candidly that he was “certain” no investigation would take place
because “NATO is a friend of the Tribunal…. NATO countries are those
that have provided the finances to set up the Tribunal, we are among
the major financiers.” In June 2000, the ICTY issued its report on
NATO’s conduct of the war. The report notes that answers given by NATO
to specific questions “were couched in general terms and failed to
address the specific incidents.” However, in what was a damning
indictment of its supposed impartiality, the Tribunal decided not to
pursue the matter further having based its investigation on “statements
made by NATO and NATO countries,” which the Tribunal “tended to assume
were generally reliable…and honestly given.”
Peacekeeping
According to a November 2003 report by the Serbian Ministry of Internal
Affairs, based on data from the Red Cross, the UN, and the ICTY, 1,192
Serbs and 593 other nationals had been murdered in Kosovo since the
deployment of 21,000 NATO peacekeepers in June 1999. Up to 200,000
Serbs and 67,000 Slavic Muslims were estimated to have fled the region,
while a further 790 people remained unaccounted for. The number of
non-Albanian refugees who have returned to Kosovo is, according to the
UN Security Council, “a small fraction of the number of Kosovo Serbs
internally displaced in Serbia and Montenegro.” A 2003 Amnesty
International report outlined the appalling conditions endured by
non-Albanians, noting, “Serbs and other ethnic minorities in Kosovo
remain at serious risk of death or injury…beatings, stabbings,
abductions, drive-by shootings and the use of hand grenades to
intimidate and kill members of these minorities are common in the
province.” The fortunes of the Albanian community have improved, yet,
under the aegis of the UN and NATO, one form of ethnic oppression has
replaced another. NATO and the UN’s inability and unwillingness to stop
the violence against the minority population has stifled the
development of a civil society essential to the functioning of any
democracy. Institutional paralysis in Kosovo has been accompanied by an
accentuation of the original societal fissure.
NATO’s bombing campaign further soured relations between Kosovars and
Serbs and the wider Slavic community. In Vojvodina, where previously
there was significant support for the Kosovars plight, the NATO
bombardment provoked an upsurge in resentment towards the Kosovar
Albanians among both the Serb and Hungarian population. Within Serbia
and throughout the Balkans, the NATO intervention induced a degree of
pan-Slavic solidarity that has negatively impacted on any support the
Kosovar Albanians may have previously had.
Kosovo’s ombudsperson, Marek Antoni Nowicki, reported to the Council of
Europe in February 2004 that human rights in Kosovo were “far from the
minimum of international standards,” warning that it is the intent of
certain sections of the Albanian community to “cleanse this land from
the presence of all Serbs.” His words proved prophetic in mid-March
when Kosovar Albanians went on the rampage in Northern Kosovo. The
spark for the violence was the allegation that Serbs had chased three
Albanian children to their deaths with wild dogs. This later proved
untrue, with NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, among
others, stating that the violence was orchestrated well in advance by
elements within the Albanian community.
The frustration felt by ethnic Albanians is understandable. Having
initially welcomed NATO and the UN as emancipators, Kosovar Albanians
soon realized that their faith in the West was misplaced. UN Security
Council resolution 1244, drafted to consolidate the post-war situation,
reaffirmed “The commitment of all member states to the sovereign and
territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” This
explicit recognition of Belgrade’s authority over Kosovo is an anathema
to the Albanian community. As Michael Mandelbaum, director of American
Foreign Policy at John Hopkins University, notes, “NATO intervened in a
civil war and defeated one side, but embraced the position of the party
it had defeated on the issue over which the war was fought.” The UN
Mission In Kosovo (UNMIK) has been unable to overcome this inherent
paradox in Kosovo’s status. With UNMIK now administering the province,
the Kosovar Albanian’s lack of influence over political power in the
region persists and, according to Aldo Blumi, executive director of the
Albanian Institute for International Studies, “What has changed in
Kosovo since June 1999 is the nature of rule not the discursive
relationship between power and subjects.”
As new concerns have come to dominate the international agenda, the
final status of Kosovo has stagnated without any diminution of the
Serbs’ or Albanians’ mutually exclusive claims on the province. In
December 2003, UNMIK stipulated that no examination of Kosovo’s final
status would take place until certain political and humanitarian
standards were reached, suggesting 2006 as the earliest date. UNMIK
thus looks likely to emulate the UN administration in Bosnia that has
now run eight years over its original remit with few signs of a
resolution of the underlying problems. As David Chandler has noted,
“The ethnic Albanians are discovering that removing Belgrade appointees
from positions of power is not necessarily a step towards greater
autonomy or self rule.” UNMIK’s lack of a clear exit strategy and the
central paradox of refusing to endorse Kosovar independence while
negating Serbia’s influence, has meant that since Operation Allied
Force, UNMIK has become isolated from both communities. The ethnic
Albanians’ calls for self-determination have become increasingly
militant in the face of UN prevarication on Kosovo’s final status. The
attacks in March against the UN and NATO, as well as the Serbs,
illustrate the depth of Albanian frustrations.
As in Bosnia and Northern Ireland, the political solution imposed by
external actors in Kosovo have been based on those imagined nationalist
fissures that created the initial tension. UNMIK has institutionalized
the ethnic divisions that emerged in the province and, while in the
short term this is conducive to the reduction of tension, the
underlying fissure between ethnic groups will eventually impact on the
functioning of the political system. In Northern Ireland the division
between Unionists and Nationalists persists and no cross-cultural
political movement has achieved electoral success since the Belfast
Agreement came into effect in 1998.
The imposition of ethnic homogenization in Bosnia, as defined by the
terms of Dayton, has all but destroyed the inter-cultural climate that
existed in the country prior to the conflagration that erupted in the
1990s. The international community has mistakenly perceived ethnic
disharmony in these regions as a product of local prejudices and
accepted them as a permanent fixture. This perspective fails to
appreciate the divisive influence of external actors in provoking the
disintegration of inter-community relations. The imposition, therefore,
of political provisions based on these false fissures and contrived
differences is inherently flawed. As Blumi states, “The world should be
appalled at the UN’s adoption of ethnic categories to parcel out a
number of operational domains for Kosovo’s population. Unless reversed,
any future interaction between Kosovars will be permanently based on
criteria beyond their control; giving self asserted nationalists veto
over any policy inside Kosovo.
In tandem with the political reforms imposed on Kosovo, Western
officials have undertaken an aggressive privatization policy. Despite
the influx of EU and U.S. loans, unemployment stands at 57 percent.
This has added to the disillusionment and discontent. According to
UNMIK economist Iain King, what growth there has been in Kosovo since
OAF has been almost wholly the result of external support, based
largely on loans and aid packages. Imports outnumber exports by ten to
one and, as King notes, “Much of the new wealth earned in Kosovo is
being used to create jobs elsewhere. The combination of external
management and monetary support has meant that Kosovo’s economy is
arguably less independent today than when under Tito’s economic system
of workers management.
The intervention in Kosovo illustrates that military victory is less
important to future stability than a coherent post-conflict
Administration, yet the crises in both Afghanistan and Iraq show that
this lesson has not been learned. By siding with the Albanian community
and intervening on their behalf, to the extent of cooperating with the
KLA whose expressed aim is an ethnically pure Kosovo, the international
community accentuated the divisions in Kosovo, hardening Serbian hearts
to the Albanian’s cause, and imbuing the Albanians with a sense of
righteous infallibility. The current efforts to institutionalize the
existing impermanence will continue to prove futile unless the
oppression of the minority population is stopped and a coherent plan
for the final status of Kosovo is implemented.
Rather than heralding the intervention, the international community
should decry the moral duplicity, violence, and political inertia that
has characterized the record of the UN and NATO during the past five
years in Kosovo. The combination of empty rhetoric, administrative
impotence, and a UN-aided entrenchment of aggressive ethnic
identification bodes ill for the future stability of “the powder keg of
Europe” and illustrate the limits of the West’s “nation building”
capabilities. The adverse consequences of the U.S. interventions in
Afghanistan and Iraq have been more immediately obvious, but the
effects of the U.S.-led campaign in Kosovo, and the subsequent
mishandling of the post war situation, are becoming apparent. The
violence in Mitrovica may be just the beginning. Of course, when
further violent unrest does return to the region don’t expect any
admissions of Western culpability—those endemic ancient ethnic hatreds
will be to blame.
Aidan Hehir is currently lecturing on Comparative European Politics
with the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the
University of Limerick and has spent the last four years researching
NATO’s 1999 military intervention in Kosovo.
=== 2 ===
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/sep2004/koso-s15_prn.shtml
World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org
WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : The Balkans
Kosovo protectorate “on point of near collapse” after March riots
By Paul Mitchell
15 September 2004
A leaked internal United Nations report says the administration in the
UN protectorate of Kosovo was on “the point of near collapse” after
riots engulfed the province in March.
The wave of communal violence resulted in a level of ethnic cleansing
that matched anything seen in the Balkans during the break-up of the
former Yugoslavia. The clashes began in the ethnically divided town of
Mitrovica and quickly spread across the province—suggesting they were
part of a coordinated operation. As a result, 19 people were killed and
hundreds injured. More than 4,000 people—mainly Serbs—were forced to
flee. Nearly 1,000 houses, mostly Serb-owned, and 36 Orthodox churches,
monasteries and monuments were destroyed or damaged.
Most of Kosovo’s 2 million people are ethnic Albanians, but there are
also about 100,000 Serbs remaining. Nearly all the 850,000 Albanians
who left when NATO bombing started in 1999 have returned, but only
5,800 of the approximately 200,000 non-Albanians who fled have done so.
These refugees are mostly Serbs, but also include several thousand
Roma, Ashkaeli, Bosniaks, Gorani and Egyptians.
The numbers who fled the riots in March are about the same as those who
returned to Kosovo during the whole of 2003.
The administration blamed Kosovar nationalist politicians and the media
for sparking off the riots by sensationalising the drowning of three
Albanian boys. A fourth boy who survived said Serbs with dogs had
chased them into a river in revenge for the shooting of a Serb teenager
earlier. The daily newspaper Dan reported recently that the Hague war
crimes tribunal will soon indict three Kosovo Albanian leaders, one of
whom is believed to be Kosovo Protection (KPC) Commander, General Imri
Ilazi.
Ilazi lead a group of several thousand Kosovar Albanians from the
Gnjilana area during the riots, setting fire to Serb homes.
The western powers have failed to solve the political and economic
crisis in Kosovo, but have instead produced a humanitarian disaster
whilst cultivating inter-ethnic conflict between pro-Albanian
separatists and ethnic Serbs backed by Belgrade. This conflict now
threatens to once again destabilise the entire region.
Officially, Kosovo is part of Serbia and Montenegro, but the region is
administered by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in
Kosovo (UNMIK) and patrolled by Kosovo Force (K-FOR) troops “pending a
final settlement” of its status.
This “final status” is framed as an attempt to appease the
pro-imperialist ethnic Albanian forces that supported the United States
and European powers in their efforts to dismantle the old Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, and the pro-western regime that was
subsequently installed in Belgrade. According to Security Council
Resolution 1244 the settlement involves “substantive autonomy,” but
also a commitment to “the sovereign and territorial integrity of the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia [now renamed Serbia and Montenegro].”
UNMIK oversees the Provisional Institutions of
Self-Government—including the president, the assembly, and the
government of Kosovo—elected with limited powers in 2001. New elections
are scheduled for October 23 of this year and have become the focus of
intense conflict between ethnic Albanian forces pressing for full
independence and Serbian nationalists seeking to maintain a variant on
Kosovo’s existing status—of which the latest round of ethnic cleansing
against Serbs is only the bloodiest manifestation.
The Democratic Party of Kosova, a successor organisation to the pro-US
stooge Kosova Liberation Army (KLA), runs Kosovo, under Prime Minister
Bajram Rexhepi. Its Assembly—which, like the forthcoming elections, is
boycotted by the Serbs—voted on July 8 to adopt several constitutional
changes including the right to hold a referendum on independence. The
Albanian government supports these moves, with its president Alfred
Moisiu recently declaring his country’s interest in resolving Kosovo’s
final status.
Albanian nationalists are also intent on pushing for the integration of
ethnic Albanian areas in the area of south Serbia, known as the Presevo
Valley—where 60,000 Albanians outnumber around 30,000 Serbs. The region
was the scene of armed conflict in 2000 involving the Liberation Army
of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja (UCPBM)—a KLA offshoot. Saip
Kamberi, a leader of the Party for Democratic Action, said, “It is only
natural that Albanians today say this region should be united with
Kosovo,” and Jonuz Musliu, leader of the Movement for Democratic
Progress, successor to the disbanded UCPBM, said, “We want to unite
with Kosovo, and we shall never give up.”
In 2001, this conflict was exported over the border into Macedonia by
KLA-UCPMB forces, where ethnic Albanians constitute one quarter to one
third of the population and separatist groups are also seeking
incorporation into Kosovo.
In the aftermath of the March riots, Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav
Kostunica put forward counter-proposals to Kosovan autonomy that were
adopted unanimously by the Serbian parliament. The proposals involve
the “cantonisation” of Kosovo by creating five ethnically separate Serb
“sub-regions” in the north, comprising 30 percent of Kosovo’s
territory. Each canton would have control over elections, security,
education, and health, and also have their own assemblies and courts.
He described his proposals as “the only solution that is in accordance
with resolution 1244, and does not lead towards the changing of
borders, be it secession or division of Kosovo, and leads to stability
in the region”.
Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova said Kostunica’s proposals were
unacceptable, as Serbs make up less than 10 percent of the province’s 2
million population, and repeated his call for complete independence.
There are conflicting positions amongst and between the representatives
of the imperialist powers on how to politically stabilise this
worsening situation, with some favouring seizing the nettle of greater
autonomy for Kosovo and others considering Kostunica’s option. But
there is a general feeling that presently things are out of control.
Following the riots, the head of UNMIK, the former Finnish Prime
Minister Harri Holkeri, resigned to be replaced by Danish
lawyer-journalist Søren Jessen Petersen. Holkeri was closely associated
with UNMIK’s “Standards Before Status” policy, which states that
discussions on the future status of Kosovo planned for the end of 2005
will only happen if certain benchmarks are met including a free market
with private property rights, functioning democratic institutions and
free movement of people.
The UN envoy to the Balkans, Norwegian Kai Eide, recently called for
policy reversal in Kosovo and the start of talks on the final status of
Kosovo, saying, “Standards Before Status” is “untenable in its present
form.”
“In the current situation in Kosovo, we can no longer avoid the bigger
picture and defer the most difficult issues to an indefinite future,”
Eide added. “Marginal adjustments will only add to frustration,
increase the danger of more violence, damage the reputation of Kosovo
further, and weaken the international community.”
Whatever happens in the months ahead, what is certain is that increased
repressive force will be employed by the western powers. An additional
2,000 troops from France, Germany and Italy are to be sent to Kosovo
next month, raising NATO strength to 20,000 troops or about one soldier
for every 100 people in the territory. They will remain until after the
October 23 elections. Additionally, several NATO countries including
Germany, Italy and Belgium have removed so-called “national caveats” on
direct policing actions—because “restrictive” rules of engagement
imposed on them were blamed for two thirds of troops being unable to
respond effectively to the violence in March.
French General Yves de Kermabon has taken over as commander of K-FOR
from General Holger Kammerhoff, whose German K-FOR troops in Prizren
ignored calls by German police in the town and let all Serb houses and
Orthodox monasteries burn to the ground.
The situation in Kosovo is a bitter indictment of the western powers’
so-called programme of “nation-building” in “failed states.” Rather,
poverty, corruption and ethnic separation have become endemic in the
Balkan region as a result of the western powers’ attempt to dismantle
the former Yugoslavia.
The UN report leaked to the Scotsman, September 2, paints a devastating
picture of the situation on the ground in Kosovo. It states, “UNMIK is
in a funk.... After five years on the ground, progress towards UNMIK’s
objectives remains elusive and the mission seems to be nearing the
point of overstaying its welcome. There are obstacles on all fronts,
and the outlook for the medium term is worse.”
UNMIK is described as being seen as “aloof,” viewed as “strangers in
the society they govern” and appearing “to have developed a habit of
closing its eyes to the facts on the ground...the leadership was not
interested in what goes on in the province.”
The then-18,000-strong K-FOR force is described as being unable to
maintain safety and security in Kosovo for minorities, for foreign
diplomats and for UNMIK itself. Many of those interviewed for the
report “believe that UNMIK and K-FOR would have collapsed had the riots
gone on for another day or two.... Both UNMIK and K-FOR were
overwhelmed by the events. K-FOR currently has neither the strength nor
the posture required to maintain a ‘safe and secure environment’ within
a civilian population.”
An investigation by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees on
the situation of Kosovo’s minorities between January 2003 and April
2004 shows there were at least 145 separate incidents during that
period in addition to those linked to the riots in March. Separate
reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have accused
UNMIK of a “catastrophic” inability to defend minorities.
Misha Glenny, author of The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great
Powers 1804-1999, has also attacked UNMIK, saying that its failure to
“restore some vitality to Kosovo’s economic life and offer a positive
perspective for a future political settlement acceptable to both sides”
has led to a situation where “both communities have provided thousands
of young recruits to an army of the dispossessed and unemployed. With
no money and the prospect only of further misery, frustration and anger
have now reached a breaking point.”
A recent World Bank report (World Bank Report 29023-KOS, Kosovo
Economic Memorandum 17 May 2004) states that during the 1990s, economic
output declined by 50 percent and by a further 20 percent after the
NATO bombing in 1999. Since 1999, growth in the economy has been driven
exclusively by $2.2 billion in foreign aid and about $0.5 billion in
remittances from expatriate Kosovars. It warns that growth has been
“driven by a post-conflict boom financed by official aid flows and is
unlikely to be sustainable” because foreign governments and
institutions have already reduced aid by 70 percent and will stop it
completely by the end of the decade.
The World Bank report says that Kosovo’s trade balance is severely
one-sided, with imports worth about $1 billion but exports valued at
only $40 million. The economy is “highly reliant” on taxes on these
imports. There has only been $30 million of foreign direct investment
in the region since 1999, mainly in the banking sector.
Agricultural production has just about reached pre-conflict levels, but
the large collective farms (agrokombinats) that dominated the
agricultural sector and produced most of the fertilisers and pesticides
have collapsed.
One of the economy’s greatest problems is electricity. Because the
power stations were bombed and maintenance has been abandoned, there
were 90 days of power cuts in 2002; and on the other days, power was
only available for six hours.
The World Bank points out that workers’ wages—at $220 a month—remain
the lowest in Europe. They have not risen, although Kosovo has had low
taxes and a labour market since 1999 that has “functioned in a
virtually unregulated way with few formal arrangements regulating
employment relationships and wage determinations.” It warns that
because foreign aid has dropped—reducing economic growth—”it will be a
challenge to maintain current incomes over the next few years.”
The only answer to this deteriorating situation offered by the
imperialist powers and institutions is greater repression and policies
that will only exacerbate both inter-ethnic violence and social
hardship.
With “pervasive” unemployment standing at 50 percent, the World Bank
recommends privatising and “downsizing” what remains of the industrial
sector, with the 500 socially owned enterprises being reduced to a
maximum of 100 and the rest liquidated.
Kosovo’s lignite mines are “potentially one of the most economic in
Europe” comprising 10 billion tons of good-quality, easily mined
lignite the World Bank declares, but it recommends reducing the current
number of 4,000 miners by half.
The Trepça lead and zinc mines employed 17,000 miners in 1991 when they
showed “strong economic activity” and exported much of their minerals.
The mines were shut down by K-FOR in 2000, which cited widespread metal
pollution as the reason. The World Bank recommends they be reopened,
but that the 10,000 miners still on their books be reduced to just
2,000.
Il Kosmet dai pogrom alle nuove elezioni-farsa (4)
1. Kosovo Five Years Later. Is intervention better than cure?
(By Aidan Hehir / Zmag, May 2004)
2. Kosovo protectorate “on point of near collapse” after March riots
(by Paul Mitchell / WSWS, 15/9/2004)
=== 1 ===
Z Magazine Online
May 2004 Volume 17 Number 6
Europe
Kosovo Five Years Later
Is intervention better than cure?
By Aidan Hehir
No military campaign in history was so heralded as “the right thing to
do” by Western political leaders before, during, and after its
initiation, as NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. The unprecedented
moralistic rhetoric that accompanied Operation Allied Force suggested
that NATO was forging a peaceful era for the inhabitants of Kosovo and
the wider world. It was, according to Tony Blair, “A war fought for the
values of civilization.” However, the recent riots in Mitrovica (and
the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq) illustrate that not only has
the immediate aim of the intervention failed utterly, but also that the
template established in Kosovo facilitated the escalation of aggressive
Western hegemony in the post-Cold War world.
In March 2004, amid the scenes of renewed violence, smouldering
churches, and huddled refugees, bewildered UN officials witnessed the
re-emergence of the Western theory that “ancient ethnic hatreds”
ultimately determine events in the Balkans. In assessing the periodic
violence in the Balkans, George Kennan stated, “Deeper traits of
character inherited, presumably, from a distant tribal past” continue
to plague the region and “seem to be decisive as a determinant of the
troublesome, baffling and dangerous situation that marks that part of
the world.” This ultimately racist outlook is echoed by chief UN
officials currently “administering” Kosovo. While touring the province
in the aftermath of the recent carnage that left 31 people dead and
over 850 injured, the head of the UN mission in Kosovo, Harri Holkeri,
solemnly declared, “The concept of multiethnic Kosovo that the
international community has been persistently attempting to implement
in recent years is no longer tenable.” In other words, the incompatible
ethnic identities endemic in Kosovo have triumphed over the West’s
“earnest” efforts to instill a culture of multi-ethnicity. This is
simply untrue. The international community, in the guise of NATO,
accentuated the ethnic fissure in Kosovo through its intervention in
1999 and the record of the UN since the cessation of Operation Allied
Force has been marked by a tolerance of low level ethnic oppression
more so than by any genuine attempts to reconcile the communities.
Western diplomatic efforts in the Balkans throughout the 1990s were
consistently predicated on the flawed logic of ethnic hatreds. Violence
in the region was portrayed as the consequence of embedded ethnic
prejudices, rather than Western interference. Whenever Western
diplomatic initiatives failed, as they invariably did, it was because
the locals couldn’t extricate themselves from their primitive ethnic
identities and genetic predilection for violence. If the region were to
ever become civilized, the argument went, order would have to be
forcibly imposed by the West.
This contemporary variant of the “white man’s burden” has engendered
among Western actors in the Balkans a psychological detachment from the
consequences of their actions and imbued the myriad “internationals”
who wield enormous power throughout the region with a sense of cultural
and political superiority. It is, therefore, not surprising that
Holkeri could survey the wreckage of the March riots without seeing any
correlation between the violence and Western actions. In reality, the
violence did not occur despite Western involvement in Kosovo, but
because of it.
Where, then, did it all go wrong? Throughout the 1990s the EU and the
U.S., at the behest of then-ally Miloševic, declared Kosovo an
“internal matter” and the issue was consciously ignored. The lack of
any provision relating to Kosovo in the Dayton Accords enflamed the
Kosovar Albanians and support gradually shifted from the pacifist LDK
party to the Kosova Liberation Army. By 1998, the conflict had
escalated dramatically and Western politicians became concerned that
the conflict might spread to Macedonia where it could potentially
engulf key NATO allies Greece and Turkey. After a number of initiatives
failed, the Kosovar Albanians and the Yugoslavs were ordered to peace
talks at Rambouillet, France in February 1999.
Despite the lofty rhetoric proffered at the time, it is now clear that
Rambouillet was not a genuine attempt to achieve a settlement. In April
2000, Madeline Albright’s personal secretary James Rubin admitted, “Our
internal goal was not to get a peace agreement at Rambouillet.” The
real internal U.S. goal was “to get a war started with the Europeans
locked in,” by orchestrating a situation whereby the Yugoslav
delegation would be made to appear intransigent and beyond diplomatic
reason. This was achieved through the dismissal of repeated compromises
suggested by the Yugoslavs and the determined courting, by U.S.
officials, of the Kosovar Albanian delegation and, in particular, KLA
leader, Hashim Thaçi.
According to Pleurat Sejdiu, a Kosovar press spokesperson at
Rambouillet, “It was an open secret that while sequestered with Hashim
Thaçi, Albright was telling him that his delegation had to sign because
otherwise NATO could not carry out its threat.” In a press statement on
April 21, Rubin admitted, “All of the officials who have worked on this
have made very clear that in order to move towards military action, it
has to be clear that the Serbs were responsible.” On April 23, Albright
declared, “It’s now up to the Kosovar Albanians to create this black or
white situation.”
During the two-week break in negotiations, increased U.S. pressure was
exerted on the Kosovar Albanians and the KLA in particular. Nightly
broadcasts of “Agreement for Peace,” comprising interviews with senior
U.S. officials urging the Kosovars to sign, produced by the United
States Information Agency, were aired on Albanian television. No
similar effort was made in Serbia. When the talks resumed Albright
assured the Kosovar Albanians, “You’ll get NATO to protect your people.
Don’t mind the small print because you will be running the show and
many of the problems in the text will be irrelevant.” The U.S.-led
propaganda campaign worked and as LeBor writes, “The Albanians signed
in much the same spirit that the Bosnian government had agreed to
various peace plans—knowing that as the Serbs would reject them, they
might as well take the diplomatic credit.” The Yugoslavs refused,
largely on the basis of the provisions of Annex B, which sanctioned the
deployment of an implementation force comprised exclusively of NATO
troops. In addition to immunity from prosecution, the annex stipulated,
“NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels,
aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded
access throughout the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, including
associated airspace and territorial waters.” This was tantamount to
asking Yugoslavia to surrender its sovereignty as there was no logical
reason why any implementation force deployed to oversee political
transitions in Kosovo should have had the right to travel throughout
Vojvodina and Montenegro.
In 2000, Lord Gilbert, minister of state in the British Ministry of
Defense from 1997-1999, outlined the West’s motives at the negotiations
when he stated to the Defense Select Committee of the House of Commons,
“I think certain people were spoiling for a fight in NATO at that
time.... If you ask my personal view, I think the terms put to
Miloševic at Rambouillet were absolutely intolerable; how could he
possibly accept them; it was quite deliberate. That does not excuse an
awful lot of other things, but we were at a point when some people felt
that something had to be done, so you just provoked a fight.” The
Yugoslav delegation had consistently stated they were willing to
“discuss the scope and character of the international presence in
Kosovo,” but would not agree to an exclusively NATO force. The proposed
security provisions afforded to NATO were more expansive than even the
Kosovar Albanians had sought. The Independent International Commission
on Kosovo concluded that compromising on this aspect of the deal was
“an obvious negotiating opening that might have broken the impasse.”
NATO, however, insisted the provisions were non-negotiable, thereby
deliberately choosing war over diplomacy. Significantly, the deal
brokered by the EU and Russia that ended the air strikes omitted the
contentious provisions rejected at Rambouillet.
Humanitarian Bombing
The immediate consequence of NATO’s bombardment was to escalate the
suffering endured by the Kosovar Albanians. NATO’s Supreme Allied
Commander in Europe, General Wesley Clark, warned his political
superiors that without a ground contingent reprisals against the
Kosovars were “inevitable.” However, fearing a backlash against U.S.
casualties, President Clinton insisted that the intervention be limited
to air strikes. NATO pilots were instructed to fly at 15,000 feet to
avoid anti-aircraft fire, while a refugee crisis of unprecedented
proportions erupted on the ground. NATO’s priorities were obvious. The
wholly inadequate provisions made for the “inevitable” exodus further
exacerbated the plight of the Kosovars. Neither the UN High Commission
for Refugees nor the governments of Albania or Macedonia were readied
for the crisis, prompting Macedonian Prime Minister Ljupco Geogijevski
to lament, “The people in Brussels started this war then left for the
Easter holidays.”
The manner in which the military campaign was prosecuted belied its
humanitarian motives. As detailed by Amnesty International and even the
normally pro-U.S. Human Rights Watch, NATO dropped cluster bombs and
depleted uranium, bombed television stations, hospitals, and water
treatment facilities, purposely targeting civilians. Yet the bombing
impacted negligibly on the Yugoslav security forces responsible for the
expulsions. Robert Hayden, Director of the Center for Russian and East
European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, noted, “The
casualties among Serb civilians in the first three weeks of the war
were higher than all the casualties on both sides in the three months
that led up to the war, and yet those three months were supposed to be
a humanitarian catastrophe.” When asked if he was worried about an
investigation into NATO war crimes by the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea
stated candidly that he was “certain” no investigation would take place
because “NATO is a friend of the Tribunal…. NATO countries are those
that have provided the finances to set up the Tribunal, we are among
the major financiers.” In June 2000, the ICTY issued its report on
NATO’s conduct of the war. The report notes that answers given by NATO
to specific questions “were couched in general terms and failed to
address the specific incidents.” However, in what was a damning
indictment of its supposed impartiality, the Tribunal decided not to
pursue the matter further having based its investigation on “statements
made by NATO and NATO countries,” which the Tribunal “tended to assume
were generally reliable…and honestly given.”
Peacekeeping
According to a November 2003 report by the Serbian Ministry of Internal
Affairs, based on data from the Red Cross, the UN, and the ICTY, 1,192
Serbs and 593 other nationals had been murdered in Kosovo since the
deployment of 21,000 NATO peacekeepers in June 1999. Up to 200,000
Serbs and 67,000 Slavic Muslims were estimated to have fled the region,
while a further 790 people remained unaccounted for. The number of
non-Albanian refugees who have returned to Kosovo is, according to the
UN Security Council, “a small fraction of the number of Kosovo Serbs
internally displaced in Serbia and Montenegro.” A 2003 Amnesty
International report outlined the appalling conditions endured by
non-Albanians, noting, “Serbs and other ethnic minorities in Kosovo
remain at serious risk of death or injury…beatings, stabbings,
abductions, drive-by shootings and the use of hand grenades to
intimidate and kill members of these minorities are common in the
province.” The fortunes of the Albanian community have improved, yet,
under the aegis of the UN and NATO, one form of ethnic oppression has
replaced another. NATO and the UN’s inability and unwillingness to stop
the violence against the minority population has stifled the
development of a civil society essential to the functioning of any
democracy. Institutional paralysis in Kosovo has been accompanied by an
accentuation of the original societal fissure.
NATO’s bombing campaign further soured relations between Kosovars and
Serbs and the wider Slavic community. In Vojvodina, where previously
there was significant support for the Kosovars plight, the NATO
bombardment provoked an upsurge in resentment towards the Kosovar
Albanians among both the Serb and Hungarian population. Within Serbia
and throughout the Balkans, the NATO intervention induced a degree of
pan-Slavic solidarity that has negatively impacted on any support the
Kosovar Albanians may have previously had.
Kosovo’s ombudsperson, Marek Antoni Nowicki, reported to the Council of
Europe in February 2004 that human rights in Kosovo were “far from the
minimum of international standards,” warning that it is the intent of
certain sections of the Albanian community to “cleanse this land from
the presence of all Serbs.” His words proved prophetic in mid-March
when Kosovar Albanians went on the rampage in Northern Kosovo. The
spark for the violence was the allegation that Serbs had chased three
Albanian children to their deaths with wild dogs. This later proved
untrue, with NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, among
others, stating that the violence was orchestrated well in advance by
elements within the Albanian community.
The frustration felt by ethnic Albanians is understandable. Having
initially welcomed NATO and the UN as emancipators, Kosovar Albanians
soon realized that their faith in the West was misplaced. UN Security
Council resolution 1244, drafted to consolidate the post-war situation,
reaffirmed “The commitment of all member states to the sovereign and
territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” This
explicit recognition of Belgrade’s authority over Kosovo is an anathema
to the Albanian community. As Michael Mandelbaum, director of American
Foreign Policy at John Hopkins University, notes, “NATO intervened in a
civil war and defeated one side, but embraced the position of the party
it had defeated on the issue over which the war was fought.” The UN
Mission In Kosovo (UNMIK) has been unable to overcome this inherent
paradox in Kosovo’s status. With UNMIK now administering the province,
the Kosovar Albanian’s lack of influence over political power in the
region persists and, according to Aldo Blumi, executive director of the
Albanian Institute for International Studies, “What has changed in
Kosovo since June 1999 is the nature of rule not the discursive
relationship between power and subjects.”
As new concerns have come to dominate the international agenda, the
final status of Kosovo has stagnated without any diminution of the
Serbs’ or Albanians’ mutually exclusive claims on the province. In
December 2003, UNMIK stipulated that no examination of Kosovo’s final
status would take place until certain political and humanitarian
standards were reached, suggesting 2006 as the earliest date. UNMIK
thus looks likely to emulate the UN administration in Bosnia that has
now run eight years over its original remit with few signs of a
resolution of the underlying problems. As David Chandler has noted,
“The ethnic Albanians are discovering that removing Belgrade appointees
from positions of power is not necessarily a step towards greater
autonomy or self rule.” UNMIK’s lack of a clear exit strategy and the
central paradox of refusing to endorse Kosovar independence while
negating Serbia’s influence, has meant that since Operation Allied
Force, UNMIK has become isolated from both communities. The ethnic
Albanians’ calls for self-determination have become increasingly
militant in the face of UN prevarication on Kosovo’s final status. The
attacks in March against the UN and NATO, as well as the Serbs,
illustrate the depth of Albanian frustrations.
As in Bosnia and Northern Ireland, the political solution imposed by
external actors in Kosovo have been based on those imagined nationalist
fissures that created the initial tension. UNMIK has institutionalized
the ethnic divisions that emerged in the province and, while in the
short term this is conducive to the reduction of tension, the
underlying fissure between ethnic groups will eventually impact on the
functioning of the political system. In Northern Ireland the division
between Unionists and Nationalists persists and no cross-cultural
political movement has achieved electoral success since the Belfast
Agreement came into effect in 1998.
The imposition of ethnic homogenization in Bosnia, as defined by the
terms of Dayton, has all but destroyed the inter-cultural climate that
existed in the country prior to the conflagration that erupted in the
1990s. The international community has mistakenly perceived ethnic
disharmony in these regions as a product of local prejudices and
accepted them as a permanent fixture. This perspective fails to
appreciate the divisive influence of external actors in provoking the
disintegration of inter-community relations. The imposition, therefore,
of political provisions based on these false fissures and contrived
differences is inherently flawed. As Blumi states, “The world should be
appalled at the UN’s adoption of ethnic categories to parcel out a
number of operational domains for Kosovo’s population. Unless reversed,
any future interaction between Kosovars will be permanently based on
criteria beyond their control; giving self asserted nationalists veto
over any policy inside Kosovo.
In tandem with the political reforms imposed on Kosovo, Western
officials have undertaken an aggressive privatization policy. Despite
the influx of EU and U.S. loans, unemployment stands at 57 percent.
This has added to the disillusionment and discontent. According to
UNMIK economist Iain King, what growth there has been in Kosovo since
OAF has been almost wholly the result of external support, based
largely on loans and aid packages. Imports outnumber exports by ten to
one and, as King notes, “Much of the new wealth earned in Kosovo is
being used to create jobs elsewhere. The combination of external
management and monetary support has meant that Kosovo’s economy is
arguably less independent today than when under Tito’s economic system
of workers management.
The intervention in Kosovo illustrates that military victory is less
important to future stability than a coherent post-conflict
Administration, yet the crises in both Afghanistan and Iraq show that
this lesson has not been learned. By siding with the Albanian community
and intervening on their behalf, to the extent of cooperating with the
KLA whose expressed aim is an ethnically pure Kosovo, the international
community accentuated the divisions in Kosovo, hardening Serbian hearts
to the Albanian’s cause, and imbuing the Albanians with a sense of
righteous infallibility. The current efforts to institutionalize the
existing impermanence will continue to prove futile unless the
oppression of the minority population is stopped and a coherent plan
for the final status of Kosovo is implemented.
Rather than heralding the intervention, the international community
should decry the moral duplicity, violence, and political inertia that
has characterized the record of the UN and NATO during the past five
years in Kosovo. The combination of empty rhetoric, administrative
impotence, and a UN-aided entrenchment of aggressive ethnic
identification bodes ill for the future stability of “the powder keg of
Europe” and illustrate the limits of the West’s “nation building”
capabilities. The adverse consequences of the U.S. interventions in
Afghanistan and Iraq have been more immediately obvious, but the
effects of the U.S.-led campaign in Kosovo, and the subsequent
mishandling of the post war situation, are becoming apparent. The
violence in Mitrovica may be just the beginning. Of course, when
further violent unrest does return to the region don’t expect any
admissions of Western culpability—those endemic ancient ethnic hatreds
will be to blame.
Aidan Hehir is currently lecturing on Comparative European Politics
with the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the
University of Limerick and has spent the last four years researching
NATO’s 1999 military intervention in Kosovo.
=== 2 ===
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/sep2004/koso-s15_prn.shtml
World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org
WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : The Balkans
Kosovo protectorate “on point of near collapse” after March riots
By Paul Mitchell
15 September 2004
A leaked internal United Nations report says the administration in the
UN protectorate of Kosovo was on “the point of near collapse” after
riots engulfed the province in March.
The wave of communal violence resulted in a level of ethnic cleansing
that matched anything seen in the Balkans during the break-up of the
former Yugoslavia. The clashes began in the ethnically divided town of
Mitrovica and quickly spread across the province—suggesting they were
part of a coordinated operation. As a result, 19 people were killed and
hundreds injured. More than 4,000 people—mainly Serbs—were forced to
flee. Nearly 1,000 houses, mostly Serb-owned, and 36 Orthodox churches,
monasteries and monuments were destroyed or damaged.
Most of Kosovo’s 2 million people are ethnic Albanians, but there are
also about 100,000 Serbs remaining. Nearly all the 850,000 Albanians
who left when NATO bombing started in 1999 have returned, but only
5,800 of the approximately 200,000 non-Albanians who fled have done so.
These refugees are mostly Serbs, but also include several thousand
Roma, Ashkaeli, Bosniaks, Gorani and Egyptians.
The numbers who fled the riots in March are about the same as those who
returned to Kosovo during the whole of 2003.
The administration blamed Kosovar nationalist politicians and the media
for sparking off the riots by sensationalising the drowning of three
Albanian boys. A fourth boy who survived said Serbs with dogs had
chased them into a river in revenge for the shooting of a Serb teenager
earlier. The daily newspaper Dan reported recently that the Hague war
crimes tribunal will soon indict three Kosovo Albanian leaders, one of
whom is believed to be Kosovo Protection (KPC) Commander, General Imri
Ilazi.
Ilazi lead a group of several thousand Kosovar Albanians from the
Gnjilana area during the riots, setting fire to Serb homes.
The western powers have failed to solve the political and economic
crisis in Kosovo, but have instead produced a humanitarian disaster
whilst cultivating inter-ethnic conflict between pro-Albanian
separatists and ethnic Serbs backed by Belgrade. This conflict now
threatens to once again destabilise the entire region.
Officially, Kosovo is part of Serbia and Montenegro, but the region is
administered by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in
Kosovo (UNMIK) and patrolled by Kosovo Force (K-FOR) troops “pending a
final settlement” of its status.
This “final status” is framed as an attempt to appease the
pro-imperialist ethnic Albanian forces that supported the United States
and European powers in their efforts to dismantle the old Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, and the pro-western regime that was
subsequently installed in Belgrade. According to Security Council
Resolution 1244 the settlement involves “substantive autonomy,” but
also a commitment to “the sovereign and territorial integrity of the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia [now renamed Serbia and Montenegro].”
UNMIK oversees the Provisional Institutions of
Self-Government—including the president, the assembly, and the
government of Kosovo—elected with limited powers in 2001. New elections
are scheduled for October 23 of this year and have become the focus of
intense conflict between ethnic Albanian forces pressing for full
independence and Serbian nationalists seeking to maintain a variant on
Kosovo’s existing status—of which the latest round of ethnic cleansing
against Serbs is only the bloodiest manifestation.
The Democratic Party of Kosova, a successor organisation to the pro-US
stooge Kosova Liberation Army (KLA), runs Kosovo, under Prime Minister
Bajram Rexhepi. Its Assembly—which, like the forthcoming elections, is
boycotted by the Serbs—voted on July 8 to adopt several constitutional
changes including the right to hold a referendum on independence. The
Albanian government supports these moves, with its president Alfred
Moisiu recently declaring his country’s interest in resolving Kosovo’s
final status.
Albanian nationalists are also intent on pushing for the integration of
ethnic Albanian areas in the area of south Serbia, known as the Presevo
Valley—where 60,000 Albanians outnumber around 30,000 Serbs. The region
was the scene of armed conflict in 2000 involving the Liberation Army
of Presevo, Bujanovac and Medvedja (UCPBM)—a KLA offshoot. Saip
Kamberi, a leader of the Party for Democratic Action, said, “It is only
natural that Albanians today say this region should be united with
Kosovo,” and Jonuz Musliu, leader of the Movement for Democratic
Progress, successor to the disbanded UCPBM, said, “We want to unite
with Kosovo, and we shall never give up.”
In 2001, this conflict was exported over the border into Macedonia by
KLA-UCPMB forces, where ethnic Albanians constitute one quarter to one
third of the population and separatist groups are also seeking
incorporation into Kosovo.
In the aftermath of the March riots, Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav
Kostunica put forward counter-proposals to Kosovan autonomy that were
adopted unanimously by the Serbian parliament. The proposals involve
the “cantonisation” of Kosovo by creating five ethnically separate Serb
“sub-regions” in the north, comprising 30 percent of Kosovo’s
territory. Each canton would have control over elections, security,
education, and health, and also have their own assemblies and courts.
He described his proposals as “the only solution that is in accordance
with resolution 1244, and does not lead towards the changing of
borders, be it secession or division of Kosovo, and leads to stability
in the region”.
Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova said Kostunica’s proposals were
unacceptable, as Serbs make up less than 10 percent of the province’s 2
million population, and repeated his call for complete independence.
There are conflicting positions amongst and between the representatives
of the imperialist powers on how to politically stabilise this
worsening situation, with some favouring seizing the nettle of greater
autonomy for Kosovo and others considering Kostunica’s option. But
there is a general feeling that presently things are out of control.
Following the riots, the head of UNMIK, the former Finnish Prime
Minister Harri Holkeri, resigned to be replaced by Danish
lawyer-journalist Søren Jessen Petersen. Holkeri was closely associated
with UNMIK’s “Standards Before Status” policy, which states that
discussions on the future status of Kosovo planned for the end of 2005
will only happen if certain benchmarks are met including a free market
with private property rights, functioning democratic institutions and
free movement of people.
The UN envoy to the Balkans, Norwegian Kai Eide, recently called for
policy reversal in Kosovo and the start of talks on the final status of
Kosovo, saying, “Standards Before Status” is “untenable in its present
form.”
“In the current situation in Kosovo, we can no longer avoid the bigger
picture and defer the most difficult issues to an indefinite future,”
Eide added. “Marginal adjustments will only add to frustration,
increase the danger of more violence, damage the reputation of Kosovo
further, and weaken the international community.”
Whatever happens in the months ahead, what is certain is that increased
repressive force will be employed by the western powers. An additional
2,000 troops from France, Germany and Italy are to be sent to Kosovo
next month, raising NATO strength to 20,000 troops or about one soldier
for every 100 people in the territory. They will remain until after the
October 23 elections. Additionally, several NATO countries including
Germany, Italy and Belgium have removed so-called “national caveats” on
direct policing actions—because “restrictive” rules of engagement
imposed on them were blamed for two thirds of troops being unable to
respond effectively to the violence in March.
French General Yves de Kermabon has taken over as commander of K-FOR
from General Holger Kammerhoff, whose German K-FOR troops in Prizren
ignored calls by German police in the town and let all Serb houses and
Orthodox monasteries burn to the ground.
The situation in Kosovo is a bitter indictment of the western powers’
so-called programme of “nation-building” in “failed states.” Rather,
poverty, corruption and ethnic separation have become endemic in the
Balkan region as a result of the western powers’ attempt to dismantle
the former Yugoslavia.
The UN report leaked to the Scotsman, September 2, paints a devastating
picture of the situation on the ground in Kosovo. It states, “UNMIK is
in a funk.... After five years on the ground, progress towards UNMIK’s
objectives remains elusive and the mission seems to be nearing the
point of overstaying its welcome. There are obstacles on all fronts,
and the outlook for the medium term is worse.”
UNMIK is described as being seen as “aloof,” viewed as “strangers in
the society they govern” and appearing “to have developed a habit of
closing its eyes to the facts on the ground...the leadership was not
interested in what goes on in the province.”
The then-18,000-strong K-FOR force is described as being unable to
maintain safety and security in Kosovo for minorities, for foreign
diplomats and for UNMIK itself. Many of those interviewed for the
report “believe that UNMIK and K-FOR would have collapsed had the riots
gone on for another day or two.... Both UNMIK and K-FOR were
overwhelmed by the events. K-FOR currently has neither the strength nor
the posture required to maintain a ‘safe and secure environment’ within
a civilian population.”
An investigation by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees on
the situation of Kosovo’s minorities between January 2003 and April
2004 shows there were at least 145 separate incidents during that
period in addition to those linked to the riots in March. Separate
reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have accused
UNMIK of a “catastrophic” inability to defend minorities.
Misha Glenny, author of The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great
Powers 1804-1999, has also attacked UNMIK, saying that its failure to
“restore some vitality to Kosovo’s economic life and offer a positive
perspective for a future political settlement acceptable to both sides”
has led to a situation where “both communities have provided thousands
of young recruits to an army of the dispossessed and unemployed. With
no money and the prospect only of further misery, frustration and anger
have now reached a breaking point.”
A recent World Bank report (World Bank Report 29023-KOS, Kosovo
Economic Memorandum 17 May 2004) states that during the 1990s, economic
output declined by 50 percent and by a further 20 percent after the
NATO bombing in 1999. Since 1999, growth in the economy has been driven
exclusively by $2.2 billion in foreign aid and about $0.5 billion in
remittances from expatriate Kosovars. It warns that growth has been
“driven by a post-conflict boom financed by official aid flows and is
unlikely to be sustainable” because foreign governments and
institutions have already reduced aid by 70 percent and will stop it
completely by the end of the decade.
The World Bank report says that Kosovo’s trade balance is severely
one-sided, with imports worth about $1 billion but exports valued at
only $40 million. The economy is “highly reliant” on taxes on these
imports. There has only been $30 million of foreign direct investment
in the region since 1999, mainly in the banking sector.
Agricultural production has just about reached pre-conflict levels, but
the large collective farms (agrokombinats) that dominated the
agricultural sector and produced most of the fertilisers and pesticides
have collapsed.
One of the economy’s greatest problems is electricity. Because the
power stations were bombed and maintenance has been abandoned, there
were 90 days of power cuts in 2002; and on the other days, power was
only available for six hours.
The World Bank points out that workers’ wages—at $220 a month—remain
the lowest in Europe. They have not risen, although Kosovo has had low
taxes and a labour market since 1999 that has “functioned in a
virtually unregulated way with few formal arrangements regulating
employment relationships and wage determinations.” It warns that
because foreign aid has dropped—reducing economic growth—”it will be a
challenge to maintain current incomes over the next few years.”
The only answer to this deteriorating situation offered by the
imperialist powers and institutions is greater repression and policies
that will only exacerbate both inter-ethnic violence and social
hardship.
With “pervasive” unemployment standing at 50 percent, the World Bank
recommends privatising and “downsizing” what remains of the industrial
sector, with the 500 socially owned enterprises being reduced to a
maximum of 100 and the rest liquidated.
Kosovo’s lignite mines are “potentially one of the most economic in
Europe” comprising 10 billion tons of good-quality, easily mined
lignite the World Bank declares, but it recommends reducing the current
number of 4,000 miners by half.
The Trepça lead and zinc mines employed 17,000 miners in 1991 when they
showed “strong economic activity” and exported much of their minerals.
The mines were shut down by K-FOR in 2000, which cited widespread metal
pollution as the reason. The World Bank recommends they be reopened,
but that the 10,000 miners still on their books be reduced to just
2,000.