War Councils Overlooked Postwar Plans for Refugees

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 28, 1999 | by Jamie Dettmer

PARIS, FRANCE

Optimism is in the air. A peace plan that would see a halt to NATO's two-month-long bombing campaign against Yugoslavia has been proposed and accepted, and officials here are hopeful that Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic will withdraw his forces from the benighted province of Kosovo and allow deployment of separate NATO-led and Russian peacekeepers.

But hope turns to despair when officials are questioned about the monumental task of ferrying hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanian refugees back to their burnt-out and bombed homes, feeding and sheltering them for weeks and even months to come and caring for hundreds of thousands of others who remained in the province during the air strikes -- many of whom are suffering from advanced stages of malnutrition and are desperately ill.

French foreign-ministry officials -- and some of their counterparts in other NATO countries, including the United States -- are fearful that the alliance is ill-prepared to administer and feed a postwar Kosovo. They say that a "negligent" lack of any detailed NATO or U.N. contingency planning for coping with the wrecked province will compound the terrible, life-threatening challenges Kosovar Albanians will face in the early weeks and months following the end of the conflict. They fear the result may be an awful humanitarian disaster -- one that could overshadow the chaos of dealing with the flood of refugees in the early days of the war.

"There has to be a meeting of minds and quickly between the United Nations and NATO about how Kosovo is going to be administered," says a senior U.S. official. "Until the last few days we have not been able to get anyone to listen to us or think about the future. There are no serious plans on the table, just some vague writings that are not in the realm of reality. In the first few days we will not have the leeway to make mistakes -- if we get it wrong hundreds, even thousands, could die. No one has even given much thought to the fact that we will need to build refugee camps in Kosovo itself."

In Washington, the fast-talking, chain-smoking Julia Taft, assistant secretary for population, refugees and migration at the State Department, has been pressing White House officials for weeks, including National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, to focus more on postwar planning but to little avail, say administration sources.

At several daily White House meetings of senior officials tasked with operational planning for the Kosovo war, Taft has raised the specter of the disasters that could rock NATO if it enters a post-conflict period unprepared for what it is likely to confront. She has warned that the situation in Kosovo in terms of food, shelter, medical resources and human misery will be desperate. At one meeting an Army colonel suggested that sheltering hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians would be easy -- all it would take would be a few tons of plastic sheeting, he argued. He was rebuked by others attending the session and reminded of the harshness of Balkan autumns and winters and of the scale of destruction and suffering NATO and Russian peacekeepers will face when they finally enter the province.

Only belatedly have the warnings of Taft and her counterparts in other NATO foreign ministries started to be heeded by their war-consumed political bosses, although still not with the alacrity some officials argue is needed. In the first week of June, a meeting was held in Brussels to start the detailed planning for an Interim Political Administration, or IPA, to oversee postwar Kosovo. At the meeting several officials raised the fear that NATO and the United Nations would fail to coordinate their efforts, resulting in the further suffering of Kosovar Albanians.

"We need each other, and at the moment there is too much turf-fighting between the organizations," says a European diplomat. "Not one international organization is going to be able to cope. I tell you we are going to find a terrible tableau of suffering in Kosovo when we get in -- it will be like entering the Warsaw ghetto. There are tens of thousands of people holed up in the mountains who are literally on their last legs -- we need to have food and medical supplies on hand and the means to distribute them quickly. There isn't a moment to waste."

Some officials maintain that IPA planners in what is called the Civilian-Military Cell are making a mistake in not talking with various Kosovar Albanian political factions -- from the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, to democratically elected Kosovar Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova and other democrats -- about how the province will be governed in the first two to three months. "There are so many things we need to sort out with them -- if we don't, we could see them at each other's throats" says a French NATO official. "One suggestion I've heard from the American military is that the KLA should be left to police the province. That would be fine, if we could stop the KLA from trafficking in drags and women."