The Chaos of Postwar Kosovo

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 6, 1999 | by Jamie Dettmer

At the end of June, news alert! ran a story detailing the problems the allies would confront in postwar Kosovo. Based on highly placed U.S. and European sources, the article reported that NATO war councils almost completely had overlooked planning for the monumental task of ferrying hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanian refugees back to their burnt-out homes, feeding and sheltering them for weeks and even months to come -- not to speak of the difficulties of policing the benighted province.

French foreign-ministry officials -- and some of their counterparts in other NATO countries, including the United States -- expressed concern that the alliance was ill-prepared for the Balkan challenges ahead. In Washington during the war, the fast-talking, chain-smoking Julia Taft, assistant secretary for population, refugees and migration at the State Department, urged top White House officials to focus also on postwar planning -- to little avail. Her efforts to get serious thinking done about how to police Kosovo fell on deaf ears. One Pentagon official questioned why the task couldn't be given over to the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, earning a magisterial rebuke and prompting a lecture on the KLA's links with drug traffickers, sources say.

Still two months after the war's conclusion and the United Nations and NATO still have been unable to assemble a viable international civilian police force in the devastated province -- or even the beginnings of one. Prospective officers assigned by some countries are unsuited for their role. On Aug. 10, Michael Jorsback, chief of the United Nations' international police force in Kosovo, admitted that 86 of the 470 police officers sent had not been assigned duties and likely were to be returned. Fifty from Nepal had arrived without handguns, while 39 from Bangladesh were administrative staff only and had no experience in patrolling mean streets.

The poor quality of the officers comes at a time of continuing high levels of violence in the province. Peacekeeping soldiers increasingly are becoming targets themselves for attacks from Albanian militants linked to the KLA. On Aug. 9 a French soldier was injured when a crowd of baying Kosovar Albanians sought to break through a cordon of peace-keepers set up to protect Serbs in the town of Mitrovica. Altogether more than 100 Serbs have been killed by Albanians, including 14 Serbs who were shot dead on July 23 as they harvested corn in a village south of Pristina. Two-thirds of the Serbs' prewar population of 180,000 have fled and more than 20,000 ethnic Turks and a similar-sized Gypsy population feel threatened as well.

As the United Nations continues with its snaillike effort to assemble a police force, Bernard Kouchner, the Frenchman who is in charge of administering the province, is finding his power paling compared with the clout wielded by the KLA's Hashim Thaci. The allies have only been able to watch as KLA appointees have moved into government offices and set about governing. The KLA's tactic is clear: Undertake a stealthlike coup and offer the United Nations and NATO a fait accompli. Thaci has made it clear he expects independence for the province.

While the worst-case scenarios of not enough food and medicine for the province in the immediate weeks following the war were inaccurate, U.N. sources tell news alert! the West shouldn't be complacent about the looming winter. They predict a major problem in terms of a shortage of shelter and food when the harsh Balkan winter hits.