black hole of Europe, The

Spectator, The, Nov 9, 2002 by Sutton, Andrew

Andrew Sutton on the miseries, corruption and human-rights abuses in Kosovo, the UN's first-ever protectorate

Pristina

I REACHED what remained of the fire-- ravaged train just as the downpour started. Inside, two burly Kosovar Albanian railwaymen in orange boiler suits sat on a twisted iron spar, smoking and sheltering from the weather. Before the war, this train took Serb men from their village to the quarry where they mined for coal. Then, one day, KLA fighters prised away a section of track near the northern town of Vushtrri, sending the train down an embankment. The workers survived the wreck, but snipers lay in wait. `Some of them escaped,' one of the railwaymen said, and swore obscenely.

Such are the levels of seething hatred still present in Kosovo. When the United Nations arrived in 1999, it took on a province ravaged by Milosevic's forces, and with an infrastructure bombed to rubble. The job was never going to be easy, and, recognising that more was required than the usual complement of peacekeepers, advisers and itinerant statesmen, the UN took a momentous step: Kosovo became its first-ever protectorate, a nation adopted by 185 parents.

Three years on, it is hard to find anyone, either local or 'international', in this wretched province who has a good word to say about the organisation. And it is not just the well-documented corruption and bungling that have led some of Kosovo's graffiti-writers to daub anti-UN slogans where once they scrawled fulsome thanks. Many of the province's sorrows result from deliberate policies of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (Unmik); policies designed by technocrats for politicians.

Take an alarming example from the Unmik police. The 49-nation force was cobbled together to show the locals how it's done, but the trouble is, not all the boys in blue berets seem to know how it's done themselves.

`You have people coming from some countries who don't know what it means to really police. They haven't done it themselves. They get here and they pass the testing,' said one officer, who asked not to be named. `Very few people are rejected, very few.' Never mind that some of these policemen have never driven in their jobs before, or have never worked in a city, or barely speak English (let alone Albanian). It would be politically inconvenient to set the standard too high - what if people were to start failing to reach it? Worse, what if it turned out that some countries' police are better trained than others? In the minds of the UN functionaries who set the rules, these perils are terrifying. If in doubt, give the officer his gun and hope for the best.

This policy has had consequences: recently a six-year-old girl and her older brother were killed here, knocked down by a Ghanaian policeman who lost control while driving his high-powered police car at more than twice the speed limit. A short walk from Pristina's tiny airport, there is a chilling sight. Behind a thin chain-link fence, row upon row of wrecked red-andwhite Toyotas bear tragic witness to the fact that such accidents are not rare.

The car lot is only one of the many dirty secrets created by Unmik's love of policy that is made for show. Last month the BBC Radio Four programme Face the Facts reported on the unexploded ordnance that still litters parts of Kosovo. The UN established a new acronym, staffed it with bureaucrats and decided that the province would be safe by 31 December 2001. Sure enough, when that day came, experts from all mine-clearance charities were ordered to stop work, and the UN declared the land 'pristine'. It was a convenient lie, and it has ensured civilian deaths for many years to come.

Kosovo was meant to be a showcase of the world's governments working together as equals to sow peace and goodwill, but the view from the ground is very different. The Kosovo people have long harboured a suspicion that Unmik is not here to help them, but to serve the UN's own political imperatives. Stick together at all costs, Unmik's motto became, whether it's working or not. That fatal car went, presumably, to Unmik's mechanical graveyard. The driver was released after two weeks in custody.

Migjen Kelmendi, a respected Kosovar intellectual turned newspaper editor, concedes that many locals still hold unrealistic expectations of Unmik, but he pleads for the officials to come down from `their towers'. `We have never lived in a democracy - we don't know how it looks. We need an interpreter to tell us how it looks in a normal Western country,' he says.

But this is a very distorted vision of what a Western country should look like. Three years after the UN set up shop here, unemployment stands at 57 per cent and corruption is rife. Last month the head of Kosovo's 'Ombudsperson' institution, Marek Antoni Nowicki, warned of a human-rights `black hole' opening up in Europe's backyard. In private, his deputy, Donna Gomien, accuses the UN of indifference towards human-rights abuses perpetrated by its own staff; of effectively allowing personnel accused of brutality to shield behind a wall of official silence. Cases are dealt with as internal disciplinary matters, names are not divulged, and any disciplinary action that is taken remains secret, even from the Ombudsperson whose role it is to monitor abuses of authority.