Looking Back Facing Forward One
Reporter's View of the Balkans
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Kosovar Albanian families know, from years of letters, phone calls and satellite-dish broadcasts from Greece, Italy, Germany, France, Great Britain and the U.S. what the “civilized world” means by normality. “But,” says the UN Special Representative for Kosovo for the first year-and-a-half of international administration, Dr. Bernard Kouchner, a former French Minister of Health and the founder of Doctors Without Borders, “in the usual sense of your country or mine, we are far from normality. In the Balkan style, the Balkan way, though,” he observes, “we are coming back slowly to normality. That is to say, the [Serb and Albanian] communities are far from living with each other, loving each other. But they are not so much killing each other.”

Not so much, perhaps, but the possibility never seems far off in Kosovo. At the border, for example, between Montenegro and Kosovo, translator Dada Jovanovic and I have our papers and KFOR (the NATO military forces in Kosovo) cards taken away for a long time. Then, we learn that because they have expired, the KFOR cards are being taken away forever. This is potentially a serious matter, especially for Dada. My American passport protects me, but she’s a Serb, and without the card saying that KFOR knows who she is, just running into the wrong police checkpoint could spark real danger.

We say we won’t move on without the expired cards, which we expected to exchange for new ones the next day. The Italian soldiers at the border tell us that we will move on or go back to Montengro. Since it is already midnight on a day when driving through fog, rain, and for the last two hours, heavy, wet, slippery snow, began at 9 a.m., we’re ready to concede when Dada is called back.

A few minutes pass and then Dada finally returns to the car, pale and shaken. “This is incredible,” she says. “I just had to sign a paper for KFOR admitting that I am a Serb and that if I am killed on this visit to Kosovo, it’s not their fault.”

“We know the two thing we have to do before any foreign capital comes into Kosovo and before Kosovo is treated like a part of Europe,” says a young Kosovar Albanian businessman I speak to a few days later in the town of Pec. “A stable, civil society has to be established, which means Serbs who fled Kosovo should be allowed to return and to live here treated equally under the law and with civility by their Albanian neighbors. That’s one. Two: we must establish a free and fair economy with modern and effective laws. Most people here understand that,” he continues. “Of those who don’t, only a small minority are real extremists.”

That minority, though, “can paralyze a majority that wants civility and peace,” says Gordon McRae, a Canadian police officer just a month from leaving his post as Chief of Operations for the UN Civil Police Unit in Kosovo. “In a bar, for example, two people can terrorize the whole place if they are determined to fight one another, much less attack the other people in the place.”

The extremists that McRae is referring to are the left-over functionaries and hit squads from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), now making mafia money. In one local town they have installed drone “company managers” over real managers, and hired hundreds of “war veterans” for no-show jobs. Elsewhere, they run street stalls selling bootleg cigarettes and compact discs and dozens of brothels renting, leasing and selling young women into sexual slavery.

KLA alumni have also kept up the violence and pressure on the remaining Serbs in Kosovo, and have even mounted paramilitary campaigns to “liberate” Albanian villages inside Serbia. The NATO military forces, and most notably their American component, have failed to stop this. There was a U.S.-backed UN plan to return hundreds of Serbs to villages near the town of Istok in northern Kosovo, but local Albanians protested. The plan stopped dead in its tracks.

“We’re the legitimate authority here and people recognize that,” McRae. “But there’s an illegitimate authority, a determined extreme group out to produce instability as well as crime. So who is running this place,” he asks, “the legitimate authority or the illegitimate? Unfortunately, that’s a real question, especially in the minds of many Kosovars.”

“If there is a ‘next time’ in Kosovo,” Bernard Kouchner says, looking to the next international rescue effort, “we have to come up with a full emergency kit of administration.” Echoing an idea presented in the Bosnian context by Deputy UN Special Representative Jacques Klein, Kouchner says, “We should think about imposing a state of emergency and set up a temporary judicial system and police. This should not be a military government but it must be done with the military.”

General Klein edges closer to recommending full military occupation on the models of Germany and Japan after World War II. “The mistake we made here in Bosnia-Herzegovina—and they made a similar mistake in Kosovo—is that we came in here thinking, if we stop the violence, they will end the war. But they didn’t. The war went on bureaucratically, through obstruction and obfuscation. In Nazi Germany, by 1942-43, we were already drafting a plan. No member of the Nazi Party would participate in government until de-Nazification was complete. We wrote the German Constitution.”

“General Douglas MacArthur in Japan gave women the vote, created labor unions, created [land reform],” he continues. “In other words, we had a plan of governance. Today, the West still has not communicated what they think the end state is here in Bosnia, or in Kosovo. [British historian Arnold] Toynbee said, every nation has an agenda, has interests, and if you don’t have an agenda, you become the victim of somebody else’s. In Kosovo, we became the victim of Milosevic and the Kosovo Liberation Army’s agendas.”

As the person who has sorted thro-ugh all that in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner deserves the final word: “The main thing about normality is that it takes time. Cultures, traditions, history, centuries of confrontation cannot just be swept away in two years or twenty.”

“There is a real human speed,” Kouchner continues. “We cannot change the behavior of people the way we change their Constitutions. Media’s speed, human speed and political speed are not all the same. We have to face media people saying, ‘What have you done in a year and a half?’ This is impossible. This is a long process.”

“Think of Northern Ireland,” Kouchner says. “It’s been 30 years there, and it’s not finished.”

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