http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/kosovo/stories/present/kfor/
CNN.com
Opinion
Misguided motives led to the chaos in Kosovo
By Jan Oberg
Special to CNN Interactive
Oberg is director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future
Research (TFF) in Lund, Sweden, where he heads the Conflict-Mitigation Team
to the Balkans, Georgia and Burundi.
(CNN) -- The conflicts that led to war and dissolution of the former
Yugoslavia took shape in the 1970s and early 1980s, and their origins are
much older. The paradox is that the international community's self-appointed
"conflict managers" have not treated the Balkan conflicts as conflicts.
Instead, they have wielded power and practiced Realpolitik disguised as
peacemaking and humanitarianism.
The international community -- a euphemism for a handful of top leaders --
has historically been an integral party to the conflicts, not an impartial
mediator. A policy of disinterested conflict analysis, mediation and
conflict resolution would require different analyses, means and institutions
(with just a minimum of training).
The leaders of the republics of the former Yugoslavia all did their best to
destroy the federation from within. Today's situation, however, is equally
the result of the international community's failed conflict management in
four cases -- Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Kosovo.
None of the peace agreements work as expected. The regions are more
polarized and ethnically cleansed than before. Democracy is formal and
imposed, not genuine. The countries are not armed simply for defense, they
are militarized.
War criminals are still at large. Refugees have not returned in any
significant numbers (except to Kosovo). The deeply human dimensions of
tolerance, forgiveness, reconciliation and societal regeneration have hardly
begun. No commissions on truth or history have been established.
Money -- always plentiful for military purposes -- is conspicuously lacking
for the prevention of civilian violence and for postwar development.
Integration into the EU may not take place for a long time yet.
Finally, and fatally, the U.N. missions to these countries have been thrown
out, substituted with more expensive and heavy-handed missions, or
discontinued prematurely.
The Kosovo operation failed three ways
a.. Failed violence prevention. There were more early warnings about Kosovo
than about any other conflict in the world. Our organization, TFF, published
"Preventing War in Kosovo" in 1992. But Kosovo's problems never made the
international agenda.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which had a
mission in the province, suspended Yugoslavia's membership in 1992 after
Belgrade refused to accommodate the mission.
Kosovo was not part of the Dayton negotiations. Neither was there any other
planned effort at dialogue, trust building, reconciliation or negotiation,
except what non-government organizations could do. The international
community recognized Yugoslavia in 1996 with Kosovo inside it.
b.. Failed peacemaking. The Kosovo Albanians under their elected leader
Ibrahim Rugova (to whom TFF's team served as goodwill adviser, 1992-1996)
advocated pragmatic non-violence. Neither Belgrade nor Western diplomats
understood the potential of this.
Belgrade turned Kosovo into something like a police state, declared it an
internal affair and did nothing to solve the conflict. Prime Minister Milan
Panic's government was the exception (1992-93), and presumably was the best
moment for international mediation. The West ignored it. Rugova resisted. A
few diplomats tried but were ignored back home.
Western actors continued to ignore all civilian peace efforts, clandestinely
gave weapons to the Kosovo Liberation Army (as they did to similar groups in
Croatia and Bosnia), marginalized Rugova, and favored absurd black-and-white
images of what always was, and is, a pretty grayish conflict. Neither could
they get an OSCE mission with 2,000 "verifiers" in place nor could they make
it work for peace.
Then came the parodic "negotiations" in Rambouillet and threats about
bombing. The West had cornered itself: Bombs had to fall to save face, not
to solve any problem.
NATO's bombing blunder predictably converted a limited ethnic
cleansing-cum-war into a massive exodus of refugees into Albania and
Macedonia. The refugees fortunately came back soon after the bombing ended.
In contrast, 800,000 to 900,000 Serbs ethnically cleansed from Croatia,
Bosnia and Kosovo have not received help to return.
c.. Failed postwar peace building. NATO, the U.N. and OSCE, and several
hundred non-governmental organizations, now populate Kosovo. Under their
eyes, about 250,000 Serbs, Romas, Turks, Gorani, Bosnians, Croats and Jews
have been ethnically cleansed from Kosovo by the very ethnic Albanian
leadership with whom the West intimately cooperates.
These various efforts undermine U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, which
set up a civil administration of the province. Kosovo is not treated as a
legal part of Yugoslavia. Belgrade is not consulted. Property and resources
are taken over. The Kosovo Liberation Army has not been disarmed; it has
only changed uniforms and become the Kosovo Protection Force (KPF) with the
same leaders. Yugoslavia is prevented from monitoring its borders. In short,
it is an occupation.
Most of the staffers with the various missions have no experience with
Kosovo before NATO's bombing campaign. Or they have been assigned tasks for
which they have no professional training.
KFOR's 45,000 soldiers -- more than Belgrade ever had in the province --
have been unable to stop ethnic cleansing and restore law and order. Because
of the war, the weapons trade, the sanctions and the internationals, the
Mafia is stronger than ever.
No one in any of the missions works directly and full-time with such
concepts as forgiveness, reconciliation, tolerance, peace. Nor is anyone
trained and educated in such approaches. The U.N. Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK)
receives only a fraction of what it needs, and seems unable to fill
municipal and other positions.
The U.N. and KFOR have so antagonized even the most conciliatory Serbs that
they have left the governing Transitional Council. In principle, there are
four governments: Yugoslavia/Serbia, the U.N., the one under Rugova, and
that of Hacim Thaci, who heads the Kosovo Protection Force. In addition,
missions compete to take the credit -- or to pass the buck.
Worst perhaps, there is no peace agreement. Hardworking mission members --
and donor countries -- do not know whether they contribute to an independent
Kosovo, re-integration into Serbia or to something else. After the local war
and the bombing, all workable solutions imaginable in the 1990s are now
defunct.
Kosovo -- a pawn
The West deliberately leaves the 9 million people of Serbia out of the
postwar perspective (as do the media). Given the destruction it wrought on
the country, such indifference is unethical. It is also evidence that
humanitarian concerns do not guide Realpolitik.
Add to all this the West's refusal to compensate Yugoslavia's trading
partners that paid for our sanctions: There may well be a Stability Pact,
but there will be no stability.
Slowly but surely it will dawn upon the deceived citizens of the West that
the Balkans constitute an exploitable pawn in a larger game related to other
moves -- NATO expansion, containment of Russia, the Caspian Sea oil
discoveries, and the military-industrial complex. Kosovo is one brick in a
new Cold War wall farther east.
It was a Western "civilizing" mission. Nations must accept free markets,
NATO's doctrine, EU militarization, selective human rights for the chosen
people, and democracy in the form of "free" elections. We must accept NATO,
not the U.N. or OSCE, as the only peacemaker under the only superpower.
We are supposed to believe there is no alternative to all this and to
bombing. In the long run, this sort of intellectual poverty threatens to
make us look like the "ugly West" in the eyes of all other cultures.
The Danish traveling journalist, Franz von Jessen, wrote that the Balkans
have always been the change big powers used in their transactions. That was
in 1913.
The recent Balkan tragedies compel us to ask whether our moral and
intellectual growth has matched our technological and material growth. The
absence of self-criticism in the West is ominous.
Serbian News Network - SNN
news@antic.org
http://www.antic.org/
