DECEMBER 2007

The Rule of Lawlessness in Kosovo
by Christopher Deliso
balkanalysis.com

The Western powers and their media apologists have generally affirmed the UN occupation of Kosovo as a great victory for humanitarian peacekeeping, democracy-building, and the rule of law. However, the vertiginous process they have overseen and guided in the belated Serbian province since 1999 has resulted in a situation on the ground far from these ideals.

The sorry travesty of the Kosovo occupation has increasingly meant the rewarding of ethnic cleansing and criminal violence, the validation of fraudulent stories as the truth, the violation of the basic workings of the international legal system, the bald-faced contradiction of the universality of international justice, and most recently, a wanton disregard for the procedure of multinational law enforcement cooperation.

Kosovo's international minders may be many things, but one thing they are not is brave. It is high time for them to come forward and say it – the independence for Kosovo they are pushing so hard has nothing to do with Western values, democracy, and the rule of law, but rather with cold, calculated realpolitik. The longer they continue to hide behind these shoddy pretensions, the more damage they do to any conception of international justice and, by implication, international relations.

The "final status" of Kosovo will probably not prove powerful enough to bring down the international system, but it will affect it. The aftershocks will be destructive for not only neighboring Balkan states, but also for other frozen conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus where the stakes – and the risks – for international confrontation are even higher. The Kosovo intervention was always a wildly reckless, shortsighted one, but it now appears that it may have wider repercussions.

March: A Graveyard of Anniversaries

All things considered, this March was a pretty rough month for the Serbs, and every year it seems to be getting worse. Among the many infamous dates the month now includes are the launch of NATO bombing in 1999 (March 24), the 2003 assassination of Zoran Djindjic (March 12), the pogrom of 2004 in Kosovo (March 17), and now the recent suspicious deaths of Milan Babic (March 5) and Slobodan Milosevic (March 11).

The latest addition to the list was the vicious stabbing of a Serbian teenager on the Mitrovica bridge in Kosovo on March 28. Indeed, the only dark date that seems to have passed them by is the ides of March – but hey, there's always next year.

The Death and Remembrance of Slobodan Milosevic

While celebrating this litany of dark events has become an annual ritual, the inaugural ceremony for this year's main addition to the list – the death of Milosevic – proved very helpful for Kosovo's pro-independence lobby. First of all, it meant the end of an embarrassing trial that, while The Hague said it was winning, would have more likely ended without the genocide convictions prosecutor Carla Del Ponte so craved. The Western media had essentially stopped covering the trial once Milosevic began his own defense, meaning that the many contradictions, sham testimonies, and deceitful witnesses he uncovered never registered in the popular mind – and thus barely made a dent in the "historical" record, which had decreed all along that Milosevic was guilty before he had even been tried. With his death, the case came to a dramatic halt, the prosecution claiming that the former Serbian president "would have" been found guilty in the end.

This was enough for the media, which largely seconded The Hague's presumptive verdict, usually substituting well-worn statistics of dubious accuracy and provenance in place of hard evidence. As Canadian journalist Scott Taylor characterized it shortly afterwards, the blanket condemnation of Milosevic in the Western media had "the force of a tidal wave," in one moment rolling over and wiping out all of the efforts that principled researchers have made over the last few years to carefully sift fact from fiction and to assign blame in its proper proportions to all of the culprits involved in the sad demise of Yugoslavia.

The Painful Case of Agim Ceku

Aside from the guilty-before-proven-anything dimension of The Hague's reaction to Milosevic's death, another element in the growing rule of lawlessness surrounding Kosovo has been the furious effort of the province's UN minders to elevate Kosovo Albanian Agim Ceku, former KLA commander and before that, a mercenary leader in the Croat army, to prime minister of Kosovo. Informed sources in the UN administration aver that this was part of the plan all along; the U.S. especially was adamant that a strong leader be in place for the final status negotiations now underway, and whether or not Ceku was a war criminal was beside the point. Scott Taylor makes a convincing case that he was. Nevertheless, The Hague Tribunal will certainly never indict him now.

Ceku is the replacement candidate for Ramush Haradinaj, another former KLA man who was indicted by The Hague but who has been out for good behavior for almost a year now. The two have control over Kosovo's armed institutions and militias; in other words, they will decide whether independence will be carried out the peaceful or the violent way. Kosovo's international overseers would like to see (largely for their own safety) that it is done in the former manner.

While the UNMIK top officials' fawning adulation of Ceku has been fairly sickening in itself, their extracurricular intercessions to remove his name from the Interpol list is of another order. Think about it: a random grouping of bureaucrats appointed by the United Nations, on temporary contracts in a country to which they owe no permanent obligations, gets to give orders to the world's only legitimate international police organization, without any discussion of the validity of their request. They did not debate any of the reasons why Ceku deserved or did not deserve to be on that list; it was purely a matter of expediency, meant to ensure that the new "prime minister" would be able to travel freely throughout Europe. And why not? After all, everything is now Milosevic's fault anyway, right?

The Plight of Kosovo's Forgotten Refugees

A nagging problem for those who would set Kosovo free is what to do with the Serbs, the ones who have already become internal refugees and those still in the enclaves who will soon be joining them. In one "temporary" shelter north of Mitrovica, near the internal border with Serbia, a couple dozen Serbs, mostly elderly, have been living for two or even seven years. They live in rooms a little bigger than the average American's broom closet and eat low-grade donated food, which they display in plastic buckets; "food not fit for a pig!" said one angry refugee. These people either have nowhere else to go, or are stubbornly refusing to leave Kosovo. They come from villages like Lipljan and Kosovo Polje in central Kosovo; a few have even had the "double refugee" experience, being uprooted from Serbian enclaves in Croatia in the 1990s, resettled in Kosovo, and expelled again. For these experiences, they can thank people like Agim Ceku, who now "genuinely expects" that the Serbs will be happy to live in the new Kosovo.

Speaking with the refugees, the implausibility of this scenario becomes apparent. "I don't want to leave Kosovo," says one woman, 39-year-old Planinka Aleksic, "but if the Albanians win independence, this is the end for us here." Others second her opinion. None have any hopes in the Belgrade government's resolve in the negotiations, either. "After everything we have suffered, I don't even know what I'd say to [Serbian President Boris] Tadic," adds another woman. A calendar donated by the Kosovo Force UN military hangs in one shabby room; vicious in its irony, it reads in Serbian, KFOR brine o vasoj buducnosti – "KFOR cares for your future."

The Future of Kosovo: Carrots, but No Sticks

The mood was the same in Gracanica, the main Serbian enclave in central Kosovo, where (as most everywhere else) seven years after the UN's arrival, waterlogged potholes still mark the sunken roads. Gracanica is still a thriving, if besieged, Serbian area, which has been more protected than others due to the presence of a magnificent 14th century cathedral. It is a bizarre kind of half-life here, where Serbian teens sip coffee in a bright café playing pop music under the protection of foreign soldiers, with little else to do, needing escorts to travel and fully aware that they are living on borrowed time.

At the two-year anniversary commemoration of the March 17 pogrom, held in front of the church, Kosovo Serbs of all ages gathered to mark the day with a modest religious ceremony. People young and old expressed the same opinion: the future will be brief. "We will leave in one or two years [following independence]," said 19-year-old Marina, a student from the village. "We have nothing to do, no chance for jobs, and no security."

Internationals monitoring the situation agree. A senior official in a Kosovo humanitarian agency who has participated in the UN mission since the beginning believes that the Serbs do not realistically have any place in the future Kosovo. The province will become independent, according to the official, though a strong international presence will remain – partially because the mission has become a cash cow for so many.

The tricky process of assigning Kosovo "conditional" independence will be executed through a combination of "carrots and sticks," he says. However, it is hard to see where the "sticks" are here: after all, it is not as if the Albanians are going to be bombed for misbehavior, should they succeed in removing the last of the Serbs, Turks, Macedonian Muslims, and Romas from Kosovo. There may well be a big movement of people into Kosovo, but this influx of unwilling returnees is likely to come from the ranks of thousands of former Albanian refugees Western countries are eager to get rid of. But it's hard to see how anyone forced to give up a new life in Western Europe for the dismal prospects offered in Kosovo is going to arrive in a particularly good mood. This also bodes ill for the future of whatever minorities are left.

The forecast of this official coincides with that of the Serbs themselves: "The more vulnerable and isolated [Serb] enclaves will be emptied within one to two years. … I give [North] Mitrovica and the other entirely Serbian-populated areas to the north 10 years at the most. That's it."

Indeed, fears based on experience exist in the currently healthy enclave of North Mitrovica, which recently came under renewed intimidation with the stabbing of a Serbian teenager on the bridge that divides the ethnicities. Thirty-two-year-old Goran Antic, a refugee from Svinjare, a village just south of the city that was ethnically cleansed in the riots of March 2004, recounts how the KFOR troops there – as elsewhere – actually abetted the goals of the "spontaneous" Albanian rioters, surreptitiously controlled by the likes of Ceku and Haradinaj.

"Several thousand [Albanians] came at us from three sides," he says. "We had only 205 people in the village, but we had a few rifles that were buried in case of such an emergency, and were able to fight them off for a few hours." Nevertheless, says Antic, "When the French [KFOR soldiers] came, they said, 'you're either staying here or coming with us – we can't protect you.' We had to leave, and then the Albanians came and stole everything they could, and burnt the rest. And now [UNMIK] is telling us to return to our village? How?"

Indeed, the UN has for the past year been continually restricting its activities and movements within Kosovo, as fears for their own safety mount. When an Albanian youth group went about flattening the tires of UN cars parked in front of Pristina's main police station a few months ago, no action was taken; rather, the UN simply told its police to find other places to park. Here, moving the problem somewhere else, as with the human transport of Serbian refugees, substitutes for tackling the root causes of it. "If the UN can't protect its own vehicles in the center of town, how are we going to protect some remote Serbian enclave?" says one American cop who was present during the incident. "The answer is, we're not."

Lawlessness Confirmed

Heading into the spring, when the ground thaws and war season starts anew in the Balkans, Kosovo is no closer to a fair and equitable solution for all of its citizens, though it is certainly closer to independence. Yet the process which has led to this outcome has been utterly at variance with all of the vaunted ideals championed by the UN and guaranteed to be the bedrock for a newer, better Kosovo. The "rule of law" has been sacrificed since the moment when NATO illegally, without UN approval, began bombing a sovereign country that had not threatened it nor any of its member states.

A Final Solution

Every major decision made since then has been motivated not by law but by political exigencies and geo-strategic intrigue; some, such as Milosevic, are "proven" guilty of war crimes before their trials have even concluded, while others, such as Ceku, are given a free pass because of their political usefulness. The UN occupying regime, which claims legal control of Kosovo, can neither enforce the barest semblance of law, nor grant the barest minimum of human rights to the minority populations. Nor can it protect the majority Albanian population from its own criminal elements, either, seeing as it owes its continued well-being to their generous hospitality.

In consideration of the amount of creative improvisation that has characterized NATO's logic of aggression and the operations of the UN in Kosovo since 1999, we might suggest adding one stipulation for those foreign "advisers" now guiding the negotiation process. It is a very simple one: let he who would grant independence to Kosovo agree to move there for the rest of his life, safe in the full guarantee that he will enjoy life under its budding democracy and rule of law.

After all, if life in an independent Kosovo will be good enough for the province's Albanians, Serbs, Romas, Turks, and Macedonian Muslims, why shouldn't it be good enough for those altruistic foreigners so eager to determine its future?

Christopher Deliso is a Balkan-based journalist, travel writer and critic of interventionist foreign policy. Over the past few years, Mr. Deliso's writing for Antiwar.com, UPI, various American newspapers, websites and European strategic analysis firms has taken him everywhere from the shores of the Adriatic to the top of the Caucasus Mountains. Mr Deliso holds a master's degree with distinction in Byzantine Studies from Oxford University, and also manages the Balkan-interest news and analysis website.