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Multiethnic Kosovo is a dream untrue U.S. officials, rights workers cite lack of protection in Serbian, Gypsy enclaves Friday, November 19, 1999 By Philip Smucker, Special to the Post-Gazette
WASHINGTON -- Senior U.S. officials and human rights workers say the prospects for a
multiethnic Kosovo are fading fast five months after the international community took control
of the embattled Serbian province.
Philip Smucker is a free-lance journalist based in Yugoslavia who frequently writes for the Post-Gazette.
That dire assessment comes in advance of President Clinton’s high-profile visit to Kosovo this
month. The Clinton administration since 1995 has referred to its policy of promoting
multiethnicity in the Balkans as a centerpiece of its foreign policy.
But a senior U.S. official fresh back from a trip to the province said he was “extremely
disappointed” with the inability of the U.N. mission to get a handle on its mandate to improve
stability and protect minorities.
A senior analyst for the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch went further, saying the United
Nations’ stated efforts to create a multiethnic Kosovo are already headed for complete failure.
“The key moment was in the first months of the international mission, but that has passed,
and now it is like closing the barn door after the animals have fled,” said Freddy Abrams, the
Human Rights Watch official currently visiting Pristina to assess the situation there.
Despite a recent upsurge in murders in Kosovo, the overall rate of crimes against minorities
has gone down in recent weeks, largely because most minorities have fled to ethnically pure
enclaves.
Abrams said adequate protection and economic support for Serbs and Gypsies in these
enclaves simply does not exist. “It is a race now against inevitability because these minorities
have no access to basic social services, nor do they have long term economic prospects. I don’t
see any viability.”
The U.N. mission has a broad mandate to work with a 40,000-strong NATO-led peacekeeping
force in Kosovo to create stability in Kosovo.
The United Nations spends some $600 million a year in Kosovo, and the NATO mission there is
estimated to cost three times that.
But five months after the two missions began, hundreds of criminals have been arrested but
none of them has been brought to trial. Albanian analysts say organized crime is on the rise, and
a mood of anarchy has fostered a rising tide of what they call Albanian “fascism.”
A senior U.S. official said both Albanians and Serbs are coming to despise the foreign presence
in Kosovo for different reasons.
Albanians hate the United Nations for upholding a mandate that essentially locks Kosovo into
Serbia despite its independence aspirations.
Many of them, including Dr. Ibrahim Rugova, arguably the province’s most popular
politician, are bitter at the U.N. refusal to make good on promises for a general election next
spring. Serbs, in turn, hate the United Nations because hundreds of international policeman
have done little to secure their homes from revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians.
Western officials have praised, however, the belated efforts by the U.N. High Commissioner
for Refugees, or UNHCR, workers to move embattled Serbs and Gypsies out of danger when
they have come under attack.
“The UNHCR has now started a bus service to make it easier for people to travel, and they
have started to respond to requests for minorities trapped in enclaves and begging to get out of
Kosovo,” said Abrams.
Ironically, UNHCR- provided assistance for fleeing Serbian and Albanian refugees has led to
accusations that the mission is indirectly aiding and abetting “ethnic cleansing.” In a
controversial U.N. assessment of its failures in Srebrenica in 1995 that was released Tuesday,
the United Nations blamed itself for not providing adequate safety to the embattled Muslim
minority in Bosnia. But the decision then to stick with the idea of a “safe haven,” even when
Srebrenica’s walls were tumbling -- rather than aid an exodus -- led to the slaughter of some
7,000 Muslim males. Serbian Gen. Ratko Mladic, who micromanaged that assault, has been
indicted as a war criminal but now resides comfortably in Serbia.
U.S. State Department officials place most of the blame for the Kosovo failures on the
shoulders of the U.N. mission, while human rights officials like Abrams say NATO is equally
responsible for what he called “the enclavization” of Kosovo.
Even in the U.S.-run sector around the eastern Kosovo city of Gnjilane, the situation for
Serbs has steadily deteriorated. Several dozen kidnappings of Serbian males in the U.S. sector
remain unsolved, and Serbs there complain that they are being strangled economically by job
firings and grenade attacks.
The upshot of the alleged U.N. and NATO failures in Kosovo has given the Serbian
dictatorship a strong “I told you so” argument that bolsters its own authority at the very time
when U.S. officials say they are committed to trying to unseat Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic through democratic means. Milosevic goaded his own people to war in Kosovo on the
grounds that the international community had no interest in their human rights.
“The U.N.’s and NATO’s failure to adequately protect minorities in Kosovo has played into the
hands of … Milosevic, giving him another tool in his bag to manipulate public opinion in his
favor,” Abrams said.
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