The international community still has some tough lessons to learn. Once the political will is in place, it successfully ends what is generally ethnic fighting. But the end of conflict itself does not always bring lasting peace. Very often the peacekeepers are dealing with the psychological debris of hundreds of years of history and deep chasms of communal distrust.
Policing the end of conflict and helping turn it into a real peace is extremely difficult. The UN KFOR troops in Kosovo have just discovered how difficult. The majority of the UN personnel in this formerly Serb-run province are soldiers, and police work requires a different order of approach to that of the professional soldier.
The outbreak of ethnic violence in Kosovo appears to have caught the KFOR peacekeepers by surprise. Following rumors that a Serb may have been indirectly responsible for the accidental drowning of two Albanian girls, ethnic Albanians launched a series of apparently coordinated attacks on their ethnic Serb neighbors. Some 20 Serbs have so far died. Even if such lawlessness came as a surprise, it should have been stopped immediately, instead of being allowed to spread through much of Kosovo. As a result of the administrative and command failure, a further 1,000 troops are being assigned to KFOR. Some 750 of these new men will be provided by Britain, which was responsible for much of the early policing of the province, after the Belgrade government withdrew.
Yet blaming the soldiers alone for failing to keep the peace is clearly unfair. The shortcomings go much further. In essence, the UN has been unable after four years of overseeing Kosovo to resolve disputes over the region’s future. The UN negotiators have rejected plans suggested in Belgrade that the province be partitioned, with the remaining Serb majority areas going to Serbia and the rest becoming an autonomous region. There are many other unresolved issues, such as compensation for the 100,000 Serbs, many of them relatively recent immigrants, who were driven from Kosovo by triumphant ethnic Albanians.
The tragedy is that violent Serb nationalism and the flow of Serbian immigration destroyed a successful multiethnic society, akin to that which once existed in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Many Albanian nationalists are now out to pay back the Serbs for their past crimes. Innocent Serbs have been caught up in the violence and fresh grounds laid for future hatred and distrust.
Had the UN administration in Kosovo behaved with more resolution from the start of its Kosovo mandate, the political situation and the economy might not have drifted so dangerously. The UN Security Council needs to wake up to the reality that it is wasting time and opportunity in Kosovo. Unless it grabs hold of the situation, and soon, the situation is going to grab hold of it.
