UN Screws the Pooch in Kosovo

From the Christian Science Monitor: Even in eager Kosovo, nation-building stalls

Five years after 'liberation,' UN officials this week are again working on a plan for the political status of the province.

Yet the greatest blame may lie with the UN itself, according to an internal UN report. Annan dispatched Norwegian UN Ambassador Kai Eide to Kosovo this summer to investigate what's gone wrong and recommend a way out. The report, delivered to Annan in July, was unusually scathing.

"The international community in Kosovo is today seen by Kosovo Albanians as having gone from opening the way to now standing in the way," Eide wrote. "It is seen by Kosovo Serbs as having gone from securing the return of so many to being unable to ensure the return of so few."

Annan has yet to act on the report. "It's still being absorbed," says a UN official.

Back in 1999, reluctance to discuss Kosovo's future was not surprising. After the wars in Bosnia and Croatia claimed more than 200,000 lives, Kosovo earned Milosevic a third strike. So the international community, spooked by a decade of Balkan warfare and potential for further splintering along ethnic lines, intervened on behalf of the Kosovars.

It was a major investment for NATO - an estimated $45 billion - and the West worried what message an independent Kosovo might send around the world: if you want independence, insurgency pays. Kosovo's fate rested in the hands of the UN Security Council. Russia and China are two of the Council's five veto-wielding permanent members, along with the US, Britain, and France. For the Russians, who had allied themselves with their Slavic brethren in Belgrade, an independent Kosovo bolsters the case for an independent Chechnya, not to mention Dagestan, Ingushetia, and so on; for Beijing, there's the specter of statehood for Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

So the UN opted for a familiar tack - kick-the-can diplomacy, as analysts describe it - putting off hard decisions until later. In his report, Eide often cites the world body's lack of clear goals when it comes to Kosovo's future.
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The UN has adopted a process it calls "standards before status," requiring Kosovo to meet satisfactory levels of democratic governance, rule of law, and multiethnic tolerance before beginning discussion of permanent status. Review of Kosovo's standards-before-status progress is slated for mid-2005.

But the standards process is seen as an unreasonably high threshold for a war- ravaged region with little to no tradition of democracy and a generation of Kosovars who opted out of Serbia's repressive administration for underground, Albanian-run institutions. Moreover, the process is seen by Kosovars as demeaning. They note that no such standards-before-status formula was laid out for, say, Iraq, before it regained its sovereignty this summer. Or, in a closer parallel, when East Timor won independence from Indonesia in 2002. And if Israelis and Palestinians were to ever hammer out a peace deal, the United Nations would probably recognize an independent Palestine the next day - before any guarantee of a democratic, tolerant society.

These guys have a more hopeful assessment.