Bringing the rule of law to Kosovo’s entrenched crime culture isn’t going to be easy, warns Elizabeth Pond. But she believes the EU’s peacekeepers have advantages that were denied its predecessor the “unloved UNMIK”
The European Union's efforts to ensure Serb minority rights in Kosovo, the world's newest state, have already made headlines, but they may well be the easiest of the jobs confronting the most ambitious peacekeeping operation the EU has ever mounted. The EULEX rule-of-law mission has a pioneering role in the new field of post-conflict executive policing, and its toughest assignment will be to shrink the power of organised crime there.
Ethnic violence since Kosovo’s independence has so far been minimal. In mid-March a confrontation at the courthouse in Serb-majority northern Mitrovica saw one Ukrainian police officer die and 64 internationals and half as many protestors injured in the mêlée. Serb rioters fired automatic weapons and threw 20 to 30 assault grenades at international police and NATO/KFOR peacekeepers. They did not, however, attack Kosovar Albanians.
Serb-Albanian clashes have been isolated and have not produced casualties. And significantly, that single major confrontation in northern Mitrovica was, according to Serbian Defense Minister Dragan Sutanovac, not initiated by Kosovars, but was orchestrated by Serbia’s Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica without the knowledge of the full cabinet. International observers in Pristina interpreted the incident as a provocation by the Serbian security services, which have run "parallel structures" among Serbs from ten safehouses in Kosovo ever since massive Serbian ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians triggered NATO’s intervention in 1999 and the province’s subsequent governance by the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). Apparently, the aim was to goad the Albanians to overreact on the pattern of anti-Serb riots in 2004 that left 20 dead, more than 900 injured, 4100 Serbs and Roma homeless, and 36 Serb churches and monasteries desecrated.
This time around, the disciplined Kosovar Albanians did not respond in kind. No mobs attacked the concentration of Serbs in northern Mitrovica, or ageing Serb farmers in the vulnerable enclaves in Kosovo's south. "We will not provoke, and we will not be provoked," declared Bajram Rexhepi, Mitrovica’s mayor, in an interview. He said the Albanians will respect scrupulously all the guarantees of minority rights and positive discrimination that had been enshrined in the Ahtisaari plan for "supervised independence" proposed in March 2007 by the UN’s Special Envoy, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari. Now, having won that independence after close to a century of heavy-handed Serbian rule, Rexhepi is among those Kosovar Albanians who point out that they can afford to be generous in implementing what is widely regarded as the most far-reaching legal protection of minority rights in Europe.
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MATTERS OF OPINION |
What Serbs feared about Kosovo's independence
A year before Kosovo’s independence, Serbs – from Kosovo and Serbia - predicted that a declaration of independence would destabilise the region. A smaller proportion – under one in five Serbs – thought that it might lead to war.
When asked in an early 2007 Gallup poll whether they thought that there would be another war in Kosovo, 16% of Serbs and 15% of Kosovar Serbs replied that they believed there would be, with 54% and 44%, respectively, disagreeing. More than 30% said they didn’t know. Only 7% of Kosovar Albanians were of the same opinion, while eight in 10 did not think there would be war.
Levels of confidence in national government remain low across the Balkan region. The exceptions were Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the only countries where more people express confidence in their government than not. In both Kosovo and Serbia, levels of confidence in the national government were below 40%, whereas more than half of the population in each country said they did not have confidence in their political leaders. This majority-held view was echoed in Albania, Croatia and Macedonia.
http://www.gallupworldpoll.com/ |
Bujar Bukoshi, a member of parliament who in the 1990s collected taxes for the Kosovar independence movement from the large Albanian diaspora in western Europe, agrees. He notes that the Albanians "had to sacrifice a lot" in endorsing the Ahtisaari de-centralisation that gives new Serb-majority municipalities extensive self-rule; he points to "fantastic privileges" for Serbs, including toleration of direct ties between Belgrade and Kosovar Serbs, and emphasises the restrictions placed on Kosovo’s sovereignty by its conditional independence. But in the long term, he adds, Kosovo must anyway meet the same standards for the treatment of minorities and other legal norms if it is to realise its dream of EU membership. "Kosovo must be nurtured to become a normal state with the rule of law. That is the alpha and omega," he asserts.
The real enforcer of Albanian civility towards the long-feared Serbs will probably be self-interest rather than any EU oversight. The new state has every incentive to be magnanimous toward the Serb, Roma and other ethnicities that make up perhaps 10% of the 2.4m population. Pristina needs to demonstrate good behaviour to win formal recognition of Kosovar independence by those states that are hesitating until they see deeds that match the words of Kosovo’s behaviour toward its minorities. The government also wants to persuade Kosovar Serbs that they have a much brighter future as citizens of Kosovo than as pawns of Belgrade’s politics. There is already a harbinger of the shift towards their acceptance of this in the voice of Rada Trajkovic, an obstreperous nationalist member of the Kosovo Assembly in the old days before Belgrade ordered all Serbs to boycott Kosovar elections. Now she has begun criticising Belgrade politicians for not caring about the well-being of Serbs in Kosovo, saying they are just using them for their own purposes.
The second task facing EULEX when supervising Kosovo’s independence is executive policing and mentoring, and it will require far more innovation than will prevention of communal violence. This reflects the newness of post-conflict executive policing, and of carrying out criminal investigations, arrests, and enforcement by international police who are not only advisers but also "executors" empowered to act in their own right. So far, executive policing has only been practiced on a significant scale in two places, Kosovo and East Timor.
In the post-Cold-War world, the western international community that began intervening in failed or failing states was slow to realise both the crucial importance of the rule of law in establishing or re-establishing order, and the specific deterrents needed to follow up with effective police patrolling on the streets the military defeat of local bullies like Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic. When UNMIK failed to set up a full complement of international police for almost a year after NATO had forced Serbian security forces out of Kosovo, rival gangs − often spun off from units of the Kosovo Liberation Army − exploited the lawless interim to extort Serbs and Albanians alike. Some segments of the competing patronage networks morphed into political parties with ruthless intelligence branches. Other segments, according to European intelligence reports, turned to lucrative drugs trafficking, muscled out the Turkish and Kurdish gangs that had previously dominated the trade from Asia to Europe, and developed highly effective mechanisms for international cooperation with Serb and Macedonian gangs to control the trans-shipment of most of the heroin that enters the EU.
When they finally arrived on the scene, the UNMIK police, and especially the international prosecutors and judges, tended to operate on their own. Without bringing their Kosovar counterparts in as partners, they reserved to themselves the pursuit of organised crime and other "serious crime", including inter-ethnic etc. While inheriting the UNMIK executive powers, the EULEX team will by contrast aim for a partnership that will gradually prepare Kosovo's law-enforcement officials to handle such sensitive cases on their own and reduce the internationals' role to monitoring implementation of the Ahtisaari minority guarantees. "That is our exit strategy," jokes EULEX spokesman Victor Reuter, making it clear that EULEX does not wish to hang around as long as did the unloved UNMIK, but wants to devolve operational responsibility as fast as possible.
Under this approach, EULEX will increase the number of international judges to more than 30 and international prosecutors to 18, and co-locate them in the offices of counterparts in the regions as well as in Pristina. In close collaboration, EULEX and US Justice Department representatives will also set up a new Kosovo Special Prosecutors Office to handle organised crime cases. For the first time since 1999 there will also be systematic vetting − "reappointment" is the official term − of the professional competence of jurists, including those who came out of the old Yugoslav system or were in the 1990s denied access to education by their Serbian masters.
In addition, the accountability of judges will be enhanced both by bringing them into hybrid decision panels with international judges in cases of serious crime and by making a single system of the five district courts so that cases cannot be shunted arbitrarily from one court to another by influential defendants in search of malleable justice.
When it comes to ordinary policing, EULEX will build on what is widely deemed a success of the pre-independence international team in setting up the Kosovo police school in Vushtrri. The Kosovo Centre for Public Safety, Education and Development has already graduated more than 8,100 Albanian and Serb policemen and women, and inculcated in them both an esprit de corps and the novel idea that police, far from being the traditional local enforcers of a powerful ruler, should act as the protectors and servants of their communities. In their public outreach, policemen regularly distribute explanatory leaflets and take their dogs to schools to give demonstrations of typical arrests. On weekends, the Kosovo Police Service school opens its modern sports hall to local children, and its officers already rank high in opinion polls about trust in institutions. All the signs suggest that the Kosovar public no longer expects to be solicited by police for bribes.
EULEX’s Victor Reuter emphasises that tackling organised crime “is absolutely a priority." For organised crime is now deeply entrenched in Kosovo, partly because of the absence of police on the beat in UNMIK's first year, and partly because poverty and soaring unemployment among this youngest population in Europe offer few livelihoods other than crime. Another factor is the Robin Hood aura that gun-runners and other smugglers gained under autocratic Serbia rule. Disconcertingly, when asked what they want to do when they grow up, quite a few boys say they want to become mafia bosses.
Dismantling this entrenched power of crime networks is a Herculean task far beyond the capacities of the limited and frequently rotating EULEX personnel of about 1,800. No one says it in so many words, but a policy choice appears to have been made not to use scarce international manpower to pursue showcase verdicts against high-profile crime bosses as a warning to others because of the possible risk of destabilisation if criminal investigations reach too high into existing political and business elites. Instead, it seems, the more modest tactic will be to rely on economic growth, social evolution and increasing transparency and accountability to constrict the space for major crime through gradual maturing processes. The hope is that − as has happened in Montenegro, Slovenia and elsewhere in the Balkans − electoral legitimacy and elevation to the European stage will let new leaders distance themselves progressively from shadowy business operations. In this atmosphere, some still call the whole EULEX experiment a mission impossible. Others remain ready to break their lances for this test of the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy.