Kosovars in strong position vis-a-vis Kfor
By Edith Kohn
BERLIN (DPA): With every day that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and United Nations peacekeepers spend in Kosovo, it becomes more apparent that their intervention a year ago was a mistake.
The leader of the UN mission, Bernard Kouchner, comes across therefore as slightly mad as -- having been in charge of the province's administration for eight months -- he now demands "clear goals" for its Kosovo policy from the United Nations Security Council.
His proposal to hold local elections at the end of the year may be in line with Article IV of the Rambouillet agreement, but the government in Belgrade never signed it.
Without the participation of the Serbian Kosovars who have been driven from the area, it will be an ethnically pure election anyway -- and also a first step for the resigned withdrawal of the international community from the crisis zone.
NATO is not facing a dilemma here, it is sitting in a trap. Whichever way it moves, it risks pushing one side towards ethnic nationalism -- either the Albanians or the Serbs.
Madeleine Albright, the hawk of American foreign politics, misjudged Albanian nationalist forces and made a mistake in forcing them into an alliance of convenience in Rambouillet. The Kosovo Albanians are regarded, on the whole, as a small wheel on the West's Balkan political machine; they themselves believe, however -- not least of all because of Rambouillet -- that they are the whole vehicle.
Their leaders behave as though Kfor and Unmik are there solely to make their nationalist dreams of autonomy a reality -- as if the international community was capable of nothing else. The fact is, however, that Kosovo still belongs to the Serbs.
The Kosovo Albanians see themselves in a strong position in relation to Kfor and Unmik, believing it enough to pay a little lip service to democracy. They are also sure they have already paid the cost of NATO's intervention in the form of the politics of Serbian separatism.
They have high hopes therefore that NATO will not seriously intervene if some of them in the south-east, for example in Mitrovica, make armed attempts to create a situation in which as much land as possible is "freed by Albanians" because there are Albanians living on it who must be protected.
NATO now seems to understand that the problems of ethnic nationalism in the former Yugoslav Federation cannot be solved simply with a call to respect public law and order. The local elections Kouchner announced are seen by the Albanians as the first step towards their complete autonomy. There remains only one way for NATO and the United Nations to exert pressure -- a calculated and timely withdrawal, just when the Albanians do not want to accept the seriousness of their own situation.