Winning the peace in the Balkan region

By Paddy Ashdown

LONDON: In this century there have been four Balkan wars, two in the first years and two in the last. And there have been two great wars. In the first, the Balkans were a cause and in the last they were a battlefield. Surely, enough is enough?

Most of Europe seem to think so. But they are about to be rudely re-awakened. History might say we won the Kosovo war half by accident. We are about to lose the ensuing peace by carelessness.

The Dayton peace agreement, which ended the Bosnian war, excluded Kosovo and we paid the price for leaving Milosevic with unfinished business to exploit. At the end of the Kosovo conflict, we have done the same with Montenegro.

The republic, still formally governed from Belgrade, is descending into chaos. Its economy, now moving into hyper inflation, is in imminent danger of collapse, stimulated by Belgrade (as one Montenegrin recently put it, Milosevic is achieving by economic means what he achieved by ethnic cleansing in Kosovo). The country slips daily deeper into the grips of the mafia and smuggling fraternity which use it as a base.

Meanwhile, the tensions between the Montenegrin government and the large numbers of Belgrade troops stationed in the country grow worse. If Belgrade needs a pretext for military action in Montenegro, there are plenty.

The west gave, in effect, Montenegro's President Milo Djukanovic a promise of military support if Belgrade threatens. Now war is on a hair trigger in Montenegro and many believe it can only be a matter of weeks before we are plunged into another Balkan crisis. As usual in the region, acting early will make it easier in the long run and waiting will make it harder.

There are three things the west (it ought to be Europe) could do. The first is stabilize the currency. This could be done the conventional way with currency boards and issued notes etc. But that would be expensive and carry severe sovereignty. Or it could be done by getting Djukanovic's agreement to allow the euro Deutschmark, specially created for Kosovo, to be established, de facto, as Montenegro's currency and, after a due date, re- enforcing this by paying government employees in the currency.

The second is to take action which, in effect, takes over Montenegro's customs and excise. Smuggling is the source of the country's corruption and is beginning to become a major domestic problem for nearby Italy. We cannot counter Milosevic's attempts to destabilize Montenegro without putting a stop to it.

And lastly, we had better make clear how we are going to deliver this, not least so that Milosevic doesn't miscalculate again.

Preventing another war in Montenegro is, however, only half our problem in the Balkans. The other, even more intractable problem is winning the peace we have created after Bosnia and Kosovo. Here the portents are, if anything, even worse. In the Balkans the race is between integration with Europe and disintegration back to chaos. And the forces of disintegration are winning.

This is not a plea for more money (though that may be needed). It is a plea for more coordination. We are putting very considerable resources into Balkan reconstruction. But these are being managed by an increasingly confusing plethora of organizations, characterized by duplication, and overlapping competencies, with little effective coordination between them and no common vision.

The end of the war was marked by the proliferation of useless organizations and an increase in bi-lateral schemes, often run to a national agenda, where our approach should be multi-national, Europe-led and closely coordinated. A recent study has shown that, of the huge sums now being put into the region, less than 50 percent reaches those for whom it is intended. Some 30 percent goes on international organizations' administrative costs and 20 percent on corruption.

Large scale infrastructural projects are taking priority over projects to enhance the human capital of the area and those designed to strengthen the rule of law, encourage the growth of civil society and create the best conditions for an export-led free-market-based economy.

The problems of the Balkans are complex, multifaceted and interconnected. To deal with these in such a piecemeal fashion is folly. To seek to do so in a region whose history has been about fissiparousness, conflict and conspiracy, is madness.

What is needed is a single over-arching (it will have to be EU) body to coordinate what the various agencies are doing, some clear political backing and the structures to make it all happen.

Otherwise we will be faced with a scandal about the wasting of funds, or outrage at the discovery that we have created a collection of dependent states in the Balkans, or a spiral into criminality with an eventual return to violence; or, more likely, all of these.

-- Guardian News Service