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Showing posts with label kosovo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kosovo. Show all posts
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Where is NETAID money? Maybe Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover know smth about ?!
NetAid Weaves a Complicated Web
By Colum Lynch and Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writers
By Colum Lynch and Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writers
Actor Danny Glover has also withdrawn his support
from NetAid. (Michael Lutzky — The Washington Post)
The concerts will be carried live on MTV, VH-1, the BBC and other broadcasters to 60 countries; radio broadcasts will reach 120 nations, potentially making these the widest heard musical performances in history. The shows will promote NetAid's Web site, which will serve as a kind of clearinghouse for donors and organizations dedicated to relieving hunger and eradicating poverty.
But even before the first chords are struck, the novel charitable alliance is caught up in controversy, deflecting charges of self-interest and self-dealing. Harry Belafonte, the actor and musician who helped organize the event, said he and actor Danny Glover were quitting in disgust. The event, he said, had "been reduced to a trade show" promoting the U.N. bureaucracy and a corporate sponsor, Cisco Systems Inc.
U.N. sources said that in his letter of resignation, Belafonte also complained that proceeds would be funneled back into the U.N. Development Program and Cisco before money reached the world's poor.
"When you deal with the flesh and the blood that makes up the hungry and disenfranchised of this world, you must play in a field of trust," Belafonte said in an interview. "I find that sacred ground. There shouldn't be any cynicism or agendas."
NetAid is the brainchild of a Cisco executive, Diane Merrick, who last year began considering ideas for an attention-getting stunt for her company, based in San Jose, Calif. To promote Cisco, which makes the routing and switching equipment that is the Internet's plumbing, Merrick considered staging an event that would be accessible to millions online.
Among other ideas, she thought about using the Internet to "stream" live video of a fashion show or the worldwide premiere of a Steven Spielberg film. The company particularly wanted to generate attention during Telecom '99, a huge trade show being held this week in Geneva (one of the NetAid concerts will emanate from Geneva, with an audience specially invited by Cisco).
"We were really looking for a way to demonstrate the power of the Internet outside the business realm," Merrick said. "Business has already embraced the Internet. What we wanted to do was give everyone else a glimpse of the future."
Casting about for a more populist vehicle, Cisco eventually contacted music promoter Ken Kragen, who had organized the Hands Across America event in 1986 and the "We Are the World" benefit for famine relief in 1985. By coincidence, Kragen had received a call a week earlier from Belafonte, who wanted Kragen's help in producing an event to mark the United Nations' World Poverty Week, also scheduled at the same time as Telecom '99.
"It was just serendipity," said Kragen. "There was something magical about" the coincidental timing of the U.N. event and the business conference. The company and Belafonte soon began discussion to merge their events.
Belafonte, who was active in the civil rights movement, was asked last year by the United Nations to harness the drawing power of the pop music and film elite in the cause of fighting global poverty. Backed by Cisco's initial commitment of $3 million, he recruited Glover, former South African President Nelson Mandela and U2's Bono, who has advocated that wealthy nations forgive the debts of impoverished countries.
But by August, less than two months before the concerts, Belafonte began privately criticizing the organizing effort. Specifically, he is upset about the makeup of the board overseeing the NetAid foundation, which is dominated by U.N. officials and corporate executives. He is also critical of an arrangement whereby Cisco will be reimbursed about $5 million from NetAid concert-ticket receipts and broadcast rights fees. The company made cash advances to reserve Giants Stadium in New Jersey and Wembley Stadium in London for the shows.
Cisco also has donated $10 million to the NetAid Foundation and contributed roughly $10 million to $12 million more in services, time and equipment. The company says that none of this will be reimbursed.
U.N. officials and NetAid organizers said the reimbursement arrangement is standard practice. They characterized the dispute as driven by oversized egos and a conflict over leadership of the event, not financial impropriety. They said Belafonte lashed out because he could not exercise absolute control over a project that grew dramatically in scope and political importance since its inception.
Organizers also noted that NetAid has continued to attract endorsements and involvement from political figures and celebrities. In September, President Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Nelson Mandela were the first to log on to the NetAid Web site (www.netaid.org). The event has also had no trouble attracting performers such as Sheryl Crow, George Michael and Mary J. Blige.
The departures, nevertheless, could prove embarrassing for the United Nations, which has gingerly begun to seek alliances with corporate sponsors to help fill the funding gap caused by shrinking contributions from wealthy governments. NetAid represents the first major collaboration between the United Nations and a private corporation to tackle a specific global problem.
In addition to Cisco, the consulting firm KMPG and the computer company Akamai Technologies have been involved in setting up the Internet site. Several of the aid organizations have links on the NetAid site, which also carries links to the homes pages of Cisco, Akamai and KMPG.
"The point is not to raise money from the concerts; the point is to build a constituency of activists for development" through the Internet, said Mark Malloch Brown, UNDP director.
The NetAid Web site also attempts to dramatize the gulf between industrialized nations and the developing world. It offers implicit and sometimes overt critiques of Western lifestyles. Visitors to the site are likely to learn that "the richest 20 per cent of the world's people eat 11 times as much meat and seven times as much fish as the poorest 20 percent" as well as the following: "In the minute it will take you to read this, 13 children will have died in the world's poorest countries. Each day, the rich West gets $35 million in debt repayments from the poorest nations in Africa. . . . Debt can kill."
The site avoids much discussion of corruption, waste, ethnic warfare, governmental oppression, political strife or cultural practices that impede progress in developing countries.
Cisco says the NetAid Web site will be the most powerful in the world, capable of handling 60 million "hits" every hour or up to 125,000 simultaneous video "streams" of the concert.
Both U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and Malloch Brown have met with Belafonte to try to address his concerns.
According to the sponsors, the net proceeds from sales of concert tickets – which cost from $30 to $75 – will go to poverty relief programs in Africa, Kosovo and elsewhere. Additional funds collected from private donations made over the Internet will go to a variety of programs, including hunger-relief projects and refugee resettlement programs, officials said.
Malloch Brown said Belafonte had proposed to distribute the money throughout the U.N. system. Malloch Brown argued in favor of creating a nine-member panel, composed of representatives of the U.N., various charities, corporate sponsors and entertainers.
Belafonte said he was asked last year by the head of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, Jacques Douf, to "please use whatever creative resources [were] at my disposal in the name of ending hunger."
He said he approached an acquaintance, Djibril Diallo, the communications director of the UNDP. But he says UNDP and Cisco Systems quickly seized control of the project.
"They co-opted the ownership of the Web site and the logo," Belafonte said. "I then decided I could not stay with the project and give it the grace of my presence, for whatever that was worth
Monday, January 10, 2011
Frode Mauring in Kosovo has time for humor - "only way to market UNDP's great achievements"
Frode Mauring speaking in a kosovar mixed with macedonian dialect - was part of a comic 10 min episode in Kosovo's TV.
UNDP's Resident Representative message to the show was so let's disarm the kosovars. (Click here for link)
Thursday, October 23, 2008
UNDP's Dervis Admits Paying Saakashvili Unwise, Dodges on Congo Security and Kosovo Fees
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis
UNITED NATIONS, October 22 -- After the UN Development Program had defended paying salary to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili since Inner City Press exclusively reported on it, on Wednesday UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis belatedly acknowledged that payments to such high officials "raises questions" and "may not be desirable."
Under the rubric of UNDP's lack of impartiality, and as limited by UNDP to post-conflict situations, Inner City Press asked Dervis about the Georgia program, about UNDP paying or processing the salary of an ex-UN employee who now works for the Kosovo government, and about a judgment against UNDP in favor of the widow of a UNDP consultant sent without security to Eastern Congo and killed. On this last, Dervis read an apology from notes, whilemistakenly locating the murder, and UNDP's negligence, as having been in Kenya. Video here, from Minute 28:15.
After Inner City Press had reported on UNDP's Georgia program, in which it funneled money from George Soros' Open Society Institute to President Saakashvili and his inner circle, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov denounced the program as a "privatization of the UN." Wednesday Inner City Press asked Dervis to respond to the criticism.
While quickly saying, "I fully agree with the Russian foreign minister," Dervis did not step away from processing such money for OSI or other -- apparently any other -- private foundation. UNDP takes a fee in such deals, although in recently months UNDP's spokesman has repeatedly declined to provide information about the fees UNDP charges. Ironic in light of this stonewalling, Dervis three times said that programs like that in Georgia "must be transparent."
UNDP's Dervis on Oct. 22, 2008, Kosovo and security answers not shown
Regarding the verdict against UNDP of 143,000 pounds, Dervis said that UNDP now has the ability, through the freedom of so-called ex gratia payments, to provide support in such circumstances. Given the now-admitted inadvisability of UNDP's program to pay Georgia's president, it is doubtful that giving UNDP less oversight in payments is advisable. But what Dervis did not address -- along with the Kosovo question, which he did not answer at all -- was the lack of security that UNDP provided to Joe Comerford when they sent him to the Congo, where he got killed. Click here for more on the case.
This seems to be a pattern with UNDP, which was criticized in the UN's recent reports about the December 2007 bombing of UN premises in Algiers Yet Dervis has yet to take any questions on UNDP's actions before the Algiers bombing, and his spokesman declined to comment on or even confirm UNDP's vacature of its premises in Amman, Jordan, despite the UN's head of security confirming it to Inner City Press. Transparency, indeed...
Watch this site, and this Oct. 2 debate, on UN, bailout, MDGs
and this October 17 debate, on Security Council and Obama and the UN.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Resisting the United Nations
By Michael J. Totten
There is no love for the United Nations in Kosovo.
Kosovo is the fourth country I've visited where the UN has or has had a key role, and in only one of them – Lebanon – is the UN not despised by just about everyone. In Lebanon the UN has so little power to make a difference one way or the other that any anger at the institution would largely be pointless. In Bosnia, though, UN “peacekeepers” stood by impotently while genocide and ethnic-cleansing campaigns were carried out right in front of them. The UN's Oil for Food program was thoroughly corrupted by Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq at the expense of just about everybody who lives there. Kosovo, meanwhile, declared independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008, but the elected government is still subordinate to the almost universally despised UN bureaucrats who are the real power. Many Kosovars insist the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) is actually a dictatorship.
Vetevendosje – “self-determination” in Albanian – was formed as a non-violent civil resistance movement against UN rule in a country that is supposed to be sovereign. Recently the European Union, which announced its own mission in Kosovo without being invited, was added to the list of opponents, but the UN remains the primary target. I attended one of Vetevendosje's rallies as an observer which began as a long march through the streets of Kosovo's capital Prishtina and ended at the United Nations headquarters where activists dumped a truckload of garbage inside the gate and hosed down the walls of the compound with sewage.
I spoke to Vetevendosje leader Albin Kurti and activist Alex Channer in their office the day before the rally in Prishtina's bohemian Pejton neighborhood.
“So basically you are opposing the UN rule here, and the EU,” I said.
“Yes,” Kurti said, “because they are going to be installed here from above without having the previous consent of the people.”
“There was no referendum?” I said.
“No,” he said. “No referendum for their installment here, and also no referendum for the UN mission. And they are going to be above the law which they will by applying on us. Ironically the EU-elects will deal with the rule of law and will have the rule of law as their priority, but they themselves will be above the law.”
“Who decided that they are going to come in here?” I said.
“It was Martti Ahtisaari's plan, this Finnish diplomat who mediated between Prishtina and [Serbia's capital] Belgrade, he together with Javier Solana. Solana is in charge of security and Foreign Policy of the EU. They prepared a draft back in July of the year 2006, and that was included in a more detailed form by Ahtisaari in his proposal.”
“And Serbia agreed to this?” I said.
“No,” he said. “Serbia did not. But the Albanian politicians did. They don’t ask because then they would have to ask again later on, and then we could change our mind. It is a mission that would be totally unaccountable to us. There is no watch dog, and in this civilian group that is going to supervise us, the ICO, the International Civilian Office, has this Peter Feith, he is there as well. So basically he is going to watch himself.”
“So should I assume that if Kosovo is invited to join the EU the way the other countries have, you would say no?” I said.
“We wouldn’t say no,” he said. “We want Kosovo to be included in the EU because we are part of European soil. But as things stand now, they wouldn’t ask us at all, they would have to ask themselves because this is the EU mission. Even so, UNMIK is still here.”
UNMIK is the United Nations Mission in Kosovo. It has been the de-facto government of Kosovo since the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade lost control at the end of the 1999 war. Kosovo has its own nominal government, but it has little power.
“So you have UN rule,” Kurti continued, “which is not leaving, and you have the ICO and EU-elects about to come. They are doubling the bureaucracy here. And we are stuck because we depend on their consensus. That means we depend on their lowest common denominator. What they care about is stability, never development or progress. For them, a crisis is only an explosion of crisis. If there is huge unemployment, poverty, they don’t care.”
“So if the EU is administering Kosovo's government,” I said, “what does that mean for Kosovo’s government? Will they be subordinate to the EU or operating in parallel?”
“They will be subordinate,” he said, “because Peter Feith will have the right to sack our ministers and change our laws. So he is going to supervise the government. Peter Feith hopes he will not be challenged to use his powers where he can simply dismantle the parliament, call new elections, change a certain minister, or say this law is not good after it has been passed in our assembly. They are hoping for self-censorship from our government in order not to be challenged and not to use those powers which would unmask them as the dictatorship they really are. It is a dictatorship, but they do not want to be seen as one, so they say we are here only to supervise. They talk a lot with our prime minister and ministers, do this, do that, in order not to be seen in the background as a sort of monarchy.”
“What is their reason for wanting to do this?” I said.
“They mediate between Prishtina and Belgrade after overthrowing Milosevic,” he said, “and they simply don’t use any more sticks, only carrots. Serbia is very aggressive, and in order to make sure that Serbia is not going to be indignant, they say Yes, Kosovo is independent, but don’t worry, it is us there. That is one reason I think they are here.
“Second,” he continued, “every bureaucracy seeks self perpetuation. A lot of people here have very high salaries, and they are like big fishes in a small pond. And they are more or less all of them into this process of privatization. Because we cannot touch them legally, they have free hands to do whatever they want. Many of them got very rich. 80 percent of the money from the international community that was poured onto Kosovo in these nine years went for technical assistance, seminars, conferences, and so on. A lot of money is in their hands this way. They direct it. It's an authoritarian law. So I think this is another reason why they’re here.”
“Does the US have any position on this,” I said, “or has is been decided only by Europe?”
“Well,” he said, “the US recognized Kosovo as an independent sovereign country, but here you have a foreign office, and I don’t think this American office is really in line with the policy of Washington. It is another small king here, and I feel that it is not that different from the European perspective because the focus has been shifted elsewhere. The US focus was here during NATO intervention and so on, but later on somehow, especially after 9/11, the focus is elsewhere, and I don’t think George W. Bush and the State Department know very well what goes on here. I think in Kosovo all of their diplomats over time don’t get better, but worse, because they see that they can be very powerful here. They have no one to balance them. Our government is very submissive, obedient, and weak. On the other hand I think there is a great deal of interest to buy into the economy of Kosovo, with its assets and resources because they have no real constraints here. We have been defined as a special case, which means they can experiment, and everything is going to be fine. It's heaven on earth for these kinds of diplomats.”
“What kinds of things have the EU and the UN done here that are bad, specifically?” I said. “I get your general point, but what are the practical results of all this?”
“No economic development at all,” he said. “Zero. No factories. No industry. Nothing. The fiscal policy is terrible. They promised us a market economy, and we ended up in a market without an economy. Then there is the internal division of Kosovo. The North is divided from the rest. The red is Serb areas, and here are new municipalities about to be created by Ahtisaari’s plan where the soft partition is strengthening itself.”
Kurti had a rough map of Kosovo on the wall behind the table we sat around. The Serb areas are shown in red, as Kurti said. The northern Serb areas are adjacent to Serbia.
“UNMIK has tolerated this,” he continued. “Now UNMIK is tolerating the elections of Serbia, so in a way UNMIK is tolerating Serbia’s intrusion and Serbian obstruction in Kosovo.”
Serbia held elections inside the Serb enclaves of Kosovo. These Kosovar Serbs did not elect representatives to send to Kosovo's capital Prishtina. They elected representatives to send to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, which is now, whether they like it or not, a foreign country. To get a handle on how strange this is, imagine if American citizens of Mexican descent in the formerly Mexican Southwestern United States voted for candidates to represent them in Mexico City.
“Why don't the EU and UN say no to Serbia?” I said. “Is it because they are trying to lure Serbia into the EU, or is it because they are afraid of more fighting?”
“I think they know very well that Serbia has not really been punished for the wars,” he said. “Serbian police and army forces killed around 200,000 non-Serbs. If one person killed 5 people, you have 40,000 serial murderers walking around inside Serbia. They are in the power structure, in the political parties, in the police, in the army. I think they are afraid of that. Instead of dealing with the principle of justice in Serbia, they are just playing this game of markets, who makes more pressure, who is more powerful, it is absolute real politics, and I think they care only for really short term stability. They don’t think any further than that. And they deal only with emergency situations. They don’t really see how structural is the cause of the conflict here. When they think about the security issue, stability, these are the words they use. Not freedom, liberty, development, and so on. They think in terms of troops they have and politicians they control, rather than in terms of the well being and situations of the ordinary citizens.”
The biggest problem with the UN and EU missions in Kosovo, as many locals see it, is that there is no proper government that is actually in charge of the country. There is no fully sovereign entity in Kosovo. The country's sovereignty is parceled out piece by piece to different bureaucracies.
“Of the things UNMIK did wrong here, and the most damaging for Kosovo, was two-fold,” Kurti said. “Apart from UNMIK's very existence, and now the EU’s mission, it creates this duality of institutions. And this duality makes vague the address of who is responsible for the people. So currently a Kosovo citizen, like myself, is not able to know who is responsible for a bad social position, for example, or a lack of money. If you ask UNMIK they say it’s your institution, if you ask our government they say Oh, it’s UNMIK. This duality makes no institutions be or feel responsible for anything that happened or did not happen in Kosovo. And secondly, when UNMIK was installed here, they took in their hands all the mechanisms for controlling the states. They control the police and all the judicial systems as well, and they tolerated corruption, and they blame us for being a corrupt society. It was they who should have acted against corruption because they have the mechanisms in their hands. I as a citizen have no mechanisms to control the government. In normal democratic countries, as a citizen you are able to punish your leaders for not defending your interests. Here we don’t have that mechanism.”
“Does the EU and UNMIK have a base of support here?” I said to Kurti.
“The popularity of UNMIK is bad,” he said. “But people link UNMIK with NATO intervention which is another issue. And they think okay, it is like an extended intervention of the world. NATO intervention saved us from Serbia, and now it is UNMIK. When people think of this they think of the first year of UNMIK, the reconstruction of buildings and houses, the emergency phase.”
There is no love for the United Nations in Kosovo.
Kosovo is the fourth country I've visited where the UN has or has had a key role, and in only one of them – Lebanon – is the UN not despised by just about everyone. In Lebanon the UN has so little power to make a difference one way or the other that any anger at the institution would largely be pointless. In Bosnia, though, UN “peacekeepers” stood by impotently while genocide and ethnic-cleansing campaigns were carried out right in front of them. The UN's Oil for Food program was thoroughly corrupted by Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq at the expense of just about everybody who lives there. Kosovo, meanwhile, declared independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008, but the elected government is still subordinate to the almost universally despised UN bureaucrats who are the real power. Many Kosovars insist the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) is actually a dictatorship.
Vetevendosje – “self-determination” in Albanian – was formed as a non-violent civil resistance movement against UN rule in a country that is supposed to be sovereign. Recently the European Union, which announced its own mission in Kosovo without being invited, was added to the list of opponents, but the UN remains the primary target. I attended one of Vetevendosje's rallies as an observer which began as a long march through the streets of Kosovo's capital Prishtina and ended at the United Nations headquarters where activists dumped a truckload of garbage inside the gate and hosed down the walls of the compound with sewage.
I spoke to Vetevendosje leader Albin Kurti and activist Alex Channer in their office the day before the rally in Prishtina's bohemian Pejton neighborhood.
“So basically you are opposing the UN rule here, and the EU,” I said.
“Yes,” Kurti said, “because they are going to be installed here from above without having the previous consent of the people.”
“There was no referendum?” I said.
“No,” he said. “No referendum for their installment here, and also no referendum for the UN mission. And they are going to be above the law which they will by applying on us. Ironically the EU-elects will deal with the rule of law and will have the rule of law as their priority, but they themselves will be above the law.”
“Who decided that they are going to come in here?” I said.
“It was Martti Ahtisaari's plan, this Finnish diplomat who mediated between Prishtina and [Serbia's capital] Belgrade, he together with Javier Solana. Solana is in charge of security and Foreign Policy of the EU. They prepared a draft back in July of the year 2006, and that was included in a more detailed form by Ahtisaari in his proposal.”
“And Serbia agreed to this?” I said.
“No,” he said. “Serbia did not. But the Albanian politicians did. They don’t ask because then they would have to ask again later on, and then we could change our mind. It is a mission that would be totally unaccountable to us. There is no watch dog, and in this civilian group that is going to supervise us, the ICO, the International Civilian Office, has this Peter Feith, he is there as well. So basically he is going to watch himself.”
“So should I assume that if Kosovo is invited to join the EU the way the other countries have, you would say no?” I said.
“We wouldn’t say no,” he said. “We want Kosovo to be included in the EU because we are part of European soil. But as things stand now, they wouldn’t ask us at all, they would have to ask themselves because this is the EU mission. Even so, UNMIK is still here.”
UNMIK is the United Nations Mission in Kosovo. It has been the de-facto government of Kosovo since the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade lost control at the end of the 1999 war. Kosovo has its own nominal government, but it has little power.
“So you have UN rule,” Kurti continued, “which is not leaving, and you have the ICO and EU-elects about to come. They are doubling the bureaucracy here. And we are stuck because we depend on their consensus. That means we depend on their lowest common denominator. What they care about is stability, never development or progress. For them, a crisis is only an explosion of crisis. If there is huge unemployment, poverty, they don’t care.”
“So if the EU is administering Kosovo's government,” I said, “what does that mean for Kosovo’s government? Will they be subordinate to the EU or operating in parallel?”
“They will be subordinate,” he said, “because Peter Feith will have the right to sack our ministers and change our laws. So he is going to supervise the government. Peter Feith hopes he will not be challenged to use his powers where he can simply dismantle the parliament, call new elections, change a certain minister, or say this law is not good after it has been passed in our assembly. They are hoping for self-censorship from our government in order not to be challenged and not to use those powers which would unmask them as the dictatorship they really are. It is a dictatorship, but they do not want to be seen as one, so they say we are here only to supervise. They talk a lot with our prime minister and ministers, do this, do that, in order not to be seen in the background as a sort of monarchy.”
“What is their reason for wanting to do this?” I said.
“They mediate between Prishtina and Belgrade after overthrowing Milosevic,” he said, “and they simply don’t use any more sticks, only carrots. Serbia is very aggressive, and in order to make sure that Serbia is not going to be indignant, they say Yes, Kosovo is independent, but don’t worry, it is us there. That is one reason I think they are here.
“Second,” he continued, “every bureaucracy seeks self perpetuation. A lot of people here have very high salaries, and they are like big fishes in a small pond. And they are more or less all of them into this process of privatization. Because we cannot touch them legally, they have free hands to do whatever they want. Many of them got very rich. 80 percent of the money from the international community that was poured onto Kosovo in these nine years went for technical assistance, seminars, conferences, and so on. A lot of money is in their hands this way. They direct it. It's an authoritarian law. So I think this is another reason why they’re here.”
“Does the US have any position on this,” I said, “or has is been decided only by Europe?”
“Well,” he said, “the US recognized Kosovo as an independent sovereign country, but here you have a foreign office, and I don’t think this American office is really in line with the policy of Washington. It is another small king here, and I feel that it is not that different from the European perspective because the focus has been shifted elsewhere. The US focus was here during NATO intervention and so on, but later on somehow, especially after 9/11, the focus is elsewhere, and I don’t think George W. Bush and the State Department know very well what goes on here. I think in Kosovo all of their diplomats over time don’t get better, but worse, because they see that they can be very powerful here. They have no one to balance them. Our government is very submissive, obedient, and weak. On the other hand I think there is a great deal of interest to buy into the economy of Kosovo, with its assets and resources because they have no real constraints here. We have been defined as a special case, which means they can experiment, and everything is going to be fine. It's heaven on earth for these kinds of diplomats.”
“What kinds of things have the EU and the UN done here that are bad, specifically?” I said. “I get your general point, but what are the practical results of all this?”
“No economic development at all,” he said. “Zero. No factories. No industry. Nothing. The fiscal policy is terrible. They promised us a market economy, and we ended up in a market without an economy. Then there is the internal division of Kosovo. The North is divided from the rest. The red is Serb areas, and here are new municipalities about to be created by Ahtisaari’s plan where the soft partition is strengthening itself.”
Kurti had a rough map of Kosovo on the wall behind the table we sat around. The Serb areas are shown in red, as Kurti said. The northern Serb areas are adjacent to Serbia.
“UNMIK has tolerated this,” he continued. “Now UNMIK is tolerating the elections of Serbia, so in a way UNMIK is tolerating Serbia’s intrusion and Serbian obstruction in Kosovo.”
Serbia held elections inside the Serb enclaves of Kosovo. These Kosovar Serbs did not elect representatives to send to Kosovo's capital Prishtina. They elected representatives to send to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, which is now, whether they like it or not, a foreign country. To get a handle on how strange this is, imagine if American citizens of Mexican descent in the formerly Mexican Southwestern United States voted for candidates to represent them in Mexico City.
“Why don't the EU and UN say no to Serbia?” I said. “Is it because they are trying to lure Serbia into the EU, or is it because they are afraid of more fighting?”
“I think they know very well that Serbia has not really been punished for the wars,” he said. “Serbian police and army forces killed around 200,000 non-Serbs. If one person killed 5 people, you have 40,000 serial murderers walking around inside Serbia. They are in the power structure, in the political parties, in the police, in the army. I think they are afraid of that. Instead of dealing with the principle of justice in Serbia, they are just playing this game of markets, who makes more pressure, who is more powerful, it is absolute real politics, and I think they care only for really short term stability. They don’t think any further than that. And they deal only with emergency situations. They don’t really see how structural is the cause of the conflict here. When they think about the security issue, stability, these are the words they use. Not freedom, liberty, development, and so on. They think in terms of troops they have and politicians they control, rather than in terms of the well being and situations of the ordinary citizens.”
The biggest problem with the UN and EU missions in Kosovo, as many locals see it, is that there is no proper government that is actually in charge of the country. There is no fully sovereign entity in Kosovo. The country's sovereignty is parceled out piece by piece to different bureaucracies.
“Of the things UNMIK did wrong here, and the most damaging for Kosovo, was two-fold,” Kurti said. “Apart from UNMIK's very existence, and now the EU’s mission, it creates this duality of institutions. And this duality makes vague the address of who is responsible for the people. So currently a Kosovo citizen, like myself, is not able to know who is responsible for a bad social position, for example, or a lack of money. If you ask UNMIK they say it’s your institution, if you ask our government they say Oh, it’s UNMIK. This duality makes no institutions be or feel responsible for anything that happened or did not happen in Kosovo. And secondly, when UNMIK was installed here, they took in their hands all the mechanisms for controlling the states. They control the police and all the judicial systems as well, and they tolerated corruption, and they blame us for being a corrupt society. It was they who should have acted against corruption because they have the mechanisms in their hands. I as a citizen have no mechanisms to control the government. In normal democratic countries, as a citizen you are able to punish your leaders for not defending your interests. Here we don’t have that mechanism.”
“Does the EU and UNMIK have a base of support here?” I said to Kurti.
“The popularity of UNMIK is bad,” he said. “But people link UNMIK with NATO intervention which is another issue. And they think okay, it is like an extended intervention of the world. NATO intervention saved us from Serbia, and now it is UNMIK. When people think of this they think of the first year of UNMIK, the reconstruction of buildings and houses, the emergency phase.”
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