Three Years After End of NATO Campaign, Kosovo’s New Prime Minister Looks Ahead

By Alan L. Heil Jr.

“The contradictory character of U.N. Resolution 1244 which includes commitments both to ‘the substantial autonomy and meaningful self-administration’ for Kosovo and to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia greatly complicates policymaking on a range of issues such as security, currency, trade, etc.”

—Report of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, 2000

“The resolution of Kosovo’s status is the key to the stability of the entire Balkans. It is dependent on an improvement of inter-ethnic relations in the province, sustained support of the international community, respect for the territorial integrity of Kosovo, and the continued presence there of NATO.”

—Kosovo Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi, at the U.S. Institute of Peace, May 2002.

Three years ago this summer, more than three-quarters of a million Kosovar Albanian refugees flooded back to their homes from temporary camps in Macedonia and Albania. It was among the 20th century’s swiftest examples of a mass return of a once-oppressed population. Today, the newly-formed government of Kosovo is working with a new U.N. administrator to continue the struggle to overcome the province’s troubled past and chart a course ahead.

Bajram Rexhepi, named prime minister of a coalition government in Pristina last March, recently briefed the Balkans working group of the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, DC. He noted that in 1999 Serbian tanks had laid waste to his Maryland-sized province, wreaking death and destruction on the Kosovar Albanian majority there. Early in that year the army and militias of Slobodan Milosevic forced more than 850,000 Kosovar Albanians to flee their homeland. In late spring, the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia and Kosovo ended the Serbian occupation, set the stage for the refugees’ remarkable return under international protection, and eventually was a major factor in ending Milosevic’s rule and his current trial at the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Prime Minister Rexhepi, however, is aware of the huge problems which still confront his new coalition government in Kosovo. In his Peace Institute appearance May 22, he listed these priorities:

Improve the standard of living in a country still under reconstruction,

Create a market economy, free of crime and corruption,

Establish the rule of law and a functioning judiciary,

Ensure a secure environment for all ethnic groups in Kosovo,

Resolve the issue of Kosovo’s future status, “a key to stability in the entire region”, and

Seek to bring Kosovo eventually into a wider European community.

Rexhepi, a respected surgeon and member of the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), acknowledged that the last three goals depend on a much-needed improvement of inter-ethnic relations in the Albanian-dominated province. As a former mayor of Mitrovica, the tense and divided city astride the Ibar River in northern Kosovo, Rexhepi, who speaks fluent Serbian, has made efforts since his appointment last March to visit Serb, Roma and other communities. He pledged cooperation with the U.N. Mission in Kosovo and its determined new chief, Michael Steiner, for “full integration” of all ethnic communities in the province, including the reconstruction of Serb homes.

That goal, however, remains elusive. In 1999, before the NATO action, Kosovo’s population was estimated at around two million—around 1.8 million Kosovar Albanians and 200,000 Serbs and other minorities. Today, only about half the Serbs remain. Despite the presence of 40,000 Kosovo Force (KFOR) peacekeepers, the international community failed to stop a new wave of retaliatory ethnic killings by Albanian Kosovars in the province. Many terrified Serbs still in Kosovo live in isolated enclaves or divided cities and must depend on armed KFOR escorts to move about safely.

“Despite some improvements in security,” wrote Kosovo specialist Louis Sell in a March 2000 report for the Public International Law & Policy Group, “conditions for Serbs in the enclaves in the Albanian-dominated southern part of Kosovo remain difficult, with few signs of change in the pattern of forced separation that emerged after the end of the 1999 war. In the north,” Sells noted, “Serbs live essentially apart from Kosovo and their leaders seem to be aiming at partition. Kosovo Serbs continue to reject any option for Kosovo’s future other than association with Belgrade, but significant sales of Serb property in Kosovo reveal a community in probably irreversible decline.”

Prime Minister Rexhepi, however, cited what he termed “a very much better security situation” in the province since the months immediately following the war, and added that he has plans to step up his visits to the Serb, Roma and smaller minority communities to talk about refugee returns.

Despite a call by some Kosovar Serb leaders for a boycott of the U.N.-supervised Kosovo parliamentary elections last November, Serbs hold 22 seats in that assembly and are part of the new coalition government negotiated earlier this year by UNMIK head Steiner. “It is important,” according to the International Crisis Group, “that the Serb-controlled region north of the Ibar River be properly integrated in the new institutional framework [of Kosovo] and that Albanian refugees [also] be allowed to return. This,” the ICG said late last year, “will require cooperation between the Serb community, UNMIK, KFOR and Belgrade. Kosovo’s Albanian leaders should also exert their moral authority to stop attacks on Serbs and Roma and allow them to return to their homes.”

For the Kosovar Albanian majority, the number one goal remains independence—despite reservations by the international community based on U.N. Resolution 1244, which ended the Kosovo war. Rexhepi was asked about the precedent set recently when Montenegro agreed to defer a referendum on independence for three years in exchange for a form of association with Belgrade. The prime minister avoided suggesting conditions or a timetable. But he spoke of a general period of two to five years to sort out the future status of Kosovo, and said he would support any option which does not unduly delay a solution. “If we take too much time,” he concluded, “radical elements will be encouraged.”

Contacts should begin fairly soon with Belgrade, he said, to deal with a number of other problems.

It appears that the United Nations administrators and the new Kosovo coalition government are working more cooperatively than at any time since KFOR’s arrival in Kosovo in June 1999. UNMIK chief Steiner, Rexhepi said, “acts expeditiously and gives enough space to us—he transfers power not too slowly, but when we’re ready to assume it.”

Kosovo’s most prominent independent journalist, Veton Surroi of the Koha Media Group in Pristina, spoke recently of the role of media in aiding the province’s transition to a secure future. During a June 11 appearance before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Surroi had this advice for editors and publishers dedicated to reform and democratization in Kosovo: “As you open up a closed society, be professionally critical not only toward the repressive regime, but also toward your own society. Credibility is raised not only through your critical attitude toward a ‘natural foe’ [as in the Milosevic case] but also by a fair and critical attitude toward your collective self.”

Louis Sells, in his recent field assessment, recommended that before the end of this year, “as institutions of self-government take hold, Steiner should begin a process of consultations among the people and political parties of Kosovo intended to establish a road map for resolving the issue of Kosovo’s final status.”

Alan L. Heil Jr. has served as an OSCE election observer in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia.

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The Special Case of Mitrovica

The ICG, in a report released June 3, was sharply critical of Yugoslavia’s continued support for Serb rule in northern Mitrovica. “UNMIK and the NATO-led KFOR troops must act vigorously to establish their jurisdiction in Mitrovica,” the ICG said. “The Serbs of Mitrovica have become pawns in the nationalist game played by Belgrade and hostages to organized crime. Meanwhile, the lack of clarity about the international community’s objectives allows hard-liners among the ethnic Albanians to play on fears that (Yugoslavia’s) secret aim is partition, both of Mitrovica and the entire province.” The ICG urges the international community to ensure without delay that Belgrade fulfill its commitments to unified self-administration in all of Kosovo “by applying pressure equivalent to that used to secure [Yugoslavia’s] cooperation with the Hague Tribunal.”

—A.L.H.