Misleading
UN Report on Kosovo (A)
TFF PressInfo
77
October 3, 1999
"Those who wrote the Report of the UN
Secretary-General on the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK)
must have had other aims than accurate reporting. The report
is biased, embellished, slanted. It omits important aspects
which point toward the fact that this mission ignores
Security Council Resolution 1244 on which it is based and is
a failure in-the-making on its own criteria," says TFF
director Jan Oberg upon his return from TFF's 37th mission
to the region and his visit to Pristina, Skopje and
Belgrade.
"The report (S/1999/987 of September 16) covers the
period in which at least 150.000 legitimate non-Albanian
(Serbs, Roma,etc) citizens were driven out of the province.
Normally this would be called ethnic cleansing. It has
happened under the very eyes of 45.000 NATO soldiers, 1.100
UN civilian police and thousands of other
internationals, including the OSCE and EU. The report does
NOT state that this is a fatal blow to both NATO and the UN.
Res. 1244 states that the mission is to 'ensure conditions
for a peaceful and normal life for all inhabitants of
Kosovo' as well as, among many other things, maintain law
and order, protect and promote human rights and ensure
public safety. The report states that 'KFOR deserves great
credit for its efforts...'
I do not think it does," says Oberg. "The
international community condemned Yugoslavia for having, at
the height of the war and bombing, about 40.000 soldiers and
police in the province to maintain law and order and - as
they saw it - to protect the Serb and other minorities. Now
the total international presence is almost twice as big and
IT has not been able to fulfil the centre-piece of the UN
mandate: to preserve a multiethnic Kosovo in safety for
everybody.
For all practical purposes, Kosovo has been ethnically
cleansed by the KLA and other Albanians AFTER the
international community arrived. This is neither regretted
nor condemned in the report. Rather, the report states that
'senior Kosovo Albanian personalities, including the
leadership of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), have voiced
increasingly forthright public positions on tolerance and
security for minorities. Senior KLA figures have denied KLA
involvement in attacks and called for non-Albanians to
remain in Kosovo and repeatedly affirmed their commitment to
human rights, tolerance and diversity.'
The report, issued in the name of the UN
Secretary-General, does NOT mention that KLA set up a
self-appointed government, installed local leaders in
virtually all municipalities and, thus, see themselves as
the legitimate authority of Kosovo. In short, the report
omits any mention of who is or must be made responsible for
the recent ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. Could the reason be
that the KLA and the political Kosovo Albanian leadership
was NATO's ally during the war and the international
community's partner now? That its prime minister, Hacim
Thaci, is the favoured leader - for the time being at least
- by the United States and other leading actors? In short,
that the West's partner is doing what we accused Milosevic
of doing?
The Yugoslav government was always pointed out as the
culprit of ethnic cleansing of Albanians. Fantastic stories
circulated without evidence about Serb plans to drive out
all Albanians from the region during NATO's bombing
campaign. With perhaps 90% of all non-Albanians now driven
out, the Kosovo-Albanian leadership is responsible for the
proportionately largest ethnic cleansing in the Balkans
since the wars started in 1991.
But those who wrote the text of this report - presumably
UNMIK staff and the office of UNMIK head, Dr. Bernhard
Kouchner in Pristina - see no reason to condemn this! The
formulation of the report is: 'In the period since mid-June
1999, non-Albanians, primarily Serbs and Roma, have been the
target for harassment, intimidation and attacks. As a
result, many have left Kosovo.' And then it mentions that
the Yugoslav Red Cross estimates that 150,000 have gone to
Serbia and Montenegro.
They have been the target - by whom? If Belgrade or Serb
paramilitaries had ethnically cleansed 150,000 Albanians or
more from their province, you may wonder how the
international community - the UN, U.S. State Department, the
media - would have formulated it. At no point does the
report state who should be made responsible for this latest
ethnic cleansing campaign, there is not a word about
Albanian atrocities, war criminals or any hesitation on the
part of the West to co-operate with individuals, groups and
institutions who is likely to have caused this exodus.
Neither does it regret that Albanians are intimidated by KLA
and forced out of their temporary houses upon return, or
punished for not wanting to join KLA.
The bias is put in perspective when the report
immediately after states that: 'Hardening Serb
attitudes towards Kosovo Albanians, driven in part by
outside extremists, are helping to radicalise Albanians in
Mitrovica.' The authors of the report has evidently never
noticed any outside extremists on the Albanian side, now or
earlier. Neither have they observed hardening Albanian
attitudes. The formulation also makes the few remaining
Serbs the causal factor and the Albanians innocent,
non-guilty of their own radicalisation.
If the basic character of Western policy and its
UNMIK/KFOR mission had been genuinely humanitarian, this
would have been dealt with in different terms. Human rights
violations play a conspicuously modest role in this
report!
Secondly, the report argues that demobilised KLA soldiers
can be a source of instability in the future which may be
true," says Jan Oberg. "However, the report enigmatically
argues that there is not enough civil employment
opportunities for these 10.000 fighters. One would otherwise
believe there was enough to do in a war-torn society such as
Kosovo! So KFOR and the UN Special Representative, Dr.
Bernhard Kouchner, are thus 'developing a concept for
demobilisation of the KLA, offering individual members an
opportunity to participate in a disciplined, professional,
multi-ethnic civilian emergency corps' of which KFOR will
provide day-to-day direction. This is what a few days later
was established formally as the Kosovo Protection Force,
KPF.
The report conveniently omits reference to the fact that
such a force is not even mentioned in SC Resolution
1244 which talks only about demilitarisation. We see here
why the Rambouillet document stipulated neither a time table
nor the modalities of demilitarisation of the Albanian side
as it did for the Yugoslav side: 1244 says that KLA and
other armed Kosovo Albanian groups shall 'comply with the
requirements for demilitarisation as laid down' by the heads
of KFOR and UNMIK. The fact that KPF is hardly
distinguishable from, but indeed looks like the embryo of, a
new Kosovo Army shall be dealt with in a forthcoming
TFF PressInfo.
© TFF 1999
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