Tolerance breaks out in Kosovo (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Tolerance breaks out in Kosovo

PRISTINA, Kosovo - Blaga Stevic doesn't have a problem with his ethnic Albanian neighbors, and they don't have a problem with him.

Stevic, a Serb who was born in Kosovo, fled with his family to Serbia after NATO went to war in 1999 on behalf of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority. He was afraid of revenge-minded extremists, he said, not the Albanian residents of his hilltop village of Stara Kolonija. So when the United Nations offered to restore his damaged home last year, he decided it was time to return.

"We're all in good relations here," Stevic said, drawing a nod from an Albanian friend sitting in his refurbished kitchen.

Stevic's dilemma now is that he can't find a job, and neither can two of his three grown children. The family, like most in the tiny hamlet, is living off paltry government aid.

Believe it or not, the Stevics' situation is evidence of progress in Kosovo, one of the world's most notorious cauldrons of ethnic hatred, but now becoming one of the international community's most audacious experiments in nation-building.

Their village may be an economic dead zone, but the Stevics are able to live in it unmolested, which is more than can be said for hundreds of Serbs targeted by revenge killings after the 1999 war, and for 10,000 Albanians killed by Serbs before that.

Four years after a U.S.-led bombing campaign drove out Serbian troops and paved the way for Kosovo to become a U.N. protectorate, civil society has been restored in a way that could offer lessons for reestablishing order in Iraq. But economic prosperity remains elusive.

Ethnic killings have abated, a multiethnic local police force is patrolling the streets, and a diminishing number of NATO peacekeeping troops are playing a role now described as largely psychological. The United Nations is gradually handing over power to an elected Kosovo government even as it oversees implementation of a new set of commercial and criminal laws.

The United Nations introduced the euro as local currency - a boon to cross-border trade that has allowed creation of a stable banking system.

In the last few weeks, Kosovo's top Albanian politicians made a public plea for the return of Serbian refugees. Officials also opened bids for the sale of five government-owned businesses and sentenced some former Albanian guerrilla leaders to prison for war-related crimes. All three developments would have been unimaginable two years ago.

Without question, enormous problems remain. Serbs still face harassment, unemployment is running at 60 percent, and the unresolved issue of Kosovo's possible independence is a constant bone of contention.

But there also are unmistakable signs of hope, among them the proliferation of cheap Internet cafes wired by a young entrepreneur.

A sense of normality is evident, particularly in Pristina, the capital, which is awash in cafes and restaurants frequented by both expatriates and locals.

"Things have improved dramatically," said Dale Pfeiffer, who heads the local office of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is spending about $31 million per year on aid projects. The international community has together spent about $1 billion per year to aid Kosovo over the last five years, not including the cost of peacekeeping troops, U.N. officials say.

"People who criticize the U.N. should come to Kosovo and see what we've done," said Sunil Narula, the chief spokesman for the U.N. Mission in Kosovo. "A lot has happened here!"

Narula spoke a few days before unknown assailants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Pristina courthouse and exploded a bomb under a police car in simultaneous attacks. Although no one was hurt, it was a sobering reminder of how quickly things could go bad again.

Locals speculated that the bombings were a protest against the convictions of the former Albanian guerrillas, the first time Albanians had been sentenced for war-related crimes.

Still, no one would dispute that Kosovo has come a long way since February 2000, when a story in The Inquirer bore the headline "NATO's best efforts have failed to produce even a semblance of peaceful coexistence."

"It's much better now than after the war," said Milos Tomic, a Serb who operates a small convenience store in the Serbian village of Klokot. "There are still evil minds with bad intentions, but people who were decent before the war are decent now. I buy goods from Albanians."

Ethnic Albanians had long made up the majority in this former Yugoslavian enclave of about 2 million people, but Serbs ran it. For years under Communist dictator Josip Broz, also known as Tito, Kosovo Albanians were full participants in the running of the province. But the rise of Serbian nationalism under Slobodan Milosevic ushered in a decade of repression during which Albanians were fired from their jobs, forbidden to buy property and barred from being educated in their language.

In the 1990s, the insurgent Kosovo Liberation Army began to mount attacks on Serbian police. The Serbs responded with reprisals that included massacres of whole villages in what was viewed as a replay of the gruesome campaign that Serbs had conducted in Bosnia. In March 1999, President Bill Clinton gave Milosevic an ultimatum to withdraw from Kosovo, and when he didn't pull out, NATO began a bombing campaign that lasted 78 days.

As destruction rained down on both Kosovo and Belgrade, Serbian troops stepped up a campaign of so-called ethnic cleansing. About 900,000 Albanians left the country. Some were forced onto railroad cars and driven out. An estimated 10,000 Albanians were killed by the Serbs.

Milosevic, who is being tried on war-crimes charges in The Hague, eventually capitulated, and Serbian forces withdrew. Along with them went about 200,000 Serbs, some of whose families had been in Kosovo for generations. The exodus included doctors, teachers, civil servants, electrical technicians, mining engineers, and the entire police force. Most of the Albanians returned, but only about 100,000 Serbs remain in Kosovo.

"How can we live with the Serbs again?" a Kosovar Albanian woman said at the time. "They killed our brothers and our sons. They held knives to our children's throats. They must leave Kosovo and never come back."

Into that whirlwind came the two organizations that would shape Kosovo's future: A 50,000-strong international peacekeeping force known as KFOR, and the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, known as UNMIK. Included in KFOR, which has drawn soldiers from 30 nations, were about 8,000 U.S. troops.

The international approach differs from the one being carried out in Iraq, where the United Nations has no formal role.

The soldiers, diplomats and aid workers arrived to scenes of chaos: Neither rule of law nor institutions of government survived.

"When I came here" in 1999, "there were no banks, no judicial system, no license plates on cars, nothing," said Capt. Ben Rost of Wayne, Pa., who returned recently for a second peacekeeping stint in Kosovo with the Pennsylvania National Guard.

Even a year after the war, the situation in Kosovo seemed every bit as dire and lawless as it does now in Iraq, except that instead of targeting the occupying troops, Albanians exacted revenge by killing Serbs and burning their houses. Then as now in Iraq, there were complaints that reconstruction aid was not flowing fast enough, and that electricity and clean water were in short supply.

And then, gradually, journalists turned their attention elsewhere. Years passed, and things started to get better.

The peacekeepers, whose numbers are to shrink to 20,000 by year's end, played a major role in the reestablishment of order by guarding Serbian villages and seizing weapons from both sides. But with civilian police gone, the United Nations also began hiring a force of international police officers, now numbering about 4,000. Those officers in turn began training a local force, the Kosovo Police Service.

UNMIK and European officials, meanwhile, created a judiciary from scratch, wrote a constitution, and set up a tax and customs system to pay for the government.

"Ordinary crime is now at Western European levels, far lower than in the United States," said Barry Fletcher, a former New Orleans police officer who now is a top official in the UNMIK police force. "We are about halfway through the process of turning things over to the local police."

Many observers believe the key to further peaceful integration lies in tackling what arguably is Kosovo's biggest remaining problem: its dismal economy.

There is no industry to speak of, and much of the country seems to be surviving on international assistance and help from relatives living abroad.

The United Nations, which is growing ever more unpopular among Kosovars the longer it holds power, has come in for particular criticism in the economic realm. Critics say it has been too slow to set the conditions needed for development - for example, by writing business-contract laws.

But while it is easy to lampoon U.N. bureaucrats who live well amid poverty, it's not clear that anyone has figured out how to woo capital investment to a war-torn place that has never known a modern market economy.

The other major unresolved issue is what diplomats call Kosovo's "final status." Many Kosovo leaders argue that foreign investment will not come until that status is decided.

Technically, Kosovo remains a province of the nation of Serbia and Montenegro, but it is an article of faith among diplomats, NATO soldiers and locals alike that Kosovars will never again be ruled from Belgrade.

Ethnic Albanians want an independent Kosovo nation, while Serbia would like to retain, at the least, the Serb-populated areas near the border. The United States opposes partition, and most U.N. and U.S. officials believe full independence is inevitable.

U.N. officials have put forth a list of "standards" they want Kosovo to achieve before the status question is addressed, including better integration of minorities, economic progress, and dialogue with Belgrade.

"In order to get that formal recognition, you have to work day and night to prove that Kosovo deserves independence," said Bujar Bukoshi, who was Kosovo's prime minister-in-exile in the 1990s and has now formed a new political party. "It will take time. But the most important thing is fixing the economy."

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