Shacked Up With the U.N., Kosovo Is Ready to Bolt
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CroRadio.net
Nov 17, 2007, 6:59:42 PM11/17/07
to Croatian News
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/16/AR2007111601214.html
Shacked Up With the U.N., Kosovo Is Ready to Bolt
By Maciej Zaremba
Sunday, November 18, 2007; Page B03
PRISTINA, Kosovo My cabby curses at the white Nissan Patrol blocking a
teeming intersection in Pristina. The SUV's driver, a Pakistani U.N.
worker, desperately jerks the gearshift while angry hooting builds
from the cars behind him. Something inside my cabby snaps, and he
roars with laughter: "First the Turks. Then the Serbs. And now? We are
invaded by Pakistan!"
That's right, he called the U.N. worker an invader. But you can hardly
blame him. The man driving the Nissan Patrol is part of the most
extensive U.N. operation in history, one that wore out its welcome
long ago.
And now Kosovo is on the brink of independence. In Saturday's
parliamentary elections, the parties had one thing in common: They
want to turn Kosovo, still technically a province of Serbia, into a
country.
The U.N. mission in Kosovo began in 1999, after NATO swept in with a
78-day bombing campaign that halted Serbian President Slobodan
Milosevic's bloody expulsion of ethnic Albanians, who make up 90
percent of Kosovo's population. Eight years later, Kosovo remains a
U.N. protectorate, but internationals do more than enforce the peace.
They train the police force, write school curricula and collect taxes.
They even design traffic patterns for one-way city streets. Kosovo is
the world's first U.N. state, created in the wake of a military
campaign that saved tens of thousands of lives, where corrupt
reconstruction efforts have turned the survivors' gratitude into
resentment.
To understand this resentment, consider the case of a 70-year-old
Kosovar widow who awoke one morning in December 2000 to find her
telephone disconnected because of an unpaid bill. The bill wasn't
hers, she protested -- it belonged to the international manager of
Kosovo's power company named Joe Trutschler who rented her home in
Pristina. When the telephone company contacted him about the bill, he
denied responsibility for the calls, even though they were made to his
home phone number in Germany.
ad_icon
The widow didn't give up. She didn't have much choice: The bill was
for the equivalent of $5,100, a year and a half's salary in Kosovo.
But when she appealed to U.N. officials, they claimed no
responsibility for an employee's private activities, she said. She
filed a complaint at the local court in Pristina, only to learn that,
as a U.N. employee, Trutschler enjoyed immunity in Kosovo.
Trutschler, who got his job with a bogus r¿sum¿ that was never checked
by U.N. officials, didn't just bilk his landlady. In 2003, he was
convicted in Germany of embezzling the equivalent of $4.3 million from
the Kosovo power company, and he was recently named in newspaper
reports as one of 11 suspects being investigated for bilking $10
million from the water company. Meanwhile, the widow's phone is still
dead.
Only 30 percent of Kosovars have faith in the United Nations,
according to a U.N. bulletin in fall 2006 -- half the number that
believed in the international administration four years ago. Fifty
percent of the population is prepared to participate in organized
protests against the world community, U.N. reports say. It's easy to
see why. Kosovars have watched fraudsters use U.N. immunity to escape
justice and seen foreign companies pocket millions of dollars in aid
without delivering meaningful results.
Take France. During the summer of 1999, when it became clear that
Frenchman Bernard Kouchner would head the fledgling U.N. mission in
Kosovo, the French government established the Mission
interminist¿rielle pour l'Europe du Sud-Est (MIESE). Its mission,
according to a French government report: to avoid a scenario like the
one that unfolded in Bosnia, where France contributed 17 percent of
the total international aid but received only 5 percent of the
reconstruction contracts. So representatives from French companies
donned military uniforms and followed French troops into the province.
Meanwhile, MIESE used its contacts in the United Nations, the European
Union and the World Bank to ensure that the mission favored French
businesses. Pretty soon, France was in 13th place as a donor country
but had won more than 30 percent of U.N. contracts in Kosovo, U.N.
officials said.
Meanwhile, half of Kosovo's population is out of work. At the inaptly
named Grand Hotel in Pristina, 21 waiters sit like melancholy jackdaws
on windowsills around the bar. The only customer in the room waits to
be noticed; his business hardly makes a difference. The same goes for
motorists who stop at any of the 660 gas stations in Kosovo. There is
a station every 3.7 miles -- too many for proprietors to support with
the sale of gasoline alone. Behind closed doors, they launder money
from the smuggling of narcotics, arms and prostitutes.
Kosovo's gross domestic product is scandalously low. Kosovars use soap
from Bulgaria and wear T-shirts from Taiwan. Their flour comes from
the Czech Republic and their drinking water from Hungary. As long as
Kosovo remains a U.N. protectorate, a non-country, outside business
investments will never come.
But what investments do you need to grow cucumber? While their own
fields lie fallow, Kosovars eat tomatoes from Turkey and lettuce from
Italy. It pays better to sell chewing gum to internationals than to
toil in the fields. And eight years after the war, the local courts
appointed and supervised by the United Nations still have not sorted
out who owns the fields.
The United Nations could argue that it lacks the funds to pay judges.
But then why does it pay an employee from Sierra Leone more than
$11,000 per month to teach Kosovars how to run their railroads? The
Kosovar railroad workers, who survive on just over $200 per month,
were more than a little offended to learn that Sierra Leone's last
trains stopped running in 1975. Their teacher was an expert on
harbors.
U.N. top brass knows full well that Kosovars are losing patience. Last
year Inga-Britt Ahlenius, U.N. undersecretary general for internal
oversight services, warned if the administration continued to ignore
corruption, the whole mission could be jeopardized. "[T]he reluctance
by senior Mission management to address fraud and corruption will have
a devastating impact on public perception inside and outside of
Kosovo," she wrote.
"Revolution," Albin Kurti tells me at a café in Pristina last year,
emptying his cappuccino in one gulp. "We are going to make a
revolution!" When he says this for the third time, people turn our
way.
A student protester and translator for ethnic Albanian guerrilla
fighters during the Milosevic regime, Kurti today leads Kosovo's
movement for independence. At age 32, he looks more like an aging grad
student from Berkeley than a revolutionary. But Kurti is the idol of
the young, which says something in a place where half the population
has yet to turn 25. Already he has enough followers to plaster the
country with the word "Vetëvendosje" -- self-determination.
On Saturday, all the candidates running for parliament will be
Albanian because the Serbs have boycotted the campaign. All the
candidates support independence. On that issue, the "international
community" is split. The U.S. government generally backs the idea;
Europe, worried about another Balkans conflagration, is mixed; Pro-
Serb Russia is against it. The United Nations is supposed to deal with
the issue soon. Kosovo's Albanians have vowed to declare independence
if no agreement is reached by a Dec. 10 U.N. deadline.
Kurti assures me the revolution will be peaceful. A hundred thousand
people will surround the U.N. headquarters, the police station and the
court. They will stay as long as it takes -- for a week, maybe for a
month.
ad_icon
But don't be surprised if the scenario plays out violently. After our
interview, Kurti was charged with orchestrating a pro-independence
riot. At that protest in February, two ethnic Albanians were killed
when Romanian police officers fired rubber bullets at point-blank
range. Last week, a court in Kosovo extended Kurti's house arrest
until Jan. 11.
Critics say that Kurti vaingloriously fancies himself Kosovo's
founding father. He wants to see his statue in the town square and his
name in schoolbooks, they claim -- to be the man who by action,
shrewdness or violence won freedom for a humiliated people. "We do not
want the U.N. mission in Kosovo, but the Kosovo mission at the U.N.!"
he cries.
An adventurer? Certainly. But the wrath he rides did not invent
itself.
maciej....@dn.se
Maciej Zaremba is a staff writer for the Swedish newspaper Dagens
Nyheter. His complete reportage on Kosovo can be read at
www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=2502&a=664639.
Shacked Up With the U.N., Kosovo Is Ready to Bolt
By Maciej Zaremba
Sunday, November 18, 2007; Page B03
PRISTINA, Kosovo My cabby curses at the white Nissan Patrol blocking a
teeming intersection in Pristina. The SUV's driver, a Pakistani U.N.
worker, desperately jerks the gearshift while angry hooting builds
from the cars behind him. Something inside my cabby snaps, and he
roars with laughter: "First the Turks. Then the Serbs. And now? We are
invaded by Pakistan!"
That's right, he called the U.N. worker an invader. But you can hardly
blame him. The man driving the Nissan Patrol is part of the most
extensive U.N. operation in history, one that wore out its welcome
long ago.
And now Kosovo is on the brink of independence. In Saturday's
parliamentary elections, the parties had one thing in common: They
want to turn Kosovo, still technically a province of Serbia, into a
country.
The U.N. mission in Kosovo began in 1999, after NATO swept in with a
78-day bombing campaign that halted Serbian President Slobodan
Milosevic's bloody expulsion of ethnic Albanians, who make up 90
percent of Kosovo's population. Eight years later, Kosovo remains a
U.N. protectorate, but internationals do more than enforce the peace.
They train the police force, write school curricula and collect taxes.
They even design traffic patterns for one-way city streets. Kosovo is
the world's first U.N. state, created in the wake of a military
campaign that saved tens of thousands of lives, where corrupt
reconstruction efforts have turned the survivors' gratitude into
resentment.
To understand this resentment, consider the case of a 70-year-old
Kosovar widow who awoke one morning in December 2000 to find her
telephone disconnected because of an unpaid bill. The bill wasn't
hers, she protested -- it belonged to the international manager of
Kosovo's power company named Joe Trutschler who rented her home in
Pristina. When the telephone company contacted him about the bill, he
denied responsibility for the calls, even though they were made to his
home phone number in Germany.
ad_icon
The widow didn't give up. She didn't have much choice: The bill was
for the equivalent of $5,100, a year and a half's salary in Kosovo.
But when she appealed to U.N. officials, they claimed no
responsibility for an employee's private activities, she said. She
filed a complaint at the local court in Pristina, only to learn that,
as a U.N. employee, Trutschler enjoyed immunity in Kosovo.
Trutschler, who got his job with a bogus r¿sum¿ that was never checked
by U.N. officials, didn't just bilk his landlady. In 2003, he was
convicted in Germany of embezzling the equivalent of $4.3 million from
the Kosovo power company, and he was recently named in newspaper
reports as one of 11 suspects being investigated for bilking $10
million from the water company. Meanwhile, the widow's phone is still
dead.
Only 30 percent of Kosovars have faith in the United Nations,
according to a U.N. bulletin in fall 2006 -- half the number that
believed in the international administration four years ago. Fifty
percent of the population is prepared to participate in organized
protests against the world community, U.N. reports say. It's easy to
see why. Kosovars have watched fraudsters use U.N. immunity to escape
justice and seen foreign companies pocket millions of dollars in aid
without delivering meaningful results.
Take France. During the summer of 1999, when it became clear that
Frenchman Bernard Kouchner would head the fledgling U.N. mission in
Kosovo, the French government established the Mission
interminist¿rielle pour l'Europe du Sud-Est (MIESE). Its mission,
according to a French government report: to avoid a scenario like the
one that unfolded in Bosnia, where France contributed 17 percent of
the total international aid but received only 5 percent of the
reconstruction contracts. So representatives from French companies
donned military uniforms and followed French troops into the province.
Meanwhile, MIESE used its contacts in the United Nations, the European
Union and the World Bank to ensure that the mission favored French
businesses. Pretty soon, France was in 13th place as a donor country
but had won more than 30 percent of U.N. contracts in Kosovo, U.N.
officials said.
Meanwhile, half of Kosovo's population is out of work. At the inaptly
named Grand Hotel in Pristina, 21 waiters sit like melancholy jackdaws
on windowsills around the bar. The only customer in the room waits to
be noticed; his business hardly makes a difference. The same goes for
motorists who stop at any of the 660 gas stations in Kosovo. There is
a station every 3.7 miles -- too many for proprietors to support with
the sale of gasoline alone. Behind closed doors, they launder money
from the smuggling of narcotics, arms and prostitutes.
Kosovo's gross domestic product is scandalously low. Kosovars use soap
from Bulgaria and wear T-shirts from Taiwan. Their flour comes from
the Czech Republic and their drinking water from Hungary. As long as
Kosovo remains a U.N. protectorate, a non-country, outside business
investments will never come.
But what investments do you need to grow cucumber? While their own
fields lie fallow, Kosovars eat tomatoes from Turkey and lettuce from
Italy. It pays better to sell chewing gum to internationals than to
toil in the fields. And eight years after the war, the local courts
appointed and supervised by the United Nations still have not sorted
out who owns the fields.
The United Nations could argue that it lacks the funds to pay judges.
But then why does it pay an employee from Sierra Leone more than
$11,000 per month to teach Kosovars how to run their railroads? The
Kosovar railroad workers, who survive on just over $200 per month,
were more than a little offended to learn that Sierra Leone's last
trains stopped running in 1975. Their teacher was an expert on
harbors.
U.N. top brass knows full well that Kosovars are losing patience. Last
year Inga-Britt Ahlenius, U.N. undersecretary general for internal
oversight services, warned if the administration continued to ignore
corruption, the whole mission could be jeopardized. "[T]he reluctance
by senior Mission management to address fraud and corruption will have
a devastating impact on public perception inside and outside of
Kosovo," she wrote.
"Revolution," Albin Kurti tells me at a café in Pristina last year,
emptying his cappuccino in one gulp. "We are going to make a
revolution!" When he says this for the third time, people turn our
way.
A student protester and translator for ethnic Albanian guerrilla
fighters during the Milosevic regime, Kurti today leads Kosovo's
movement for independence. At age 32, he looks more like an aging grad
student from Berkeley than a revolutionary. But Kurti is the idol of
the young, which says something in a place where half the population
has yet to turn 25. Already he has enough followers to plaster the
country with the word "Vetëvendosje" -- self-determination.
On Saturday, all the candidates running for parliament will be
Albanian because the Serbs have boycotted the campaign. All the
candidates support independence. On that issue, the "international
community" is split. The U.S. government generally backs the idea;
Europe, worried about another Balkans conflagration, is mixed; Pro-
Serb Russia is against it. The United Nations is supposed to deal with
the issue soon. Kosovo's Albanians have vowed to declare independence
if no agreement is reached by a Dec. 10 U.N. deadline.
Kurti assures me the revolution will be peaceful. A hundred thousand
people will surround the U.N. headquarters, the police station and the
court. They will stay as long as it takes -- for a week, maybe for a
month.
ad_icon
But don't be surprised if the scenario plays out violently. After our
interview, Kurti was charged with orchestrating a pro-independence
riot. At that protest in February, two ethnic Albanians were killed
when Romanian police officers fired rubber bullets at point-blank
range. Last week, a court in Kosovo extended Kurti's house arrest
until Jan. 11.
Critics say that Kurti vaingloriously fancies himself Kosovo's
founding father. He wants to see his statue in the town square and his
name in schoolbooks, they claim -- to be the man who by action,
shrewdness or violence won freedom for a humiliated people. "We do not
want the U.N. mission in Kosovo, but the Kosovo mission at the U.N.!"
he cries.
An adventurer? Certainly. But the wrath he rides did not invent
itself.
maciej....@dn.se
Maciej Zaremba is a staff writer for the Swedish newspaper Dagens
Nyheter. His complete reportage on Kosovo can be read at
www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=2502&a=664639.
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