Byzantine Blog

Nowhere in Europe

Nowhere in Europe is there such segregation as Kosovo. Thousands of people are still displaced and in camps.

Nowhere else are there so many ‘ethnically pure’ towns and villages scattered across such a small province.

Nowhere is there such a level of fear for so many minorities that they will be harassed simply for who they are. And perhaps nowhere else in Europe is at such a high risk of ethnic cleansing occurring in the near future – or even a risk of genocide.

Kosovo Today

This is not a description of Kosovo in 1998 or in 2003. It is a description of Kosovo today. For the Serbs and ‘other minorities’ – the Roma, Bosniaks (Slavic Muslims), Croats, Turks and Albanians of Kosovo – who suffer from expulsion from their homes, discrimination and restrictions on speaking their own language, the pattern of violence they have endured for so long may be about to be entrenched as law in the new Kosovo, as the future status talks continue behind closed doors in Vienna.

How, after one of the longest and most expensive international administrations since the creation of the United Nations (UN), whose mandate was explicitly to secure an environment for refugees to return home and ensure public safety (Resolution 1244, Article 10), has this been allowed to occur?

Clear Failure

This report tracks a clear failure on the part of the international protectorate to learn lessons from the past and draw on the minority rights expertise available to it in the UN and other bodies. This failure has allowed decision-makers to remain unaccountable, and produced a Constitutional Framework that refers to minority rights so broadly that they are too wide to be effective. Instead of integration, the current situation encourages the opposite: segregation. The report shows how the initial international governance structure – five different armed brigades in Kosovo, each running a different region and led by a different country (France, Germany, Italy the UK and the USA), each with very different policies towards security and minorities – has kept fresh the wounds inflicted before the security forces first arrived and allowed patterns of violence to be repeated.

The problem is not lack of financing. Conversely, the fact that so much money has been spent on the region has allowed segregation in public services to become an easy solution to conflict between groups. A short-term mentality, the use of quota systems in public services and an electoral system based on rigid ethnic representation show a lack of commitment to implementing minority rights in any meaningful way.

Radical Need for Change

This report shows how the future status negotiations currently under way in Vienna represent both the best hope and the greatest danger for peace.

For hope to be justified, the report emphasizes, there is a radical need for change in mindset and in practice:

• Minority rights should be guaranteed by a rule of law that is actually taken seriously and applied.

NATO and UN in Kosovo Above Regulation

Till today, the governing administration, the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) have declared themselves above regulation, overturning even the most basic of human rights laws, that of requiring all detention to be by order of a judge. Rights that exist on paper are made meaningless, and any fragile sense of security minorities have is consistently undermined. Therefore:

• The criminal justice system must hold those responsible for past crimes to account and see them arrested whatever their political power. Out of hundreds of investigations into the 2004 atrocities, few have been prosecuted, and those few convicted have received lenient sentences.
• All minorities should be consulted on the future of their lives, their property and their country, instead of talks taking place among a select group of people, in secret and behind closed doors.
• Specific efforts must be made to include women’s views and international negotiations should include minority rights and gender experts. When the Constitutional Framework was drawn up in 2001 it was not put up for general consultation. The same mistake is being made today, with talks taking place in Vienna, far from where the most disadvantaged can take part. Understanding the devastating realities facing returning refugees and communities wanting to keep their language alive, to travel in safety and to seek work at all levels of society – all of which have become next to impossible for Kosovo’s minorities despite seven years of international intervention – is vital for anyone involved in peacekeeping missions, in reportage or in international governance.

Present Danger

The report shows that measures that separate communities through religion or ethnicity should be transitional, if they have to be used at all. The future status talks offer a chance for change. Otherwise, the danger is that the patterns of segregation that are accepted in Kosovo, and that lead to the terror of ethnic cleansing, will be enshrined in the Constitution, and will be played out again over the next decade.

Summary of the damning report titled Minority Rights in Kosovo under International Rule, by Clive Baldwin, Head of Advocacy at Minority Rights Group International. From 2000 to 2002 the author was a member of the OSCE Mission in Kosovo. Previously, he was a practising human rights lawyer.

Clive Baldwin's Kosovo Report in PDF format.