History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  More seriously, the KFOR forces have detention camps, with hundreds of suspected murderers and violent criminals. “But then,” an exasperated officer tells me, “the Albanian judge comes and releases all the Albanians, the Serb judge does the same for the Serbs.” Mere looting and plundering earns just “a cuff round the ear and don’t do it again.” The soldiers always knew they could never be a substitute for a proper police. The then KFOR commander, General Sir Michael Jackson, told me in May last year, when they were still waiting in Macedonia, that the key to success would be international police. Disastrously, UNMIK has gotten only some 1,800 of the 6,000 international police Kouchner requested when he arrived in July. And 6,000 would still be too few.

  Some of these police are from third-world countries, such as Bangladesh and Malaysia, and critics say they are mainly here for the money. They sit in the cafés while crime goes on all around. The more professional ones mix grim determination with despair. They include sixty officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, fresh from the streets of Belfast. “It’s just like home,” one of them remarks, after discussing last night’s particularly nasty summary executions. Just a couple of hundred local police have graduated from the new police academy. Behind them, there is still no proper structure of law, judges, courts, and prisons. UNMIK has taken half a year to secure agreement even on which body of law should be applied, let alone to start applying it.

  This is the greatest failure of international administration but not the only one. Six months after the world moved in, the province still has nothing that could be called a proper government.

  2

  There are, it seems to me, five main reasons for the way this unprecedented experiment in the local application of world government has thus far gone wrong. First, you could hardly think of a more difficult place to try. It’s not just the physical devastation, with more than a third of the houses destroyed or damaged. It’s also the social and psychological devastation wrought by ten years of oppression, followed by war, forced exile, and return. Further dislocation is caused by the tens of thousands of country people flooding into Priština because they have nowhere to live for the winter.

  Second, there is the disunity, corruption, and irresponsibility of the local Kosovar Albanian politicians, among whom Kouchner looks for partners in a joint administration. Five years ago, we would still have had one relatively well-defined local structure to deal with, the underground administration of the Democratic League of Kosova (LDK), headed by the unofficial president, Ibrahim Rugova—no shining light, but at least committed to peaceful change. Now there is another major movement, the KLA, which—together with its new Sinn Fein, the PPDK—believes that it has matchless legitimacy flowing from the armed struggle for independence. Several lesser competitors swirl in the background.

  The leader of the unofficial KLA government, Hashim Thaci, known here as Albright’s Darling, greets me in a smart blue suit and smoothly makes all the right noises about human rights, tolerance, and stability. “We didn’t make war to have this anarchy,” he says. But all the time a curious, slightly sinister smile plays on his lips, as if he’s really thinking, “What a huge joke that the United States and the whole Western world and this man from Oxford are all treating me, the kid from Drenica and the Zurich Bahnhof, with such respect.” Well-informed, very senior Western sources think it is a bad joke, since they claim to have firm evidence that Thaci has been directly involved in KLA racketeering and strong-arm tactics.

  In small towns and villages, the self-appointed KLA bosses behave as if they are the masters now. Local people complain bitterly about the unjust way the bosses distribute international aid. (The mother of my Mališevo family shows me all they have received: one cardboard box, marked, in some Sussex spinster’s hand, “Teenage Girls’ Underwear.”) In many places, they intimidate the local LDK leaders, still loyal to Rugova—so much so that in one village in the KLA heartland of Drenica, the LDK representatives did not even dare to turn out to meet Dr. Kouchner. “Thaci thinks he’s Castro,” the independent newspaper editor Baton Haxhiu says. And even Dr. Kouchner wearily comments, “Thaci wants to run the whole thing.”

  Yet this insolent arrogance of power alienates many Kosovars. Wherever I go, I find evidence of strong support for the LDK and especially for Ibrahim Rugova. Rugova himself is back and receives me in stately style in his large suburban house, full of heavy furniture and rich carpets. He wears a suit and tie but not, for once, his trademark paisley scarf. In his passable French, he tells me how he was detained by the Serbs in this very room with fourteen people and forced to go to Belgrade and be shown on Serbian television shaking hands with Milošević. Don’t people blame him for that? I ask. “No, because every Kosovar was in the same situation.” Like Thaci, he offers me smooth clichés about tolerance, stability, and democracy, but his problem is the weakness of his party, especially since the Serbs killed Professor Fehmi Agani, the éminence grise who held it together. At parting, Rugova shows me his mineral collection and presents me with a semiprecious lump of Kosova.

  Rugova wants three sorts of election as soon as possible: local elections, what he calls national (i.e., all-Kosova) elections, and direct presidential ones. The KLA wants local and national ones, then for parliament to elect the president, because they fear that Rugova would win a direct election. Kouchner hopes to start with local elections; but first the citizens and voters have to be registered, and that process has barely begun. Autumn 2000 seems the earliest likely time, and anyway such a contest is likely to sharpen the local rivalries.

  In the background, there is a second unofficial government headed by Bujar Bukoshi, who allegedly has hundreds of millions of deutsche marks collected from Kosovars living abroad during the 1990s. Thaci charmingly calls it “the mafia of Bukoshi.” There’s also another party, headed by a leading Kosovar intellectual, Rexhep Qosja, which, like the KLA and Rugova’s LDK, was represented at the Rambouillet peace talks in early 1999. In case you were wondering, the Islamic clergy seem quite incapable of acting as an integrating and pacifying force. “We try,” says the nice hoxha of Prilep, “but the anger is stronger, the anger is stronger.” When I ask the newspaper publisher Veton Surroi why he does not take a lead, he replies, “Me, I’m a moral authority.” But he says it with a weary, almost cynical shrug, as if he would add, “Whatever that means, in a place like this.”

  The third reason that things are going wrong is the complexity and chaos of the international presence itself, which matches and compounds the local Kosovar confusion. Locals comment proudly, “We’re Balkanizing the international community!” But the international community does that all by itself. On paper, there’s a structure which is drawn in KFOR documents—this is not a joke—as a Greek temple. The base is KFOR, providing security. Then there are four columns: UNMIK, for civil administration; the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), for restoring people’s homes; the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), for elections and media; and the European Union (EU), for economic reconstruction. The pediment is marked “a stable and peaceful Kosovo.” Very neat. But the practice, ah, there’s a different matter.

  All these international organizations have their own marked bureaucratic styles and political constraints. All compete with the others. All are subject to innumerable national pressures. Their separate propaganda sheets make revealing reading. The European Commission has a Reconstruction Weekly. Lead item in the 21—27 November 1999 issue is a report of a one-day workshop on management training that apparently concluded that “top-level managers in socially-owned companies … would require training on change and organisational behaviour, quality management, public relations, international markets, as well as general management development.” The bureaucratic language takes one straight back to Brussels. One wonders what polished consultant was paid what enormous fee (a year’s living for ten large Kosovar families?) to compose this ringing statement of the blindingly obvious. The report goes on
to discuss the small and medium-size enterprise (SME) sector: “To acquire a fully comprehensive assessment of training needs, it was recommended that a survey of all existing SMEs be undertaken to define more clearly training and related requirements (such as technology, markets, clients, and partnerships).” To anyone who knows the chaotic reality on the ground, this idea of a “survey of all [!] existing SMEs” in Kosova is utterly ludicrous. It’s stuff like this that can make even the staunchest friend of the EU despair of the Europe our fathers have built.

  Turning to the KFOR Chronicle, I particularly enjoy one headline: GREEKS ORGANISE THE CHAOS. Well, exactly General Reinhardt tells me he has thirty-four different national contingents under his command, “and don’t think they do something just because I order them to.” No, they all go off and ask their national governments first. I find that people from KFOR, UNMIK, and OSCE privately spend much time blaming each other—just like the Kosovar politicians. In fairness, one should say that the UN has never before been charged with such a complex piece of international government and at such short notice. Many dedicated, idealistic, professional people work long hours doing real things. There is something truly touching about this Babel of Azerbaijani soldiers, French intellectuals, Swedish diplomats, and Zambian policemen, trying to make a reality of a liberal internationalist dream. I wish it could work. I really do.

  Behind the conflicts of the local mortals, there are the demigods squabbling in New York, Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Beijing. It is no secret that Kouchner has spent much of his time trying to secure agreement from the UN Secretary-General and Security Council to this or that minute step of local self-government. When I ask him about this, he replies startlingly “New York does not exist!” (I think it might sound better in French.) In a conversation that I would characterize as unfocused, Dr. Kouchner gives me the impression of passion and Gallic eloquence but not of masterly administrative skills. Yet to make this thing work needs a politician-administrator of genius.

  The problems run from the very top to the very bottom. For example: UNMIK is trying to recruit judges, customs officials, and teachers at salaries of some DM100 to 500 a month. But the same people can earn DM1,000 to 2,000 a month working as interpreters or simply as drivers for those same international organizations. Thus, the international community unwittingly defeats its own objectives. (“And,” a Kosovar friend adds, “do you think customs officials on DM500 a month are going to collect many customs dues? Of course, they’ll take bribes instead.”) My own driver-interpreter is a judge, dismissed by the Serbs in 1991. He won’t go back to being a judge, for three reasons: because of the money; because he fears his own dear fellow Albanians will make trouble for him if he convicts some of their choicer brethren; and because he wants to emigrate to Canada anyway, to give his children a better life.

  In mid-December, shortly after I left, Kouchner finally persuaded his multiple international masters and the three Kosovar Albanian parties represented at the Rambouillet peace conference to agree on a structure of interim administration. This is supposed to last until elections produce something more democratic and permanent. It places him at the top as civilian governor of the province, with a mixed UNMIK and local administrative council beneath him and nineteen executive ministries under that. Competent persons are to be proposed by the Kosovar parties to head these ministries, but Kouchner will decide who gets the jobs. Well, we shall see.

  The fourth reason for the mess is the deep ambiguity of UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which, as a paper bridge between the Western and the Russian/Chinese positions, declares that the province is at once subject to the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and will enjoy substantial autonomy and self-government. Virginity and motherhood combined. This is, as one senior UNMIK official puts it candidly, “a nightmare.” The Russians and Chinese cry blue murder at every step to self-government, such as having a budget in deutsche marks rather than Yugoslav dinars or instituting customs controls or issuing separate identity papers. Yet such steps are the only way out of anarchy.

  Last but by no means least, it’s a mess because the world really does not want to be here. We stumbled into this experiment as we stumbled into the war itself. Each individual member state counts the cost. The reason why the international police officers, to take the single most important failure, have been so slow in coming is that national governments have not found them and won’t pay for them—including, as Kouchner bitterly remarks, his own, French government. (There are gendarmes in Kosovska Mitrovica, but the gendarmes are a military not a civilian force.) All Africa cries: What about us? International attention has already moved on to other crises. Chechnya, not Kosova, now produces the CNN effect. UNMIK had to go around with a begging bowl to raise the $250 million needed for this year’s core administration budget. It’s often been said but still bears repeating: For the price of a few days’ bombing, we are throwing Kosova away.

  This place supposedly took its name from “the field of the blackbirds” (Kosovo Polje), and in the bleak midwinter blackbirds still gather in vast numbers to squawk and caw in the trees of Priština. As I write up my notes in the early morning of my last day here, they flock and swirl outside my window, blackening the dawn sky above the offices of the International Criminal Tribunal, as if to shriek, “We know where the rest of the bodies are buried!” Then they swarm above the main headquarters of the UN administration, as if to crow, “You’ll never bring peaceful order to this place!” It’s a scene from Hitchcock’s Birds, and it eerily heightens my sense of grim foreboding as I leave for Serbia. The West won the war. I fear we are losing the peace.

  3

  To return to Serbia proper from occupied Kosova is a surreal experience. In the freezing fog, I say farewell to my Albanian judge/ driver/interpreter. Cheerful Canadian soldiers at the sandbagged checkpoint take my passport details—“Just in case something happens to you.” My Serbian driver waits on the other side, to take me past the Serbian police checkpoint. Then we drive through what still looks, by comparison with Kosova, to be a civilized and orderly landscape to Belgrade. There, I tell friends and acquaintances about life in the chunk of their country we’ve just occupied and what the German general proposes to do with it.

  These are not easy conversations. Surprisingly, Kosovo/a is not itself a major subject of contention, although the state media do make propaganda out of the suffering of Serbs at the hands of vengeful Kosovars and out of the general chaos in the province. In a public-opinion poll conducted in October for the National Democratic Institute—amazing that a U.S. public institution can commission a poll in what is still virtually enemy territory—only 5 percent of respondents said that the loss of Kosovo was the most important problem facing Serbia, compared with 26 percent who singled out poverty and social problems, and 14 percent who mentioned the regime of Slobodan Milošević. A year ago, Vuk Drašković, leader of the half-oppositional Serbian Renewal Movement, spent most of our conversation ranting about Kosovo. This time, in a long talk at his large, comfortable family home, he mentions it only once, almost in passing: “Of course Kosovo is lost.” Among other opposition politicians, who for years have been struck dumb by the Kosovo issue, I sense something like relief: “At least it’s not our problem anymore.”

  The war, however, especially the bombing of their own cities and towns, is a major subject for conversation with an Englishman. Aleksa Djilas, son of the famous dissident Milovan Djilas and, I like to think, a friend, greets me warmly in his apartment and then says, “Do you realize, if Britain had conscription and the war had gone on, we might have been fighting each other?” Quite a thought. Everyone has a story of the bombing. A woman who works for one of the most genuinely liberal (and therefore small) opposition parties recalls that when her six-year-old daughter asked, “Why are they bombing us?” she tried to explain along the lines of “there are bad people in Serbia doing bad things, and they are bombing those bad people, but unfortunately that means they�
�re also hitting us.” The little girl didn’t understand. (I’m not quite sure I do either.) Instead, she now goes around singing a popular rude song against “Clinton Bill.” The double-edged bitterness felt during the bombing was perfectly summed up in a graffito that read simply “Slobo Klintone!” “Slobo, you Clinton!”

  Generally, the bombing has reinforced the Serbs’ already highly developed sense of national victimhood. I talk to the angry former mayor of a village in Serbia’s wooded rural heartland, the Šumadija. As I take my leave, he says, generously, “We Serbs can forgive, but we cannot forget.” No notion that Serbs might themselves need to ask anyone else for forgiveness! At the same time, there’s an overwhelming awareness that Serbia has to start rejoining the civilized, developed world. Even this man, who belongs to Milošević’s Socialist Party, thinks there is no alternative.

  Yes, the Milošević regime accuses the opposition of being NATO lackeys. But, an opposition leader observes wryly, ordinary Serbs also respect power, and the bombing was nothing if not a crude lesson in power. Psychologically, even more than economically, the country is in a horrible condition, stewing in a witches’ broth of resentment, cynicism, conspiracy theories, and humiliated pride. The same Belgrade intellectuals who one minute berate me for the sins of Western policy are, next minute, privately asking me for a letter of recommendation or other assistance in getting to the West. So many of the brightest and best have left already. Those who remain are often reduced to semilegal small business or plain black-marketing to make ends meet.

  “To understand this country now,” says a political scientist whose judgment I respect, “you don’t need a political scientist. You need a clinical psychologist. We’re all crazy somehow.” And he mentions a black-humor diagnosis: Political Serbicide Syndrome. They feel they belong to a society being led into collective political suicide by Slobodan Milošević, himself the son of parents who both committed suicide.