The View From Kosovo

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday October 16, 2003

Stay in Touch is edited by Alan Kennedy

It is four years since NATO led the bombing of Serbia after it invaded Kosovo. Slobodan Milosevic is now before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague , and Serbia is a democracy. But Kosovo remains an open sore. Delegates from Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro are meeting this week in Vienna.

Writing in the Financial Times, columnist Stefan Wagstyl said: ``The negotiations are expected to address co-operation on transport, energy, missing persons and issues relating to refugees. The final status of Kosovo will not be discussed, and on this issue the two parties could not be farther apart."

In a commentary in The New York Times, European political affairs analyst Andrew Rosenbaum said observers ranging from the former US president Bill Clinton and his Balkans envoy, Richard Holbrooke, to the founder of Doctors Without Borders and a former UN administrator in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, have hailed the talks.

``Unfortunately, anyone who spends even a day walking the streets of Pristina and its neighbouring towns will come away convinced that peace is not to be gleaned through diplomacy.

``The wounds of the ethnic Albanian majority and the ethnic Serb minority alike have not healed, and the 12,000-plus NATO troops here are simply staunching the bleeding by force.

``And the unease is growing as the initial joy of independence has faded. [With] the first rush of aid money drying up, many [new buildings] are unfinished and abandoned. And Kosovo lacks either civil or commercial law. As long as both Serb and Albanian Kosovars settle their disputes with guns, foreign investment is a moot point."

In France, Liberation columnist Patric Sabatier said it was an irony of history that protectorates like Kosovo are now ``fashionable".

``The protectorate model, under which a state's government is entrusted to a foreign nation to help it climb out of chaos and allow for reconstruction, has been used by colonial empires in places from Cambodia to Morocco.

``Today, it is the international community that intervenes, under the rubric of the United Nations. But it is also a profound political act because it supersedes the principle of national sovereignty and can jeopardise the independence of entire nations. Often, it freezes conflicts rather than resolves them, as can be seen in Kosovo."

The Moscow daily Novye Izvestiya said: ``The West needs them to create the illusion that some kind of process has begun. In fact, no such process is visible."

© 2003 Sydney Morning Herald

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