Containing Kosovo

The international community's five-year performance review on its efforts in Kosovo has come in, and the grades are not passing. By almost any measure, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Kosovo Force (KFOR), the United Nations Interim Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), Kosovo's own political leaders, and the myriad other organizations and states trying to bring peace, stability, human rights, and a multiethnic society to Kosovo have utterly failed in their efforts. As Human Rights Watch summed up the situation in Kosovo in the wake of the March 2004 pogroms, during which twenty people were killed, four thousand driven from their homes, and thirty-six Christian churches and monasteries destroyed:

The security organizations in Kosovo—KFOR, the UNMIK international police, and the Kosovo Police Service (KPS)—failed catastrophically in their mandate to protect minority communities during the March 2004 violence. . . . The international community appears to be in absolute denial about its own failures in Kosovo.¹

While it is the most serious outbreak of violence in Kosovo since NATO and the UN assumed responsibility for the province, this violence was certainly not an isolated occurrence. In reality, ethnic minorities have faced an "unrelenting tide of violence"in the province since 1999, in the words of a UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)/Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) report.² As one editorial noted:

While the campaign of murder and arson [in Kosovo] never stopped, the international community in Kosovo reported one success after another in its campaign to create a multiethnic society. Slaloming around dead bodies and fire sites, the UN administration and NATO gave Kosovo all the right institutions . . . [while Kosovo] remained a lawless place in which the only true authority remained with the former KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] and underworld bosses.³

The result for non-Albanian ethnic communities in Kosovo has been both tragic and catastrophic. Far from becoming a tolerant society where different ethnic groups are guaranteed their full human and civil rights, it remained a society of injustice, as Amnesty International reported in 2003:

Minorities in Kosovo continue to be denied access both to their basic human rights and to any effective redress for violations and abuses of these rights. Almost four years after the end of the war in Kosovo . . . members of minority communities continue to both suffer and fear assaults by the majority community on their lives and property. . . . This climate of fear, insecurity, and mistrust . . . has resulted in the effective denial of the right of ethnic minorities to enjoy freedom of movement in Kosovo. Additionally, those who are able to gain some measure of freedom of movement find themselves subjected to both direct and indirect discrimination when seeking access to basic civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights.⁴

Passively monitoring violence against ethnic minorities is only one of a long list of the international community's failings in Kosovo. But since earlier failures are no excuse for not having a more feasible current policy, the international community must still come to grips with the question of what to do about Kosovo. Some argue that the current status quo in the province is untenable and that moving toward independence is the only feasible political option. As I will argue, however, current international policy, intent on maintaining a strict "standards before status" approach regarding Kosovo's future, is the only realistic policy available, for three reasons.

First, there are simply no responsible institutions or individuals in Kosovo to transfer sovereignty to. Kosovo's political leaders, security organizations, and civil society institutions over the past five years have shown that they are incapable of creating a state (or unwilling to do so) that respects the rights of non-Albanian ethnic communities and the security of neighboring states, or even of guaranteeing the rule of law for its own citizens. As one scholar has noted, "a breakdown of law and order has been an almost permanent feature of life" in Kosovo for the past century.⁵ After the...