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Joining the program from Belgrade, Dr. James Lyon, the Special Balkans Advisor at the International Crisis Group, speaks with Jerry Fowler about the region, where he has been working for the past twenty-five years. He explains the complexity of Kosovo’s history and how ethnic differences remain tied into this regions’ present struggle for independence.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: Our guest today is James Lyon. He is Special Balkans Advisor at the International Crisis Group, and has been working in the region for over twenty-five years. He joins us from Belgrade. Dr. Lyon, thanks for being with us.
JAMES LYON: My pleasure; it is a pleasure to be able to talk with you today.
JERRY FOWLER: I wanted to focus primarily on Kosovo today. Since 1999 when NATO launched its intervention in Kosovo, the region has basically been an international protection. I was wondering, if to begin with, you could tell us how that has worked?
JAMES LYON: On paper, the way it has worked it that it is governed by a United Nations Security Council Resolution called 12-44. This Security Council Resolution essentially establishes a United Nations protectorate, and in the scope of that protectorate you have the United Nations sort of on top of a series of what they call, “pillars.” Now the “pillars” are all officially part of the United Nations, but they are actually run by separate organizations. You have one pillar that is run, for example, by the organization for Security and Operation in Europe, the OSCE. You have another pillar that is run by the European Union, the EU, and so and so forth. Then to give it a little bit of muscle, the United Nations also has a civilian police mission there, and then in addition you have the NATO led Kosovo force, known as K-4 which is on the ground there to provide security and to keep the Serbs from reoccupying the territory, etc.
JERRY FOWLER: In terms of both the civilian police mission that is run by the EU and K-4, how many people are we talking about?
JAMES LYON: I do not have the exact numbers as of today for K-4, but I think at present, K-4 is somewhere around 17,000 troops, if memory serves correctly. Do not hold me to that number because it is always in flux, there are always rotations. It was initially a much larger force which has been reduced. It is now down to about half of its original strength which was somewhere around 30,000 soldiers. The civilian police, once again, I cannot give you the precise number, but at present we are talking about somewhere around five hundred people.
JERRY FOWLER: Do they have responsibility for keeping public order or is that being exercised by the Kosovar government?
JAMES LYON: That is an excellent question. In Kosovo, the first order of business seems to be one of avoiding blame and of avoiding responsibility for doing anything.
JERRY FOWLER: The first order of business on the international community--?
JAMES LYON: Everybody, but including the international community. If we start with the local government, the Kosov-Albanian government, they always claim that they cannot do anything because the international community is there, and at the end of the day, the international community is responsible for everything, and the international community is preventing the Kosovar authorities from carrying out their functions which is a patent falsehood and obviously a big excuse. Then we have the United Nations which claims that it has to leave everything up to the Kosovo government, and that it itself cannot really intervene very much, because at the end of the day, it is the Kosovo government’s job, so the United Nations, UNMIK—United Nations Mission in Kosovo—always tries to avoid taking responsibility for doing anything and putting the blame on the Kosovo government when things do not happen. Then, it the security sector you have the KPS—the Kosovo Police Service—which is an indigenous police force created by the United Nations to be Kosovo’s police, to replace the old Milosevic era police, and this once again, is a force that always seems to say, “We cannot really do much of anything because K-4 is here and so are the United Nations civilian police, and at the end of the day, they are the ones that take care of the real big security issues,” and also the KPS is a very relatively weak force that often is out-gunned and out-manned by local paramilitary and organized crime groups. Then you have K-4 claiming, “This is not our mandate; we are here to separate Serbia from Kosovo,” and each national contingent inside K-4 seems to interpret its mandate in a different light as to what they may and may not do. This is sort of the general picture. Then you have the Kosovo Protection Core which is the old Kosovo Liberation Army, just under a new guise which is officially now a civilian civil descent organization to protect against natural catastrophes and disasters which is the only security institution inside the country which any real authority or ability to do anything, but it has been prevented from carrying arms or engaging in any security related tasks by the international community. Essentially there is one large avoidance game going on by everybody; no one is willing to accept responsibility.
JERRY FOWLER: In spite of having a number of security organs, there is basically something of a vacuum.
JAMES LYON: There is a tremendous vacuum, and we say to a certain extent a similar situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina following the Dayton Peace Accords where you have a strong international presence, a quasi-protectorate and yet once again, the internationals coming in, enjoying their salaries, enjoying being there but not necessarily willing to get involved in the dirty work that it would take to reform the country and to change the security environment.
JERRY FOWLER: In a context of this vacuum, the original international intervention, or NATO intervention was because of Serbian persecution of the Albanian majority, but then in the years since, there has been violence against the Serbian minority in Kosovo, right?
JAMES LYON: I think it goes beyond simple persecution. It was a blatant attempt by the Serbs to drive all of the Albanians out of Kosovo, and in the course of two months, they succeeded in getting 800,000 Albanians to leave their homes and cross out of the borders of Kosovo, usually by means of violence and terror, what we refer to as ethnic cleansing. It was not just, shall we say, mistreatment. The Albanians all returned immediately, following the NATO intervention and NATO entry into Kosovo in July of 1999. What we have had since then have been an ongoing series of incidents, primarily Albanian on Serb violence, where there are many Albanians who had family members killed by Serb forces in the violence during the 1990s and who are seeking revenge. There are many Albanians who are also suspicious of the remaining Serbs inside Kosovo and view them as a potential fifth column and it is an excuse for Serbia to once again intervene. They feel that until Kosovo is given status as an independent nation these Serbs will always pose a threat to Kosovo’s future, so right from the very start, we have a very tense situation where Albanians are inclined to distrust Serbs and to do as much as they can to ostracize them or to physically drive them out of Kosovo. Of course, they have not been able to do this in the way many Albanians would like simply because of the presence of international security forces, the international community, the attention of the international media, and the fact that this would certainly hurt their chances for independence.
JERRY FOWLER: At the same time, have there been active efforts on the part of the Kosovo government to protect the rights of minorities?
JAMES LYON: There has been a mixed record. If we look at things on paper, we can say that there have been some efforts made on paper. We see the current Prime Minister, Agim Ceku and his predecessor, Ramush Haradinaj have both made an effort to reach out to the Serbian populations. This is important because both Haradinaj and Ceku have reputations of being war time heroes in what they call their liberation struggle against Serbs, and so what these men say carries a great deal of weight. Mr. Ceku has gone out of his way; he speaks to the Serbs in Serbian; when it is a Serbian religious holiday, he will send official greetings to the Serbian patriarchs, the Serbian clerics and the Serbian people, and he has visited Serbian areas, and he has tried to reach out, but he is one man and it takes a while to change an entire national consciousness.
JERRY FOWLER: One of the things you mentioned, United Nations Security Council Resoultion 1244, which created the international presence in Kosovo, but it left up in the air the final status of Kosovo—whether it would become independent or have some other status—but I gather that those issues are now coming to a head.
JAMES LYON: They are, and it appears that they will be resolved by the end of this year. The United States are both pushing that they be resolved by the end of this year so that they can move ahead on other issues related to the Balkans. [Resolution] 1244, although being somewhat ambiguous, is not quite as ambiguous as people would like to think, especially those in Belgrade. If you read it closely, it does refer to a resolution of Kosovo’s final status, and in so doing, the text of 1244 clearly refers to the Rambouillet Agreement; the Rambouillet document that called for a referendum to be held in which Kosovo’s status would be decided on by the majority of the people, so although 1244 does not explicitly say, “independence,” what it does say is, “this is a route, a road map whereby Kosovo can become independent, and we are expecting that by the end of the year, the international community will agree on some sort of a decision that will move Kosovo toward a form of conditional independence.
JERRY FOWLER: When you say, “conditional independence,” what would be the conditions?
JAMES LYON: There is a lot of discussion on that; that at first it would be limited independence, limited sovereignty, that as Kosovo fulfilled certain conditions regarding protection of minority rights, regarding certain types of reforms, regarding the judiciary in a series of other issues. There is an entire laundry list that has been issued by the contact group, and as they see to the conditions fulfilled, they will check them off and say, “Okay, you have done this, now let’s talk about Council of Europe membership… you have done this, let’s talk about OSCE membership… you have done this, let’s talk about a United Nations seat… you have done this, let’s talk about the World Bank membership;” things of this nature. I think a lot of it will be, “If you want to get into this club, you have to do that.”
JERRY FOWLER: Getting into the different clubs, I guess, would be full membership in the international community, but on the other hand, independence, that is, being formally recognized as independent would be somewhat, I guess, an early step. How much appetite is there on the part of the international community, the contact group that you have mentioned, to actually enforcing the conditions that have been discussed?
JAMES LYON: If we look at both Bosnia and Kosovo, we have to be very, very open in saying that the international community usually in these instances is looking for a way to gracefully exit, and that means saying and doing all the right things on paper, but not having the political will to back up what they have actually said or done, and after they depart or after they draw down, then they tend to stand back and wring their hands and say, “Oh my, how tragic,” or “how horrible,” and we have seen this repeated over and over again in the Balkans; first with the collapse of Yugoslavia, the response to the genocide in Bosnia, then in response to other actions throughout the region. Today we see, for example, in Bosnia, that things appear to actually be getting worse, rather than getting better, simply because of an international lack of commitment to follow through on the initial military action and the initial political action. We see the same in Kosovo; we should not be surprised if after Kosovo becomes independent that it half-heartedly fulfills the conditions set by the international community in that it is all conveniently forgotten.
JERRY FOWLER: What would be the consequences of that? Is there the potential for renewed violence?
JAMES LYON: In the Balkans, there is always a potential for renewed violence. Right now, we see politicians in Bosnia who are playing some very dangerous games in an election year that could, once again result in seeing Bosnia resort to violence, and I say this through politicians in the Republic of Serbska calling for a referendum; there are politicians in the Federation who seem to be egging the Serbs on. Inside Serbia, we are faced with a situation where Serbia today, increasingly sort of resembles Weimer, Germany in many respects, in terms of its current social and political direction. In terms of its economic direction we see some gradual reforms but these are very slow, very painful; even then these are quite fragile and might not survive given the current political state, but we see on the political, cultural and social level, not that Serbia is in reverse, but rather, they have turned the car around and are now moving rapidly in the opposite direction from which we would like to see them move, and this is on an entire series of social and cultural issues and political issues that are very troublesome. The recent law on religion, for example, is very draconian. It is going to mean that a lot of churches that are accepted as mainstream in the United States and Western Europe are going to be shut down because they will be labeled as cults. We have just seen a publication of new school text books that have in the history of the Second World War, they have omitted the word, “Holocaust,” and any mention of the Holocaust whatsoever. We see the Serbian Orthodox Church having just created a new saint, a very high profile saint, who is sainted not for any spiritual deed or miracle—he had none—but rather because of his ideology. This is the same saint, newly created saint that was awarded the civilian medal by Adolph Hitler in the late 1930s; he used to correspond with Hitler because of his anti-Semitic writings. We have a country that politically is rehabilitating the Milosevic era; it is politically rehabilitating a golden era of 1930s fascism. It is troubling to watch.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me ask you this, with regard to the textbooks, how do the textbooks deal with the Milosevic years—the eighties and nineties—or do they even deal with them?
JAMES LYON: They do not really.
JERRY FOWLER: What is the attitude in Serbia, both at the government level, and then at the popular level, to a move towards a final status for Kosovo?
JAMES LYON: It is very mixed. It is very mixed. It depends who you talk to, but the people who actually hold power, the ones who control the guns, the ones who control policy, are very much opposed. They have said that they will not accept any form of independence whatsoever. Prime Minister Koštunica has spent the last month and a half, two months putting his foot in his mouth and engaging in open, verbal combat with the European Union and the United States and the rest of the international community over Kosovo, and has made it clear that they will accept no compromise solution that includes independence. Essentially what is striking is since Milosevic was overthrown on October 5, 2000, there has not been a change whatsoever in Serbia’s policy toward Kosovo. In other words, if you look at and compare the Milosevic era Kosovo policy with the Sejdiu and then the Koštunica era, Kosovo policy, we see a direct continuity with no break or no change in policy direction. There is reason to believe that there might be some people inside Serbia who might be very upset by an independent Kosovo. We know that there are paramilitary groups that would like to take action. The question is whether or not the Serbian security forces can control them or will have the political will to control them and prevent them from taking these steps, but we are certain of is that Kosovo will be partitioned, the question is in what manner and what would the Albanian response be to this partition.
JERRY FOWLER: When you say partition, you mean that a portion of Kosovo will be cut off and remain part of Serbia?
JAMES LYON: That is highly probable. The Serbs have a relatively homogenous area to the north of the Ebar River beginning at Mitrovica. This is a northern area of Kosovo; it is about the northern quarter of Kosovo, and it abuts on Serbia directly, and since 1999 when NATO came in, they have been working overtime to separate that area from the rest of Kosovo. The four municipalities are in the North now; the Serbian municipalities have now come out and openly disavowed all allegiance to the Kosovo government. The Serbs have begun forming paramilitary organizations; they have completely rewired the electric and telephone infrastructure. They have completed a new water supply system for the North. They build roads so that Serbs no longer have to drive through Albanian majority areas to get to certain Serb areas that were before, shall we say, isolated. They control the police, the entire civilian administration there, whether it be the hospitals, the health care, education; whether it be the police; whether it be the judiciary; are all controlled directly by Belgrade. The soft partition has already taken place; the question is what will the response be to an independence declaration? Can we expect to see Belgrade declare a hard partition? There is a high likelihood of this, and in the meantime, we see that Belgrade is working overtime to try to provoke the Albanians into resorting to violence in the efforts that this will somehow help Belgrade’s negotiating position. We just saw at the end of June, on June 28th, Prime Minister Mitrovica went to visit the great Monastery, allegedly for religious services on Saint Vidus’ Day, Vidusdan as they call it, which is the anniversary of the famous battle of Kosovo in 1389 against the Turks on which most of the Kosovo mythology and legend is based, and eh although allegedly visiting there for a religious service—it was held in the morning by the patriarch—he got there after the service had ended and gave a political speech saying that Kosovo has always been a part of Serbia and will always remain a part of Serbia, and then left. Obviously hoping to provoke the Albanians into some sort of response which the Albanians were fortunately mature enough to avoid.
JERRY FOWLER: In some ways this is kind of an eerie replay of a speech that Milosevic gave in 1989, isn’t it?
JAMES LYON: Yes and no; Koštunica also wanted to visit the site of 1989 speech, Gazimestan which is at the site of the battle of Kosovo field, and they would not let him do it. They felt it would be too much of a political provocation; however, a number of the government ministers did go there. On the other hand, Milosevic’s speech at that time threatened of wars to come and threatened that the Serbs would take up arms, a threat which turned out to be a promise; all too accurate as it turns out. There were many overtones, and certainly everyone in the Balkans knows what June 28th means; that is not only the date when the Battle of Kosovo field was fought; that is also the date when the Arch Duke France Ferdinand was killed in 1914 in Sarajevo by a Serb assassin. It is a date that is fraught with historical memory, and it is a date that is often seen as having symbolism in the Balkans. That is the date that Milosevic was sent off to the Hague tribunal, etc. It is the type of thing that if you live in the Balkans, you kind of want to be on vacation on June 28th and not be at home.
JERRY FOWLER: We are running out of time; very briefly, what would be the key steps that the United States government and other major actors should take to move the situation more in a positive direction than it is going right now?
JAMES LYON: Right now, there is very little than can be done. Nobody wants to see an exception made to Serbia on the issue of war crimes. I think the war crimes issue has been very important thus far. The international community helped the line on war crimes in Croatia; it cut off talks with Croatia, and Croatia eventually responded and showed that it was indeed interested in moving toward the European Union. The war crime issue, the issue of responsibility, of memory, the issue of how it affects current political affairs and relations is very important, and without the war crimes tribunal operating, there will never be any true reconciliation because we just cannot have massacres and genocide and then have no one held responsible. On the other hand, the international community has made a key mistake, and that is following the ouster of Milosevic, although they had gotten rid of the man, they had not gotten rid of the policies, and the international community has completely dropped the ball in terms of supporting civil society, and those forces that are trying to change the minds of people and to have them look at the history of the 1990s in a different manner. The funding for the civil society sector has been completely gutted, and we have essentially let the bad guys take over and win the propaganda war. When I say the bad guys, I include the current Prime Minister Koštunica, who has since coming to power, rehabilitated a huge number of Milosevic functionaries and individuals associated, who actually were arrested as being complicit with the assassination of the reformist Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003. It is very hard to see much that we can do other than try and support people who genuinely support the civil sector and development of civil society and democracy, and that does not mean that we should be giving Serbia any economic benefits or sweeteners, rather, we should be trying to help normal people who are trying to create a more normal society.
JERRY FOWLER: James Lyon is Special Balkans Advisor and the International Crisis Group and he is speaking to us from Belgrade. Dr. Lyon thanks so much for being with us.
JAMES LYON: My pleasure; thank you very much for having me.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
