Last August I was asked by the
foreign office to leave at short notice for Kosovo. Six days
later, after a brief induction course in Vienna, I arrived in
Pristina as deputy director for democracy at the Organisation
for Security & Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
In the first bloom of peace
after the Nato bombardment, I was really pleased to be in at
the reconstruction of Kosovo. Ethnic Albanian Kosovans smiled
when they recognised my UN/OSCE identification tag. They still
saw the international community as a liberating force. People
sat at pavement tables in cafes in the warm sunshine, looking
forward to a brighter future.
But while Kosovans were able
to leap from exile into rebuilding homes and shops, the UN
from the start became ominously mired in bureaucratic tangles.
Although a local cafe quickly opened with internet access on
10 computers, round the corner at the OSCE HQ we managed to
get one computer to cope for email access for 700 staff, and
virtually no phones. As the international community failed to
produce tangible results, the Kosovan population began to feel
impeded rather than liberated.
A Kosovan NGO leader summed up
the mood: "You 'internationals' are polluting our air and
clogging up our roads with all your white vehicles," she
said. "You refuse to employ us as professionals in your
organisations. There are thousands of you. You all make
promises but we neither see action nor do you provide us with
funds to get on with things ourselves."
Albanian Kosovans are
energetic and self-starters. For a decade under Serb hegemony
they organised their own alternative society beneath
Belgrade's ethnic and religious apartheid system. They ran
more than 500 schools and paid a voluntary 3% tax. The
educated and professionals, by contrast with Bosnia, returned
to Kosovo.
Within days of my arrival I
noted that with one exception, all senior posts in the OSCE
mission and the UN mission in Kosovo (Unmik) were held by men.
Unmik and the OSCE were deeply imbued with a
"dolly-bird" culture, a sure sign of corporate
early-onset sclerosis and entrenched behaviour. Exclusion of
women from the democratisation process was highlighted by the
fact that Dr Bernard Kouchner, special representative of the
UN secretary general in Kosovo, had appointed not one woman to
the Kosovan transitional governing council, even though the UN
global platform for action states that at least one third of
all decision-making positions in politics and public life
should be filled by women.
Deeply ignorant of the
majority gender, the OSCE regularly discussed what percentage
of Serbs and ethnic groups should be represented on judicial,
political and public bodies, but not the role of women. When I
pointed out this discrepancy I was told women in leadership
posts would be "alien to local culture and
tradition" and, in any case, "no women in Kosovo are
interested in participation in politics or public life."
Women comprise more than 50%
of Kosovans, not least because so many of their men were
murdered. They not only took the brunt of the ethnic
cleansing, many served with the Kosovan liberation army.
Luleta Pula, leader of a
social democratic party, told me that in 1990 she had headed a
60,000 strong women's wing of the LDK political party. From
the Russian revolution to decolonisation days, from Togo to
the India of the Raj, women have been instrumental in the
fight to defend freedoms and rights.
Kosovan women's NGOs were
especially angry at being entirely ignored in the
democratisation process. I was told by a leader of Motat
Qiriazi, an umbrella of four rural women's networks, "The
international community has marginalised us women in a way we
never had been before. We have never felt so pushed aside as
we feel now."
Prompted by the frustrations
of the Kosovan women, a UN colleague and I faxed UN secretary
general Kofi Annan to ask him to intervene. As a direct
consequence, three Kosovan women NGO leaders were invited to
meet with Kofi Annan and Bernard Kouchner. Unmik agreed to
hold regular consultations with women NGO leaders. One woman
was subsequently invited to join the interim transitional
council.
But there was also, to me, an
unexpected result. Just as I was getting into my stride in
helping to build civil society - yes, including women's
campaign groups - the fax to Kofi Annan was to be used by the
OSCE head of mission to rid his boys of my turbulent presence.
I was "uncollegiate" (yes, women do indeed do things
differently) and "too zealous" in advancing the
needs and roles of Kosovan women.
The fax was considered a
"major breach of protocol" by senior males. It had
embarrassed the hierarchs of the OSCE in Kosovo. It was given
as a main reason for my being told to leave the mission a few
weeks later.
By mid-December UNMIK had
squandered the honeymoon period. A sinister atmosphere of
incipient thuggery and danger was developing fast. Today Serbs
and Roma have either been terrorised into fleeing the province
or hide, frightened, in their homes. The crime rate has
increased dramatically, night by night. Law and order have
broken down. Tales of intimidation and shoot-outs between
rival criminal gangs are part of everyday life. Barely nine
months after Milosevic capitulated, the Kosovo to which I was
sent out with such high hopes, has become a scene of the
utmost horror. And as for the position of women: they are now
regularly kidnapped - an estimated five women a week in
Pristina alone. And by November women no longer went out after
dark. They were too afraid.
Kosovo was and is hardly a
little matter of a far-away people of no interest to Britain.
The first shot was a missile fired from a British submarine.
Tony Blair put much of his leadership credibility behind the
bombing, to the extent the new German chancellor, Gerhard
Schröder only half-jokingly dubbed him "the young god of
war".
Kosovo was an unusually
complex situation not typical of most post-conflict
situations, in that Nato had acted outside the customary UN
collectivist approach, primarily to avoid a Russian veto. This
may well have hampered planning efforts by Unmik. It was
bogged down in a nightmare of bureaucratic entanglement,
miscasting of characters and the wrong design of organisation
taking on the job. But from that point on they dug their own
(and many a Kosovan's) grave.
©Lesley Abdela 2000
