Misleading UN Report on Kosovo (B)

3. October 1999 by Leave a Comment

By Jan Oberg

TFF PressInfo 78 – October 3, 1999

Originally published here.

 

“The UN and NATO missions in Kosovo violate Security Council Resolution 1244 which clearly guarantees the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). The Security Council has just reaffirmed that Kosovo is a part of FRY. 1244 also demands the full cooperation of FRY in implementing the missions tasks. All this is pure pretence, as any visitor to Kosovo will learn – and mission members will tell you privately.

The Report of the Secretary-General (S/1999/987 of September 16) does not even bother to mention whether KFOR/UNMIK cooperates with Belgrade! It seems pretty clear, rather, that the international community has fooled Belgrade and considers it so weak that it doesn’t even have to be polite or give the world the impression that it respects the country’s sovereignty. This coincides with credible press analyses that the U.S. decision makers think Kosovo must become independent.

The international presence of UNMIK and NATO in Kosovo base itself on the bombing campaign the legality of which remains highly disputable. In its day-to-day operations, this presence amounts to a de facto occupation force that co-operates with Albania military and civilian leaders who have perpetrated gross human rights violations,” says Jan Oberg upon his return from Pristina, Skopje and Belgrade, TFF’s 37 mission to the region.

Here follow some facts:

“The missions have set up border points to Serbia but until recently not to Macedonia and Albania. Public and state property is ‘taken over’ by the UN and KFOR, no legal regulations done or rent or compensation paid to the Yugoslav state. Visa is not needed to enter Kosovo. The German Mark is introduced and the Yugoslav dinar disappearing. Tax and customs are now collected to the benefit of Kosovo, with no proportion going to Serbia or Yugoslavia. A new army-like “Kosovo Protection/Defence Force” is established and has the old KLA commander at its head.

Should we be surprised if the mineral resources and the Trpca mining industry complex in Mitrovica is soon ‘taken over’ by foreign capital? Dr. Kouchner serves at the moment as a one-man legislature: he can overrule any federal law and he promulgates legally binding “regulations” by the day.

Resolution 1244 stipulates that ‘after the withdrawal an agreed number of Yugoslav and Serb military and police personnel will be permitted to return to Kosovo to perform functions’ such as liaising with the international civil and military missions, marking and clearing mine fields, maintaining a presence at Serb patrimonial sites and maintain a presence at key border crossings (specified in Annex 2). Reference to all this is conveniently omitted in the UN Report – that serves to evaluate the UN mission and is written, we must assume, by the UN staff in Pristina itself.

So much for the United Nations manifest, gross violation of FRY’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. One understands why all this goes unmentioned in the Report. I am not a lawyer, but it looks to me as a new sort of international lawlessness and might-makes-right,” says Jan Oberg. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Conflict analysis, Peace-prevention, Prognosis, The larger framework, UN missions - weak/strong Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Read UN Resolution 1244 and watch NATO in Kosovo

18. June 1999 by Leave a Comment

By Jan Oberg

TFF PressInfo 71 – June 18, 1999

Originally published here.

Serbo-Croatian version here.

 

“Did you read UN Security Council Resolution 1244 about peace in Kosovo? Well, it is not exactly coherent. If your computer manual was this much of a mishmash and contradictions and if dozens of pages were missing, you would probably have operative system failures and bombs – and I think this is what will happen with NATO in Kosovo.

But the resolution IS clear enough on essentials for us to ask after one week of NATO ‘peace’-keeping in Kosovo what on earth is going on,” says TFF director Jan Oberg. 

Here and in PressInfo 72 follow some of the already manifest problems.

 

1. RESOLUTION 1244 IS CONTRADICTORY AND INSUFFICIENT

It condemns all acts of violence by the local parties, but has not even a mild statement about the uniquely brutal NATO-caused killings and devastation of a country of 12 million people. It expresses a determination to resolve the humanitarian crisis – well and good – but does not address any underlying conflict and makes no mention of the civil war that raged in Kosovo between February 1998 and March 24 this year.

It does reaffirm the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia but fails to present the procedures and modalities as to how the endorsed civilian and security presences shall operate to respect that sovereignty and integrity.

Further to this point, it simultaneously decides (Para 11a) that the civilian presence is tasked with ‘promoting the establishment, pending a final settlement, of substantial autonomy and self-government in Kosovo, taking full account of annex 2 and of the Rambouillet accords.’ So, the US-manipulated Rambouillet dictate – perhaps the most shameful event in modern diplomatic history – was sneaked into the text in contravention of what had been agreed with Belgrade. To make things worse, the same Para 11f mentions ‘facilitating a political process designed to determine Kosovo’s future status, taking into account the Rambouillet accords.’ This formulation can – and will – be used to justify a process towards establishing an independent Kosova; indeed, it is difficult to envision NATO leave the province by just handing Kosovo back to Belgrade, given the tremendous investment and given the almost limitless distrust and hate between Serbs and Albanians after what has happened.

There is a minimum of operationalization, of stipulating who is doing what when. NATO is the only organization mentioned, not the OSCE, the UN, or NGOs. During the G8 process, the United States and NATO suddenly decided to increase the military presence from 28.000 (at the time of Rambouillet) to 48.000, no explanation offered, [Read more…]

Filed Under: Diagnosis, Peace-prevention, Prognosis Tagged With: , , , , ,

Rambouillet: Imperialism in disguise

16. February 1999 by Leave a Comment

By Jan Oberg

TFF PressInfo 55 – February 16, 1999

Originally published here.

“What happens now in Rambouillet has little to do with creating peace for the suffering citizens in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo/a. Disguised as “negotiations” about a “peace” plan, the international so-called community promotes less noble values and long-term goals in the region and use the Serbs and Albanians as supernumeraries in its drama. It’s time we ask what the self-proclaimed “conflict managers” are actually up to. If peace in Kosovo or the wider Balkans had been the real aim, we would have witnessed a completely different approach leading up to Rambouillet. We come closer to the truth about Rambouillet if we use words such as globalisation, strategic expansion, Caspian oil, Greater NATO, containment policy and imperialism disguised as conflict-management and peace-making,” says Dr. Jan Oberg upon returning from the 34th TFF mission to the region since 1992, this time to Skopje, Belgrade and Kosovo.

“If peace was their profession, the governments of the international community would – around 1992 – have put enough diplomatic and other civilian pressure on the parties to begin a dialogue, not negotiations. It would have provided 5-10 different secluded meeting places for Albanians, Serbs and other peoples – NGOs, teachers, intellectuals, journalists, doctors etc. – to explore their problems and possible solutions. In short, an international brainstorm to produce creative ideas for later elaboration at a complex negotiation process that would take at least a year.

Today, instead, we are left with only one – legalistic and formal – plan developed by U.S. ambassador Christopher Hill. It is not the result of neutral mediation, contains no creative ideas and is so unattractive to the parties that it has to be imposed as a fait accompli by bombing threats and by arrogant talking down to the delegations (“they must be brought to understand their own best..”) [Read more…]

Filed Under: Conflict analysis, Diagnosis, Peace processes, Peace-prevention, The larger framework, Treatment - Proposals Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Peace order in Europe? Lessons from Yugoslavia

22. November 1992 by Leave a Comment

By Håkan Wiberg

Background paper to the symposium “Challenges for Peace and Security” at the International Institute for Peace in Vienna, 21-22 November 1992. Second draft, documentation not yet completed, not for quotation without the prior permission of the author – criticisms and comments are most welcome.

1. Introduction

This paper does not attempt to analyze in detail the extremely convoluted conflict complex in Yugoslavia; except for the unraveling of the former USSR, there is no set of conflicts in Europe even remotely as complicated as this. For such details and overviews, I therefore have to refer to the standard literature. The present paper is a first attempt at capturing some of the interaction between the conflict parties in Yugoslavia and various external parties, in particular the EC, trying to understand how this interaction has contributed to escalating some contradictions that it had been possible to handle relatively peacefully for decades into a war so sanguinary that the Greek Civil War in the 1940s and the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 are the only postwar European counterparts.

One of the central problems in the present paper is therefore the following: What factors have affected the position of the EC in different phases of the development of the conflicts? The main groups of factors are taken to be (without any internal ranking to be read into the numbers):  1) The development in Yugoslavia, 2) the propaganda war, 3) factors that have affected the positions of individual states in the EC and 4) factors in the power games and in the internal and to some extent autonomous dynamics of the EC.

In order to have a background to the international interaction, it is nevertheless necessary to paint the broader background with a very broad brush in section 2, and the recent history with an equally broad brush in section 3. Section 4 then gives an overview of the specifically Balkan setting of the conflicts and section 5 analyses the propaganda war, before the remaining sections try to solve, or at least chart, the puzzles surrounding the strategies and the development of behaviour of the EC. These are discussed in sections 6 and 7; section 8 then looks at the primus motor (in this context): The FRG, section 9 looks at the problems encountered by Realpolitik in the Yugoslav context, section 10 at international law and politics, section 11 at the Eigendynamik elements of great power politics and, finally, section 12 tries to assess the situation now. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Conflict analysis, Diagnosis, Lessons to learn, Nation and state Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,