Imagine Wales. Imagine Wales, after a terrible war, dotted with the debris of death; its fine hills brimming with roofless red-brick villas, its roads heaving with all manner of military hardware, trailers and trucks.
Now imagine this devastated slither of land as a tower of Babel, with thousands of foreigners, speaking dozens of different tongues, flooding in, all bent on rebuilding and protecting it.
Imagine the people of Wales – a little unsure of their own national identity – watching these foreign imports as if they had been flown in from another planet. Imagine them looking on with relief and resentment as they hurtle past in their mammoth four-wheel drives. Imagine this wretched place flying the United Nations flag.
You have just imagined Kosovo, the colony that belongs to the world: 4,250 square miles of brewing anarchy and anger that is now awash with visionless well-intent.
One year after Nato liberated it, Kosovo, they say, is on the mend. A spot of ethnic trouble here and there, now that spring is in the air (always the Balkans’ favourite killing time), but as near to paradise as the Albanians have ever got, now that their Serb tormentors have gone.
Children may play marbles in the mud. Their parents may pick their way through their collapsed homes, fallen factories, burnt animal sheds and other symbols of savagery that will probably surround them for years to come. Both may shiver in the frost and have dark, expressionless hollows for eyes (such is the horror one knows they have seen). And both may live in a climate of spiralling confusion and crime. But for those who have arrived to protect and reform them, the Kosovars have never had it better. “You will see how much they love us,” says the Danish corporal, waxing lyrical as he issues the international peacekeeping force Kfor’s must-have entry pass into the straggly province. “Every day in Kosovo is Wednesday. There is never a day off,” he chatters, reciting a line I will hear more than once. “They just love us for it. Do anything to say ‘thank you’, shake your hand, come up to you in the street, you’ll see.”
Gratitude, you quickly discover, is a constant theme in Kosovo – along with pot, sex, love among the internationals, the dangerous driving habits of the locals and the innate hatred that continues to pit the Albanians against the Serbs.
In the nine months since Nato triumphantly marched into the benighted territory, every do-gooder, Bible-basher, adventure-junkie and wide-eyed idealist has pitched up. Forget Mozambique or Chechnya. Kosovo has become the place if you want to seek penance, divest yourself of creature comforts, assuage middle-class guilt or simply put “expert” theories into practice. The freaks and the faithful have come a-flocking, just as they did in the colonies of yore.
On the last count, there were some 370 non-governmental organisations which had set up shop, alongside some some 30,000 Nato forces. Among them are the Vietnam Veterans’ Association, Lay Volunteers International, Japanese Need Foundation, the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Glasgow City Council Social Group. They work alongside the likes of the UN and OSCE, whose desire to leave their mark on the land has surprised even the most cynical.
On my first night installed in Pristina’s determinedly ungrand Grand Hotel, I bumped into a bespectacled Finn who inquired whether I might be the new recruit who had come to teach handicapped women how to sew. No, I said, but did she like Kosovo? “Aw, ya,” she burbled. “We internationals are like one big happy family. It is hard, ya, but when it gets too hard you can find help with marijuana. You go to any bar and there it is, our little friend that makes the place seem much, much better.”
How, I wondered, had people endured a winter of power cuts that was also the coldest on record? “Easy,” replied a Russian bureaucrat. “Sex, sex, sex under at least five blankets with another international . . . “
Never mind that few of the foreign missions have problem-solving skills in this field. Bernard Kouchner, the UN’s special representative, tells anyone who will listen that international parsimony has forced him to become a professional panhandler – the good doctor’s entire annual budget amounts to less than a day’s worth of the Nato bombing campaign.
But the internationals, one soon discovers, are on fat-cat salaries. Throw in hardship-post allowances, supplemented wages and days off and you are looking at a nice little earner – money, many now think, that would be much better spent training the Kosovars to take over the place themselves.
It is an open secret, among foreigners in Pristina, that Kosovo is run as if it were a classic colony – and a badly run one at that. “It didn’t work in the 19th century and it’s clearly not going to work in the 21st,” says Joly Dixon, the interim administration’s amiable and honest British finance minister. “It’s totally wrong.”
You see them, the “white men” in their shiny brogues, striding purposefully along Pristina’s litter-strewn streets. Entrusted with the task of rejuvenating a civil administration that is currently neither civil nor administrative, most work nine-to-five days in bureaux that could be in Brussels, were it not for the wretched views beyond their windows.
And then there are the “natives”: unsure of the rule of law, after ten years of marginalisation under Milosevic’s rotten regime, a little reticent, a little slow, but good people. Just too “hot-headed” to be handed the trappings of power (even if the colonisers are ambivalent about having too much of it themselves) and far too different, culturally, ever to socialise with.
The creation, this month, of a joint interim administration, one that has seen Kosovo’s two main political parties collaborate with Dr Kouchner, has quickly been rubbished as a cosmetic move by Albanians furious at their lack of access to decision-making. The Serbs may have boycotted their seat in protest, but among Kosovars, at least, there is a growing sense that their destiny has been taken out of their hands.
“They listen to us, they’ll hear our views, but there’s no way that we can actually participate in formulating policy,” says one Albanian official who understandably preferred not to be named. “This colonial approach is not what we expected.”
Locals are the first to say that it is the internationals who have made life tolerable, providing employment for innumerable interpreters and bodyguards, who now earn more than their parents could ever have dreamed. “We have this really ridiculous situation, where a child who is a translator for the OSCE will take home 2,000 Deutschmarks a month while his father, who for 25 years has worked as a doctor, gets DM200 a month,” says Dreni Hoxha, an interpreter himself.
Rarely has the gap between those who govern and those who are ruled been as pronounced, say UN officials who have worked on similar missions around the world. “It’s us and them. We live in very different worlds,” said another UN official. “I realised the other day that, after eight months being here, I’ve never actually had dinner with an Albanian.”
It is a gap that speaks volumes about the international community’s clumsiness in getting Kosovo back on its feet. At no level – as an institution, in terms of security, on an economic level – is the province really working. Left to their own devices, the Albanians have set up a parallel system of drug-, gun- and women-trafficking that many fear has sown the seeds of instability under the very noses of the western officials deployed to stop the rot.
Kosovo, it is clear, is now an incubator of organised crime, one that has flourished in the total absence of an effective criminal justice system, police system, banking system and local civil service.
With the mafia running the show – in cahoots with the clans that control the local economy – crime has come to grease the wheels of the political system. Pristina, a forebodingly surreal place where shops do a brisk business selling anything from bridal gowns to smuggled cigarettes, has rapidly become a giant protection racket. In recent months, economic crime, especially shoot-outs and murders, has sky-rocketed among Albanians.
“The problem is that we don’t have anywhere to put criminals,” says John Blaherty, a Toronto officer with the 2,000-strong UN police force, which gave up arresting gun-smugglers long ago. “You know ma’am,” he says, angrily throwing my driver’s keys into what he hopes will be a minefield, “I hate these people. After seven months here, I realised they don’t want to be sorted out . . . all these dead dogs and smashed cars that you see along this road are proof that we’re wasting our time. They just don’t care.”
Kosovo’s unclear international status does not help. Armed with a murky mandate that speaks only of providing the territory with “substantial autonomy”, UN officials are still hazy about their ultimate objective. What is Kosovo? And where is it headed? How can it best be decolonised when no one is sure what it’s real identity is? For the first time in their joint histories, both Nato and the UN are being forced to feel their way in the dark.
“Every time you make the simplest change, in whatever area, you run up against this problem,” sighs Annie Bouvin, a visiting profession of law from Paris. “The Albanians may not like it, but this place is still a sovereign part of Yugoslavia . . . we can’t give them citizenship, but the hope is that they will be registered in voting-lists before soon.”
The hope is that the Kosovars will be able to assume their own administration, at least on a municipal level, after local elections this autumn. That, say the mandarins, will be a significant first step towards self- government. There are real – and growing – concerns, though, that the anarchy of Kosovo may have derailed that strategy by feeding the dreams of extremists.
The west has watched with horror recently, as Albanian irredentists advocating a Greater Albania have sought to stir up trouble across the Kosovo border in the southernmost reaches of Serbia. Already there are fears of Kosovo Part 2. Wisely, the west has decided to play down this year’s landmark anniversary. There may be many more to come.
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