The New York Times

Wednesday, November 24, 1999

Failures of Peace in Kosovo

President Clinton went to Kosovo yesterday primarily to pay a pre-Thanksgiving call on American troops and encourage ethnic reconciliation. His pleas for forgiveness toward the Serbs drew a predictably chilly reception. But his visit will be valuable if it draws broader attention to the serious problems bedeviling international rebuilding efforts in Kosovo. Last spring NATO used its military power to uphold humanitarian principle and allow hundreds of thousands of brutally uprooted ethnic Albanians to return to their homes. That precious victory must not now be allowed to degenerate into an unstable, unworkable peace.

More than five months after the withdrawal of Serbian forces, Kosovo still lacks basic water, electricity and sanitation services. With police scarce and courts nonexistent, criminals control the streets while non-ethnic-Albanian residents, whether Serbs, Gypsies or Bosnian Muslims, are being burned out of their homes. European donors have been slow in following through on their pledges of financial help and many countries have lagged in providing volunteers for the short-staffed international police. Officials from the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe spend too much time and money building up their rival bureaucratic empires and not enough helping Kosovars create their own institutions.

Through the hard work of local inhabitants, Kosovo's private economy is starting to revive. But the international organizations have not been much help. They have failed to rebuild the power plants and waterworks sabotaged by the departing Serbs or the roads and bridges bombed by NATO. They have not moved fast enough to put the old Serb-run state companies into private local hands.

The U.N. and the O.S.C.E. seem intent on erecting bureaucratic structures for long-term international administration rather than encouraging eventual self-government. Able to offer much higher salaries than local employers, they have drawn educated Kosovars to their payrolls at the expense of schools, law offices and other professions. They have poured disproportionate resources into building competing official broadcast networks, siphoning money and talent that should be going to strengthen independent media.

NATO must also take responsibility for its failure to protect Serbs and Gypsies and preserve the possibility of a multi-ethnic Kosovo. Instead, most Serbs have either fled to Serbia or regrouped in the northernmost part of Kosovo. There French NATO commanders have wrongly tolerated a kind of unofficial partition, marked off by road barricades, that has left one of the province's most valuable economic resources, a lead and zinc mining and smelting complex, under Serbian control.

The peace in Kosovo is hardly lost, and Mr. Clinton was right to urge local civilians to be patient. Bernard Kouchner, the chief U.N. administrator, has shown an admirable willingness to listen to critics and occasionally change direction. But unless there is a significant reining in of the international bureaucracy and greater efforts to involve the Kosovars more directly in the economy and administration, the outlook is disheartening.