The New York Times

Tuesday, March 7, 2000

U.N. Council Urged to Debate Political Future of Kosovo

By BARBARA CROSSETTE

UNITED NATIONS, March 6 -- The director of United Nations administration in Kosovo told the Security Council today that the time had come to open a debate on the political future of the Serbian province, where local elections are scheduled to take place before the end of the year.

Bernard Kouchner, the transitional government's director, said after all-day meetings with the Security Council that he had won its approval on the planned elections. He has held that job since last summer, when responsibility for governing Kosovo, establishing political and legal institutions and building an economy were handed to the United Nations.

Other officials at the meetings said that the council did not disagree with Mr. Kouchner's assessment that the "substantial autonomy" promised for Kosovo by a Security Council resolution creating the administration has never been adequately defined. The officials said that Mr. Kouchner's plan is to move ahead as he sees fit, and that he does not intend to wait for a council definition of where he is headed.

Mr. Kouchner, who briefed the Security Council jointly with Gen. Klaus Reinhardt, the military commander of the NATO-led peacekeeping forces, invited the 15-member Security Council to travel to Kosovo to see the situation on the ground.

Neither Mr. Kouchner nor General Reinhardt, who held a news conference together after the Security Council sessions, chose to dwell primarily on the volatile security situation in the divided town of Mitrovica on Kosovo's northeastern border with the rest of Serbia. Mr. Kouchner did return several times to the theme of protecting minorities in Kosovo, however, saying that this is an important ingredient in shaping the political future of the territory. Aides say that the vision of the United Nations administration in Kosovo is not independence, as some nationalist Kosovo Albanians are demanding.

Mr. Kouchner mentioned the scarcity of money and other resources, but did not make that his major theme, council members said. "His priority today was not to invite us to provide more money or even more men for the police and so on," said Alain Dejammet, France's representative. "His main preoccupation today was to get some guidelines from the Security Council."

Not all council members share Mr. Kouchner's vision of Kosovo's political future, and there are bound to be debates here as the administration in the province introduces more political and economic measures.

The sharpest criticism of Mr. Kouchner's administration today came from the Russian representative, Sergey Lavrov, council members said. The Russians, traditional friends of the Serbs, are concerned that Kosovo, still regarded internationally as a Serbian province, is drifting toward independence.

Some diplomats and experts on the region are critical of the United States and to some extent of Europe for what they see as a failure to keep Russia, which has troops in the NATO-led military operation, involved in political planning as well.

Carl Bildt, Secretary General Kofi Annan's special representative in the Balkans, said at a public forum in Washington last week that the only durable agreement on Kosovo's future will come from the United States, Europe and Russia working more closely together.

Dennis McNamara, who is responsible for refugee and relief affairs in Kosovo for the Untied Nations, said at the news conference after the closed-door meeting that Kosovo lacks police officers and legal institutions and officials to back them up.

The United Nations Association of the United States, an independent research and support group, has published a set of proposals for Kosovo at www.unausa.org/issues/kosovo. One of its proposals was that the search for judges and prosecutors be broadened to create a more balanced judiciary.

Jeffrey Laurenti, executive director of policy studies for the association, said that of 180 local judges sworn in so far, only 8 were from non-Albanian ethnic groups; of 39 prosecutors, 2 were. "You're getting a particularly monochromatic cast," he said.