The UN Mission in Kosovo is starting to look like that tedious guest at the end of your dinner party that just won’t leave. Except, in this case, the guest also happens to be your landlord. With the Security Council deadlocked, Kosovo is still subject to its Resolution 1244 of 1999 – and according to 1244, the Special Representative in charge of UNMIK is still the ultimate civilian authority in the province. But since the Kosovo Albanian government declared independence in February, pushing the Serb minority that lives in the northern hills to declare a counter-secession, the poor old UN has been stuck. The Albanians want to be free. The Serbs want to be part of Serbia. Nobody wants the UN in charge. But guess what, it is. At least in theory.
For how much longer? Since 2006, the EU has been planning to put a civilian team and police into Kosovo to replace UNMIK and support the nascent government, and UNMIK never made any secret of its desire to this get this over with. But it’s hard to get round the Special Rep’s legal status. While the EU aims to be up and running by mid-June, it looks like UNMIK may have to linger on. Both Peter Feith – the EU’s top man in Kosovo – and Ban Ki-moon have implied that this may be the case. Here’s a taste of the bureaucratic double-speak floating around Pristina:
There is no question of having two international presences in Kosovo, one for Albanians and one for Serbs, Kosovar President Fatmir Sejdiu said in Pristina on Thursday. By mid-June, the new European Union police and justice mission is expected to take over UNMIK’s supervisory role in Kosovo. UNMIK says it is ready to reconfigure its activities by then. Sejdiu stressed that “UNMIK will play its role for as long as Resolution 1244 is in place,” but he refused to say how long this is likely to be the case. UNMIK spokesperson Sven Lindholm said that reconfiguration simply means evolving tasks as the situation changes.
Got that? The UN’s reconfiguring, and that can mean anything it damn well likes (when I visited Pristina last fall, “reconfiguration” was already the word on everyone’s lips and it already seemed to have a different meaning in every conversation). There is a school of thought that backs the scenario that Mr. Sejdiu dislikes: that the EU should get on with overseeing Albanian Kosovo and leave the UN to look after the Serb north. Something like that may already be happening. Since UNMIK police effectively lost a battle with Kosovo Serbs in March, UN officials have been looking for a modus vivendi in the north – which meant more work for cool-as-ice Sven Lindholm yesterday:
New talks between the UN and Serbia on the future of UNMIK are unacceptable, Kosovo authorities have said. Sven Lindholm had earlier confirmed that talks were underway at the request of UN Headquarters in New York to find a solution to the undermining of UNMIK’s mandate. But according to Lindholm the talks “are of technical nature” and cover areas such as “governance, police officers who left the service, railways, customs – all these areas that are related to technical issues.”
Ah yes, that minor technical issue “governance”. In another sign of how tricky things are getting, UNMIK has just had to deny that the Special Representative – German diplomat Joachim Ruecker – is about to resign. Sven Lindholm was presumably otherwise engaged, because UNMIK rolled out another spokesman to rubbish this and explain the joys of reconfiguration:
UNMIK Spokesperson Alexander Ivanko told Balkan Insight that rumours of an impending Ruecker resignation were nothing but “media speculation”. “Nothing like that has been ever discussed,” Ivanko insisted, flatly ruling out the prospect of Ruecker’s resignation.
UNMIK has administered Kosovo since 1999. Since Kosovo’s declaration of independence on February 17, UNMIK has begun to “reconfigure” and “adapt to the newly created reality”, although Ruecker noted earlier this week that Security Council Resolution 1244, which regulates UNMIK’s mission, will “still remain in place”.
I don’t want to be unfair to the UNMIK guys: they’re doing a miserable job and know that, if and when their mission finally does fold, they’ll have to look for another job. But they are being cornered into phraseology that is straight out of the GDR circa 1989. Adapt to the newly created reality! Evolve tasks as the situation changes! Adapt the evolution of tasks as the situation changes to create a new reality of evolving adaptation!
Time, I think, to give these guys a much needed break and save Kosovo from drifting into a multi-institutional impasse. Daniel Korski and I have come up with a proposal by which UNMIK would become a “constitutional monarch” overseeing both the Albanian and Serb parts of Kosovo,while letting the EU do its thing – read it here. You can quibble with the details, which are still hazy. But the central idea is that Kosovo needs clarity on its governance structures that will allow the EU, the UN and the Kosovars themselves to regain the initiative and start charting their future – rather than muddling through as they are now.
