International Intervention in the Balkans since 1995
How beneficial has international intervention been for the Balkans and what are the lessons to be learned from it? In 1999 NATO fought against Yugoslavia, the organization’s first ever war; Bosnia and Kosovo are effectively international protectorates and intervention has increased in Macedonia since the 2001 conflict. In spite of new strategies, which seem to offer long-term prospects of eventual integration into wider European structures, the international presence in the Balkans seems set to persist for some time to come. This inter-disciplinary study offers an analysis of the activities of the international community in the Balkans since the 1995 Dayton Agreement. The equivocal consequences of international intervention mean that there is a need for serious reassessment of policies and a careful analysis of past successes and failures. The authors in this collection provide this analysis by examining intervention, not just in terms of military action and the activities of major international agencies at state level, but also the activities of outside NGOs within the local environment. International Intervention in the Balkans since 1995 includes contributions from both academics and practitioners, and contains in-depth case studies of international intervention in Kosovo, the former Yugoslavia and the Miloševiæ regime, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia.
Peter Siani-Davies is Lecturer in Modern South-East European Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
Routledge Advances in European Politics
1 Russian Messianism Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After Peter J.S. Duncan 2 European Integration and the Postmodern Condition Governance, Democracy, Identity Peter van Ham 3 Nationalism in Italian Politics The Stories of the Northern League, 1980–2000 Damian Tambini 4 International Intervention in the Balkans since 1995 Edited by Peter Siani-Davies 5 Widening the European Union The Politics of Institutional Change and Reform Edited by Bernard Steunenberg 6 Institutional Challenges in the European Union Edited by Madeleine Hosli, Adrian van Deemen and Mika Widgrén 7 Europe Unbound Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European Union Edited by Jan Zielonka 8 Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition Cathie Carmichael
9 Democracy and Enlargement in Post-Communist Europe The Democratisation of the General Public in Fifteen Central and Eastern European Countries, 1991–1998 Christian W. Haerpfer 10 Private Sector Involvement in the Euro The Power of Ideas Stefan Collignon and Daniela Schwarzer 11 Europe A Nietzschean Perspective Stefan Elbe 12 Europe, Globalisation and Sustainable Development Edited by Brian Baxter, John Barry and Richard Dunphy 13 European Union Council Presidencies A Comparative Perspective Edited by Ole Elgström 14 European Governance and Supranational Institutions Making States Comply Jonas Tallberg 15 European Union, NATO and Russia Martin Smith and Graham Timmins
International Intervention in the Balkans since 1995
Edited by Peter Siani-Davies
First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2003 Peter Siani-Davies; individual contributors their contributions All rights reserved. No part of this book my be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-63402-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-63742-9 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–29834–2 (Print Edition)
For Mary
Contents
Notes on contributors Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction: international intervention (and non-intervention) in the Balkans
ix xiii xiv
1
P E T E R S I A N I - DAV I E S
1 Intervention in the Balkans: an unfinished learning process
32
M A RY K A L D O R
2 The concept of humanitarian intervention
42
V E S S E L I N P O P OV S K I
3 The controversies of Euro-Atlantic interventionism in the Balkans
59
M I RO S L AV H A D I Æ
4 Mostar: international intervention in a divided Bosnian town, 1994–2001
68
SUMANTRA BOSE
5 When our men arrive: UNMIK’s post-conflict administration of Kosovo EMMANUELA C. DEL RE
88
viii Contents
6 International intervention in Macedonia: from preventive engagement to peace implementation
105
A L I C E AC K E R M A N N
7 The impact of international intervention on domestic political outcomes: Western coercive policies and the Miloševiæ regime
120
JA S N A D R AG OV I Æ - S O S O
8 From kanun to capacity-building: the ‘internationals’, civil society development and security in the Balkans
136
STEVEN SAMPSON
9 Securing the community? An examination of international psychosocial intervention
158
VA N E S S A P U PAVA C
10 Beyond intervention? The Balkans, the Stability Pact and the European Union
172
DAV I D P H I N N E M O R E A N D P E T E R S I A N I - DAV I E S
11 Gaps of concern: an inconclusive conclusion
194
S T E P H A N I E S C H WA N D N E R - S I E V E R S
Index
218
Contributors
Alice Ackermann is Professor for Conflict and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in GarmischPartenkirchen, Germany. Prior to this she was visiting Lecturer at the Richardson Institute, University of Lancaster. Her research has been published in the Journal of Conflict Studies, Security Dialogue, Peace and Change, European Security, and The International Spectator. She is the author of Making Peace Prevail: Preventing Violent Conflict in Macedonia, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000, and the producer of an award-winning documentary on the prevention of violent conflict, From the Shadow of History, Cinema Guild, 1997, which was aired on the History Channel and Public Television in the United States, and has been screened internationally. Sumantra Bose teaches comparative politics in the Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is author of Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention, London: Hurst and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. His other books are Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003; The Challenge in Kashmir: Democracy, Self-Determination and a Just Peace, New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997; and States, Nations, Sovereignty: Sri Lanka, India and the Tamil Eelam Movement, New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994. Emmanuela C. del Re is a researcher at the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ and is completing her doctoral thesis on international electoral observation at the European University Institute of Fiesole. She is lead analyst for Albania and the Balkans for the European Stability Initiative of Berlin and Director of Research at the Military Centre for Strategic Studies of the Italian Ministry of Defence. She is also member of the editing committee, consultant and regular contributor to the Italian Geopolitical magazine LIMES and scientific coordinator of the website www.politicaestera.info. Her publications include Corridor 8, Rome: Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, 2003; ‘Albanian
x Contributors society in evolution: the migration factor’, in C. Lanni (ed.), Albania, a Country of Europe: The Migration Factor, Turin: EGA, 2000, pp. 9–43; ‘Albania in transition: the question of identity and the customary law’, in G. Schopflin and S. Bianchini (eds), State Building in the Balkans, Ravenna: Longo, 1998, pp. 167–194; Albania Punto a Capo, Rome: SEAM, 1997; ‘Il ruolo del kanun, la legge consuetudinaria, nell’Albania che cambia’, La Critica Sociologica, 114–115, 1995–1996, 104–122. Jasna Dragoviæ-Soso is a Swiss National Science Foundation Scholar and Research Fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, working on problems of democratization, nationalism and international intervention in the former Yugoslavia. She is the author of ‘Saviours of the Nation’: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Rise of Nationalism, London: Hurst and Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2002. Miroslav Had iæ is Associate Professor at the Department for International Relations, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade, specializing in civil–military relations in former socialist countries and contemporary security studies. His recent publications include The Fate of the Party Army, Belgrade: Samizdat FreeB92, 2001; The Chronic Shortage of Security: The Case of Yugoslavia, Belgrade: Institute for Social Sciences, Centre for Civil–Military Relations, 2001; The Yugoslav People’s Agony, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003; ‘The civilian control of the Yugoslav Army’, in M. Had iæ (ed.), Civilian Control over the Army and Police, Belgrade: Media Center, Center for Civil–Military Relations, 2000; ‘Kosovo and the security stabilization of South-East Europe’, International Peacekeeping, 7:2, 2000; ‘The Army’s use of trauma’, in Nebojsa Popov (ed.), The Road to War in Serbia, Trauma and Catharsis, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000, pp.509–536. Mary Kaldor is School Professor and Programme Director at the Centre for Global Governance, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is the author of New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999; the editor of Global Insecurity, London: Pinter, 2000; and, with Ivan Vejoevoda, Democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, London: Pinter, 1998. She is co-editor of Global Civil Society 2001 and Global Civil Society 2002, an annual devoted to the idea and the practice of global civil society. David Phinnemore is Lecturer in European Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He has written widely on the European Union’s association agreements and enlargement, notably on Romania’s position within the process of European integration. His publications include Association: SteppingStone or Alternative to EU Membership, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999, and Post-Communist Romania: Coming to Terms with Transition, London: Palgrave, 2001 (edited with Duncan Light). He is also co-author,
Contributors xi with Clive H. Church, of The Penguin Guide to the European Treaties: From Rome to Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and Beyond, London: Penguin, 2002. Vesselin Popovski is a former Bulgarian Diplomat (1988–1996), currently working as a long-term expert on the EU TACIS project ‘The Legal Protection of Individual Rights’ in Russia. From 1999 to 2002 he was Lecturer in Politics at the University of Exeter. He was awarded an individual fellowship under NATO’s ‘Democratic Institutions’ programme (1996–1998) and took part in the Princeton Project on Universal Jurisdiction (1999–2000) as well as the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2000–2001). Among his publications are ‘The Security Council approach to former Yugoslavia’, Journal of Southeast European Studies, 2: 3, 2002; ‘International Criminal Court: a step towards global justice’, Security Dialogue, 31: 4, 2000; ‘ICC: from distributive to restorative justice’, International Relations, 15: 3, 2000; ‘UN Security Council: re-thinking the veto and humanitarian intervention’, Security Dialogue, 31: 2, 2000. Vanessa Pupavac is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Nottingham. She has a background in law and area studies, having previously worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia and for the OSCE in Bosnia. More recently she was involved in the ODI/VALID independent evaluation of the DEC Kosovo Crisis Appeal. She is currently researching the emotionology of international policy. Her recent publications include: ‘Kosovo on the couch’, Alternatives, 27:4, 2002; ‘Afghanistan: the risks of international psychosocial risk management’, Health in Emergencies, 12, March 2002, 1–2; ‘Therapeutic governance: psycho-social intervention and trauma risk management’, Disasters, 25:4, 2001, 358–72. Steven Sampson is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Lund, Sweden. He has carried out research on NGO development and democracy assistance in South-Eastern Europe. He has also worked as consultant for the EU, OSCE, Danish and Swedish aid organizations on civil society development projects in Romania, Albania, Bosnia and Kosovo. His recent articles include: ‘The social life of projects: importing civil society to Albania’, in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models, London: Routledge, 1996, and ‘Trouble spots: projects, bandits and state fragmentation’, in J. Friedman (ed.), Globalization, The State and Violence, Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2003. He is currently researching global morality and anti-corruption initiatives in Southeast Europe Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers is the first Alex Nash Fellow for Albanian Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Since 1992 she has conducted anthropological research in Albania and Kosovo, publishing extensively on Albanian politics of
xii
Contributors representation and identity, the construction of ‘tradition’, political culture, security, myth and memory. She is the co-editor, with Bernd J. Fischer, of Albanian Identities: Myth and History, London: Hurst, 2002.
Peter Siani-Davies is Lecturer in Modern South-East European Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He has published on the contemporary history and politics of the Balkans. He is the author of the forthcoming Romanian Revolution of December 1989, the co-editor with David Phinnemore of South-Eastern Europe, the Stability Pact and EU Enlargement, Cluj: Cluj University Press, 2002, and, along with Mary Siani-Davies, the compiler of Romania (revised edition), Oxford: Clio, 1998.
Acknowledgements
The idea for this book and, indeed, the basis for some of the chapters, came from a conference convened by the Centre for South-East European Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London in June 2000. Entitled ‘Balkan Security: Visions of the Future’, the conference was co-organized by Peter Siani-Davies and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers. Unfortunately, due to other commitments, Stephanie was unable to participate in the editing of this book, although she has written an extensive concluding chapter. She, nonetheless, remained a key contributor to this project, not least because without her energy and enthusiasm the original conference would never have been the success it was.
Abbreviations
BiH BSEC CARDS CEE CEI CFSP CSCE DP DPA DPA EBRD EC ECMM ECOWAS ECTF EEC EP EU EUAM FBiH FRY FYROM HCNM HDZ HDZ-BiH HNS HVO HZHB ICC ICFY ICISS
Bosnia and Hercegovina Black Sea Economic Cooperation Community Assistance for Reconstruction, Development and Stabilisation Central and Eastern Europe Central European Initiative Common Foreign and Security Policy Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe displaced person Democratic Party of Albanians Dayton Peace Accords European Bank for Reconstruction and Development European Community European Community Monitoring Mission Economic Community of West African States European Commission Task Force European Economic Community European Parliament European Union European Union Administration of Mostar Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia High Commissioner on National Minorities Croatian Democratic Union Croatian Democratic Union – Bosnia and Hercegovina Croatian National Congress Croatian Defence Council Croatian Community of Herceg-Bosna Informal Consultative Committee International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
Abbreviations ICRC ICTY IFI IFOR IMF iNGO IOM IPTF JNA JUL KFOR KLA KPC KVM LDK MUP NATO NGO NLA OECD OHR OHR-S OSCE PDP PHARE PMR QSP Quango RACVIAC RRTF RS SAA SAP SBiH SDA SDP-BiH SDSM SECI SEECP SEEU SFOR SFRY SIDA SPAI
xv
International Committee of the Red Cross International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia international financial institution Implementation Force International Monetary Fund international non-governmental organization International Organization for Migration International Police Task Force Yugoslav National Army/Yugoslav People’s Army United Yugoslav Left Kosovo Force Kosovo Liberation Army Kosovo Protection Corps Kosovo Verification Mission Democratic League of Kosovo Ministry of the Interior North Atlantic Treaty Organization non-governmental organization National Liberation Army Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Office of the High Representative Office of the High Representative-South Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Party of Democratic Prosperity Pologne, Hongrie, Assistance à la Restructuration Économique Pridnestrovskaja Moldavskaja Respublika Quick Start Programme quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization Regional Arms Control Verification and Implementation Assistance Centre Reconstruction and Return Task Force Republika Srpska Stabilisation and Association Agreement Stabilisation and Association Process Party of Bosnia and Hercegovina Party of Democratic Action Social Democratic Party-Bosnia and Hercegovina Social Democratic Alliance of Macedonia Southeast European Cooperative Initiative South East European Cooperation Process South East Europe University Stabilization Force Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency Stability Pact Anti-Corruption Initiative
xvi
Abbreviations
SPOC SPS SRSG UÇK UN UNDP UNESCO UNHCR UNICEF UNMIK UNMOP UNOSOM UNPREDEP UNPROFOR UNSC UNTAES UPFM USAID VMRODPMNE WEU
Stability Pact Anti-Organized Crime Initiative Socialist Party of Serbia Special Representative of the Secretary-General Ushtria Çlirimtare E Kosovës United Nations United Nations Development Programme United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Nations Children’s Fund United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo United Nations Mission of Observers in Prevlaka United Nations Operation in Somalia United Nations Preventive Deployment Mission United Nations Protection Force United Nations Security Council United Nations Transitional Administration for Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium Unified Police Force of Mostar United States Agency for International Development Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization-Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity Western European Union
Introduction International intervention (and non-intervention) in the Balkans Peter Siani-Davies
This book is concerned with international intervention in the Balkans since the Dayton Peace Accords of November 1995.1 During the years since the ending of the Bosnian war, outside intervention in the region has continued to grow, most openly in NATO’s 1999 aerial bombardment of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The aim of this Introduction is to place this action and other recent international activity within the region into a broader historical context. This is because post-1995 international intervention cannot be considered in isolation from the expectations and anxieties engendered by past incursions into the Balkans, a number of which helped establish the norms of intervention and non-intervention on a global scale. A brief history of international intervention in the region will elucidate some of the reasons for intervention (or non-intervention), the aims of those who intervene and the consequences of their actions, which often differed from their aspirations. The chief argument will be that until recently there have been remarkable continuities in the approach of the western world towards the Balkans, with multilateral intervention largely being driven by a desire to contain crisis and maintain the status quo in a region seen as lying on the periphery of Europe. Only from the mid-1990s, with the exception of Greece, where the policy was prefigured earlier, have there been signs that this approach might be replaced by a qualitatively different one based on contractual engagement and a possibility of eventual integration into the European mainstream. However, the meaning of integration for the Balkan space remains unclear. Within the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe and the Stabilization and Association Process there are suggestions that it could eventually lead to EU accession and, certainly, this is the dream of many within the region. However, with the EU already facing the challenge of an unprecedented enlargement into Central Europe and the Baltic, the likelihood of this occurring within the short or even the medium term remains doubtful. Alternatives to membership have been canvassed, and European Commission President, Romano Prodi, has even floated the idea of some form of ‘virtual membership’ for the states of the region, but, if this is the case, will integration itself be anything less than ‘virtual’?2
2
Peter Siani-Davies
Recent literature has emphasized the negative connotations carried by the word ‘Balkans’.3 These are exemplified by the term ‘Balkanization’ which has come to mean fragmentation into mutually hostile entities. Balkanization is the exact opposite of integration and, as such, it can be seen to represent Europe’s past. Indeed, according to Ole Waever, it is not an external threat that today is Europe’s defining ‘other’, but this conflictriven past.4 ‘The Balkans’, with all the connotations the term represents, after over a decade of conflict and crisis, still lie outside the European mainstream, but not by virtue of geography. They are no longer the lands suspended between Occident and Orient. Now, they form a temporal ‘other’; they represent the European past which cannot become the future. It may be questioned whether ‘virtual integration’ will debalkanize the Balkans. It will not truly unite the region with the geo-political whole and, in the absence of this, in all probability, it will not succeed in helping the Balkan states fully escape the problems of their past. Instead, the process is all too likely to create a ‘virtual Balkans’. A region still peripheral and separate from the EU, suspended somewhere between the inclusive promise of integration and the exclusion that in the past has fostered conditions producing intervention. Only real integration and acceptance that the periphery is part of the main will truly debalkanize the Balkans, but for that to happen, the Balkan ‘other’ will have to be recast and, as the chapters in this volume will show, this process is still far from completed. Instead, in the immediate future it seem likely that the twin discourses of intervention and integration will continue to interact and overlap.
Understanding international intervention in the Balkans There is no simple definition of intervention. There is a wide range of understandings available in politics and international law, ranging from a narrow dictatorial interference that impairs the independence of a state to a multiplicity of forms almost as broad as international politics.5 The 1970 Declaration of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, often described as the authoritative interpretation of the UN Charter on the subject, is all-encompassing when it mentions ‘economic, political or any other type of measures’.6 The divergence of views is partly due to the different disciplinary approaches applied to the subject. On the one hand, those working within the field of International Relations have tended to favour an empirical approach, classifying specific cases of behaviour identified as intervention. This has permitted the detailing of different forms of intervention, such as military, political or economic, although the military has often tended to predominate. On the other hand, those concerned with International Law have tended to take a more precise juridical view, seeing intervention as an ‘improper interference by an outside power with the territorial integrity or political independence of a
Introduction
3
state’, and measuring it against the established norm of non-intervention.7 In this view, intervention is not necessarily military, but it is a deviation from standard practice and, as such, has to be justified. The norm of non-intervention rests on the concept of state sovereignty, and particularly the idealized Westphalian state in which, within a specific territory, the domestic political authorities are seen as the sole arbitrators of legitimate behaviour. In fact, as Stephen Krasner has shown, such sovereignty has rarely existed.8 Sovereignty is a contested term, frequently changing and incapable of easy definition.9 Nonetheless, it remains a useful starting point for an examination of intervention, which may in part be characterized as a transgression of sovereignty that aims to change the authority structures of a state, whether these are construed in political, social or economic terms. Sovereignty has various dimensions and these may conveniently be grouped under internal and external forms. Internal sovereignty, sometimes seen as being positive sovereignty, relates to the actual practice of power within the territory.10 It is grounded in the authority structures of states and their ability to assert control. Within the Balkans this has historically often been weak and today it still varies from state to state with sharp contrasts existing between, for instance, Romania and Bulgaria, which both enjoy a high degree of control over their territory, and Moldova, which has no jurisdiction within Transnistria, or Albania, which has low levels of institutional penetration. State capabilities obviously impact on intervention. Indeed, Hedley Bull in part defined a great power as one ‘that cannot be intervened against’.11 None of the Balkan states are great powers. On the contrary, the power asymmetries that exist between them and the outside world not only open up the possibility of intervention but often give them little choice but to ‘invite’ outside assistance at times of weakness and crisis. The external facets of sovereignty, sometimes seen as negative sovereignty, usually relate to the acceptance by other states that an entity has a valid claim to ultimate authority over a particular territory. This ability to grant or withhold international legal recognition is widely accepted as a significant instrument of intervention and has frequently been used in South-Eastern Europe in recent times, with Moldova, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia being accepted as independent states but not, as yet, Kosovo or the breakaway Transnistrian PMR.12 Nonetheless, the latter do have many of the trapping of sovereignty, including in the case of the PMR its own currency, and there has historically in the Balkans been times when entities have de facto been treated as sovereign states, even if full international legal recognition has not been accorded. For instance, in 1866 and 1871 the United Principalities of Moldova and Wallachia signed treaties of navigation with Russia and Austria even though Romanian independence was not formally recognized until 1878.13 External sovereignty, however, is not just concerned with international legal recognition, it also rests on other
4 Peter Siani-Davies principles, including the ability of a state to join international institutions. To become full members of international society most states, especially European states, have long felt the need to enter a host of international institutions, and in each case an opportunity for intervention arises not just in the ability to decline or recognize entry but also in the imposition of membership criteria. In the case of Croatia’s application to join the Council of Europe these covered twenty-three areas, including the return and reintegration of refugees and internally displaced persons, the full implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords, and changes in the laws on elections and media.14 Subsequent deviation from these standards in extreme cases can lead to exclusion from the club, an action that in itself can be seen as a further form of intervention, a recent example being the suspension of Yugoslavia from the OSCE in 1992. Traditionally a line has been drawn between the voluntary acceptance of outside involvement by ‘invitation’ and its coercive imposition through ‘intervention’, but the lines of division are rarely so clear, as the following example will show. Facing defeat by the Turks in the 1897 war, the Greeks asked the great powers to intervene, agreeing to abide by any rulings they made. The great powers managed to persuade the Turks that they should abandon the Greek lands they had captured on payment of a large indemnity. The Greek state, however, was bankrupt and unable to raise money to pay the Turks. In the end the great powers agreed to lend more money to the Greeks but only on the condition that the Greeks effectively put all national macro-economic levers and much of the state’s tax revenue in the hands of an International Financial Commission of Control and, as Turkey remained in control of Thrace until the indemnity was paid, the hapless Greeks had little choice but to agree.15 The legislation ratifying the Commission of Control was duly passed by the Greek parliament on 26 February 1898 but indicative was the comment of the Greek Finance Minister, E. Streit, who asked that it be inserted into the minutes of the parliamentary debate that the Chamber of Deputies had cast its vote ‘under duress and coercion’.16 The great powers had been requested by the Greeks to negotiate the settlement and the Commission of Control was established by a law passed by the Greek parliament. Yet, in both cases ‘intervention’ would seem the best term to use, although strictly speaking in each instance the powers were ‘invited’ to act. At best it may be said that they elicited consent rather than coerced obedience. Today, much assistance is similarly conditional on a state undertaking certain political and economic measures. If these are not fulfilled, then the offer of assistance can be withdrawn. The coercive element was clearly evident in the demand that Yugoslavia extradite Slobodan Miloševiæ to the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague before aid was released but this is just a particularly newsworthy example of a widespread practice, since the EU and International Financial Institutions (IFIs) invariably apply some degree of conditionality. Indeed, in the case of the European Bank for
Introduction
5
Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) it is actually prescribed in the first article of its charter. The poor state of the Balkan economies makes them ready recipients of IFI loans. In the period 1999–2001, the IMF alone lent 1,372.19 million euros.17 This gives the IFIs enormous leverage within the region. Asymmetrical power balances between the Balkan states and the outside world and conditionality continue to blur dividing lines, often making it difficult to distinguish between imposition and invitation. Due to intervention being measured against the norms of nonintervention in international law, it is usually seen as being a negative phenomenon. But, just as voluntarily accepted aid may create problems, it is also the case that assistance applied with coercion may bring benefits, at least for some people. Intervention may transgress the boundaries of a state and, indeed, be opposed by the authorities, but this does not mean that it is opposed by all. From the early nineteenth century, many Balkan national movements have sought outside intervention in aid of their cause. A memoir presented to a group of western governments and Japan by Macedonian Bulgarians in 1919 candidly states ‘All the bloody struggles of the Macedonian Bulgarians during the last thirty years, down to 1912, have had one principal objective – to provoke the intervention of the great powers.’18 Likewise, the destruction of the Ottoman fleet at Navarino by a joint British, French and Russian force in 1827 that helped secure the independence of Greece may have been, at least according to the Duke of Wellington, ‘untoward’ but it was welcomed by many Greeks.19 Today, although the post-colonial discourse has tended to substitute human rights for self-determination as a legitimation for intervention, it is no less welcome to the Albanians of Kosovo. Indeed, in the tradition of such movements many would argue that the chief strategy of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was to provoke international intervention.20 It is a commonplace but accurate truism that one person’s intervention has often been another’s liberation. Intervention in such cases is negative in terms of state sovereignty but it can be positive in terms of human rights. Indeed, a legitimacy for intervention based on the safeguarding of peoples is increasingly cited, with arguments supporting this interpretation being found in both the UN Charter and the Helsinki Final Acts.21 The centrality of the state within the idea of intervention is also being eroded by the actors who intervene in contemporary interventions. As this Introduction will show, multilateral intervention in the Balkans is nothing new, but in the past it tended to be through groups of powers acting in concert. Indeed, the use of the word ‘international’ in the title of this work refers to collective rather than unilateral action. Today, although states remain at the centre of decision-making regarding intervention, the activity is often legitimized through UN resolutions and undertaken by non-state international organizations. Such interventions, when they do occur, are frequently carried out in the name of the international community, with the shared values of the collectivity seen as granting a legitimacy which is
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Peter Siani-Davies
rarely present in the political interests of a particular state. The existence of such an international community depends to a large extent on both theoretical and political viewpoint. Those opposed to intervention would join realists in seeing it as merely cloaking great power interests, while those in favour would side with liberals in seeing the community as promoting certain values and defending certain principles.22 Whichever view is taken, the normative base of any actions taken in the name of the international community is clearly grounded in the West and, when it acts, it tends to be through international organizations, such as the UN, the EU, NATO, OSCE, the Council of Europe, the IMF, the EBRD and the World Bank. Alongside these international organizations can also be found a host of international non-governmental organizations (iNGOs). These range from bodies such as the Soros foundation to humanitarian relief agencies, like Oxfam and Médecins sans Frontières, to Human Rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Indeed, iNGOs are having an increasing influence with human rights groups seen as being particularly active in challenging the norm of non-intervention, as in Kosovo.23 Today, when the international community acts in the Balkans, those who partake in its action seldom speak of intervention. Instead they dress their activities in a more innocent language. In the Stability Pact the hierarchy between donors and supplicants is dissolved, all are ‘partners’ and the talk is of ‘assistance’, ‘aid’, ‘reconstruction’, ‘local ownership’ and the ‘sharing of values’. However, among those who are subject to the activities of the ‘international community’, less kind words are sometimes heard. When the West spoke of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo, the Serbs condemned brutal ‘NATO aggression’ and, while the signing of the Ohrid Framework Agreement in August 2001 was generally hailed by the West (and Albanians) as a breakthrough in the search for peace in Macedonia, many Macedonians charge that the sovereignty of their state has been so compromised that it is now little more than an international protectorate.24 Any choice of term to describe the activities of the outside world within the region is essentially political, but it is also historically and culturally determined. The capitulations that granted extraterritorial consular courts and other concessions to western interests within the Ottoman Empire may have been freely given at the time but as time passed they came to be seen as symbols of oppressive intervention.25 Each state defines the level of foreign interference that it believes is acceptable at any one time and in the case of a former highly centralized communist state raised on an ideology of nonintervention, the threshold of acceptance is likely to be lower than in Western Europe.26 In sum, the meaning of intervention remains fluid, it differs in time and place, as it is constantly negotiated, but, like ‘the Balkans’, the negative connotations the term carries means that it always bears considerable political resonance.
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From independence to the Second World War: the limits of multilateral intervention Although it is possible to speak of intervention occurring throughout history, it is usually considered within a distinct historical meaning deriving from the emergence of the nation-state, nationalism and the concept of sovereignty.27 This Introduction, therefore, will only be concerned with the Balkan states after independence. International or multinational intervention has a similar historical meaning deriving from the evolution of the great power system in the nineteenth century, in which five, later six, powers acted together to manage change in the world outside their bounds, and the growth of the notion that there existed an international society that adhered to certain ‘standards of civilization’.28 This was a vague concept, but generally states were expected to protect the basic rights of European nationals, to have an effective government over a defined territory, to maintain domestic and international legal regimes acceptable to international society and to participate within the accepted framework of international exchange and communication.29 When states were perceived as not conforming to these standards the great powers could assert rights of intervention, as the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, did in January 1850 when he ordered a blockade of Piraeus and other Greek ports in support of the claims of Don Pacifico, a British citizen of Portuguese Jewish extraction whose house in Athens had been ransacked by a mob.30 Palmerston’s actions were of doubtful legality and the timing, three years after the initial incident, aroused suspicions that he was chiefly interested in securing the deposition of the Greek king, Othon, and the installation of a successor more favourable to British interests. The concept of multilateral intervention evolved throughout the nineteenth century and it is not easy to make a clear distinction between when the great powers were acting in a traditional framework of alliance and when they were acting in a broader cooperative concert – unanimity is not necessarily an adequate guideline. However, there does seem to be a qualitative difference between the joint British, French and Russian action at Navarino and the participation of these powers, alongside Italy, in the occupation of Crete in 1897, when the upholding of certain norms assumed on the basis of a right to spread civilized values does seem to have been as relevant as upholding the balance of power.31 During the nineteenth century the chief mechanisms for legitimizing multilateral interventions were congresses, including the Congress of Berlin of 1878, and conferences of ambassadors. The latter were ad hoc bodies charged with overseeing specific interventions, as in the aforementioned occupation of Crete, which was overseen by the ambassadors of the great powers in Rome. After the First World War, the notion of collective security and the creation of the League of Nations offered new bases for intervention but the League remained hamstrung by great power rivalries and, at least in the Balkans, its position was further
8 Peter Siani-Davies eroded by the competencies claimed by parallel mechanisms such as the Conference of Ambassadors, a permanent body established in Paris in 1920 to oversee the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920. Multilateral intervention in the Balkans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rested on both a realist and idealist base. It was concerned both with geopolitical balances of power and the defence and propagation of certain values. Aside, from the particular interests of each power in the region, Great Britain, for instance, sought to curb Russian expansion and protect the passage to India, there was a generally recognized need among the great powers to preserve the balance of power in Europe. Any territorial expansion in the Balkans could potentially unbalance this carefully constructed system and this largely explains the continued efforts to buttress the Ottoman Empire throughout the nineteenth century and the reluctance of the great powers to intervene in support of Balkan national movements, often in the face of considerable public pressure at home.32 Even the British Foreign Secretary George Canning, usually seen as a Philhellene, was not initially predisposed to recognize the Greeks as belligerents during their war of independence and only formally recognized their naval blockade because of domestic opinion and the need to safeguard his country’s commercial interests.33 Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries pleas for intervention by various Balkan peoples almost invariably fell on deaf ears. However, once the activities of the people of the region themselves or those of the outside powers, as in the Battle of Navarino, or the two in combination, made the creation of a state inevitable, the great powers acted to finalize boundaries so as to maintain the balance of power both within the wider European system itself and within the Balkans. The need to preserve these balances of power effectively limited intervention, and meant that, even when unilateral intervention did occur, as in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, a multilateral solution was sought to the issues raised. In this case it was through the Congress of Berlin, when the great powers sitting in concert effectively redrew the political map of the Balkans, with little contribution from the peoples of the region.34 Aside from the balance of power, culture and values also seem to have played a role in determining attitudes to intervention, primarily through the predominant Christian character of the region, which at times was construed as a reason for both non-intervention and intervention. Christianity mediated the position of the Balkans, bringing it closer to ‘Europe’ and distinguished it from the ‘Orient’. It reinforced the idea that the new Balkan states should be granted recognition and allowed them a relatively easy passage into international society which, during the nineteenth century, was seen as an almost exclusively Christian club.35 All the extant Balkan states were invited to attend the Hague Conference of 1899, which is often viewed as a foundation-stone of international society, although Bulgaria, not yet fully independent, was seated behind Turkey.36 Christianity, thus, in one sense, acted as a shield against intervention, facilitating
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recognition and forestalling any thoughts the great powers may have had of recolonization.37 However, it also served as a pretext for intervention, especially in the dying years of the Ottoman Empire. The treaty of KuchukKainardji in 1774 had given the Russians a vague right to represent Orthodox Christians within the Ottoman realm and, coupled with panslavism, this fed an interventionist sentiment. Later in the nineteenth century there evolved a more general ‘European’ concern to protect the Christian populations from the excesses they sometimes suffered within a Muslim state. Present from the time of the Greek war of independence, this was particularly clearly and widely articulated in Great Britain during the campaign over the massacre of Bulgarian Christians following the abortive April Uprising of 1876. Grounded in the religious revival of the nineteenth century and a widespread repugnance at the official pro-Turkish policy of the British government, members of the pro-Bulgarian movement, like the Duke of Argyll, who shuddered at ‘the horrid cruelties of Ghengis Khan in the days of Queen Victoria’, anthropomorphized the state, giving it the same moral responsibilities as individuals.38 The campaign against the Bulgarian atrocities did not lead to intervention, but it was to foreshadow the future. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, faced with the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire, the weakness of the new Balkan states, and the threat this situation posed to wider European security, for a variety of reasons, political, moral and humanitarian, the great powers were to launch a series of multilateral interventions in the region using diplomacy, coercion, economic measures and, ultimately, the stationing of troops and advisers in a series of stabilization missions.39 The most significant of these missions were to Eastern Rumelia, Crete and Macedonia. In each case advisers backed by police and sometimes troops from the great powers were installed in a troubled region of the Ottoman Empire to prevent further massacre of the Christian population and facilitate reform. In Eastern Rumelia and Crete the deployments were to autonomous territorial entities. Eastern Rumelia, today’s southern Bulgaria, had been granted autonomy by the 1878 Congress of Berlin, while Crete was taken under the protection of the great powers with the agreement of the Turks following the 1896 revolt.40 The intervening powers, Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy – the more pro-Turkish Germany and AustroHungary deciding not to participate in the action – occupied Crete, dividing it into sectors with the capital, Hania, left as an international district.41 As in Eastern Rumelia, a Christian high commissioner was installed. The powers eventually settled on Prince George, the second son of the King of Greece, to administer the island, which remained under Turkish suzerainty, even though it was self-governing with its own constitution, assembly, flag and currency. In 1899, following the training of an Italian-directed and officered gendarmerie, most of the foreign troops were withdrawn, leaving only small detachments in key towns as a reserve in times of need.42 The mission
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to Macedonia was slightly different in that no attempt was made to create a distinct Macedonian entity. The deployment was triggered by the 1903 Ilinden uprising and was made on the basis of the joint Austro-Russian Mürzsteg programme of 22 October 1903.43 This introduced a Russian and Austrian civil commissioner to monitor reform in the region and to act as advocates for the Christian population as well as establishing an international gendarmerie to help keep the peace and reorganize the local police, recruiting more Christians. The programme was not as ambitious as the deployment in Crete. The civil commissioners were only given an advisory and consultative role and were accompanied on their missions at all times by Ottoman officials. The gendarmerie were also circumscribed in their freedom, with their commander, an Italian, officially having to enter Ottoman service and the number of foreign officers being limited to forty-eight. With their mandates of preventing atrocities, ensuring stability, and fostering reform, particularly in the security sector, these late nineteenthcentury multilateral interventions bear some comparison with their late twentieth-century counterparts. Fearing instability, the great powers had launched the missions to preserve the status quo, but in each case the foreign presence was used by the Christian populations to organize movements seeking either independence or unification with co-nationals.44 In Macedonia, in particular, the various national groups came to assume that the Mürzsteg programme was only a first step towards greater intervention and this led to a growth in violence as all sides tried to amass territory encouraged by Article three of the programme which suggested redrawing local boundaries at an unspecified date. Rivalry between the great powers pursuing different interests strained relations between diplomats and military officers wanting to take more robust action. Similarly, the non-arrival of promised funds and hostility from some local groups, which felt they had been coerced into an agreement, all tempered the success of the earlier missions as much as they have later deployments in the region. The conditions of the local Christian populations were ameliorated but no base was built for long-term reform. Stability was visualized only in terms of the maintenance of the status quo or its mild readjustment, and as such the missions merely formed a transitional stage in the evolution of the region. Eastern Rumelia, without the permission of the great powers, united with Bulgaria in 1885, as Crete did with Greece in 1912. Macedonia was divided between Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria after the Balkan wars of 1912–13. In the period from the independence of Greece to the Second World War many of the norms of intervention and non-intervention were shaped within the Balkans. The idea that the great powers had the right to intervene to protect persecuted minority groups, particularly Christians, and to protect the interests of their own citizens were both shaped within a Balkan environment, as were the notions of multinational peacekeeping forces, multinational economic intervention, and, indirectly, conditionality.45 Yet, it
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is also true to say, that, although there was international intervention in the region, in many ways it was surprisingly limited.46 Whether this was due to the policies pursued by Balkan politicians or the great powers is debatable, but paradoxically it may have been the amount of control that the outside world did exercise within the region that prevented more overt intervention. The newly independent Balkan states existed within a system of constrained sovereignty which placed limits on their freedom of action. This was most obvious in the case of Greece where the convention establishing sovereignty was between the three guaranteeing powers, France, Great Britain and Russia, and the Bavarian house of the new king, Othon, alone, with no Greek signature on the document.47 Elsewhere, the great powers intervened to set borders, influence constitutional structures and impose conditions before recognition was granted, especially relating to the protection of minority rights and the building of railways. Prior to 1878, Serbia had built no railways, considering them of doubtful utility, but now together with other states of the region it was coerced into an ambitious programme of railroad construction which, if it did not directly introduce outside influence, left it dependent economically on Western Europe.48 The system of constrained sovereignty formally restricted the freedom of action of the new Balkan states but if the interests of the great powers were not directly challenged, the impositions could often be bypassed. Following pressure from the Congress of Berlin, Art. 7 of the Romanian Constitution was changed to allow Jews to obtain legal and civil rights, but before 1914 only about 1,000 succeeded in gaining citizenship.49 Yet, perhaps more significant than direct intervention was the allure western forms held for the elite of the region. Whether because they genuinely accepted the western model as superior or because they sought personal advantage by adapting to the ways of dominant powers, leading members of the Balkan elite embraced western forms. By virtue of travel, education and language skills, they were able to position themselves as mediators between the local population and the outside world, using this access to reinforce their privileged position. The ever present risk was that in the process this westernized elite would become so associated with the outside world that it would alienate its local constituency and, indeed, a constant in many Balkan polities has been a deeply politicized divide between western-orientated modernizers and those who sought a supposedly more native path to modernity.50 And, this seems as true today, in the age of the white jeep, as it was before with the frock-coat.51 The period between independence and the Second World War provided a base on which later discourses of intervention could be built. Among the countries of the region and many outside observers it laid the foundations of a historiography that in its stress on the national frequently interpreted Balkan history in terms of intervention.52 Within the international arena it established the view that the Balkans lay on the margins of Europe, a savage world somehow apart, and this image has been played upon both at the time
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and since to justify both intervention and non-intervention as the need arises. The Kaiser invoked the same image of primitive difference, when he declared that the Serbs ‘are Orientals, therefore liars, tricksters and masters of evasion’, while countenancing intervention at the beginning of the First World War, as Western politicians deployed to forestall more active intervention during the Bosnian War, when they argued for the impossibility of keeping the peace between sides riven by such strong ancient ethnic hatreds.53 The Balkans, as a recent book has termed them, were Europe’s ‘outcasts’ and this image was reinforced during the inter-war years when multilateral intervention virtually ceased and the region became a marginal playground for the great power ambitions of Italy, France and Germany.54
Unilateral intervention and the ideology of non-intervention during the Cold War Post-1945 there was little scope for multilateral intervention in the region, as the Balkans lay at the heart of the Cold War divide, with all the region falling within the Soviet bloc, except for Greece. From the periphery the Balkans moved towards the centre of the stage. This was to bring both high levels of unilateral intervention but also, partly in reaction, important reaffirmations of the principle of non-intervention. In Romania and Bulgaria communist regimes were installed on the base of Red Army occupation, in Yugoslavia and Albania through wartime partisan activity. Everywhere communism was initially imposed on the Stalinist model with greater or lesser amounts of terror, industrialization and collectivization. Soviet advisers were also deployed, particularly in the army and security services, and joint-stock companies established to transfer assets to the Soviet Union. All were expected to follow the Soviet lead and this was reinforced by the creation of Cominform in 1947. Even though Yugoslavia, Albania and to a lesser extent Romania all subsequently achieved considerable degrees of autonomy, for much of the period they still lived under the shadow of possible Soviet intervention. Especially in the case of Bulgaria and Romania, their sovereignty was effectively constrained, as, even if they wanted to break free from the Soviet bloc, they were unable to do so. On the other side of the Iron Curtain in Greece there was also a high degree of intervention but this time designed to keep the country within the western sphere of influence. British and American military intervention proved crucial in the bitter civil war (1947–9) the Greek government fought against the communist-led Democratic Army of Greece. Although few, if any, foreign combat troops saw action, operations were overseen by a joint American–Greek general staff and the national army was supplied with copious amounts of Western military equipment. This intervention in Greece (and the need to support Turkey) produced in March 1947 a wider justification for similar actions elsewhere in the shape of the Truman Doctrine – a pledge by the US President, Harry S. Truman, to intervene
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anywhere in the world to support ‘free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’.55 Truman continued, ‘I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes’ and American military help was indeed buttressed by massive financial support – between 1947 and 1966 Greece received $3,749 million split almost evenly between military and economic assistance.56 Even after victory had been secured in the civil war, there continued to be high levels of interference by the Western powers in Greek political life to ensure the continuing domination of the political right. This did not bring domestic stability and when the position of the army was challenged, the result was a coup d’état and the installation of a dictatorship headed by a group of colonels in 1967. The dictatorship was eventually brought down by an abortive intervention in Cyprus (an attempt by the colonels to oust the Cypriot leader, Archbishop Makarios), which produced a military intervention by one of the island’s guaranteeing powers (Turkey) that was met by a non-intervention (the response of the other guaranteeing powers, Greece and Great Britain, as well as the USA, to the invasion). In 1974 a new democratic regime was installed in Greece and in 1981 the country consolidated its westward orientation when it obtained full membership of the European Community (EC). The accession of Greece to the EC marked a decisive change in West European policy towards the Balkans. For the first time a conscious decision was made to integrate a Balkan country into the European mainstream and, indeed, it can be argued that by this act the country itself was effectively removed from the region.57 The Cold War brought considerable intervention by both sides in the Balkans but it also brought important affirmations of the principle of nonintervention in both the legal and political realms. The key legal ruling came in 1948 following an incident two years before, in October 1946, when two British warships passing through the narrow channel between Corfu and the Albanian coast had struck mines, causing damage and loss of life. On 12–13 November 1946 the Royal Navy, without the consent of the Albanians, returned to sweep the channel, including Albanian territorial waters, for mines. The British raised the matter of compensation in the UN Security Council and the case was eventually passed to the newly created International Court of Justice in The Hague. The court ruled that Albania had been responsible for the explosions of October and must pay damages to the British but that the Royal Navy had violated Albanian territorial sovereignty in November.58 As much as the Truman Doctrine established a political ideology of intervention, the Corfu Channel case established the norm of non-intervention in international law. Alongside the Nicaragua versus the USA ruling of 1986, it has remained a definitive statement on the subject. This legal ruling on non-intervention was also matched by developments in the political field. The assertions of non-intervention flowed from the
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Tito–Stalin split of 1948, which led to Yugoslavia mapping out its own path to socialism independent of the USSR. Subsequently, Yugoslavia expelled all Soviet advisors, failed to enter the Warsaw Pact, and, finally, along with Egypt and India, established the Non-Aligned Movement. Standing apart from both superpowers, this became a staunch advocate of the principle of non-intervention, strongly supporting UN documents such as the 1965 Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty. For Yugoslavia non-alignment did not mean turning its back on the world. Instead the country used its position between the blocs to attract support from all sides, including financial support from the West, much of it of a multilateral nature. Like many of the pre-1939 states, it entered a position of growing dependency, its freedom of movement increasingly circumscribed by IMF conditionality and, as the international environment changed in the late 1980s, with the superpowers losing interest in the region, this contributed to its eventual collapse.59 The development of a Yugoslav road to socialism independent from the USSR produced a model for others to follow. Romania adopted a semiautonomous position. Not quite as independent as Yugoslavia, it remained, for instance, a formal member of the Warsaw Treaty Organization even if it did not attend exercises, it, nonetheless, skilfully used the discord between Moscow and Beijing to present an independent face to the outside world. It gained political plaudits from the West and valuable economic agreements including Most-Favoured Nation trading status with the United States, before a debt repayment programme, partly driven by a desire to remove potential levers of intervention, cast the country into a morass of isolationist autarky. An equally extreme response to intervention came from the Albanians. Initially closely aligned with the Yugoslavs, the Albanians chose to back the USSR during the Tito–Stalin split. Alignment with the USSR continued until 1960–1961, when, after the USSR broke off diplomatic relations, Albania sought support from China. In 1978, when this relationship in turn went sour, the Albanian leader, Enver Hoxha, adopted an ideological position that cast the USA and USSR as equal enemies. Subsequently, some attempts were made to build relations with other countries, but the ideology of isolation based on the notion of non-intervention remained central. During the Cold War, political behaviour in the Balkans was at times more constrained by the outside powers than at any time since independence. Partially in reaction to this, many of the region’s states embraced an ideology of non-intervention. Central to the regimes of Albania, Romania and Yugoslavia this also had many adherents elsewhere, including the Greek political left, which adopted it as a reaction to American intervention in their own country. Taken to its extremes the ideology of non-intervention led to economic autarky and diplomatic isolation, most notably in the cases of Ceauºescu’s Romania and Hoxha’s Albania. It proved to be a political dead-end, breeding only instability and socio-economic collapse. Out of this
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era there grew both a strong desire to reintegrate into the European mainstream for economic gain and political freedoms but also an alternative discourse that continued to stress independence of action.
Multilateral intervention (and non-intervention) after the Cold War The end of the Cold War produced an international environment more conducive to multilateral intervention. Greater collaboration between the superpowers lessened the chance of a veto within the UN Security Council (UNSC) and led to a sharp rise in UN-based operations.60 Fourteen new peacekeeping missions were initiated in the period 1988–1992 alone.61 Other coalitions, sometimes legitimized by UN resolutions sometimes not, have also been formed with the USA, as the leading world power, at the fore – most notably in the cases of Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. The growing tendency to support multilateral intervention was also matched by a perceived need for such actions, as the end of the Cold War brought increased global instability. In particular, the Balkans and especially Yugoslavia were torn apart by a succession of conflicts in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia (1991–1995), Moldova (1992), Yugoslavia, including Kosovo (1999) and Macedonia (2001), as well as witnessing the violent collapse of all institutions of law and order in Albania (1997). At the end of the Cold War, the first response of both superpowers was to disengage from the Balkans. Exemplifying this trend and the new spirit of cooperation between the USSR and the USA was an obscure incident during the Romanian revolution. Amid the shooting that followed the overthrow of Ceauºescu, the incoming National Salvation Front regime seem to have made a tentative request for military assistance from the Soviet Union. Somewhat surprisingly the idea was publicly backed by James Baker, the US Secretary of State, on an American talk show but rebuffed by the Russians who stressed that at a time when they had just apologized for their intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 they were not going to follow the example of George Bush, who was in the process of invading Panama. In fact no intervention was needed and the Romanians subsequently denied making such a request, but the incident highlights the great paradox of the immediate postCold War Balkans. At the time the former communist countries were casting aside the ideology of non-intervention and seeking to return to the European mainstream, the outside world was turning its back on the region, once more consigning it to the periphery of Europe. International intervention in Yugoslavia The Yugoslav wars were eventually to force a change of policy but this was to be a slow and painful process marked by division, doubt and hesitant intervention. When, on 25 June 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared their
16 Peter Siani-Davies independence, the leaders of the EC responded by dispatching the ‘troika’ of past, present and future foreign ministers of the presidency of the European Council of Ministers to try and avert further bloodshed and mediate a settlement. On 7 July 1991, they duly announced that they had negotiated a cease-fire in Slovenia, the withdrawal of Yugoslav People’s Army units, the opening of negotiations between the various parties and a moratorium on declarations of independence for three months. The ‘success’ of the ‘troika’ was to be largely transient, but this first major diplomatic intervention in the war did lay some of the patterns for future actions. First, it established the EU as the lead outside mediator and, through the framework of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), led to the deployment of the first monitors, the white-clad European Community Monitoring Mission (ECMM). Second, it offered only a partial settlement. It may have halted the war in Slovenia but it did not resolve the crisis as a whole, with fighting continuing in Croatia. Third, it influenced the dynamics of the conflict in Yugoslavia. It effectively legitimized the new Slovenian and Croatian entities, paving the way for their later formal recognitions but in the process removed an important source of potential leverage.62 International intervention in the Yugoslav wars had four frequently overlapping dimensions: diplomacy, recognition, humanitarian action, and coercion.63 Diplomatic efforts to end the fighting continued throughout the conflict. At first the EU was dominant, hosting the conference in The Hague chaired by the former British Foreign Secretary, Peter Carrington. Its purpose was to negotiate an overall settlement to what was, at that time, perceived as an intra-Yugoslav civil war and to provide a framework for future relations between the republics, but this rationale was effectively ended by the recognition of the successor states. Recognition transformed the conflict into wars between sovereign states and, although negotiations continued during the Portuguese Presidency of the EU, the UN became an increasingly important mediator. This was formalized with the establishment in Geneva in September 1992 of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia (ICFY), co-chaired by the former British Foreign Secretary, David Owen, on behalf of the EU, and the former US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, for the UN.64 The ICFY had a broad mandate for conflict settlement and prevention but focused chiefly on the Bosnian war, producing a series of proposals to end the fighting, including, in January 1993, the Vance–Owen Plan. The ICFY continued to operate until the end of the war but gradually the focus began to shift towards great power mediation through the Contact Group, which included representatives from the USA, Russia, Great Britain, France and Germany.65 Nonetheless, it was only a significant shift in the situation on the ground allied with the more active engagement of the USA that eventually produced a peace settlement. Diplomatic intervention was centred on trying to end the Bosnian war. It failed for the most part because of opposition from the combatants and
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differences within the powers, especially between the west Europeans and the United States. The Vance–Owen plan was scuttled by the Bosnian Serbs and the incoming Clinton administration.66 None of the major powers initially considered they had vital interests at stake in Bosnia, to do so would have meant redefining Cold War realist paradigms. The argument for intervention was principally made in moral terms and none of the powers were prepared to go beyond deploying troops within the UN peacekeeping mission. The championing by the USA of a policy of ‘lift and strike’ (coupling the lifting of the arms embargo on Bosnia with air strikes against Bosnian Serb targets) merely produced conflict with France and Britain whose troops on the ground were always potential hostages. Even in their reading of the war the two sides differed, with the Europeans tending to see a civil war and the Americans external Serbian aggression. The result was that policy rarely strayed beyond ‘containment with charity’ with multilateralism serving largely as a cloak for evolving bilateral ties.67 In the absence, until the final months of the conflict, of a credible coercive threat from the international community, it is possible that diplomacy only prolonged the conflict, as the warring parties stalled, hoping to extract more concessions in the next round of talks or secure intervention, which the ‘American club’ within the Bosnian leadership remained convinced would come. In a manner similar to the Mürzsteg Programme at the beginning of the century, the negotiators, as they produced a succession of plans based on dividing Bosnia into ethnic units, probably exacerbated the process of cleansing, as each side moved to pre-empt talks by clearing territory. Indeed, the very process of negotiation, to a certain extent, legitimized the war-makers and consolidated ethnic divides, as it marginalized those opposed to the conflict. As it had been during the Greek war of independence, nearly two centuries before, recognition was also to be an important instrument of intervention during the Yugoslav conflict. On 15 January 1992, under pressure from Germany, the EU recognized the independence of Slovenia and Croatia. The decision was made after the Hague conference had asked a commission under the French jurist, Robert Badinter, to pronounce on the requirements that should be attached to recognition and the basis on which borders should be drawn. The commission, rather contradictorily, while producing a series of guidelines for recognition, also simultaneously recommended that Slovenia, Macedonia and Croatia should be recognized, despite the fact that Croatia did not control large swathes of its claimed territory.68 The commission, ignoring Serb arguments to the contrary, also pronounced in favour of republican borders being recognized as international boundaries on the principle of uti posseditis juris, established during the process of decolonization. Badinter made no clear proposals on Bosnia beyond recommending the holding of a referendum on independence. However, once Slovenia and Croatia were recognized, for the authorities in Sarajevo the position of Bosnia within the Yugoslav
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federation became untenable, and with its cause championed by the USA it also received recognition on 6/7 April 1992.69 Bosnia may already have been sliding to war but recognition did nothing to forestall the process. The powers vested in the Badinter Commission bear some resemblance to those held by the Congress of Berlin. Again representatives of the major powers were able to pronounce on the rights of Balkan states to exist or not and their territorial bounds. And, even if, this time, their judgement rested on a substantial corpus of international law and their concerns were not chiefly with the balance of power, they still weighed questions of precedent and the needs of wider European security. Just as with the Congress of Berlin, the Badinter Commission also left key issues unresolved, with the decision that international borders should follow republican divides, leaving Kosovo, which had only been an autonomous province within Serbia, with no right to secede. Recognition, though, did internationalize the conflict and, as the fighting worsened and stories emerged of terrible atrocities, particularly against the Muslim population, there appeared growing calls for international intervention within the international media. As in the past, when similar pleas were made on behalf of the Christian population of the region, these were staved off by the great powers.70 However, after a succession of other attempts had failed, in November 1991, the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative, Cyrus Vance, finally negotiated a lasting cease-fire in Croatia. UN monitors were dispatched to the conflict zone and in February 1992 this was followed by the establishment of a fully fledged UN mission (UNPROFOR). By the summer of 1994, 36,000 blue-helmeted troops were stationed in Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia. In each country their mission was distinct. In Croatia they came closest to acting as traditional peacekeepers, when the third party separates the combatants, as they were inserted between the Croats and Serbs. In Bosnia their role was more peace enhancing. Often in the face of local opposition, particularly Serbian, they were charged with first reopening Sarajevo Airport and then with protecting humanitarian aid convoys organized by the UNHCR.71 During the coming years, this initial mandate was broadened through a succession of UN resolutions, until they were also charged with monitoring airfields and borders, and later with protecting the UN safe areas of Srebrenica, Sarajevo, Gora de, Bihaæ, epa and Tuzla. Finally, in Macedonia UNPROFOR formed the UN’s first preventive deployment, responsible for guarding the border and monitoring interethnic relations. In this role they were joined by an OSCE spillover mission, which was deployed in September 1992. The overall success or failure of the UN intervention in the Yugoslav wars is difficult to establish, it partly depends on the mandate on which it is judged. In Croatia the UN forces initially faced charges that their failure to demilitarize the UN Protected Areas helped the Serbs consolidate their gains. However, their presence also shielded the Croats, giving them time to
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reorganize. Subsequently, the UN proved incapable of stemming Croat offensives against Serb-held areas causing the flight of over 150,000 refugees. In Bosnia the UN did provide considerable amounts of aid, without which many more may have died. However, they also failed to defend the safe areas, particularly, Srebrenica.72 Indeed, it might be said that the delivery of humanitarian relief became a substitute for greater intervention and much of the aid seems to have ended up with the warring parties, perhaps prolonging the war.73 The weakness of the UN forces lay in their contradictory mandates and the limited political resolve of the major powers. These failings were exacerbated by problems of communication within and between large and unwieldy international organizations and between soldiers and civilians reluctant to countenance more robust coercive actions, such as air strikes.74 Only in Macedonia can the UN deployment be seen as an almost unqualified success. Finally, the outside world intervened in the Yugoslav conflict through coercion. An arms embargo had been imposed on all of Yugoslavia on 25 September 1991. This may have been aimed at preventing further escalation of the violence but in reality it sealed the weapons imbalance to the detriment of the Croats and especially the Bosnian Muslims. A regime of sanctions also began to be applied on the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, comprising Serbia and Montenegro, with the Adriatic and the Danube blockaded in a joint operation by NATO and the WEU. On 9 October 1992, an air exclusion zone was declared over Bosnia, prohibiting all non-UN missions. Initially limited to UN monitoring, this was later enforced by NATO which, in February 1994, shot down four Bosnian Serb planes. As the war progressed, there was a gradual drift towards more assertive behaviour, as coercion came to support diplomacy, but these measures were not without cost. The arms embargo was of doubtful morality and the sanctions on Serbia brought considerable suffering to the general population for limited gains. In the summer of 1995, the coercive potential of the intervening forces was considerably enhanced through the deployment of a largely Anglo-French Rapid Reaction Force around Sarajevo equipped with heavy artillery capable of inflicting damage on Bosnian Serb positions. Then, following a mortar attack on Sarajevo market, on 28 August, NATO unleashed a ferocious bombing campaign on Bosnian Serb positions. With a joint Croat-Bosnian Muslim offensive in the north of the country rolling back Serbian gains, intensified negotiations conducted by US Assistant Secretary of State, Richard Holbrooke, eventually led to proximity talks at Wright-Patterson air base in Dayton, Ohio.75 On 21 November 1995, after brinkmanship by all sides, under pressure from the great powers, and, particularly, the USA, these produced the Dayton Peace Accords (DPA) which were formally ratified in Paris on 14 December 1995. Multilateral diplomacy backed by coercion had eventually secured an agreement but only after there had been a major shift in the balance of power on the ground among war weary combatants.
20 Peter Siani-Davies International intervention in the Balkans since 1995 International intervention post-Dayton is considered more closely within the pages of this book, and so here only a sketch of the main events will appear allowing the various chapters to be placed in context. The period post-1995 is divided into two by the Kosovo bombing campaign of 1999. The first period of 1995–1999 was a time of continuing crisis management in which the outside world, while still trying to limit its engagement, was gradually led into an ever deeper involvement in the region, especially Bosnia-Hercegovina. Here 60,000 IFOR troops were deployed under NATO control.76 IFOR’s mission was to enforce the line of separation between the warring parties and, increasingly, to provide the conditions for the fulfilment of the DPA. Within the institutions of the new Bosnian state, international involvement was high. The constitutional structures had been drawn up by outside experts, and foreign nationals were appointed to such key positions as governor of the national bank and sat on the bench of the constitutional court. In the years since 1995, although the number of foreign troops has declined, in the face of continuing opposition from ethnically based political parties, the tendency has been for the outside world to increase and not diminish its role in the country. In December 1997, in a meeting in Bonn, the powers of the Office of the High Representative, the chief officer of the international community in Bosnia, were expanded considerably. Subsequently, successive incumbents have removed elected officials from office, including the President of the Republika Srpska, Nikola Poplasen, in March 1999, banned political parties, and imposed legislation when the parliaments have refused to accept it, including, in April 2002, new constitutions for the Croat-Muslim federation and for the Republika Srpska which made Muslims, Serbs, and Croats politically equal throughout Bosnia.77 Elsewhere, although intervention was not so marked as in Bosnia, the stress was also on containing existing crisis and consolidating often fragile peace settlements, with a key role being played by UN and OSCE missions. In Croatia, on 18 April 1996, the OSCE launched what was to be its second largest mission to date, focusing on refugee returns, minority issues, democracy building and police monitoring.78 In Macedonia the UN force, now under the new name of UNPREDEP, continued in its preventive deployment function until 1 March 1999, when it was ended by a Chinese veto in the UNSC. In Moldova an OSCE mission, established on 4 February 1993, continued to work for a settlement of the Transnistrian conflict, facilitating negotiations between the parties and monitoring the political process. In January 1996 the UNSC authorized a military observer mission (UNMOP) for the strategic Prevlaka peninsula which lies within Croatia but controls access to the Yugoslav naval facilities in the bay of Kotor.79 In the same month, the Security Council also outlined a programme which, after a period under the control of the UN Transitional Administration for Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium (UNTAES), was to see this, the last area of Croatia still under Serb control, peacefully (re)integrated into the Croatian state.
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21
At the same time as the outside world was working to consolidate peace after the Yugoslav wars and the conflict in Moldova, it was also faced by three new crises within the region, each of which had major humanitarian as well as political implications. In each case, it eventually acted but the initial reluctance indicated there were still limits to intervention. Two of the crises occurred almost simultaneously in spring 1997. In Bulgaria a banking crisis precipitated an almost total economic collapse and political chaos. Both inside and outside Bulgaria it was agreed that the only possible solution was the establishment of a currency board which would peg the Bulgarian Leva to the Deutschmark, thereby stabilizing the exchange rate and restoring economic confidence. The situation in Bulgaria in 1997 was reminiscent of Greece in 1897, when the great powers installed an International Financial Commission of Control. The IFIs effectively defined the policy agenda as Bulgaria lost control of monetary policy, no longer able to set interest rates or use the levers of demand management. There were, however, significant differences from 1897. Not only did the currency board that began operation on 1 July 1997 function through the issuance department of the Bulgarian National Bank, which was headed by a deputy Governor of the Bank who was a Bulgarian citizen, but also its chief concern was the economic stability of Bulgaria, not the payment of debts to creditors. At the same time as Bulgaria was facing economic collapse, Albania was toppling into complete anarchy following the collapse of a number of pyramid schemes which overnight reduced much of the country to poverty. In the face of the crisis, the army and security organs collapsed. The population pillaged hundreds of thousands of weapons from barracks and store rooms and large swathes of Albania fell out of government control. Following the declaration of a state of emergency, a national reconciliation government was installed and, on 12 March 1997, an appeal was made for outside assistance to restore order. There was little enthusiasm for this idea within NATO or the EU but, eventually, on 29 March, a UN Security Council resolution supported a proposal from the OSCE that individual states be allowed to help the Albanian government.80 A multinational force of 5,915 troops led by Italy, the great power traditionally most interested in Albanian affairs, was eventually dispatched, but not before considerable domestic debate about the wisdom of such a course of action. With order restored in the country the majority of the force withdrew in August 1997. Dwarfing the crises in Bulgaria and Albania, at least in the scale of the international response, was Kosovo. Following clashes between armed insurgents of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the Serbian Police in February 1998, the province descended increasingly into violence. Intense diplomatic pressure, including a September 1998 UNSC resolution demanding the withdrawal of Yugoslav security units used for civilian repression, backed by threats of NATO bombing produced an agreement between Miloševiæ and Holbrooke in October 1998. Under the terms of this agreement the Yugoslav authorities committed themselves to withdraw some
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of their armed forces from Kosovo, to enter into negotiations with the Kosovar Albanians and to allow the deployment of an OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM). This was charged with verifying a cease-fire between the two sides and monitoring the movement of forces and human rights violations, but, as with so many past interventions, it was hampered by the lack of an effective enforcement mechanism and could do little to prevent further violence, especially after the KLA began to occupy positions vacated by the Serbs.81 The most serious incident was at Raèak where the deaths of forty-five Albanians were blamed on the Yugoslav authorities. The KVM was withdrawn at the beginning of March 1999 but prior to this date, in February 1999, an abortive peace conference under the chairmanship of the British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, and his French counterpart, Hubert Védrine, had convened at Rambouillet. This broke down over Yugoslav refusals to countenance the stationing of NATO troops on its sovereign territory and Kosovo Albanian disquiet over the lack of a pledge to hold a referendum on the constitutional status of Kosovo within the next three years. Eventually, at a second round of talks in Paris two weeks later, the Albanians were cajoled into signing an agreement and, when the Yugoslavs did not follow suit, on 24 March 1999, NATO began bombing targets in Kosovo and also elsewhere in Serbia, including Belgrade. In the next few weeks, as the heavy bombing continued and the Serb forces stepped up their activities, almost one million Albanian refugees were to flee Kosovo, mostly into Macedonia and Albania, in what quickly became a humanitarian crisis. A massive inflow of outside assistance addressed the worse of the suffering but, with NATO continuing to rely on bombing and showing no real inclination to deploy ground troops, there was little sign of an overall settlement. Nonetheless, diplomatic efforts persisted and, working on some general principles for ending the war enunciated by the G-8, the former Finnish President, Martti Ahtisaari, acting on behalf of the EU and UN, the former Russian Prime Minister, Victor Chernomyrdin, acting on behalf of the Russian Presidency, and Strobe Talbott of the US State Department eventually hammered out a deal – the Russians effectively acting on behalf of Miloševiæ much as Miloševiæ had acted on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs at Dayton. For reasons still best known to himself, Miloševiæ agreed to the terms and a Military-Technical Agreement was signed between NATO and the Yugoslav armed forces at Kumanovo, Macedonia, on 9 June 1999.82 The next day the bombing was officially called off and a multinational occupation force, KFOR, entered Kosovo, as Yugoslav forces withdrew. The NATO bombing campaign remains highly controversial, with critics continuing to question the legitimacy of an operation launched without UNSC sanction, the objectives of a campaign, which they charge, was as much about consolidating NATO influence in the area and weakening Miloševiæ as protecting human rights, the methods of a high-level aerial bombing campaign, which seemed to minimize NATO casualties at the expense of civilian targets on the ground, and the results of an action which
Introduction
23
allowed the Albanians to return home but left the Serbs of Kosovo either fleeing or living in heavily protected enclaves.83 At the end of the twentieth century, as at the beginning of the nineteenth century, great power intervention had shaped the outcome of a Balkan conflict. The first intervention had secured the independence of Greece, the second, probably, will eventually lead to Kosovo gaining the same status. Yet, what was often overlooked was that outside the world wars and their immediate aftermath the bombing campaign was the first major offensive military engagement of the western powers in the Balkans since the defeat of the Turkish fleet in 1827. The victory at Navarino changed the political landscape of the Balkans forever. As much as it laid down a precedent for outside support of national movements in general, it produced a precedent for self-determination and the establishment of nation-states in the Balkans. Although it is still too early to say, it is possible that the bombing of Yugoslavia may prove to be equally decisive, since its effects appear to have been similarly momentous. First, it has led to the establishment in Kosovo of a level of external control not seen in the Balkans outside colonization. Once again the powers are constructing a new entity in the Balkans, although whether its life span will be any greater than that of autonomous Crete at the beginning of the twentieth century is still too early to say. The province remains nominally part of Yugoslavia but its long-term status remains unresolved. Second, and more significantly, it has led to a major reappraisal of policy towards the region as a whole. The Kosovo crisis created widespread dislocation in terms of refugee flows, trade disruption and other economic effects. This reinforced growing feeling among outside policy-makers, first, that the Balkans had to be treated as an interdependent whole and, second, that its problems could not be contained within the region. There was also a perceived need to reward those countries within the region that sometimes in the face of considerable domestic opposition had supported NATO throughout its aerial bombardment. In response, new policies began to be shaped which were seen as moving beyond reactive crisis management to encompass broad strategies for conflict prevention built on fostering ‘peace, democracy, respect for human rights and economic prosperity’ throughout the region.84 This new multilateral strategy needed new vehicles of cooperation. In April 1999 the European Commission and the World Bank established a joint office to lead the coordination of bilateral and multilateral aid under the guidance of a High Level Steering Group currently made up of the finance ministers of the G-8, the country holding the EU Presidency, the Netherlands, and representatives of international financial institutions, as well as the Special Coordinator of the Stability Pact. For day-to-day management it relies on a Working Level Steering Group. A series of donors’ conferences and meetings were also organized to raise funds for individual countries as well as for the region as a whole (March 2000, October 2001). At the same time the activities of the international financial institutions in the region were stepped up, with the IMF, the World Bank,
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including its subsidiary bodies such as the International Finance Corporation, which provides loans and equity financing to the private sector, and the Foreign Investment Advisory Service, the European Investment Bank, the Council of Europe Development Bank and the EBRD all becoming more active. In the period between January 1999 and December 2001 it has been estimated that the total amount committed to South-Eastern Europe by these and other sources was 19.268 billion euros.85 To further coordinate programmes the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe was initiated in Cologne by EU foreign ministers on 10 June 1999, before being formally launched at a 30 July summit in Sarajevo. The new actors do not use the term ‘intervention’ to describe their activities. Under a rhetoric of ‘assistance’, ‘partnership’, ‘regional ownership’ and ‘integration’ they have presided over an unprecedented transfer of resources, norms and values to the region but, as in the past, this has not been without conditions. In a process which has often impinged on classical notions of sovereignty the region in exchange has had to undergo a radical programme of political, economic and social reform. The conditionality principle of the EU was established throughout the 1990s, but in regards to the Balkans it was specifically shaped at the Luxembourg European Council Meeting of April 1997. Democratization, respect for human and, especially, minority rights, and the institution of the rule of law and a market economy, were to be the sine qua non for trade preference, technical support and the development of treaty-based relations. The latter has potentially opened up the possibility of EU membership for the whole region, allowing the other countries to follow the example of Greece and find a path away from the Balkans. When Europe Agreements were signed with Romania and Bulgaria in 1993 they were redefined, if only temporarily, as ‘Central and Eastern European Countries’, so that they fell within the EU’s Copenhagen commitment to admit those ‘associated countries of Central and Eastern Europe that so desire’. This enabled them to become part of the EU’s pre-accession strategy, launched in 1995, and the ‘inclusive and evolutive’ accession process established in early 1998. The same was also true of Slovenia which effectively embraced a Central European future when it concluded a Europe Agreement with the EU in 1996.86 The process of integration accelerated following the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Full accession negotiations were opened with Romania and Bulgaria and a Stabilisation and Association Process launched for what the EU terms the ‘Western Balkans’: Albania, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Yugoslavia. The first Stabilization and Association Agreement was signed by Macedonia in April 2001, the second by Croatia in October 2001, with others expected to follow. To support the process the EU adopted the CARDS programme with a budget of 4.65 billion euros over the period 2000–2006. The Stabilization and Association Process is designed to offer a credible prospect of EU membership but, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, serious questions remain as to when, if not whether, this
Introduction
25
goal will be met. With the quasi-protectorates of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo and continuing troop deployments in Macedonia sitting alongside the Stability Pact, and the Stabilization and Association Process, it seems likely that the discourse of intervention will retain significance in the region for some time to come.
Structure of the book The very scale of intervention in the Balkans since 1995 makes it difficult to survey all its facets.87 Instead in its layout this book moves from the general to the particular – from the global to the local. It begins with three chapters addressing the broad aims of post-1995 intervention. In Chapter 1, Mary Kaldor argues that it is possible to distinguish between two types of security philosophy that have guided intervention in the Balkans. One is the traditional top-down geo-political approach, in which security is understood as the defence of territory, the other is a bottom-up cosmopolitan approach which sees security in terms of defence of human beings. Vesselin Popovski, in Chapter 2, looks at the definition and legal status of humanitarian intervention and, taking Kosovo as a case study, offers criteria for its future justification. Miroslav Had iæ, in Chapter 3, suggests that, while international intervention has been marked by a series of paradoxes and inconsistencies which, in many ways, makes it the great unknown of Balkan security, there are still, nonetheless, certain principles that are discernible. There then follow four chapters which focus on specific interventions in the region. In Chapter 4, Sumantra Bose considers intervention in postDayton Bosnia through the experiences of the town of Mostar, while in Chapter 5 Emmanuela C. del Re offers an appraisal of the performance of UNMIK in Kosovo, which highlights both its achievements as well as its deficiencies. In Chapter 6, Alice Ackermann traces the three phases of international intervention in Macedonia from the first deployments in 1992 through to the 2001 conflict and its aftermath. Jasna Dragoviæ-Soso, in Chapter 7, appraises the impact of intervention on domestic political outcomes by considering whether Western coercive policies against Yugoslavia weakened or consolidated the Miloševiæ regime. Two chapters then focus on how foreign assistance has impacted at a lower level. In Chapter 8, Steven Sampson considers civil society development programmes, arguing that they create both security but also insecurity in the form of new tension within Balkan societies and between various local and international actors. In Chapter 9, Vanessa Pupavac then focuses on specific programmes aiming to provide post-conflict trauma relief in the former Yugoslavia, suggesting that the lessons learned from the Yugoslav experience are relevant for other war-affected societies. Finally, in Chapter 10, David Phinnemore and Peter Siani-Davies consider the complex relationship between intervention and integration through a study of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe and EU policy towards the Balkans before
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Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers in Chapter 11 draws the various threads together in a conclusion which also stresses that the gap between the concerns of local and outside actors needs to be bridged if the aims of intervention are to be met and integration achieved.
Notes 1 Since this book is concerned with international intervention in the Balkans it seems most appropriate to define the region in terms of the beneficiary states of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe: Albania, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Romania and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Greece will be considered as a Balkan state within this Introduction, although, for reasons outlined below, not in the text as a whole. The Ottoman lands which lie within the current Balkan states also feature in this chapter but not the Empire as a whole or modern Turkey. 2 ‘EU enlargement echoes Alexander’s vision’, Irish Times, 7 April 2001, 14. See also David Phinnemore and Peter Siani-Davies, Chapter 10 in this volume. 3 The term ‘Balkans’ is not used in the title of this volume in any pejorative sense. It is, however, used in full understanding of the often negative connotations that the word has carried and in support of the argument that the institutionalization of the idea that the Balkans are separate from the European mainstream has played a significant role in determining intervention in the area. On the negative connotations of the Balkans, see M. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 4 O. Waever, ‘European security identities’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 34: 1, 1996, 122. 5 S. Hoffman, ‘The politics and ethics of military intervention’, Survival, 37: 4, 1995–1996, 33; H. Bull, ‘Introduction’, in H. Bull (ed.), Intervention in World Politics, London: Clarendon Press, 1984, p. 2. 6 Quoted in L.F. Damrosch, ‘Politics across borders: nonintervention and nonforcible influence over political affairs’, American Journal of International Law, 83: 1, 1989, 9. The wording was subsequently paraphrased in the Helsinki declarations. 7 L.F. Damrosch, ‘Changing conceptions of intervention in international law’, in L.W. Reed and C. Kaysen (eds), Emerging Norms of Justified Intervention, Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Science, 1993, p. 91. 8 S.D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 9 T.J. Biersteker and C. Weber, ‘The social construction of state sovereignty’, in T.J. Biersteker and C. Weber (eds), State Sovereignty as Social Construct, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 10 The concept of positive and negative sovereignty is drawn from R. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 11 Bull, ‘Introduction’, p. 1. 12 The Pridnestrovskaja Moldavskaja Respublika occupies the lands to the east of the Dniester river in Moldova together with the city of Tighina/Bendery on the west bank. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is another example of such an entity. 13 E. Hertslet, The Map of Europe by Treaty: Showing the Various Political and Territorial Changes which Have Taken Place since the General Peace of 1814, vol. 3, London: Butterworths, 1875, pp. 1789–1796, 1909–1910.
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14 Croatia was accepted as a member in November 1996. 15 J.A. Levandis, The Greek Foreign Debt and the Great Powers: 1821–1898, New York: Columbia University Press, 1944. 16 Levandis, The Greek Foreign Debt, p. 99. The Commission included one representative holding full diplomatic status from each of the six major powers. Mindful of Greek sensitivities over intervention, it chose not to establish itself as an autonomous body but to exercise power indirectly through an intermediary domestic organization. Nonetheless, its control was ‘absolute and indisputable’. 17 http://www.seerecon.org/Calendar/2001/Events/src/OverallAssistance.pdf (accessed 12 July 2002). 18 Memoir Presented to the Governments of the United States of America, of Great Britain and Ireland, of France, of Italy and of Japan by the Executive Committee of the Brotherhoods of the Macedonian Emigration in Bulgaria, Sofia, 1919, p. 5. For a similar appeal by Greeks see D. Dakin, ‘The formation of the Greek state, 1821–33’, in R. Clogg (ed.), The Struggle for Greek Independence: Essays to Mark the 150th Anniversary of the Greek War of Independence, London: Macmillan, 1973, p. 162. 19 The defeat of the Ottoman fleet at Navarino, the Russian–Turkish war of 1828, and the actions of French troops in Morea, were all critical for the securing of Greek independence. In the process, according to Schwartzberg, a general precedent was established for intervention by the great powers in favour of ‘national liberation movements’. S. Schwartzberg, ‘The lion and the phoenix – 1: British policy towards the “Greek Question”, 1831–32’, Middle Eastern Studies, 24: 2, 1988, 141. 20 See Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, Chapter 11 in this volume. 21 For a more extended discussion of these issues see Vesselin Popovski, Chapter 2 in this volume. 22 G.M. Lyons and M. Mastanduno, ‘Introduction: international intervention, state sovereignty and the future of international society’, in G.M. Lyons and M. Mastanduno (eds), Beyond Westphalia: State Sovereignty and International Intervention, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 14. Jackson identifies three international communities based on states and citizens, humankind, and world interests, such as the environment. R.H. Jackson, ‘International community beyond the Cold War’, in Lyons and Mastanduno (eds), Beyond Westphalia, p. 81. Gow accepts ‘international community’ is a nebulous term and uses it to refer to ‘the sum of states, international bodies and other international actors engaged with broadly common values and purpose within the framework of the collective resolution of international security questions’. J. Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War, London: Hurst, 1997, p. 3. 23 Ann Marie Clark, ‘Non-governmental organisations and their influence on international society’, Journal of International Affairs, 48: 2, 1995, 507–525. 24 See Alice Ackermann, Chapter 6 in this volume. 25 G.W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society, Oxford: Clarendon, 1984, pp. 116–119. 26 This draws on Richard Little, ‘Revisiting intervention: a survey of recent developments’, Review of International Studies, 13: 1, 1987, 49–60. 27 M. Trachtenberg, ‘Intervention in historical perspective’, in Reed and Kaysen (eds), Emerging Norms of Justified Intervention, p. 15. 28 For international society, see H. Bull and A. Watson (eds), The Expansion of International Society, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. 29 Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’. 30 In a speech at the time Palmerston enunciated the principle that, like the Roman Empire, Great Britain had the right to intervene anywhere in the world to protect
28
31 32
33 34
35
36
37
38 39
Peter Siani-Davies its own citizens (civis Romanus sum). For Don Pacifico, see D. Whitten, jun., ‘The Don Pacifico affair’, Historian, 48: 2, 1986, 255–267; J. Ridley, Palmerston, London: Constable, 1970, pp. 370–385. An earlier example of international activity driven largely by a desire to impose ‘civilized’ values was the suppression of the slave trade, see Krasner, Sovereignty, pp. 106–109. Trachtenberg roots the notion of non-intervention in the British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh’s State Paper of 5 May 1820 opposing generalized intervention by the Holy Alliance which was written against the backdrop of the Greek revolt. Trachtenberg, ‘Intervention in historical perspective’, pp. 21–22. Multinational Empires such as Austria–Hungary were also understandably reluctant to sponsor national movements for fear of creating precedents. Y.A. Stivachtis, The Enlargement of International Society: Culture Versus Anarchy in Greece’s Entry into International Society, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998, p. 130. In 1913 the powers sitting as the London Conference acted in a similar fashion to create an Albanian state but, in general, the Balkan wars (1912–1913) displayed the limits of great power intervention in the region, as the territorial redistribution which followed was largely decided by the belligerents. A possible exception to this rule was Turkey, but for differing opinions see Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’, pp. 106–119; T. Naff, ‘The Ottoman Empire and the European states system’, in H. Bull and A. Watson (eds), The Expansion of International Society, pp. 149–169; Stivachtis, The Enlargement of International Society, pp. 82–88. J.B. Scott, The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1909. In the second conference of 1907 Bulgaria took part on equal terms even though it did not officially declare independence until 1908. The idea that the Balkans may have been open to recolonization is not that far fetched. The Treaty of Berlin of 1878 also effectively transferred BosniaHercegovina from the Ottoman to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Southern Bessarabia, part of Moldova again since the Treaty of Paris at the end of the Crimean war, to the Russian Empire. Great Britain occupied the Ionian islands between 1815 and 1864 and Italy the Dodecanese islands between 1912 and 1947, while other areas of the Ottoman Empire either became formal colonies, such as Cyprus, administered by Britain since 1878 and formally annexed as a crown colony in 1914, or pseudo-colonies under the League of Nations mandate system. Even as late as 1880, Bismarck was able to suggest to the French ambassador in Berlin that France might find compensation for British advances in Egypt by taking control of Greece. D.K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire 1830–1914, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973, p. 255. For the difficulties of non-western polities avoiding colonization at this time, see D. Strang, ‘Contested sovereignty: the social construction of colonial imperialism’, in T.J. Biersteker and C. Weber (eds), State Sovereignty as Social Construct, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 22–49. R.T. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876, London: Nelson, 1963, p. 31. The most long-term of these was the European Commission of the Danube, which was originally established after the Treaty of Paris of 1856 to clear the river of debris left from the Crimean War. Under the Congress of Berlin the river from GalaZi to its mouth was placed under the jurisdiction of the Commission even though it was recognized that this was Romanian sovereign territory. Romania was given a seat on the Commission but, significantly, the Russian bank of the river was excluded from its purview. The mandate of the
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41
42 43
44 45 46
47 48 49
50 51 52 53 54 55
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Commission was renewed a number of times until 1948 when the Belgrade Conference replaced it with a new international commission. See R.C. Frucht, Dunärea Noastra: Romania, the Great Powers, and the Danube Question, 1914–1921, Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1982. The Congress of Berlin created Eastern Rumelia alongside an autonomous Bulgaria as a compromise following the rejection of the ‘Greater Bulgaria’ of the Treaty of San Stefano. The constitution of the new entity was drawn up by foreign advisers sitting as the Eastern Rumelian Commission with separate parts of the administrative structure modelled on different powers. R. Crampton, Bulgaria 1878–1918: A History, Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1983, pp. 85–90. T.G. Tatsios, The Megali Idea and the Greek–Turkish War of 1897: The Impact of the Cretan Problem on Greek Irredentism 1866–1897, Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984; A.A. Pallis (ed.), The Cretan Drama: The Life and Memoirs of Prince George of Greece, High Commissioner in Crete (1898–1906), New York: R. Speller, 1959. While undertaking their ‘peacekeeping’ duties fourteen British marines were killed during fighting in Iraklio in September 1898. Pallis (ed.), The Cretan Drama, p. 139. S.W. Sowards, Austria’s Policy of Macedonian Reform, Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1989; N. Lange-Akhund, The Macedonian Question 1893–1908 from Western Sources, Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1998. Lange-Akhund, The Macedonian Question, p. 148. Bodies similar to the International Financial Commission of Control in Greece existed elsewhere. In Egypt there was the even more intrusive Caisse de la dette and in the Ottoman Empire the Council of the Public Debt. During the Crimean War a joint Anglo-French force occupied Piraeus to dampen Greek irredentism and support for the Russian cause. In 1886 a naval blockade was imposed on Greece to prevent the country from entering the SerbBulgarian dispute and seeking compensation for the Bulgarian annexation of Eastern Rumelia and a similar tactic was also tried in 1897, although with mixed success, to prevent a Greek invasion of Crete. When it was deemed appropriate, similar tactics were also employed elsewhere. In April 1912 a fleet of British, French, Austro-Hungarian, German and Italian warships intervened to force the Montenegrins to stop bombarding Shkodër. M.S. Anderson, The Eastern Question 1774–1923, London: Macmillan, 1966, p. 296. The guaranteeing powers retained their status until 1923. J.R. Lampe and M.R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950: From Imperial Borderlands to Developing Nations, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 208. K. Hitchins, Rumania 1866–1947, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, pp. 165–166. S.K. Pavlowitch, A History of the Balkans: 1804–1945, London: Hurst, 1999, p. 130, suggests that the great powers were also concerned with preventing Jewish emigration to the ‘West’. See, for instance, Hitchins, Rumania 1866–1947, pp. 292–334. See Steven Sampson, Chapter 8 in this volume. A recent work in English within this genre is M. Glenny, The Balkans, 1804–1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, London: Granta, 1999. Quoted in I. Geiss (ed.), July 1914: The Outbreak of the First World War, Selected Documents, London: Batsford, 1967, p. 256. T. Gallagher, Outcast Europe: The Balkans, 1789–1989, from the Ottomans to Miloševiæ, London: Routledge, 2001. H. Jones, A New Kind of War: America’s Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine in Greece, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 240.
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56 B. Jelavich, History of the Balkans: Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 407. 57 Within this chapter integration is treated as a western orientation towards EuroAtlantic structures which is quite distinct from the eastern-orientated integration into the Soviet Bloc, the Warsaw Treaty Organization and the Council for Mutual Economic Aid experienced by some of the countries of the region during the second half of the twentieth century. 58 L. Gardiner, The Eagle Spreads its Claws: A History of the Corfu Channel Incident and of Albanian Relations with the West, 1945–1965, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1966, pp. 194–221; L.C. Green, International Law through the Cases, 4th edition, Toronto: Carswell, 1978, pp. 228–237. 59 S.L. Woodward, ‘The West and international organisations’, in D.A. Dyker and I. Vejvoda (eds), Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth, New York: Addison-Wesley Longman, 1997, pp. 155–164. 60 Increasing interdependence and the growth of collective norms of human rights are also sometimes cited as contributing to the rise in intervention at this time but, as this Introduction has shown, as far as the Balkans are concerned, these were already present in some form in the late nineteenth century. The late twentieth-century shifts in power balances which produced both a more hospitable environment for multilateral intervention in the outside world and the need for such intervention in the Balkans would seem to be most important in bringing about recent interventions. The temptation to draw general rules should, however, be resisted because similar circumstance (a multipolar world and Balkan instability) at other times have not produced similar levels of intervention, for instance, during the Balkan wars. 61 T. Risse-Kappen, ‘Between a new world order and none: explaining the re-emergence of the United Nations in world politics’, in K. Krause and M.C. Williams (eds), Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, London: UCL Press, 1997, p. 271. 62 The CSCE had also been involved in the negotiations through its Committee of Senior Officials. 63 The arguments within this section rely heavily on Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will; S.L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995; and S.L. Burg and P.S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999. 64 Vance was replaced by former Norwegian Foreign Minister Thorvald Stoltenberg in May 1993 and Owen by former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt in May 1995. 65 Established in April 1994. 66 For a discussion of the plan and an assessment of its feasibility, see Burg and Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina, pp. 214–262. 67 Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 320. 68 The recognition of Macedonia at this time was prevented by Greece. 69 The continuing arms embargo led some to argue that the UN should take responsibility for the security of Bosnia. The fact that it failed to do so, can be taken as a significant case of non-intervention. See Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will, p. 90. 70 Again it can be said that non-intervention was the most crucial form of intervention in the war, bringing to mind Talleyrand’s dictum that ‘non-intervention is a term of political metaphysics signifying almost the same as intervention’. Quoted in D. Geldenhuys, Foreign Political Engagement: Remaking States in the PostCold War World, London: Macmillan, 1998, p. 15.
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71 An important aim again seems to have been to stop the flow of refugees to the West; Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will, p. 111. 72 J. Honig and N. Both, Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime, London: Penguin, 1996. 73 Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 319, suggests over 50 per cent. 74 Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will, pp. 139, 149–151. 75 R. Holbrooke, To End a War, New York: Random House, 1998. 76 The mandate of IFOR expired in December 1996, when it was replaced by SFOR with the number of personnel reduced to 31,000. 77 RFE/RL Newsline, 23 April 2002, available at http://www.rferl.org/newsline/2002/ 04/230402.asp (accessed 17 July 2002). 78 OSCE Handbook, available at http://www.osce.org/publications/handbook/ files/handbook.pdf 79 UN military observers had been in place since October 1992. 80 Stefano Silvestri, ‘The Albanian test case’, International Spectator, 32: 3/4, 1997, 87–98. 81 T. Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 188–189. 82 For an analysis of why Miloševiæ capitulated, see S.T. Hosmer, The Conflict over Kosovo: Why Miloševiæ Decided to Settle when He Did, Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2001. 83 The extensive literature on Kosovo includes N. Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo, London: Pluto, 1999; A. Schnabel and R. Thakur, Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention: Selective Indignation, Collective Action, and International Citizenship, Tokyo: UN University Press, 2000; T. Ali (ed.), Masters of the Universe: NATO’s Balkan Crusade, London: Verso, 2000; T. Galen Carpenter (ed.), NATO’s Empty Victory: A Postmortem on the Balkan War, Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2000; W.J. Buckley (ed.), Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000; I.H. Daalder and M.E. O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2000. 84 http://www.stabilitypact.org/About.htm (accessed 12 March 2000). 85 http://www.seerecon.org/Calendar/2001/Events/src/OverallAssistance.pdf (accessed 12 July 2002). 86 See David Phinnemore and Peter Siani-Davies, Chapter 10 in this volume. 87 In that several chapters in this volume, not least this Introduction, discuss aspects of intervention prior to 1995, the title of this book is to a certain extent a misnomer. It has nonetheless been retained as an indication that the overwhelming focus of the volume is on intervention after the Yugoslav conflict of 1991–1995.
1
Intervention in the Balkans An unfinished learning process Mary Kaldor
The wars in the western Balkans could be considered a laboratory for postCold War intervention. There have been five conflicts over the last decade: Slovenia 1991; Croatia 1991–1992; Bosnia-Hercegovina 1992–1995; Kosovo 1999; and Macedonia 2001. As a consequence of global media attention and civil society pressure, outside powers have been learning to adapt the forms of intervention to an interconnected globalized world. Broadly speaking, it is possible to distinguish between two types of security philosophy that have guided interventions in the Balkans. One has been the traditional geo-political approach, in which security is understood as the defence of territory. The geo-political approach tends to be top-down, using diplomatic, economic and military pressure to influence political leaders and warring parties. The other approach is cosmopolitan in which security is understood as the defence of individual human beings. This approach is bottom-up; the emphasis is on respect for human rights, support for civil society, economic assistance and regional cooperation. Top-down approaches, of course, remain important, but they are shaped by bottom-up priorities. My argument is that, in the context of globalization, geo-political approaches to security have perverse effects – they lead to fragmentation and instability. Indeed, it is the attachment to territory and borders that explains the disintegrative process in former Yugoslavia. By and large, the United States has tended to pursue geo-political forms of intervention, while the European Union (EU) has tended to apply both geo-political and cosmopolitan approaches, although, over time, as a result of its experiences in the Balkans, the cosmopolitan have become more salient. It can be argued that the EU itself is a form of experimentation. While most commentators agree that the EU is neither a new European nationstate in the making nor a traditional inter-governmental regime, there is no clear consensus on the nature of this new type of polity. Is it something in between? Is it a new ‘network state’?1 In Europe, nation-states were constructed through war. It was through war that states consolidated their hold on territory, eliminated domestic private competitors and protected borders from external competitors.2 The EU, by contrast, was established in reaction to war; its founders believed that the gradual integration of
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economies, societies and, eventually, polities could prevent war in Europe. How the EU relates to areas beyond the member states will influence its own development. Will it apply traditional geo-political approaches and treat its own borders as nation-state borders? Or will it apply the methods that were adopted in its own internal development? What happens in the Balkans, thus, will have profound effects on the character of the EU itself. Indeed, the future of the EU may well depend on its readiness to apply seriously a cosmopolitan approach to the Balkans. In this chapter, I will develop this argument, first by describing the character of the wars in the Balkans and how they can be understood as a response to globalization. Then I will analyse the geo-political and cosmopolitan approaches to the wars before, finally, drawing some conclusions about future directions.
The new nationalism in the Balkans Geo-political approaches to security in the Balkans have been based, to a large extent, on interpretations of the Balkan wars that derive from statist preoccupations. One dominant interpretation, especially in Europe, has been the notion that the wars can be explained in terms of ‘ancient rivalries’; that they were primordial competitions for state power among competing ethnic groups, whose origins are lost in the mists of history. The very term ‘Balkans’, which seemed to have lost its salience in the Cold War period, conjures up an image of violence and instability, as well as colourful and exotic behaviour.3 ‘Violence was all I knew of the Balkans,’ wrote Rebecca West in her book about travelling through what was then Yugoslavia, ‘all I knew of the South Slavs.’4 And this stereotypical view of the Balkans was echoed by contemporary leaders, especially in Britain, up to 1997, and France. The other interpretation, favoured in both the United States and in Germany, at the early stages of the wars, was the notion that they were a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. Miloševiæ was seen as the last remnant of communism and the demand for self-determination by the leaders of Slovenia, Croatia and later Bosnia-Hercegovina was seen as a quest for democracy in the face of Serbian domination. Yet, as most scholars of the Balkans have pointed out, the region was no more violent than the rest of Europe up to the nineteenth century.5 It was the encounter with modernity, the romantic idea of nationalism, that led to the Balkan wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the first bouts of ‘ethnic cleansing’. ‘The introduction of the Western formula [the principle of nationalism] among these people,’ wrote Arnold Toynbee in 1922 ‘has resulted in massacre … Such massacres are only the extreme form of national struggle between mutually indispensable neighbours, instigated by this fatal Western idea.’6 Moreover in the period 1945–1990, the western Balkans enjoyed peace and stability. The proponents of the ‘ancient rivalries’ thesis argue that Tito’s Yugoslavia suppressed but did not eliminate
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these tendencies; hence once the ‘lid’ was taken off the ‘boiling pot’ – a favourite metaphor – these animosities burst forth. But why then have animosities between England and France, or Britain and Germany (equally virulent in their time) gone away? And why, for example, have not animosities between Germany and the Czech Republic burst forth since the Czechoslovak regime was much more repressive than Tito’s Yugoslavia? The problem with the other interpretation – democracy versus totalitarianism – is that it fails to take into account, on the one hand, the ‘new’ character of the Miloševiæ regime and, on the other, the authoritarian exclusivist character of the regimes that are supposed to be democratic, especially Croatia under Tudjman. Miloševiæ came to power in a sort of coup in 1987, making use of an entirely new form of virulent nationalism, at that time, directed against the demands of the Kosovo Albanians, and it was on the same platform that he secured victory in the post-communist Serbian elections of 1991. Even though Tudjman did not inherit the Communist Party machine, his brand of exclusivist authoritarian nationalism was very similar. Indeed, most of the successor states of Yugoslavia (as in those of the former Soviet Union) exhibit post-totalitarian authoritarian tendencies. Both the ‘ancient rivalries’ and the ‘democracy versus totalitarian’ interpretations derive from a collectivist view of social relations. In the first, the wars were perceived as being between communities competing for state power, in the second, as being between states representing different ideologies. In the one case, the five wars were treated as a single ‘civil war’, in the other as five sequential ‘international wars’. Yet, neither interpretation takes into account the particularities of the contemporary context and, in particular, the impact of globalization on formerly authoritarian states. Yugoslavia opened its borders long before other communist states. Its citizens were allowed to travel and under the term ‘structural adjustment’ various liberalization measures were introduced some ten years earlier than in other communist countries.7 In other words, it had effectively already experienced some of the consequences of transition. I prefer to use the term ‘new nationalism’ to explain the character of the wars in the Balkans. The ‘new nationalism’ makes use of nineteenth-century romantic nationalism, with new nationalist politicians reviving memories of the first Balkan wars (1912–13) and the Second World War to legitimize their claims to power, just as earlier nationalists ‘invented’ a history of ancient rivalries. But the roots of the ‘new nationalism’ lie less in the distant past than in the immediate history of communism and the impact of globalization. The new nationalism does involve a conflict between totalitarianism and democracy but not between states, rather within states, as it reproduces the totalitarian tendencies of the previous regime in a nationalist guise. A new ideology of the ‘other’ replaces the discredited ideology of the past and justifies control over the inherited state apparatus. The new nationalist parties are created on the model of the former communist party, as a mechanism to control society.
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In the former Yugoslavia, as in the Soviet Union, national differences were ‘constitutionally enshrined’.8 The administrative division into republics and provinces was based on nationality. In planned systems, competition exists but it is bureaucratic competition rather than market competition. After 1974, these administrative units received much more autonomy and nationality became a way to bid for resources in a context where free public debate was disallowed. Yugoslavia was held together by the Communist Party and the JNA (the Yugoslav National Army). When these began to disintegrate after 1989, nationalism provided a mechanism for former communist leaders to retain their hold on power. The impact of globalization is partly to be explained in economic terms. The shrinking of the budget under the impact of IMF policies, the lowering of tax revenues, and the liberalization of trade led to inequalities both between town and country and among different regions; exacerbating tensions between villages, which retained their separate national identities and secular multi-cultural towns, and intensifying regional claims to resources.9 The emergence of a parallel market was associated with the increase of criminality and corruption; many of the new nationalists were engaged in shadow activities and sought a way to legitimize their activities. Finally, high levels of unemployment, unprecedented in the communist world, led to a sense of ontological insecurity, which was assuaged by the simplicities of the nationalist rhetoric. But globalization, in the sense of interconnectedness, also affected the character of the new nationalism. It was Miloševiæ who was the first to make use of the electronic media as a way of propagating the new nationalism. Serbs were fed an electronic diet of ‘genocide’ in Kosovo, first by the Turks in 1389 and more recently by Albanians, and of holocaust in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, with clips of the Second World War interspersed with recent developments.10 In effect the Serbian public experienced a virtual war long before the real war began – a virtual war that made it difficult to distinguish truth from fiction, so that war became a continuum in which the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, the Second World War and the contemporary wars in Yugoslavia all became part of the same phenomenon. The Serbs, like European politicians, were drilled with the ‘ancient rivalries’ thesis. In Croatia, Tudjman made use of the global Croat Diaspora with his party, the HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union), establishing branches throughout North America. The Diaspora was to provide funds, techniques, and ideas. In effect, the Diaspora introduced another form of virtuality; through their disproportionate influence, they tried to impose on Croatia an ideal image which dated from their own departure and not from current realities. Likewise, the ‘weekend fighters’ who came from Germany or Switzerland to fight in Bosnia or Kosovo experienced war as a manufactured adventure, a form of war tourism, and not as an everyday reality.
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On this interpretation, the ‘new nationalists’ war can be understood as a form of political mobilization. In classic wars between nation-states, the aim was, to quote Clausewitz, ‘to compel an opponent to fulfil our will’. In general, this was achieved through the military capture of territory and victory in battle. People were mobilized to participate in the war effort – to join the army or to produce weapons and uniforms. In the Yugoslav wars, mobilizing people was the aim of the war effort. The violence was not so much directed against the enemy; rather the aim was to entrench the politics of the new nationalism. The goal was to control territory through political means, with military means being used to kill, expel or silence those who might challenge this control. The wars were fought by a combination of regular forces – the remnants of the JNA and the newly created national armies in Croatia and BosniaHercegovina; para-military forces like Arkan’s Tigers, Frenki’s Boys (notorious in Kosovo) or the Croatian ‘wolves’; foreign mercenaries like the Mujahadeen or the various British, French or Russian soldiers looking for new sources of income in the context of post-Cold War military redundancies; or self-defence forces, as in the case of volunteers in Tuzla or Zenica who created units to defend their homes. Likewise, the KLA in Kosovo and the NLA in Macedonia were a mixture of different types of forces – classic left guerrilla groups, para-military groups, and self-defence forces. Battles between the warring parties were rare. Rather control of territory was achieved through population displacement – ethnic cleansing. Techniques of terror, ranging from massacres, various atrocities, including systemic rape, or the destruction of historic buildings, were deliberate war strategies, at least on the part of the Serbs and the Croatians. The strategy was to gain political power through sowing fear and hatred, to create a climate of terror, to eliminate moderate voices and to defeat tolerance. Thus, the political ideologies of exclusive nationalism were generated through violence. Rather than ancient rivalries being a cause of war, they were constructed through the experience of war. ‘The war had to be so bloody,’ Bosnians will tell you, ‘because we did not hate each other; we had to be taught to hate each other.’ Violations of humanitarian and human rights law were not a side effect of war but the central methodology of the wars in the Balkans. And this is why over 90 per cent of the casualties were civilian and why the numbers of refugees and displaced persons were so high. The classic exponents of this strategy were the Serbs and the Croatians. The Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) strategy was more defensive, although they also committed war crimes. The KLA and the NLA tended to try to gain political control through support of the local population – hence they tended to target soldiers and policemen, although they were involved in ethnic cleansing as well. The wars in the Balkans exacerbated the economic tendencies towards criminality and informality. They involved very high levels of physical destruction and a disruption of trade. GDP fell dramatically as did levels of
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taxation. Hence the warring parties had to seek alternative methods of finance. Alongside remittances from the Diaspora, these included loot and plunder, smuggling drugs, illegal immigrants, cigarettes and alcohol, and the ‘taxation’ of humanitarian assistance. All of these types of economic activity are predatory and depend on an atmosphere of insecurity. Indeed, the wars in Yugoslavia speeded up the insertion of the Balkans into a globalized informal economy – the transnational criminal and semi-legal economy that represents the underside of globalization and a further source of recruitment for the new nationalists. For these reasons, each bout of war in the former Yugoslavia strengthened the position of the new nationalists both in political and economic terms. The trauma of the wars left a trail of fear and insecurity, guilt and mistrust – emotions that cannot be easily allayed but which seek reassurance in the apparent certainties of ethnic identification. The ex-Yugoslav economy was destroyed as a consequence of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the war. GDP fell dramatically and unemployment rose to unprecedented levels – in many areas it is as high as 40–50 per cent. An illegal informal economy linked to criminal networks and para-military groups across the region was established and many people remain dependent on its activities, which, up to now, have received ‘protection’ from the nationalist parties. And finally, civil society and non-nationalist political forces were weakened by war. A form of democratic politics was beginning to develop in Yugoslavia during the period 1990–1992, especially in towns. However, it was the urban, educated, secular people – the bedrock of potential democratic politics – who left or, in some cases, were killed; this was especially true in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia and Serbia. The wars in Kosovo and Macedonia, and the smaller conflict in the Presevo valley in Southern Serbia, all have to be understood in terms of the legacy of earlier wars. In the case of Kosovo, it can be argued that the tactics of the KLA in 1996–1997, in reversing the non-violent strategy of the Kosovo Albanians, precipitated the war. Nevertheless, the extent to which the vested political and economic interests of the new nationalists around Miloševiæ needed a new bout of violence to confront the growing democratic opposition in Serbia and to find new sources of revenue has been widely ignored in explanations of the war. Likewise, the extent to which the Macedonian conflict has to be understood as a spillover from the war in Kosovo precipitated by veterans of the KLA intent on exposing the fact that the ‘Albanian question’ was far from solved also seems to have been relatively neglected. Thus according to my interpretation, the wars in the former Yugoslavia are wars which spread a new phenomenon – exclusive nationalism, allied to a criminalized informal economy. On this interpretation, intervention from above, unless it is accompanied by intervention from below, will end up strengthening the ‘new nationalism’.
38 Mary Kaldor
The role of outside intervention The dominant form of outside intervention up to 1999 was geo-political. Those who interpreted the conflicts as wars of ‘ancient rivalries’ tended to favour the diplomatic approach – talks among the warring parties. Those who perceived the wars as a conflict between democracy and totalitarianism, with Serbia cast in the latter category, tended to favour economic sanctions and air strikes – ways of putting pressure on Serbia and taking sides with the so-called democrats without risking Western casualties. In practice, both approaches ended up reinforcing the new nationalism. The talks tended to legitimize the warring parties, transforming war criminals into negotiating partners. In so far as agreements were reached, they rationalized positions on the grounds and represented unrealistic fragile compromises among exclusivist demands – the most obvious compromise being ethnic segregation or partition. Thus Dayton effectively divided Bosnia-Hercegovina into three ethnic parts; UN Security Council Resolution 1244 recognized the Kosovars’ right to self-government and, at the same time, the sovereignty of Yugoslavia; and the Ohrid Framework Agreement signed in Macedonia in August 2001 gave Albanians more representation in the state apparatus but at the same time allowed for an autonomous Albanian region. Sanctions and air strikes did not change the situation on the ground – they were forms of long-distance outside intervention. But they did contribute to the nationalist mindset; in particular they strengthened the Serbian conviction of victimhood, of being singled out for punishment in a war for which, in their view, Croats and Muslims were equally responsible. By destroying physical and economic infrastructure, sanctions and air strikes also contributed to the growth of the parallel economy.11 The Americans claim that it was air strikes that eventually ended the long Bosnian war and that it was the combination of air strikes and sanctions that finally led to the demise of Miloševiæ. In the case of Bosnia, air strikes may have provided the additional impetus to bring Serbs to the negotiating table but what really mattered was the rationalization on the ground; ethnic cleansing was virtually complete. The Dayton Agreement was needed by all the warring parties, but especially the Serbs and Croats, to legitimize the status quo. As for the Kosovo war and its aftermath, it is true that Miloševiæ was defeated but not because of his responsibility for the wars and the terrible events of the 1990s but because he failed to live up to the promises of Greater Serbia. It was the workers carrying Serbian flags and symbols who defeated Miloševiæ but this did not mean the defeat of nationalist sentiment, even though the postMiloševiæ regime is more democratically minded. An alternative cosmopolitan approach to security began to be developed during the Bosnian war under pressure from the international media and from civil society both within Bosnia-Hercegovina and in the rest of Europe. A series of significant innovations were introduced, which offered the possibility of a new approach centred on human rights. These included
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humanitarian corridors, safe areas, the no-fly zone, the setting up of an International Tribunal for war crimes, and the notion of international administrations or protectorates. All of these approaches were aimed at the protection of civilians in a war where they were the primary targets. Problems arose, on the one hand, due to a lack of commitment in implementing these innovations and, on the other, due to the contradictions between this new cosmopolitan approach and the simultaneously unfolding geo-political approach from above. It is sometimes argued that there were insufficient troops to carry out the various tasks that devices like safe areas required. This may be true, but more important was the lack of political will and a constrained mandate, which limited the degree to which soldiers were allowed to act ‘robustly’, as the jargon puts it. Moreover, talks going on at a diplomatic level did not deal with the day-to-day operations of the war but rather with finding a final settlement; the very people who were attacking civilians were, at one and the same time, respectable negotiating partners. In some cases, the talks even exacerbated developments on the ground, as the warring parties struggled to take control of particular areas, so as to improve their bargaining positions. The nadir was the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995, when Dutch peacekeepers handed over some 8,000 men and boys to Serb forces and they were all killed. The tension between cosmopolitan and geo-political approaches persisted after the Dayton Agreement. On the one hand, the Dayton Agreement divided Bosnia between two entities – one Serb and the other Croat and Muslim – and entrenched the position of the nationalist parties who were responsible together with the international community for implementation. On the other, the agreement contained commitments to human rights, freedom of movement and the integration of the country. In 1997, after the election of a Labour government in Britain and the Sintra Peace Implementation Council meeting, greater emphasis was placed on a cosmopolitan approach, in particular, the capture of war criminals and support for non-nationalist politicians. This strategy was consolidated after the war in Kosovo when a new regional approach was initiated with the Stability Pact Initiative, the Stabilization and Association Agreements, and a host of other devices designed to foster cooperation and bring the region within the orbit of the EU. What has been the balance sheet of all these efforts? First, most importantly, the wars have ended. But the various settlements that led to cease-fires (Dayton, 1244, or Ohrid) incorporated exclusive nationalist interests and, hence, contain within them the possibility of renewed conflict. In particular, both Dayton and 1244 are unworkable as long-term solutions without a sizeable international presence. The same may be true of Ohrid. Second, extreme nationalists have been, for the most part, removed from power. Miloševiæ and Tudjman have gone. A coalition of Social Democrats and moderate nationalists came to power in BosniaHercegovina and a moderate coalition also holds power in Kosovo. But
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grassroots nationalism persists and is much stronger than before the war. Ethnic discrimination is widespread as are popular expressions of extremist sentiment, such as the demonstrations in Serbia and Croatia against cooperation with the war crimes tribunal, or in the Serbian entity of Bosnia against the rebuilding of mosques, or in the support for the NLA among the Albanian community in Macedonia. Moreover, extreme nationalists are likely to regain power in elections, as they have done in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Third, there has been some progress in reconstruction, economic cooperation and market reforms – the euro, or its exact equivalent, is the official currency in Montenegro, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo. But there are still widespread restrictions on the movement of people, not only within the region but also with the rest of Europe. Unemployment remains unacceptably high throughout the region and corruption/criminality is widespread. The rule of law still does not function. Neither internationally, because the final status of borders is not yet determined, nor domestically, and throughout the region, civil society is much weaker than before the war. The weaknesses in the Balkans reflect weaknesses in Europe as a whole. Within the region, the EU, by putting the emphasis on economic and social integration, support for civil society and education, has made efforts to replicate its own internal policies. These ‘bottom-up’ policies do represent important elements of a cosmopolitan approach, but the EU has never succeeded in articulating a distinctive cosmopolitan politics, which might challenge the dominant geo-political approach ‘from above’. It has never succeeded in constructing a popular narrative about peace and human rights that could legitimize its own political institutions and that is why it is so vulnerable to right-wing nationalist tendencies. In the Balkans, there is an important strand of thinking that supports what are known as European civic values. But the EU has never been able to transform this vision into a forward-looking reality that could challenge the backwardlooking virtuality of the new nationalist rhetoric. It is partly a matter of resources; actual assistance has never matched the promises. More importantly, however, it is because the EU is afraid to address issues that might unravel the painful geo-political compromises that sustain the current uneasy peace. So there is still a lot to learn. Some kind of cosmopolitan political settlement for the whole region needs to be worked out now to complement the efforts from below – a settlement aimed at making easier the life of individuals not collectivities, of breaking down the gap between everyday life and formal politics, of ending the partitions and mini-partitions that currently characterize so much of the Balkans. The purpose of such a settlement is to improve the lot of the people who live in the region, but it would also help to strengthen the European idea.
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Notes 1 M. Castells, End of Millennium, vol. 3: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998; M. Leonard, Network Europe: The New Case for Europe, London: Foreign Policy Centre, 1999. 2 C. Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990–1990, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. 3 M. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 4 R. West, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon: Record of a Journey through Yugoslavia in 1937, London: Macmillan, 1942. 5 M. Glenny, The Balkans 1804–1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, London: Granta, 1999; M. Mazower, The Balkans, London: Phoenix, 2000; Todorova, Imagining the Balkans. 6 Quoted in Mazower, The Balkans, p. 129. 7 See S.L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995. 8 R.M. Hayden, ‘Constitutional nationalism in the former Yugoslav republics’, Slavic Review, 51: 4, 1992, 654–673. 9 Woodward, Balkan Tragedy. 10 See M. Thompson, Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, and BosniaHerzegovina, London: Article XIX, 1994. 11 V. Bojicic and D. Dyker, Sanctions on Serbia: Sledgehammer or Scalpel?, SEI Working Paper No. 1, Brighton: Sussex European Institute, University of Sussex, June 1993.
2
The concept of humanitarian intervention Vesselin Popovski
The question of whether states and international organizations can take coercive action against another state to protect their populations from lifethreatening risks – in other words whether they have the right to exercise humanitarian intervention – has been one of the most controversial and difficult in both international law and international politics. The academic debate has so far failed to produce a unified doctrine, with proponents and critics divided not only when the humanitarian intervention does occur but also when it fails to happen. In an attempt to move beyond the controversies the recent report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) proposed a shift in the discourse from the ‘right to intervene’ to the ‘responsibility to protect’.1 This is a significant move, because it changes the emphasis of the discussion from the interests of the intervening states to the interests of the people at risk. It should consolidate and rationalize the debate on humanitarian intervention. Disagreements may remain about why states and organizations intervene (or fail to intervene), on the motives for their actions and on the relative balance between national and humanitarian interests, but there is a growing consensus that displaced, starving and dying people do need help and, with the continuing accumulation of precedents, the concept is gradually gaining international understanding and acceptance. This chapter elaborates on the definition and the legal status of humanitarian intervention, presents the recent development of the concept, defends it against some criticisms and, taking Kosovo as a case study, offers criteria for its justification.
Definition In an ‘intervention’ states or international organizations act against the will of another state.2 According to Stanley Hoffman, ‘the purpose of intervention is the same as that of all other forms of foreign policy; it is to make you do what I want you to do, whether or not you wish to do it.’3 As well as military action, intervention in Hoffman’s view may also comprise economic and diplomatic pressures to achieve foreign policy goals. The concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’ as a distinct form of intervention has been
The concept of humanitarian intervention 43 developed in recent decades by a number of scholars. Adam Roberts has suggested it may be defined as: ‘military intervention in a state without the approval of its authorities and with the purpose of preventing widespread suffering or death among the inhabitants’.4 Compared to Hoffman’s understanding of ‘intervention’, Roberts’s definition of ‘humanitarian intervention’ is narrower in both scope (military) and objectives (humanitarian). The first of these limitations, however, may be questioned. A humanitarian intervention might include not only military action but also non-military measures, such as economic sanctions, travel restrictions and even criminal prosecution against the perpetrators of gross violations of human rights. Indeed, it can be argued that the military option is often the least desirable one. The problem when transporting the classical definition of ‘intervention’ into ‘humanitarian intervention’ lies in the inherent linguistic dilemma that exists between the positive postulate of ‘humanitarian’ and the negative postulate of ‘intervention’, the latter seen as violation of state sovereignty and accordingly prohibited in international law. Adam Roberts succinctly identifies the moral pitfalls when he asks whether it makes sense to call an intervention ‘humanitarian’ when the troops involved may have to fight and kill those who, for whatever reasons, seek to obstruct them … [o]r when the troops involved fail to provide what the inhabitants most desperately need – including security.5 The humanitarian agencies have strongly opposed the militarization of the concept of humanitarian intervention, but it is also true that the inherently positive postulate of ‘humanitarian’ may prejudge the issue in the other direction, by removing the need for comprehensive justification. In other words, the dice is loaded ‘in favour of intervention before the argument has ever begun, by tending to label and delegitimize dissent as anti-humanitarian’.6 People may become victims in different types of humanitarian crises. These may be caused by natural disasters, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and floods or by man-made disasters, such as civil wars or governmental policies which lead to widespread violations of human rights. Humanitarian intervention would normally enjoy state consent in the first type of scenario. Governments, engaged in civil or secessionist conflicts, such as the Congo in the 1960s, or Angola, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Sierra Leone in the 1990s, would also often welcome international involvement. However, in cases where governmental polices have produced the human suffering – situations like Northern Iraq, Rwanda and Kosovo – humanitarian intervention would normally be opposed. Roberts in his definition maintains that ‘humanitarian intervention’ is an act against the will of another state and explicitly excludes situations where international involvement might be welcomed by the host government. Yet, the concept of state consent has been historically problematic. First, the
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‘invitation’ to intervene may come from illegal or ‘puppet’ authorities – the Soviet Union tried to justify its interventions in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979) through the ‘invitation’ of the communist governments, but it can be questioned whether these authorities were representative of the will of the people. Second, the consent may be formally given by a nominal government, but if it is not shared by all warring factions in civil wars, it has little value. In 1992 UN peacekeeping missions entered Somalia (UNOSOM) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (UNPROFOR) with the consent of the authorities in Mogadishu and Sarajevo and with mandates from the Security Council, but when warlords, such as Generals Aidid and Mladiæ, not only refused to cooperate, but undertook deliberate hostile actions, the UN missions were trapped between their initial ‘humanitarianism’ and the need to respond coercively to violations of international humanitarian law. In conclusion, it would seem there might be a value in retaining a narrow technical meaning for the term ‘humanitarian intervention’ encompassing a limited emergency mechanism, necessary to be carried out in extreme cases of genocide, crimes against humanity and gross violations of human rights. It would be an international action by non-military or military means aimed at alleviating human suffering. A Chapter VII resolution would certainly improve the chances of success but, even in its absence, the general acceptance of a ‘responsibility to protect’ would render immaterial the issue of whether or not the action is supported by the territorial authorities in question.
Legal status As already pointed out, the classical notion of intervention has been regarded as a violation of international law. The UN Charter has been structured to prohibit the use of force in Art. 2(4) and involvement in matters that lay essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of other states in Art. 2(7). Art. 2(4) says that ‘All states shall refrain … from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state or in any other way, inconsistent with the purposes of the present Charter.’ Military action to protect human rights invariably infringes the territorial integrity of states and therefore violates the Article. Indeed, as Jonathan Charney has noted, ‘the phrases “territorial integrity” and “inconsistent with the purposes of the Charter” were added to Article 2 (4) to close all potential loopholes in its prohibition on the use of force, rather than to open up new ones’.7 And to those who suggest that alternative legitimations may exist, he adds the ‘protection of human rights is also among the primary purposes of the Charter but is subsidiary to the objective of limiting war and the use of force in international relations.’8 Thus, the UN Charter in Charney’s interpretation prohibits unilateral intervention for whatever purpose, including humanitarian, reflecting the historical difficulties with
The concept of humanitarian intervention 45 the justification of any use of force in the absence of self-defence. However, the prohibition on intervention does not amount to a carte blanche for violations of human rights. Nowhere in the Charter or international law is there a conclusion that asserts that respect for state sovereignty stands higher in the scale of values than the respect for human rights. In the words of Rosalyn Higgins: in a decentralised legal order, each action will have to be looked at on its merits and in context, and appraisals made as to whether the purpose of the military assistance is to support or to crush the values of human respect and liberty that international law should be promoting … I believe such policy choices are appropriate when the legal norms leave open alternative possibilities. I believe that to be the case, for example, on the question of humanitarian intervention.9 The UN Charter envisages two exceptions to the prohibition of the use of force: the right of self-defence (Art. 51) and measures taken in response to ‘threats to, or breaches of the peace, or acts of aggression’ (Art. 41, 42). Both exceptions have their own limits. The right of self-defence applies strictly to states that are the victims of ‘an armed attack’ and is qualified by the principles of immediate response, necessity and proportionality. There have been several attempts to justify humanitarian intervention in terms of ‘self-defence’: Indian intervention in Eastern Pakistan (1971), Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia (1979), and Tanzanian intervention in Uganda (1979).10 Although these states were physically attacked by aggressive neighbours, the international community tacitly accepted that the gross violations of human rights amounting to genocide and humanitarian catastrophe constituted a good reason for intervention. The second option – a military action under Art. 42 – is limited both procedurally by the right of veto of the permanent members of the Security Council and by the requirement to determine a ‘threat to the peace’, and practically by the political will of states. Intervention in domestic affairs does not raise legal problem when it is exercised under Chapter VII. Art. 2(7) clearly states that domestic jurisdiction is suspended when the Security Council determines a ‘threat to the peace’. The competence of the Council to define any humanitarian disaster as a threat to the peace and impose appropriate non-military and military measures is enormous – its decisions create binding obligations on member-states and they have to accept and implement the provisions of the resolutions.11 Within the last decade there have been many examples of the Security Council using these powers in humanitarian circumstances – Northern Iraq, Somalia, Liberia, former Yugoslavia, Haiti, Sierra Leone and East Timor. It may be questioned, however, whether the Security Council has approached all situations with the same standards of fairness and whether its actions have been effective in alleviating humanitarian crises. Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo are among the
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most notorious failures of the Council. In the first two cases it was due to a lack of political will to implement mandates, in the last case it was because of the threat of a veto.
Modernization of the concept of sovereignty Difficulties with the traditional concept of intervention and the limited space international law gives for actions against violations of human rights led to the development of the concept of humanitarian intervention as a third way to justify involvement in humanitarian disasters in situations short of self-defence and effective Security Council action. The notion of humanitarian intervention has evolved in parallel with the modernization of the classical vision of sovereignty as an absolute good.12 According to Stanley Hoffman: the state that claims sovereignty deserves respect only as long as it protects the basic rights of its subjects. It is from their rights that it derives its own. When it violates them, what Walzer called ‘the presumption of fit’ between the government and the governed vanishes, and the state’s claim to full sovereignty falls with it.13 Sovereignty is not diluted by such an understanding, instead it is re-formulated from being an absolute control over territory to being a responsibility to govern in a certain manner. This new conception of sovereignty is based on a dual responsibility: external respect for the sovereignty of other states and internal respect for the dignity and human rights of the domestic population. The two are tied by the fact that the responsibility to respect other states depends on whether these states respect their own people. This change in the understanding of ‘sovereignty’ has produced a concomitant shift in the concept of ‘intervention’, with the two notions no longer being seen as opposites. When states engage in genocide, crimes against humanity or gross violations of human rights, an intervention by international agencies to save lives no longer undermines the idea of sovereignty. Instead, by reinforcing the fundamental sovereign right of life, it can effectively restore the sovereign rights of the people against a murderous regime, in the process re-establishing the constitutional contract between governor and governed. The classic notion that the defence of sovereignty implies non-intervention has therefore ‘melted down’. Sovereignty as responsibility holds that states are accountable for the safety and lives of their citizens. When a state fails to protect its people, and, moreover, engages in deliberate mass murder, other states and international organizations may exercise the responsibility to protect across borders. The stark choice of whether to intervene or not has gradually been substituted by a more constructive debate on when and in what form intervention should take place. Within both policy-making and academic circles, a number of voices have argued that the UN rules for
The concept of humanitarian intervention 47 intervention are obsolete and have to be changed, while others have even gone as far as to suggest that the right of humanitarian intervention is gaining acknowledgement as a new customary law.14 It is not necessary to follow the lead of those who advocate the radical re-modelling of the law of the use of force. More fitting would seem to be the scepticism of those who prefer to see humanitarian intervention as an exceptional use of military force of last resort, when all other instruments fail. It would be more constructive to seek methods to make the Security Council more authoritative and operative in a future ‘Kosovo’ scenario rather than to think how it might be sidelined by alternative authorizations for the use of force. There may never be a consensus on any justification of humanitarian intervention outside strict authorization by the Security Council. People and states from different continents will always question whether the pursuance of humanitarian purposes can be achieved by employing military force against sovereign states. Therefore, it would be prudent to embrace a conservative view and continue to regard humanitarian intervention as an exception to the rule, rather than as an emergence of a new rule. Rather than adopting a principle that would open up a Pandora’s box for unauthorized use of force, it would seem wiser to acquiesce to a single violation of the rule, seen as necessary and moral in a particular situation. The debate after Kosovo has accumulated a substantive conceptual baggage and the political, legal and ethical literature continues to expand, but many questions still remain unanswered. Do we need further codification (either ‘hard’ or ‘soft’) or simply a fresh interpretation of already existing rules? Can we agree on a ‘tick-list’ of criteria for justified intervention? Is it possible to reach a global agreement that humanitarian intervention is the necessary response to genocide and crimes against humanity? Is it feasible to clearly establish the time when diplomacy and sanctions are no longer effective and have to be substituted, or rather paralleled, by other necessary and proportionate means, including military force? The most serious problem with the concept of humanitarian intervention, however, lies not in the sphere of international law or global ethics but in international politics. The responsibility to protect has not been codified not because of the lack of international moral standards nor because of the insufficient accumulation of examples of state practice or opinio juris. The main obstacle to more lax interpretations of Art. 2(4) and 2(7), in the absence of Chapter VII measures, is the historically grounded suspicion that states will use them to pursue their own selfish interests. The list of such abuses of ‘humanitarian’ purposes is lengthy. In 1938 Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia to ‘protect’ the German minority. The Soviet Union assaulted Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 pretending to ‘restore’ the rights of the working class. In 1979 Vietnam intervened in Cambodia not simply to stop the Khmer Rouge genocide but with plans for long-term occupation. Even in a more clear-cut example of humanitarian intervention – NATO’s action over Kosovo – some suspicions remain that it
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was driven by the need to strengthen NATO credibility and avoid Albanian refugee flows. Scepticism also arises because of the lack of consistency and the failure to act wherever the lives of people are at risk. These two fundamental problems – the abuse of the concept for national interests and the lack of consistency – need to be addressed. Can harmony between national interest and humanitarian purpose be achieved? Can we learn from the selectivity and the failures of the past, rather than allow them to embarrass the humanitarian interventions of the future? The answer to both questions must be ‘Yes’. Conceptual and legal difficulties as well as historical inconsistencies cannot be an excuse for a lack of action to prevent crimes against humanity and protect people at risk.
National interests The real interventionist issue is not about the right to transgress the sovereignty of a target state but about humanitarian imperatives and national interests. More interventions have not materialized as a result of the lack of national interests rather than due to the absence of a codified right to intervene. States prefer to stay away from humanitarian catastrophes not so much due to a conservative respect for the sovereignty of other states (this is the usual excuse) but because of lack of political will and disinterested public opinion. Critics of a more permissive approach to intervention will invariably assert that the intervening states are pursuing their national interests and historically such scepticism is warranted. Indeed, there might never be a case of humanitarian intervention absolutely untainted by the national interests of the intervening states. However, the statistics suggest that more people have suffered because of lack of intervention than because of the abuse of intervention in national interests. No matter how self-interested the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia, it put an end to the genocide of the Khmer Rouge and saved the lives of many innocent people. Reversing the usual argument, it can be argued that the national interests of intervening states rather than being an impediment to humanitarian intervention are in fact a necessary prerequisite. In Rwanda the legal authority for humanitarian intervention, based on the Genocide Convention and Security Council resolutions, did not help hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, massacred as a result of the lack of political will to intervene. Yet, the lack of UN authorization did not prevent NATO acting over Kosovo. Or, to take another example, the ‘safe havens’ of Northern and Southern Iraq were never explicitly authorized but nevertheless were effectively protected, while the perfect mandate to protect the Bosnian ‘safe areas’, such as Srebrenica, epa and others, given by Security Council Resolution 819 (1993), remained a paper-tiger. National interests are complex constructs that include not only economic and security aspects, but also issues such as international reputation and
The concept of humanitarian intervention 49 leadership ambition. Joseph Nye and Kofi Annan have recently argued that they need not necessarily be detached from humanitarian purposes.15 There is no impossible choice. Instead of juxtaposing national and humanitarian interests, it might be better to look for a positive synthesis between the two. The era of globalization leaves no space for isolation and disengagement and it would be difficult for states to detach their national interests from universal values and concerns. To ignore international ethical standards and demands for humanitarian action would not help the national interests of any country, particularly those that pretend to be part of the global political and moral leadership. This was realized by the Clinton administration when it apologized to the Rwandan people for the lack of intervention to stop the genocide in 1994, and by the Dutch Government, which resigned in 2002 over its failure to prevent the massacre in Srebrenica in 1995. Here is the paradox: policy-makers when addressing a domestic audience have to present the humanitarian intervention as corresponding to the national interest, but when addressing an international audience they have to do the exact opposite. In front of the national parliament they have to explain why it is so vital to help homeless people on the other side of the globe (rather than homeless people at home), while in front of the UN General Assembly they have to convincingly argue that no national interest lies behind the same humanitarian mission. There is nothing wrong in justifying humanitarian intervention in terms of an exercise of national interests. What happens in small provinces, like Kosovo or East Timor, short of oil and geo-strategic significance, affects many states around the globe and becomes part of their national interests. The national interest of avoiding large-scale refugee flows naturally complements the humanitarian concern of returning displaced people home. States are willing to act robustly and prevent gross humanitarian crises to avoid large refugee flows and this is an excellent example of how the alleviation of human suffering in one state is directly linked to the national interests of other states.
Consistency Apart from its usurpation by national interests, the concept of humanitarian intervention has also been subjected to selectivity and double standards. For example, in Bosnia and Rwanda the Security Council explicitly authorized the use of ‘all necessary means’, but the reluctance of states to engage in military operation led to horrific massacres. Vice versa, the lack of legal mandate from the Security Council did not prevent NATO from intervening in Kosovo. As Adam Roberts has noted: the practice of the Security Council does suggest a high degree of selectivity about situations in which humanitarian intervention might be authorised, and this selectivity involves many factors other than the plight of the people whom an intervention might be intended to assist.16
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Is it justifiable to intervene in one situation, if no intervention occurred in similar situations elsewhere in the past? I would argue that precisely because states failed to prevent crimes against humanity in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere, they are under greater obligation to respond to similar crimes in the future. Past non-interventions should not be an excuse for future inaction. Both intervention and non-intervention create precedents. There are precedents of intervention leading to the occupation of foreign territories and there are precedents of non-intervention allowing dictators to massacre people. The second scenario is as equally pernicious as the first. Indeed, it can be plausibly argued that more people have suffered from the lack of intervention in the face of serious atrocities, than from biased and self-interested actions. The double-standards criticism may also fail to acknowledge the important Hippocratic principle – ‘Do not harm!’ – the intervention should not worsen the situation of those who are supposed to be protected. It has to be recognized that applying the same standards does not necessarily mean reaching the same outcomes. Intervening states have to make careful cost–benefit calculations and assess the likelihood of success before engaging in military operations. The question ‘Why Kosovo, but not Chechnya or Tibet?’ has a simple answer – a military intervention against Russia or China would have undoubtedly resulted in greater loss of life, including Chechens and Tibetans.
Criteria for humanitarian intervention The idea of standardized criteria to legitimate the resort to armed force has a long history and is reflected in many writings, known as ‘just war theories’.17 Although sceptics will always question the validity and generality of any set of criteria, the mere fact that they are being discussed in relation to humanitarian intervention shapes the legitimacy of such actions, making them more acceptable. Therefore, to create a safeguard against abuse, it is important that we clarify at least a rudimentary, if not a doctrinal, legal and moral framework. Among the scholars who have proposed various criteria for justifying foreign military engagement in humanitarian emergencies Tom Farer and Antonio Cassesse both identify six elements.18 Adam Roberts develops his understanding of humanitarian intervention ‘in four respects – in its original motives, in its stated purposes, in its methods of operation and in its actual results’.19 Most recently the ICISS came up with four sets of principles under the headings: (1) just cause threshold (large-scale loss of life); (2) precautionary principles (right intention, last resort, proportional means, reasonable prospects); (3) right authority (Security Council, General Assembly, regional organizations); and (4) operational principles (clear objectives, rules of engagement).20 Drawing on the recent debates and literature, the following principles can be offered as a justification for humanitarian intervention:
The concept of humanitarian intervention 51 1 2 3 4 5
Existence of a humanitarian crisis. Inability or unwillingness of the domestic government to redress the crisis. Last resort (peaceful means to resolve the crisis are exhausted or ineffective). International and internal support for intervention. Proportionality between aims and means.
Existence of a humanitarian crisis The international agencies as a rule intervene to redress a serious humanitarian disaster rather than a sporadic act of violence. Humanitarian intervention is therefore clearly triggered by a certain magnitude of human suffering, but this raises a difficult moral question: ‘How many people have to die before a humanitarian intervention is activated?’ Intervention should ideally save lives before they are lost rather than wait until some ‘critical mass’ of activation is achieved. The ICISS report emphasizes the prevention element within the responsibility to protect without quantifying the ‘large-scale loss of life’ or the level of suffering. Instead, it argues that a crisis should be measured in both actual and potential terms, with intervention being triggered not so much by a certain number of victims but by an assessment that large numbers of lives are in danger.21 In Kosovo there were relatively few casualties, but an enormous number of internally displaced people, suggesting a magnified humanitarian crisis. The calculation of the scale of a humanitarian crisis might be difficult and speculative, but not necessarily impossible. Guidance can come from reports by independent international agencies, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) or the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Respected and unbiased NGOs, such as Médecins sans Frontières, might also help to identify the scale of human suffering. It was the estimate by the UNHCR that 250,000 people were displaced in Kosovo by October 1998 that led to Security Council Resolution 1199 determining the situation as a ‘threat to the peace’. The threshold for activating a just cause for intervention ideally should be noticed and recognized by the Security Council – the only authority able to define legitimately a ‘threat to the peace’ and adopt mandatory measures. Whether the identification of such a threat then provides a right to use force is more questionable, but there is no doubt that once a situation is defined as ‘threatening the peace’, it implicitly ceases to be purely ‘domestic’ and invites international action. A problem with this first criterion might occur, if a party to the conflict deliberately decides to exacerbate the humanitarian crisis to speed up the intervention and this requires a set of safeguards against such abuse.
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Inability or unwillingness of the domestic government to redress the crisis The second calculation that needs to be made is whether the government is able or willing to address the crisis appropriately. This criterion does not aim to waive the responsibility to protect if a government is cooperative. As discussed earlier, humanitarian intervention does not need to be attached to state consent. The ICISS report included in the sets of circumstances that justify intervention situations of ‘state collapse’ or ‘overwhelming natural or environmental catastrophes’.22 In both instances intervention faces few political or legal barriers. In a case of ‘state collapse’ the ‘domestic jurisdiction’ is practically non-existent, while after earthquakes, floods or other natural disasters, governments are usually grateful for any foreign rescue teams that arrive. In situations where governments are the cause of the humanitarian suffering, however, they are unlikely to redress the crisis. The killing of fortyfive Albanians at Raèak in Kosovo in January 1999 and the subsequent refusal by the Yugoslav authorities to allow the prosecution team of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to carry out an investigation smacked of an intentional policy. It became clear that the regime in Belgrade was reluctant to investigate the murderous actions in Kosovo either through domestic or international channels, leaving little hope that the same government would alleviate the suffering of the displaced population. Humanitarian intervention may be expected in situations that present evidence of international crimes – such as the planning or committing of genocide or the forceful deportation of people – but not in civil wars between a government and an organized opposition where both sides apparently respect civilian lives. The ICISS report excluded from possible intervention human rights violations falling short of outright killing or ethnic cleansing and denial of people’s democratic rights by a military take-over.23 A distinction needs to be made between governments unwilling to redress a crisis and those unable to do it. In some situations, e.g. Somalia, Angola and Sierra Leone, the governments were too weak to restrain warlords and alleviate humanitarian disasters. In other situations, e.g. Northern Iraq, Kosovo and Afghanistan, the governments themselves were instrumental in producing the humanitarian catastrophe. Both situations may provoke humanitarian intervention but on different legal grounds. In the first case the government, if it still exists, would normally welcome international involvement; in the second, the international organizations have to penetrate the ‘domestic jurisdiction’ ideally through a Security Council resolution. Last resort This third criterion, known as ultima ratio (last resort), lies at the heart of just war theory and is universally accepted. It holds that, if all alternative means of eliminating a crisis have failed, then the use of military force is justified as a last option. However, there is no agreement whether the ‘last
The concept of humanitarian intervention 53 resort’ should be interpreted as an expression of time or effectiveness. That is, whether the alternative options have to be physically tried in practice and found wanting or whether a decision can be made on the basis that they are likely to prove ineffective. The second, more permissive, interpretation would seem preferable. It is not absolutely necessary to try in practice all alternatives – some of them might only waste time, if they are clearly inadequate. However, the intervening states or coalitions need to have credible evidence that all alternative options are ineffective, either in practice or by persuasive estimation of possible effects. The difficulty with the ‘last resort’ criterion is to know at what point all alternative options prove to be ineffective, since there is no established and tested methodology to appraise whether another round of negotiation could have produced a non-military outcome. There will always be critics on both sides. The ‘doves’ will claim that the military option has been employed too early before all non-military options were exhausted, while the ‘hawks’ will say that an excessive amount of time was allowed to pass before force was employed. The first group would insist that another round of negotiations would have removed the need for NATO to bomb the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the second that NATO could have saved more lives by beginning operation ‘Allied force’ immediately after the failure of the Rambouillet talks in February 1999. A possible solution to this dilemma is to regard diplomatic and coercive measures not as substituting but as complementing each other. Diplomacy will rarely succeed without some credible threat of sanctions and military victory is seldom achieved without a parallel diplomatic process. Richard Holbrooke was able to negotiate an agreement with Miloševiæ in October 1998 backed up by the threat of air strikes within NATO’s ‘activation order’. And Miloševiæ surrendered in June 1999 not because of huge military losses after seventy-eight days of bombing (these were in fact minimal), but due to concerted multilateral diplomatic efforts by the G-8, the UN SecretaryGeneral and Russia, the latter crucially changing its attitude after the ICTY indictment against the Serbian leader on 27 May 1999. Following the argumentation from the previous criterion, I would like to suggest that the actual perpetration of international crimes, such as genocide and the forceful deportation of people, is instrumental in driving the responsibility to protect into the ‘last resort’ – the use of military force. International and internal support for intervention To justify humanitarian intervention one needs to assess also the support of both the majority of states in the world (external legitimacy) and the people at risk (internal legitimacy). If the humanitarian intervention is externally supported, ideally it should be authorized by a Security Council resolution or alternatively a General Assembly resolution.24 Nigel White has suggested that if NATO had taken the Kosovo issue to the General Assembly, it would
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have most probably achieved a two-thirds majority, presenting ‘a sound legal basis upon which to launch its air strikes’.25 The difficult issue is how a humanitarian crisis should be approached in the absence of UN authorization. Chapter VIII of the UN Charter suggests that regional organizations can adopt measures, including military means, to eliminate threats to international peace and security. Although the strict letter of the law requires that these should have prior approval from the Security Council, the precedents established during the intervention of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Liberia and Sierra Leone suggest that there may be some latitude in future actions.26 In the absence of UN authorization the intervening coalition should enjoy a level of sympathy among a majority of states or at least their acquiescence. Even if it is unofficially registered, this will give the humanitarian intervention a degree of legitimacy and justification. In the case of Kosovo, the Russian attempt to initiate a Security Council resolution condemning NATO’s operation in Yugoslavia failed by twelve to three votes, whereas a resolution initiated by the Western powers in the UN Human Rights Committee against the Serb policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ was adopted by a vote of forty-four to one with six abstentions.27 This indicates that the majority of states (although maybe not the majority of people, since three of the most populous countries in the world, China, India and Russia, opposed the operation) were sympathetic to NATO’s intervention. A sign of external legitimacy also came from the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who never condemned the NATO operation and in several statements invited Yugoslavia to accept the G-8 demands.28 Collective decision-making among democratic states may give some protection against abuse of the principle of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and in his study Adam Roberts concludes that the ‘massive multilateral support within NATO … confirms that this military action did represent an international community interest, and not just the interests of one single state.’29 In addition to international support, to be justified, the humanitarian intervention also has to be welcomed by the victims of the crisis. Paradoxically, even interventions with a genuine humanitarian purpose which have been authorized by the Security Council, like the mission to prevent starvation in Somalia, may not enjoy internal support and eventuate in failure. A fundamental principle for a justified intervention is that no harm should come to those who are supposed to be protected. In the case of Kosovo, Serb propaganda, led by Miloševiæ, claimed that the NATO air strikes led to Albanian refugees fleeing to Macedonia and Albania. In such situations, measuring internal legitimacy is empirically difficult and possible only after the intervention has occurred. Nonetheless, it is significant that the Albanian refugees and internally displaced people did not blame NATO but the Serb police for their misery, and that it was Tony Blair, not Slobodan Miloševiæ, who was welcomed when he visited the refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania and offered food, shelter, medicines and other support.
The concept of humanitarian intervention 55 Proportionality between aims and means The final and crucial test for humanitarian intervention is proportionality. This takes several forms: the objective of the action must be proportionate to the circumstances of the crisis; the strategy must reflect and achieve the objective; the intervention should immediately cease upon achieving its objective; and, finally, the methods of intervention should be strictly in harmony with international humanitarian law (jus in bello). The objective of the humanitarian intervention should be limited to the elimination of the crisis. It ideally should not aim at replacing governments, but at saving people, and there should be no compromises with the inviolability of the territorial integrity and political independence of the state in question. Once the appropriate objectives are reached, in the absence of a specific request from the state itself, or the adoption of a Security Council resolution delegating new peacekeeping tasks, the intervening forces should withdraw. The stated objective of NATO’s operation over Kosovo was ‘to avert an impeding humanitarian catastrophe by disrupting the violent attacks currently being carried out by the Yugoslav security forces … and to limit their ability to conduct such repression in the future’.30 In fact, the NATO operation ranged far wider than Kosovo, destroying large numbers of targets throughout Serbia, including bridges, fuel depots, electricity generators and television studios. Moreover, Adam Roberts and others have questioned whether the zero-casualty military strategy centred on high-altitude bombing matched the stated objective of averting ‘ethnic cleansing’.31 The Geneva Conventions require belligerents to protect civilians, not soldiers (unless they are wounded or imprisoned), but NATO did exactly the opposite. Fixated by the idea of not sacrificing the life of a single soldier, it adopted a strategy that reduced bombing accuracy and inflicted numerous civilian casualties on both Serbs and Albanians. The NATO leaders apparently feared that ‘body-bags’ would undermine domestic support but their greatest discomfort came in explaining air strikes against hospitals, humanitarian convoys, residential buildings and the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Western publics would have accepted casualties among their soldiers with pride, whereas news of the death of innocent civilians was met with considerable unease. Gandhi once said that there are many causes to die for, but there is no single cause to kill for. The fifth criterion of humanitarian intervention is by any standards the most difficult to meet: the targeting has to be very precise to minimize collateral damage and any unexpected long-term effects on the civilian populations. In the case of Kosovo doubts still remain over the wisdom of using depleted uranium and cluster bombs and the targeting of bridges and energy supply systems. Humanitarian intervention is not an excuse for the blanket waging of war against an aggressor-state in which even a television station can be presented as a legitimate military target. In such actions the threshold of necessity and proportionality should be higher than in conventional war, and this is even more so in a ‘virtual war’, such as NATO’s action over Kosovo.32
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Conclusion The discourse on humanitarian intervention has gradually developed from a ‘right to intervene’ to a ‘responsibility to protect’. The world may never agree on a general right of humanitarian intervention, but it can and should agree on a duty to save lives endangered by genocide, crimes against humanity and widespread and gross violations of human rights. There is no longer a sharp division between non-interventionists, asserting sovereignty as an ultimate principle, and interventionists, asserting universal human rights protection. The question is less about whether to intervene, rather, it is in what form to intervene. Non-UN-authorized humanitarian intervention will always be viewed with suspicion and the only formal way to legitimize such actions will remain Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Extraordinarily quickly after the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the Security Council was re-unified not only in adopting the post-conflict administration in Kosovo (Resolution 1244) but also in undertaking major operations in East Timor, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. In a further extraordinary cooperative atmosphere the Security Council even reached an agreement on the post-war arrangements in Iraq. In the future, instead of returning to Cold War deadlock, there are signs that reform will produce a new willingness to define humanitarian crises as ‘threats to the peace’ and impose legally binding and enforceable UN measures. However, if the Security Council becomes blocked once more, as over Kosovo and Iraq, then the legal and moral dilemmas of humanitarian intervention will have to be confronted again through the political calculations inherent in the five criteria listed above. The legitimacy of humanitarian intervention in such cases will be a complex construct of legality, willingness, capacity, authority and effectiveness. Intervention can be applied only to serious actual or potential humanitarian crises, when the governments responsible for the crisis are either unable or unwilling to cooperate. Military measures can only follow after all peaceful alternatives have been considered and only upon expectation of considerable external and internal support. Finally, but most importantly, legitimacy will depend on the proportionality of the means used towards the ends. Only limited force against precise targets, minimal collateral damage, strict respect for international humanitarian law and immediate withdrawal upon the completion of the objectives will grant humanitarian intervention its legitimate and deserved space in international law and international relations.
Notes 1 The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, Ottawa: International Development Research Center, December 2001. I had the honour to be among the contributors to this report. 2 See J. Vincent, Non-Intervention and International Order, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974.
The concept of humanitarian intervention 57 3 S. Hoffman ‘The problem of intervention’, in H. Bull (ed.), Intervention in World Politics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, p. 9. 4 A. Roberts, Humanitarian Action in War: Aid, Protection and Impartiality in a Policy Vacuum, Adelphi Paper 305, London: IISS, 1996, p. 19. See also R. Lillich (ed.), Humanitarian Intervention and the UN, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1973; H. Bull (ed.), Intervention in World Politics; F.R. Tesón, Humanitarian Intervention: An Inquiry into Law and Morality, Dobbs Ferry, NY: Transnational, 1988; N. Rodley (ed.), To Loose the Bands of Wickedness: Intervention in Defence of Human Rights, London: Brassey’s, 1992. More recently, S. Hoffman, The Ethics and Politics of Humanitarian Intervention, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996, and J. Harris, The Politics of Humanitarian Intervention, London: Pinter, 1995, reflected post-Cold War changes. After Kosovo the theme has been further substantively developed by N. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; A. Schnabel and R. Thakur (eds), Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention: Selective Indignation, Collective Action, and International Citizenship, Tokyo: UN University Press, 2000; F. Kofi Abiew, The Evolution of the Doctrine and Practice of Humanitarian Intervention, The Hague: Kluwer, 1999; S. Garrett, Doing Good and Doing Well: An Examination of Humanitarian Intervention, New York: Praeger, 1999. 5 Roberts, Humanitarian Action in War, p. 26. 6 The Responsibility to Protect, p. 17. 7 J. Charney, ‘Anticipatory humanitarian intervention in Kosovo’, American Journal of International Law, 93: 4, 1999, 36. 8 Ibid. 9 R. Higgins, Problems and Prospects: International Law and How We Use It, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 253. 10 See G. Klintworth, Vietnam’s Intervention in Cambodia and International Law, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1989; T. Franck and N. Rodley, ‘After Bangladesh: the law of humanitarian intervention by military force’, American Journal of International Law, 67: 2, 1973, 275–305. 11 Art. 25 and Art. 48 of the UN Charter define clearly the binding force of the Security Council resolutions. However, these do not lead to automatic implementation – states may violate their binding obligations and remain unpunished. Ideally the Security Council should define the non-implementation of previous resolutions as a threat to the peace and impose sanctions against non-cooperative states, although there is little evidence emerging of such a practice. 12 See R. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; S.D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. 13 S. Hoffman, ‘The politics and ethics of military intervention’, Survival, 37: 4, 1995–1996, 35. 14 See M. Glennon, ‘New interventionism’, Foreign Affairs, May–June 1999, 1–9; D. Scheffer, ‘Towards a modern doctrine of humanitarian intervention’, University of Toledo Law Review, 23: 2, 1992, 286–293; C. Greenwood, ‘Is there a right of humanitarian intervention in international law?’, World Today, 49: 2, 1993, 34–40. 15 J. Nye, ‘Redefining national interest’, Foreign Affairs, July–August 1999, 22–36; K. Annan, ‘Intervention for human rights’, The Economist, 16–23 September 1999, 82. 16 Roberts, Humanitarian Action in War, p. 25. 17 For more detailed accounts, see M. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980; P.
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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32
Vesselin Popovski Ramsey, Just War: Force and Political Responsibility, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983. T. Farer, ‘A paradigm of legitimate intervention’, in L. Damrosch (ed.), Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993, pp. 316–347; A. Cassesse, ‘Ex iniuria ius oritur: are we moving towards international legitimation of forcible humanitarian countermeasures in the world community?’, European Journal of International Law, 10: 1, 1999, 23–30. Roberts, Humanitarian Action in War, p. 29. The Responsibility to Protect, pp. XII–XIII. Ibid., pp. 19–29, 32. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 34. In 1950 the General Assembly adopted the ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution, allowing intervention in the Korean peninsula in spite of a Security Council veto. N. White, ‘The legality of bombing in the name of humanity’, paper presented to the British International Studies Association (BISA) Annual Conference, University of Manchester, 20–22 December 1999, p. 4. ECOWAS intervened in Liberia (1990) and Sierra Leone (1997) and the Security Council post facto passed resolutions confirming these actions. UN Press Release SC/6659, 26 March 1999; UN Press Release HR/CN/910, 13 April 1999. UN Press Release SG/SM/6952, 9 April 1999. A. Roberts, ‘NATO’s humanitarian war over Kosovo’, Survival, 41: 3, 1999, 107. Defence Secretary George Robertson, briefing at the Ministry of Defence, 26 March 1999. A. Roberts, ‘Willing the ends, but not the means’, World Today, 55: 2, 1999, 8–12; Roberts, ‘NATO’s humanitarian war’. M. Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, New York: Metropolitan, 2000.
3
The controversies of EuroAtlantic interventionism in the Balkans Miroslav Had iæ
In 1990 the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) entered a new security environment. In the international arena the self-dissolution of the Warsaw Pact stripped away the benefits the country had enjoyed from sitting on the fence between the rival superpowers. Focused on increasing its strategic influence in the states of the former Soviet bloc, the West showed little concern for the events unfolding in the Balkans. So, when local elites plunged the Yugoslav state into war, the European Union and United States of America (together with NATO, the Euro-Atlantic community of this chapter) were conceptually and operationally unprepared as well as politically and economically reluctant to face one of the consequences of what, until then, had been an overwhelming strategic objective: the elimination of socialism.1 Domestically, the collapse of socialism also laid bare the internal crisis of the SFRY. Instead of a peaceful transition to a stable democracy, under a rhetoric of democracy and the right of nations to self-determination, national and republican elites embarked on an aggressive and chauvinistic path, which, in the absence of a willingness to compromise, ended in violence and calamity.2 There is no doubt that the war (wars) in the former Yugoslavia endangered the basic human rights of the population. One country was destroyed and several new ones created through the use of armed force. Borders were changed. War crimes were committed. With immense suffering, population structures were drastically altered by ethnic cleansing. There was also widespread international intervention. Indeed, without intervention, it is possible the wars might have lasted virtually until the mutual extermination of the conflicting parties.3 Intervention effected the dynamic of the conflict and had a significant influence on its outcome.4 From the first EU-led attempts to defuse the Slovene crisis to the bombing of the FRY by NATO, intervention was critical. Yet, it was also marked by a series of paradoxes and inconsistencies and it is the aim of this short chapter to highlight some of these in the belief that their mark can still be found on Euro-Atlantic policy towards the region today and that unless an open and thorough evaluation of intervention is carried out, it will remain difficult to create a new stable security architecture for the Balkans.
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Within this chapter special attention will be paid to international intervention during the Kosovo crisis. Kosovo was a turning point marking the end of one stage and the beginning of another in the Yugoslav drama. It can, therefore, stand as a starting point both for the analysis of the past record of the Euro-Atlantic management of the Yugoslav crisis and for the devising of a valid strategy for stabilizing the Balkans in the future. During the Kosovo conflict, leaving aside the differences in the magnitude of power, the strategies of both sides were remarkably similar to the model of ‘bullying the weaker’, which Slobodan Miloševiæ, supported by the Serbian remnants of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), had applied throughout the Yugoslav conflicts.5 On both sides the strategy had disastrous results: Miloševiæ failed to resolve any of the Serbian national or state problems, while NATO failed to eliminate critical security risks within both the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans in general.6 In the case of the Kosovo conflict it is difficult to talk of war objectives. Certainly, even if they existed, they were not firmly held, since both parties readily abandoned them for temporary and limited gain. The ultimate objective of NATO may have been the removal of Miloševiæ but this was not possible without a land operation and, for this, the USA had the consent neither of all its allied partners nor the American public. Perhaps the war did have humanitarian aims but it should have been clear from the outset that these were not attainable through high-altitude bombing.7 In fact, the tactics of NATO were entirely counter-productive.8 It had been calculated that air strikes would give the highest gains with the least risks but in the end the victory that was achieved was barely justifiable and Miloševiæ was left in power, just as Saddam Hussein was after the first Gulf War.9 So, the paradox of the war was that Miloševiæ was not faced with the usual political consequences of defeat, that is, the loss of power. Instead, he was able to use the NATO bombing to hide the considerable concessions he had already made on Kosovo and to excuse the economic catastrophe unfolding in Yugoslavia as well as to tighten the screw of his dictatorship.10 Defeat, in some ways, helped Miloševiæ stave off the consequences of his misrule and, in this regard, even after the effective loss of the province, Kosovo retained a significant instrumental value for his regime. Kosovo also produced a further paradox. Despite the fact that during the conflict no NATO forces were actually deployed on the territory of the FRY, it ended with a NATO ‘conquest’, that is, the negotiated take-over of Kosovo. Indeed, the absence of land operations in many ways dulled the division between victor and vanquished, allowing all the participants to claim satisfaction with the outcome.11 Nevertheless, the greatest beneficiaries of the conflict, at least initially, were probably the KLA. Incapable of winning the struggle for an independent Kosovo on their own, the KLA in 1998 played the role of ‘stalking-horse’ for NATO. First, it drew the Serbian police and the Yugoslav Army further into the conflict, allowing the outside media to produce convincing reasons for NATO intervention. Then, during
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the bombardment, its activities created the conditions which accelerated the expulsion of the Albanians from Kosovo, while simultaneously it provided intelligence to the NATO airforces.12 If it had come to a land operation, the KLA would have played the role of advance strike echelon for NATO, perhaps performing a role similar to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Indeed, so successful was the KLA in fulfilling their allotted task that its leadership earned an initial right to rule Kosovo. Among the most important initial objectives of the KFOR deployment in Kosovo was the deterring of further aggression from the armed forces of Serbia/FRY or rather the prevention of a renewal of conflict between these forces and the KLA. However, this had to be balanced with the need to protect KFOR troops and, in consequence, NATO reduced the security contribution of its forces to a minimum. Fear of casualties remains the weak point of the deployment, which hostile forces may yet exploit, especially if the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state continues to be delayed. The potential still remains for the liberators to become occupiers and in the long term NATO remains vulnerable, partly due to its failure to properly disarm the KLA.13 Post-Kosovo there is a need for a different security model in the Balkans. Sufficient elements exist for this to emerge, with the causes of internal instability now being well known, as are the external factors which determine security.14 Previously, the sub-regional security of the Balkans was mainly understood as an element of the global balance of power which, ultimately, rested on the alignment of the superpower blocs. The presence of this overlay not only prevented the creation of autonomous security arrangements within the region but, along with the repressive nature of the communist states, it also camouflaged the potential instability of the Balkans. This lack of a regional security architecture was one of the reasons why the violent (self)destruction of the Yugoslav state so jeopardized the Balkans, as, within a changing global environment, it aggravated existing weaknesses. Now, in order to prevent a further outbreak of conflict, the European Union and USA are taking steps to integrate the states of the region into the security architecture of NATO and the Partnership for Peace. However, whether such links will actually increase security remains open to question, as they do not guarantee a democratic transformation, especially if the elite structures remain unchanged. NATO was also a clear beneficiary of the Kosovo conflict. It was able to find a purpose after the end of the Cold War, pulled out of the uncertainties of redefining its role by the Yugoslav leadership and America’s global aspirations.15 In general, however, the Yugoslav wars revealed the deficiencies of existing Euro-Atlantic security structures, with the European Union and NATO proving unable to define joint objectives or to select and apply timely and appropriate military measures. The Kosovo campaign produced some signs of critical reflection, as several NATO members questioned the extent to which powers were transferred to the organization and the degree to which
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competence was vested in the United States. Overall, though, the Yugoslav wars revealed the dominance of the Americans in Euro-Atlantic policy making. After an initial period of autonomous mediation by the European Union between July 1991 and April 1992, the initiative was lost to the USA during the Bosnian war.16 This is not to say that the USA and the European Union then disagreed on the formulation and implementation of policy, they were generally in accord, but, throughout, the USA enjoyed primacy.17 Today, the policy adopted by the USA remains critical to the future of the region, but it is also the great unknown of Balkan security. Local states have virtually no influence on American policy, and such has been its inconsistencies over the years, that really they can only anticipate it at a rhetorical level. In contrast, the Euro-Atlantic community is usually able to anticipate the actions of local actors and can even frequently determine local conduct. Despite their monopoly of the management of the Yugoslav crisis, the external actors failed to properly evaluate the situation, a fact that had serious consequences. Having badly assessed developments and divided the warring parties into culprits and victims, the intervening parties persisted with their initial view, despite changing circumstances, gradually losing contact with the realities of the war. Unable to understand the logic of the conflict, protracted ineffectiveness eventually gave rise to internal political frustrations that encouraged the use of external force in unpredictable patterns of behaviour which departed from stated principles. The lack of a clear Euro-Atlantic strategy towards the crisis in Yugoslavia, aggravated by the solo actions of certain community members, created the space for local republican actors to wield influence, enabling most of them to obtain independence through use of arms. They were helped in this by the aggression of the Serbian and JNA leadership and the aforementioned readiness of the Euro-Atlantic community to violate and reinterpret its own principles, as it repeatedly legalized and legitimized otherwise illegal and unconstitutional armed rebellions by separatist movements. Once legitimized, these parties then frequently managed the crisis in their own interests. In this way Miloševiæ was able to simultaneously play the role of main culprit and key player for future peace. The absence of a coherent Euro-Atlantic strategy towards the Yugoslav crisis may be explained by, first, the time it took for the USA to shape a policy for the ‘new world order’ which emerged following the crumbling of the Berlin Wall; second, the infatuation of the Euro-Atlantic community with the concurrent collapse of the USSR, or perhaps it might be better to say the preparation of the community for the adverse consequence of this collapse; third, a lack of common purpose and interest in addressing the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991; and, fourth, a, perhaps not unexpected, failure to fully anticipate the consequences of this collapse and the lasting impact it would have on local, regional, global and humanitarian security. Finally, the very size of the military-political power possessed by the Euro-Atlantic community to a certain extent inoculated it from the adverse consequences of its abortive intervention, allowing it to ignore valuable lessons.
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This lack of a strategy towards the Yugoslav conflict produced a series of inconsistencies in Euro-Atlantic policy. Some of these may be summarized as follows: • • •
• • • • • •
the restraint shown in early stages of the conflict; the rapid taking of sides with certain actors in a complex and evolving conflict; the adoption of a piecemeal approach to negotiations, ending the war(s) stage by stage only after certain actors had achieved desirable political and territorial goals; the tacit and selective approval of subsequent corrections of war results; the absence of the demilitarization and de-ideologization necessary for a comprehensive peace process; the biased distribution of war gains and losses; the remaking of warlords into peace-makers; the tacit support given in certain instances to the establishment of authoritarian-nationalistic systems; the selective and restrained (calculated) prosecution of persons charged with war crimes etc.18
But this is not all, because the failure to enunciate a clear strategy also produced a number of paradoxes. Chief among these was the support given to efforts to preserve the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multiconfessional composition, first, of Bosnia-Hercegovina and, then, of Kosovo, after the direct and indirect support given to the violent destruction of the SFRY. This, at least nominally, used to be such a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-confessional society or at least had the potential to be so after democratic reform. Likewise, the alliance’s strong but mainly resolution-based support for the return of refugees lies in sharp contrast to the lack of effort made in the first place to prevent these people being swept out of their homelands in ethnic cleansing. It might, therefore, be rightly concluded that the Euro-Atlantic community throughout has applied only a ‘stopgap’ approach to the crisis. Despite the high costs, it seems to have found the piecemeal imposition of peace more profitable than a comprehensive long-term plan of Marshallian assistance to the Yugoslav state. Further evidence for this supposition comes from the current failure to supply adequate economic and military assistance to Macedonia and Albania, with the shortfalls being revealed by the spillover of KLA activities from Kosovo. Nonetheless, despite the paradoxes and inconsistencies, two principles can be discerned behind Euro-Atlantic intervention in Yugoslavia and it seems possible to suggest that these will also guide intervention elsewhere: First principle: objectives which are significant in terms of security and unquestionable in terms of value, such as peace, human rights, and democracy, may be accomplished (and protected) even by inappropriate means.
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The clearest example of this principle is the bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo crisis, when war was used in the name of averting a humanitarian crisis. Adhering to this principle the intervening parties claimed (usurped) complete freedom in the choice of means to protect objectives which they themselves had designated. Unconstrained by any superior body, they were effectively excepted from any obligation to act timely, adequately, purposefully, justly or consistently. This principle allows the Euro-Atlantic community to arbitrarily decide where and to what degree universal civilized values are being violated and whether their protection deserves the use of arms, political and economic sanctions or abundant and unconditional assistance. Indeed, it may be argued that the further one moves from the Euro-Atlantic core, the instrumental value of human rights rises in direct proportion to their fall in real value, giving ever greater space for the arbitrary use of intervention. Two interrelated questions would seem to be pertinent: first, is ‘humanitarian intervention’ intended merely for weak countries on the periphery of the Euro-Atlantic community’s strategic interests; and, second, have selective interventions made the principle of non-interference in internal affairs only relevant to the strategic partners and/or rivals: Russia and China? Second principle: putting an end to local or regional wars, particularly to internal (civil) wars, although commendable in its own right, can only be justified if it achieves wider strategic goals. The Euro-Atlantic community may have been largely motivated by humanitarian interests in intervening in the Yugoslav lands but undeniably it also made certain gains. Although the strategic importance of the former Yugoslavia has (temporarily?) declined, NATO has secured direct military and political control over large areas of its territory, with protectorates established in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo. This presence could, at an appropriate juncture, form a platform for achieving wider strategic goals.19 Furthermore, the Dayton Peace Accords subjugated all military and police forces in Bosnia-Hercegovina to effective NATO control. The same can also be said for Kosovo, and, with the Yugoslav, Croatian, Slovenian and Macedonian armies all also falling within NATO’s sphere of control, the hold of the Euro-Atlantic community on the region has been further consolidated. Other gains were also made during the conflict. Kosovo gave the USA a chance to test the tolerance of the UN towards NATO actions without Security Council support. In the process the Council was effectively immobilized and mechanisms of collective security blocked. The UN Security Council may still be used by the USA, but it is mainly as a means of legitimizing its actions through resolutions. Any attempt to seriously analyse the performance of the Euro-Atlantic community during the Yugoslav crisis is fraught with difficulties. Factors determining the choice of strategy and the criteria for selecting objectives will need to be identified, along with those deciding the choice of means. Actual EU/US relations and decision-making structures within the
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European Union will also have to be considered, as will the difficulty of defining the share of groups/individuals in attaining final goals. The problem of the lack of reliable evidence will have to be bridged and some sort of cost estimates made as well as calculations of efficiency of investment. There also needs to be a procedure for evaluating results, bearing in mind that this will be directly dependent on the chosen benchmarks. In this regard, the time-frame of analysis is especially important. For instance, the results achieved by the European Union would have a very different value if measured against the situation in July 1991, when the first European Union troika arrived in Yugoslavia and negotiated the Brioni Agreement which agreed a three-month moratorium on the action of the federal authorities, including the Yugoslav People’s Army, and the disassociation of Slovenia, rather than July 1995, and the incursion of the army of the Republica Srpska into Srebrenica, when war crimes were committed. In the same way, the perception of the achievements of the Dayton Peace Accords continues to evolve. In November 1995, the accords were treated as the major achievement of the Euro-Atlantic community but six years later, the imposition of peace has not eliminated the prospects of an ethnic division of BosniaHercegovina. Such an evaluation, however, is vital because today the Euro-Atlantic community still faces challenges in the Balkans that are remarkably similar to those it experienced in 1991. An ethnic group still aspires to create its own exclusive national state, but this time it is the Albanians of Kosovo. Previous support for the ethnic division of the second Yugoslav state makes it difficult for the Euro-Atlantic community to counter the aspirations of the Albanians. If statehood is granted, however, it would have serious implications for Albania, as it may or may not lead to a greater Albanian state, and could easily lead to the destabilization of the existing states of FRY and FYROM. The Euro-Atlantic community would also find it difficult to deny similar requests from the entities of Bosnia-Hercegovina, thereby ushering in a new cycle of decomposition and recomposition within the Balkans.20 The patterns of the past may still be present but the risks are now combined differently. There is an urgent need to re-evaluate and rethink the performance of the Euro-Atlantic community in Yugoslavia, all the more so because of the prospect of increased European Union competence in the future. Once such an evaluation is made, an optimum alliance strategy for the region can be shaped and a new security identity for the Balkans forged. However, this identity will ultimately be determined by the Balkan states themselves, it is clear that it will be expected to conform to the EuroAtlantic model. The risk is that this new identity will be adopted unthinkingly without proper evaluation, both on behalf of the Balkan states and the Euro-Atlantic community as a whole. Instead of being assumed, important issues need to be critically examined, including the question of whether the expansion of NATO will actually increase security within the region.
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Notes 1 A further indication is the fact that the Euro-Atlantic community chose to first offer the ex-communist countries military links through NATO and only later widened this to discussions about future economic and political integration: To open this door [to prosperity and freedom] we do not need a second Marshall Plan, but we do need to draw on Marshall’s vision … Just as the Marshall Plan used economic revival as the catalyst for political stabilization – and ultimately the development of the modern Europe – the PfP [Partnership for Peace] uses security cooperation as a catalyst for political and economic reform. (W. Perry, ‘Partnership for Peace transforming Central, Eastern Europe’, Balkan Forum, 1, 1996, 5–15) 2 See N. Popov (ed.), The Road to War in Serbia, Trauma and Catharsis, Budapest: CEU, 2000. 3 For the dynamic of third-party intervention, see S. Lucarelli, The International Community and the Yugoslav Crisis: A Chronology of Events, Florence: European University Institute, 1995. 4 H. Wiberg, ‘Third party intervention in Yugoslavia: problems and lessons’, in J. de Wilde and H. Wiberg (eds), Organized Anarchy in Europe: The Role of States and Intergovernmental Organizations, London: I.B. Tauris, 1996, pp. 203–226. 5 Since the military impotence of the KLA compared with the Yugoslav Army was of the same scale as the impotence of the Yugoslav Army compared to NATO, this trilateral conflict can be better characterized as a ‘chain of bullies’ turned against the weaker, than as a war. Indeed, it can be said that the same model has consistently been used throughout the Yugoslav wars by leaders such as Milan Kuèan, Franjo Tudjman, Alia Izetbegoviæ and also Hasim Taqi. 6 T.G. Carpenter (ed.), NATO’s Empty Victory: A Postmortem on the Balkan War, Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2000. 7 J. Galtung, ‘NATO war, ethnic cleansing – is there a way out?’, TV/radio interview, Stockholm, 24 May 1999, available at http://www.transnational.org/ pressinf/pf70.html (accessed 30 July 2002). 8 M. Mandelbaum, ‘A perfect failure: NATO’s war against Yugoslavia’, Foreign Affairs, 78: 5, 1999, 2–8. 9 For a brief analysis of the reasons for Miloševiæ ending the conflict, see Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘Why Miloševiæ capitulated in Kosovo’, The New Leader, 7 October 1999. 10 Earlier the Miloševiæ–Holbrooke agreement of October 1998 had (1) annulled all the results of the Serbian military and police counter-offensive, so the Serbian regime once more lost control over the major part of the territory of Kosovo; (2) created a kind of a security vacuum which favoured the Albanian side and facilitated the revitalization and reorganization of the KLA; (3) installed an asymmetric model of control: the Serbian side was threatened with bombing at any time, while Rugova and the KLA escaped sanction; and (4) established a ‘security see-saw’ which made Serbia and the FRY responsible for the safety of the OSCE verification mission, despite the fact that the Serbian army and police had been effectively hamstrung by the agreement. This created the space for both internal and external manipulation of the mission, permitting NATO to arbitrarily intervene to protect the verifiers, see M. Had iæ, ‘Kosovo agreement – first reading’, Foreign Policy Papers, No. 7, Belgrade: European Movement in Serbia, December 1998, pp. 41–48.
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11 From the address of President Bill Clinton to the citizens of the USA: ‘We did the right thing’, Federal Document Clearing House, 11 June 1999, p. A.31. 12 However one regards the consequences of NATO intervention in Kosovo, it is clear that once the air campaign started, it was entirely logical for Miloševiæ to drive ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo at the greatest possible speed and the greatest possible numbers, in the expectation that he could then negotiate from a position of strength before the bombing did too much damage. Bombing would, after all, create some political cover for his behaviour, allowing him to suppress internal opposition and win support for the government from among the Serb population. (‘The situation in Kosovo’, Report, Document 1651, Paris: Assembly of Western European Union, 10 June 1999, p. 7) 13 The KLA devised its own plan of disarmament, which was subsequently authorized by KFOR; ‘Undertaking of demilitarization and transformation by the UCK’, AFP, 21 June 1999. 14 See M. Had iæ, ‘Kosovo and the security stabilization of South-East Europe’, International Peacekeeping, 7: 2, 2000, 83–94. 15 ‘Without the Soviet Union as the enemy, NATO became an alliance in search of a mission’, R.A. Remington, ‘US military and the Dayton Accords: politicians in uniform?’, Balkan Forum, 4, 1996, 45. 16 Kosovo came to be seen as a strategic interest by the USA and NATO partly because of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Four factors were crucial: (1) the limitations of the so-called ‘new world order’ exposed in Bosnia; (2) the diplomatic mistakes made by the European Union and the USA; (3) the perceived erosion of NATO credibility; (4) resoluteness on the part of the USA to confirm its global leading position. G. Toal, ‘A strategic sign: the geopolitical significance of “Bosnia” in U.S. Foreign Policy’, available at http://toal.net/ (accessed 30 July 2002). 17 However, this unity of approach was not always accompanied by a unity of action on the part of all Euro-Atlantic community members, some undertook steps contradictory to official community policy. For one view of Germany’s role in the violent decomposition of the second Yugoslavia, see T.W. Carr, ‘German and US involvement in the Balkans: a careful coincidence of national policies?’, available at http://www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/carr/carr.htm (accessed 30 July 2002). 18 See: M. Had iæ, ‘The role of the army in the process of disintegration of Yugoslavia’, in Kriegsverbrecher vor Gericht, Das Haager UN-Tribunal für ExJugoslawien, Cologne: Sudosteuropa-Gesellschaft und Deutsche Welle, 1999, pp. 71–78. 19 ‘It is the gateway to areas of intense Western concern – the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iraq and Iran, Afghanistan, the Caspian Sea, and the Transcaucasus. Stability in Southeast Europe must be a precursor to protecting Western interests and reducing threats from farther east.’ Washington Post, 20 April 1999. 20 Cf. D.H. Allin, NATO’s Balkan Interventions, Adelphi Paper No. 347, London: IISS, 2002.
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Mostar International intervention in a divided Bosnian town, 1994–2001 Sumantra Bose
Mostar, the historic capital of Hercegovina, was in 1991 one of the most culturally cosmopolitan and nationally diverse towns in Yugoslavia. Nestled amid Hercegovina’s starkly beautiful, rugged mountain ranges and spread out on both banks of the emerald-green Neretva river, the town had 76,000 residents, of whom 34 per cent were Muslim, 29 per cent Croat, and 19 per cent Serb, while as many as 18 per cent were self-declared ‘Yugoslavs’ even in the twilight of Yugoslavia. The entire municipality of Mostar, including the clusters of villages in the town’s hinterland, had 126,000 people – 35 per cent Muslim, 34 per cent Croat, 20 per cent Serb, and 11 per cent Yugoslav. Mostar’s character as a city was a captivating mosaic of south Slavic, Ottoman Turkish, Austro-Hungarian and Mediterranean influences, a microcosm of the hybrid Bosnian and Yugoslav heritage. Three years later, Mostar lay in ruins. Much of the city centre, the Stari Grad (Old Town), and the neighbourhoods on the eastern bank of the Neretva had been reduced to rubble. The town’s famed symbol, the sixteenth-century Ottoman bridge (Stari Most) spanning the Neretva gorge, was no more. The overwhelming majority of the town’s Serb population had fled or been expelled in 1992. When Muslim–Croat fighting for control of Mostar ended in March 1994, the town, like the rest of Bosnia-Hercegovina (BiH), had undergone a de facto national(ist) partition. The bulk of the larger western bank, including most of the pre-war city’s social housing stock, public utilities and civic facilities, was in the hands of the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) militia and the local Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). The Muslim Armija BiH retained the rubble of the smaller eastern bank and a slice of the western bank contiguous to the bombed-out frontline with Croat forces. Only a few dozen Croats were left in the Muslim enclave (down from perhaps 6,000 before the war), while about 85 per cent of the approximately 15,000 Muslims who had lived in the HVO–HDZ area had been expelled. Most of Mostar’s human assets – highly trained professionals and specialists in various fields, the intelligentsia – had fled the destroyed, divided city, usually in search of refuge and a new life abroad. Their place had been taken by thousands of internally displaced persons of rural or small-town origins, Muslims from Serb-controlled eastern
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Hercegovina and Croat-controlled western, central and southern Hercegovina, and Croats from central Bosnia and from Muslim-controlled areas like Jablanica and Konjic, north of Mostar. Since the Washington Agreement of March 1994, which established the so-called ‘Muslim-Croat federation’ (formally, the ‘Federation of BosniaHercegovina’ or FBiH), the re-integration of Mostar has been viewed by the international community as a key indicator of the viability of that precarious federation. Since the Dayton Peace Accords (DPA) of November–December 1995, the state of affairs in Mostar has also been regarded as a measure of post-war stabilization and the development of the minimal framework of a common state of BiH. Mostar has therefore been subject to a special degree of international attention, supervision and engagement. Between July 1994 and January 1997, the city was under a special supervisory regime, the European Union Administration of Mostar (EUAM). After the expiry of the EUAM’s mandate, its tasks of supervising Mostar’s reconstruction and re-integration were transferred to the consortium of international agencies that entered Bosnia after the Dayton Accords – the UN-supervised International Police Task Force (IPTF), responsible for police monitoring, training and restructuring, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), responsible for framing electoral rules, conducting elections, and grassroots democratization initiatives, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the specialized Reconstruction and Return Task Force (RRTF), responsible for promoting refugee and displaced person (DP) returns, the NATO-led Stabilization Force (SFOR), guarantor of overall security, and the Office of the High Representative-South (OHR-S), based in Mostar, charged with formulating strategy and coordinating the raft of civilian agencies. This chapter surveys the record of intense international activity in Mostar between 1994 and 2001, and on the basis of that survey, draws out the implications of the balance sheet in Mostar for the debate over the efficacy of international intervention in post-war BiH as a whole.1 Mostar has been one of the most important, and difficult, sites of internationally sponsored state-building and democratization in post-war Bosnia, and it refracts in a concentrated, microcosmic form practically all of Bosnia’s problems in the aftermath of the 1992–1995 war. Mostar is an illuminating example of the formidable challenges encountered by international state-builders and democratizers in the post-Dayton period, and of the complex interplay of local and international forces shaping BiH’s painful, tentative post-war transition in a context of deep national cleavages, institutional instability, and chronic social crisis. Mostar’s evolution under international supervision between the end of large-scale armed hostilities in 1994 and the end of 2001 is also a telling lesson that it is inappropriate to view Bosnia’s post-Yugoslav future in terms of the conventional, stark dichotomy between ‘integration’ and ‘partition’. Instead, I argue that Mostar’s, and Bosnia’s, transition to a
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post-Yugoslav future is open and ongoing, a relatively fluid and dynamic process. To the dismay of both ardent advocates of integration and diehard proponents of partition, that transition seems to be leading not to a singular, unambiguous future – as they prefer – but to a more complicated, ambiguous future which is a compound of hybrid elements and competing influences.
A tenuous bridge A strong international presence has helped secure some gains in Mostar. For example, the EUAM poured some 300 million marks worth of donor assistance into the reconstruction of the city, and more money, from Western, Islamic and Asian governments, as well as from non-governmental aid agencies, has come into Mostar in the years since. As a result, utilities such as water, electricity, gas and telephone services were restored fairly rapidly, although with separate systems for the two zones. Schools and hospitals reopened, also on a segregated basis. Most war-damaged buildings, concentrated in the Muslim zone and along the former frontline, have been painstakingly repaired, although one swathe of land in the town centre largely remains a gutted wreck. A certain superficial revival of the service sector has taken place, as restaurants, café-bars, nightclubs, chic designer stores selling clothes and jewellery, and hairstyling salons can be found across town. The Stari Grad quarter has recovered much of its charm, although it can never be the same without the Old Bridge. Two other measures, implemented by the international community throughout BiH since mid-1998, have over time had a distinctly softening effect on the hard line of division running through Mostar. The first was the introduction of common licence plates for all BiH cars, replacing plates bearing distinctive group symbols and emblems which instantly flagged the national identity of the owners. When this was made mandatory in mid1998, Mostar was a tense city, where freedom of movement between the two zones was very limited. By 2000, freedom of movement with motor vehicles had become the norm in Mostar, although it is still self-limited for pedestrian traffic. The main intent of the new licence-plate system was to increase vehicular traffic between the Federation and BiH’s other entity, the Republika Srpska (RS), but it also had the effect of softening de facto intraentity boundaries, such as in Mostar. Three road bridges between the city’s western and eastern banks are now in operation; in addition, there are several footbridges, including a temporary suspension structure at the point previously spanned by the Old Bridge. The second step was the introduction, also in mid-1998, of the common Bosnian currency – the ‘convertible mark’ (KM), pegged 1:1 to the German mark – under the auspices of BiH’s internationally run Central Bank, as sole legal tender throughout the country. After an initial phase of grumpy opposition, the KM began to be accepted in groceries, butcher shops, retail stores, café-bars, restaurants and hotels in
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west Mostar. Today, it has all but squeezed out Croatia’s currency, the kuna, in the predominantly Croat districts, just as the KM has gradually supplanted the FRY dinar in RS. The creation of a single monetary space, an almost total freedom of movement, and substantial reconstruction of war-damaged infrastructure, utilities and buildings have all been enabled in Mostar, as in BiH as a whole, by a huge, protracted international peace-building effort. However, the overall balance-sheet of international intervention in Mostar is dominated by frustration, slow progress, tenacious stalling by local power-brokers (especially on the Croat side), and even outright failure to achieve goals. After more than seven years of extensive international involvement, politics in Mostar is still highly polarized between Muslims and Croats, and the police service is only superficially integrated. The remnants of the pre-war economy are effectively divided, as is key infrastructure, such as the telecommunications network, the water supply system, the public health system, and hydro-power plants located in the vicinity of the city. The city’s educational system functions in segregated spheres. Cultural activity takes place in distinct Croat and Muslim spaces, and throughout town, symbolic markers of the city’s division into ‘Croat’ and ‘Muslim’ territory are conspicuous. In short, duplicate sets of almost every kind of institution and facility exist in Mostar, precisely the kind of segmented, parallel regimes anathema to international officials supervising the peace implementation process. The continuing bifurcation of Mostar’s society and polity supplies plenty of ammunition to attack the international community’s record. But in fact, international intervention has gradually and incrementally reconstructed a very tenuous bridge across the Neretva, preventing what would have otherwise been the inevitable outcome – fully fledged partition. The failure of international engagement to produce dramatic breakthroughs is not an indictment of the international role as such, but rather a pointer to the intrinsic limitations of what can be achieved even by a massive, protracted international intervention in the context of a very deeply divided society. The international experience in Mostar supports the argument, developed in my book Bosnia after Dayton (2002), that a gradual, incremental approach, and a relatively modest, streamlined set of goals, will in the end leave the least divisive and most usable legacy for Bosnians themselves, in collaboration with other Yugoslav successor-states, to build on in the future. The most realistic and fair international policy is to resist the polar extremes of either sponsoring unpopular, coerced integration (which will fail) or passively condoning the chauvinist preference for partition and segregation, and promoting a necessarily grey third way that steers a skilful middle course between these extreme and untenable temptations. Aiding the reconstruction of bridges – even precarious ones – across divides rendered deep and apparently unbridgeable by war is an apt metaphor for such a sophisticated, calibrated approach.
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Refugee and DP returns: the decisive factor Bosnia’s multinational social fabric has been undone permanently. The vast majority of Bosnians, of all three communities, now live in areas solidly dominated by their own national group. Between 1 January 1996 and 30 September 2001, some 245,000 ‘minority returns’ occurred in BiH; this term applies to returns by refugees and internally displaced persons to their original homes in areas which are now dominated, demographically and politically, by another community. Of these, over half – 124,000 persons – returned during 2000 and 2001 (which are also the years in which the first sizeable returns of Muslims to the RS occurred). As a result, by 2001 a series of minority enclaves had re-emerged on the otherwise homogenized BiH map. Minority returns, even if they occur on a large scale – which is not the case in BiH except in some localities, such as returns by more than 20,000 Serbs to Sarajevo between January 2000 and September 2001 – are not in themselves sufficient to restore a multinational society and polity in the substantive sense. Nonetheless, minority returns – the more the better – are the essential basis for any viable strategy to re-integrate, or even for the more practical and sensible option of working to restore broken bridges. The rate of minority returns in Bosnia picked up significantly only in 2000, when over 67,000 such returns were recorded, a sharp rise from each of the preceding two years, 1998 and 1999, when the figure hovered around 40,000. Returns continued to languish at abysmal levels in Mostar, however. Prior to 2000, Muslim returnees to Croat-controlled parts of Mostar numbered in the low hundreds, and even this was partly offset by more Muslims being forcibly evicted from west Mostar after the war (especially in 1996–1997). Returns by displaced Croats to Muslim-controlled districts were even more negligible, in part a consequence of a deliberate attempt by the local and regional HDZ to seal a permanent territorial division. Returns by Serbs to both sides of the city did occur – Serbs are a marginalized and hence non-threatening community in Mostar – but only at the level of a steady trickle. During 2000, Mostar defied the pattern of increased minority returns in many parts of BiH. Just ninety Muslims returned to west Mostar and thirty-seven Croats to east Mostar (Serb returns were slightly higher: 103 to west Mostar and 127 to east Mostar). The problem extends beyond Mostar. The divided city is located at the geographical centre of the Muslim–Croat Federation’s most divided and polarized canton – Canton 7, Hercegovina-Neretva – whose northern municipalities (Konjic, Jablanica) are overwhelmingly Muslim and southern municipalities (Capljina, Stolac, Ravno, Neum, plus the Prozor district, tucked into the canton’s northwestern corner, adjoining central Bosnia) are overwhelmingly Croat. In 2001, however, the pace of minority returns in Mostar increased dramatically, bringing the city somewhat more in line with BiH as a whole. Against the almost 57,000 returns recorded in BiH as a whole in the first nine months of 2001, 1,477 Muslims (‘Bosniacs’) returned to west Mostar, as did 962 Serbs, the latter mainly from the nearby RS town of Nevesinje,
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east of Mostar.2 These are substantial numbers for a medium-sized town, especially compared to 2000 and earlier. The corresponding figures for east Mostar were more modest – 231 Croats and 311 Serbs – but still not insignificant, since east Mostar is both less urban and much less populous than west Mostar.3 The decisive factor in enabling this improved situation has been the international community’s renewed emphasis on vigorous property law implementation – entailing eviction of illegal occupants and repossession by original owners or tenants – under the stewardship of BiH’s top international supervisor between 1999 and 2002, ‘high representative’ Wolfgang Petritsch. This strategy has enabled sharp increases in minority returns not only, albeit belatedly, in Mostar, but also in other cities like Sarajevo and Banja Luka. In Mostar, the process was facilitated by the high representative’s dismissal from office, in late 1999, of the obstructive Croat mayor and housing department head of one municipal district, Mostar South-West, which is the core of urban Mostar and has the highest density of the city’s stock of social housing (publicly owned apartments). The much more optimistic scenario regarding minority returns that unfolded in Mostar in 2001 shows that even this deeply divided and polarized city is not as frozen in time as is sometimes assumed. Returns continued at a brisk pace during 2002, and by 30 September 2002 the BiH-wide total of minority returnees was 368,000. During the first nine months of 2002, 2,059 Bosniacs and 1,267 Serbs returned to west Mostar, while 1,109 Serbs and 1,020 Croats returned to east Mostar.4 However, the wartime legacy of distrust and division that permeates almost all aspects of life in this scarred city will prove difficult to overcome.
Politics: the persistence of polarization Bosnia’s first election after the DPA was a local election held in Mostar under EUAM and IFOR (Implementation Force, precursor to SFOR) supervision at the end of June 1996, preceding the first post-war general elections to BiH’s state, entity and cantonal institutions in the autumn. Although Mostar had by mid-1996 been at ‘peace’ for two years, the electorate simply collapsed along the national(ist) faultline. A list headed by the (Muslim) Party of Democratic Action (SDA) won 28,505 votes (49 per cent), and a HDZ list polled 26,680 votes (46 per cent). A non-sectarian list, including the Social Democratic Party (SDP-BiH) and smaller groups, got 1,937 votes – 3.5 per cent. A totally still-born city council of thirty-seven members was elected, with twenty-one seats going to the SDA coalition (including five Serbs) and sixteen to the HDZ. Under the Interim Statute of the City of Mostar, published by the EUAM in February 1996 after extensive consultations and negotiations with Mostar’s SDA and HDZ power-brokers (Safet Orucevic and Mijo Brajkovic, respectively), the prewar municipality of Mostar was divided into six municipal districts. Of these, three (Mostar South-West, Mostar West and Mostar South) covered
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the Croat-controlled area, and three – Mostar Stari Grad, Mostar North and Mostar South-East – spanned the zone under Muslim control. The Statute also made provision for the existence and development of a neutral ‘central zone’ in the decimated town-centre (this was strongly resisted by the Croats and a controversy over its size led eventually to the resignation of the EUAM’s head, Hans Koschnick, in March 1996). In addition to a city council and government, six municipal councils were elected at the same time. Formation of governments in the three Croat-majority municipalities were blocked by the HDZ until mid-1997. During this period of deadlock, forced evictions of remnant Muslim residents in west Mostar escalated, and in February 1997, an ugly confrontation between Croat police and goons and a crowd of Muslim citizens at a cemetery on Liska Street, just inside the Croat sector, led to the death of one Muslim man. Wishful hopes voiced by international officials that the post-election phase would see rapid progress towards the normalization and reunification of Mostar were swiftly revealed to be a pipe-dream. The second city and municipal elections in Mostar, organized and supervised by the OSCE, were held in September 1997 together with the first BiH-wide local elections. The outcome in Mostar substantially replicated the results of 1996. The SDA’s Orucevic became Mayor, heading the more or less irrelevant joint city administration, switching places with the HDZ’s Ivan Prskalo, Mayor in 1996–7, who became Deputy Mayor. In addition, six 25-member municipal assemblies were elected as mandated, and six municipal governments came into existence. Under internationally devised regulations, each of these six municipal regimes had power-sharing mechanisms built into their structures. In the three Croat-controlled districts, Muslims were guaranteed a share in the executive offices of local government, and vice versa. It was stipulated for example that in a Croat-controlled municipality, the mayor would be a Croat but the deputy mayor, who would be responsible for day-to-day administration and also have charge over refugee and DP returns, would be a Muslim – and vice versa for a Muslim-controlled municipality. The intent of this scheme was unimpeachable, but ground realities in Mostar tended to confound its goals. Ten months after the elections, in July 1998, I found that Marko Rozic, Croat deputy mayor of the Stari Grad district – which is mostly on the east bank but spills over into the Muslim-held slice of the west bank – had not attended office even once, simply because of the office’s location on ‘Muslim’ territory. In June of that year, Mustafa Skoro, Muslim deputy mayor of the hard-line Croatcontrolled Mostar South-West municipality and a displaced person, decided to start repairs to his damaged house, located in that district, with the intention of returning there. The night after the repairs began, another empty Muslim home next to his was fire-bombed and gutted, in an obvious warning to him not to take his responsibilities – or his rights – at face value. His planned return was postponed indefinitely after the incident.
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The difficulties of operationalizing formal power-sharing arrangements and cross-community consensual governance at the local level in Mostar are symptomatic of the problems encountered in making post-Dayton BiH’s consociational and confederative institutional model work as a whole. The international community has also attempted to foster a degree of cross-national integration in Mostar through another technique recommended for that purpose in divided societies – deliberate design of the rules and regulations of the electoral system. As in elections at all levels of legislative bodies in BiH under the Dayton regime, a system of proportional representation (PR) based on party (and coalition) lists is used in Mostar’s city and municipal elections, and ‘mandates’ (seats) are allocated according to a formula known as the Sainte-Lague method. In the BiH local elections of April 2000, this system was modified by the introduction of an ‘open list’ provision, under which voters could mark preferences for individual candidates on a list rather than simply vote for the list as a whole. Open lists were extended to general elections held in November 2000, and have subsequently been institutionalized in the permanent Election Law enacted in August 2001. In Mostar, this system was qualified by a further, specific regulation. The seats on the city council and the municipal councils, between 1996 and 2000, were divided up in advance by nationality. Thus, the thirty city council members had to include ten Bosniacs, ten Croats and ten ‘Others’. Eighteen of these members were elected from the municipalities (three from each), the remaining twelve from city-wide lists. Article 56 of the Interim Statute of Mostar also pre-assigned seats on the municipal councils (twenty-five each) by nationality (see Table 4.1). 7DEOH 6HDWDOORFDWLRQVRQ0RVWDUPXQLFLSDOFRXQFLOV 0XQLFLSDOLW\&URDWV%RVQLDFV2WKHUV 0RVWDU1RUWK 0RVWDU6WDUL*UDG 0RVWDU6RXWK(DVW 0RVWDU6RXWK 0RVWDU6RXWK:HVW 0RVWDU:HVW
Under this formula of reservation of seats by nationality, not only were Bosniacs, Croats and Others (in practice, Serbs) supposed to be equally represented on the city council, but in no municipal council – except Mostar South-East, a sparsely populated district – did any one community have the majority of seats pre-assigned in its favour. The more obvious objective of this electoral framework is to ensure that all the three groups that made Mostar a multinational mosaic until 1992 are represented in municipal and city institutions. There is a further, less obvious
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purpose, however. Thus in the municipal councils seats are allocated to parties (and coalition lists) in the first instance according to the SainteLague method. But, once the quota of any of the national groups is filled, the next candidate on the same list belonging to one of the other two groups is elected. If there is no such candidate on that party’s list, the seat automatically passes to another party, starting with the list that has the next Sainte-Lague quotient, which does have such a candidate. If no such candidate(s) can be found, the seat(s) remain vacant. The same procedure has been followed in filling the twelve seats on the city council elected from citywide lists, which is done after the eighteen seats elected from the municipalities have been distributed, in a step-by-step process. In the first step Seat 1 for each district is allocated, then Seat 2, then Seat 3. If during any step one national community is poised to exceed its maximum allocation of ten seats on the city council, the seat passes to the next candidate on the same list who belongs to one of the two groups whose quota is yet unfilled. If that party or coalition does not have such an eligible candidate on its list, the seat is given to the party or coalition list with the next quotient that does have such a candidate. If any seats cannot be filled after repeated applications of this method, they remain vacant. This framework of electoral regulations amounts to an invitation to cross-national politics cutting across communal boundaries, in the sense that it clearly favours parties and coalitions with ‘mixed’ candidate lists. As such, it is designed to provide an in-built incentive to the major players in local politics to put forward at least somewhat multinational slates. The electoral system does give the most disadvantaged and marginal of Mostar’s three communities – remnant and returnee Serbs – a certain guaranteed representation on the city council and the municipal councils that would otherwise not be the case. It also tends to favour the seat-gaining prospects of small parties within each of the three blocs. However, the electoral system has not had the desired effect of promoting substantively multinational politics in Mostar, for several reasons. The first reason is the absence, in Mostar, as in BiH as a whole, of one or more significant parties with a cross-national base of support which can take advantage of the opportunities offered by the system. In the city-wide contest to fill twelve seats on the city council in April 2000, for example, a coalition of Muslim sectarian parties (SDA and the ‘Party of Bosnia and Hercegovina’ or SBiH) polled 42 per cent of the vote and the HDZ 37 per cent. In other words, four out of five votes cast went to either Muslim or Croat sectarian parties. The SDP, Bosnia’s only major party of cross-national orientation – although not of cross-national base, since the overwhelming majority of its supporters are urban Muslims, usually areligious and better educated – was far behind, winning only 13 per cent of the vote. The nationally segmented character of the party system and the dominance of sectional and sectarian parties of various hues and stripes sharply limit the integrative impact of electoral systems in Mostar and throughout BiH.
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The second reason is that the sectarian parties usually figure out the intent behind the design of particular types of electoral frameworks and modify their tactics in response. Both the SDA and the HDZ, especially the latter, have done this in Mostar. Thus in the key Mostar South-West municipal district, where Croats are entitled to fill only twelve seats, the HDZ retained majority control in the 2000 local elections, winning fifteen seats by including several Serbs on their list. The same happened in Mostar West and also in Mostar South, where, in a constituency in which the Croats are only entitled to a maximum of twelve seats, the HDZ performed spectacularly, electing nineteen councillors including at least three Muslims in addition to several Serbs. The HDZ in Hercegovina can hardly be trusted to represent the interests of Muslim and Serb constituents. This was nothing but tactical selection of candidates in response to electoral regulations, leaving the dynamics of power in local politics and its ethnic basis essentially unaltered. Similarly, in each of the three Muslim-majority districts the SDA/SBiH list gained majorities of seats, although the SDP did well in the Stari Grad municipality, taking most of the seats reserved for non-Muslims. Of the thirty seats on the city council, the Muslim nationalist coalition took sixteen seats, the HDZ eleven, and the SDP three seats. Overall, the case of Mostar is typical of the limits of the integrative potential of electoral engineering in BiH.5 In addition, as in Bosnia as a whole, much local power is exercised through informal channels. In east Mostar, real power rests with the shady strongman Safet Orucevic, while in west Mostar, it rests with a cast of unsavoury oligarchs united by a HVO paramilitary background and/or connections to Hercegovacka Banka, the financial nerve-centre of Croat hard-liners targeted by international punitive action in 2001. This is sometimes called ‘the Siroki Brijeg faction’, after a town synonymous with Croat extremist politics and organized crime located immediately west of Mostar, where Tudjman’s notorious Defence Minister, Gojko Susak, was born and raised. As I have mentioned, Mostar’s predicament is compounded by its location at the vortex of the Muslim-Croat federation’s most divided and polarized canton, Hercegovina-Neretva (the other bi-national canton, central Bosnia, which like Hercegovina-Neretva has a special power-sharing regime, has done relatively better in the post-war years, powered by a much superior returns record). The canton is the most important layer of government in the FBiH’s framework, and its institutions have jurisdiction over decisionmaking and implementation in a wide range of subjects.6 In general elections in September 1998, the HDZ-BiH won 49.5 per cent of votes in the canton; two years later, in November 2000, it secured 48.2 per cent. If the vote shares of small right-wing Croat parties are added to this tally, hard-line Croat politics is the choice of a slight majority of the canton’s electorate. In autumn 1998 the major Muslim-based parties polled 43 per cent of the vote in the canton, of which four-fifths went to the SDA-SBiH coalition. In late 2000 Muslim parties polled around the same percentage, this time split more evenly between the SDA, the SDP and the SBiH, in that order.7
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Policing is in the cantonal purview, so international efforts, led by the UN and the regional OHR, to create an integrated police force in Mostar have of necessity been conducted in a canton-wide context. The canton’s Interior Ministry (MUP) has thirteen police stations under its jurisdiction. Of these, six are in Mostar – three on each side, corresponding to the municipal districts. Of the others, some are in hard-line Croat areas (Stolac, Capljina, Prozor), while others, such as Jablanica and Konjic, are in solidly Muslim territory. After several years of intensive effort by the ‘internationals’, ‘physical’ – as distinct from ‘functional’ – integration of the Interior Ministry was finally achieved in mid-2000. Until then, duplicate interior ministries had existed in the literal, physical sense, with an all-Croat ministry functioning from west Mostar and its Bosniac counterpart from the Muslim zone. In future, there is supposed to be a single Interior Ministry headquarters in Mostar’s ‘no man’s land’, the central zone. In the meantime, physical integration has meant that the crime-investigation department and legal, personnel and administrative sections of the ministry operate on a joint basis from the Stone building on the west side, while the ministers’ office, uniformed police department and finance section work from the UPFM building in the Muslim sector. In a reciprocal exchange forty-two Bosniac police and other ministry employees have moved to the Stone building – which the BiH Croat intelligence service was constrained to vacate – and 109 Croats to the UPFM premises. This development, a major breakthrough by Mostar standards, amounted to only one step towards the creation of a genuinely unified, multi-ethnic police service in the city and its region. In Mostar, according to local UN sources interviewed by this author in late 2000, ‘no communication’ and ‘no cooperation’ existed between the three police stations in west Mostar and the three in east Mostar. Many Croat police in the city are members of the HVO war-veterans’ association which acts as an ultranationalist pressure-group in local politics. Following sustained international pressure, the six stations had developed a single radio frequency for emergency calls, but were still maintaining separate frequencies for other calls. The east Mostar stations customarily have their autopsies and analysis of blood and DNA samples done in Sarajevo, the west Mostar stations in Split, the nearest large Croatian city on the Dalmatian coast. Separate detention facilities continued to exist, with the Croats in control of the pre-war city’s prison. In some stations in west Mostar and even more so in the smaller Croat-controlled towns of the region, it was commonplace to find the sahovnica (the red-and-white checkerboard that is the Croat national symbol and Croatian state emblem), Herceg-Bosna (the name of the wartime BiH Croat statelet) insignia, HDZ party literature, statues and pictures of the Virgin Mary, portraits of the late Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, and occasionally maps of Greater Croatia, in contravention of OHR directives that all public buildings including police stations should display only Federation symbols and insignia of ‘a neutral or inoffensive nature’.
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This simply reflected the situation in the wider canton. At the canton level, Bosniacs tended to report to the Bosniac deputy minister of interior and Croats to the Croat minister of interior, perpetuating separate chains of command and responsibility (appointment of ministers and their deputies on national criteria is a constitutional requirement in the Federation, particularly in the bi-national cantons). Separate interior ministry budgets continued to exist – in 2000, 18 million marks for the wealthier Croat side and 8 million for the Bosniac side – despite partial integration of accounts under international mediation. In every police station the position of deputy chief is occupied by a member of the minority group, as per internationally imposed regulations. According to internal UN documentation made available to this author, audits conducted during 1999–2000 found that ‘in all police administrations the deputy is almost always bypassed, does not attend high command meetings within the administration and does not issue subordinates with instructions and directives.’ The degree of marginalization varied – typically, Croat deputy chiefs in Bosniac-controlled municipalities were less marginalized than Bosniacs in Croat-controlled municipalities. Nonetheless, in all police precincts audited, whether on Croat or Bosniac turf, it was found that ‘the minority police officers [assigned to the station] are not working as their job descriptions envisage … In some Bosniac-controlled stations the Croat deputies do not spend the required time at work and seem to have no real intention to work as effective deputies.’ Police officers working in the same station received their supplies including weapons from different wings of the nominally integrated Interior Ministry, and personnel matters (routine administration, disciplinary action) were dealt with on the basis of separate filing systems for employees of different nationalities in each precinct. Moreover, the vast majority of minority officers lived in their ‘own’ areas and commuted to work – Muslims to Stolac, Capljina, Prozor, Neum and the west Mostar stations, Croats to the east Mostar stations, Jablanica and Konjic. As for Serb representation, Hercegovina-Neretva is supposed to have a total of 170 Serb officers in its thirteen stations, but as of late 2000 only fifteen had been deployed. By 2000, the international community had succeeded to some extent in creating the formal framework of a multi-ethnic police force in Mostar and its canton, based on a 48:52 Bosniac–Croat ratio agreed with representatives of the two groups. This was a marked improvement on the early post-war period, 1995–1997, when all police stations were mono-national. The limited progress, however, was dealt a setback by the crisis over Croat national rights during 2001, when 897 of 923 Croat employees (police and support staff) of the canton’s Interior Ministry issued a declaration of solidarity with the HDZ-led Croatian National Congress (HNS) in its confrontation with Bosnia’s international officialdom, and the interior minister, Dragan Mandic, was subsequently fired from his post by the high representative’s decree. Much like a skeleton devoid of flesh and blood, the structure of multi-ethnic policing established by international intervention lacks substance, and the form remains at variance with realities on the ground.
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The efforts of UN and OHR personnel directed at setting up a professional, multinational judicial system in Mostar and its region have met with comparatively greater success. By 2000, after numerous delays and stalling by Croats, a multinational cantonal court started functioning in Mostar’s central zone with the usual sharing of positions – cantonal court president a Croat, public prosecutor posts equally distributed between Croats and Bosniacs, president of the cantonal minor offence court a Bosniac, the cantonal public attorney a Croat with two Bosniac deputies, and so on. Some Serbs were also included among the cantonal judiciary. In addition, nine ‘basic’ (municipal) courts started functioning with Croat, Bosniac and Serb judges and prosecutors, although, curiously, the canton’s Ministry of Justice, which has a Bosniac minister and Croat deputy minister, remained segmented, physically as well as functionally. In late 2000 and early 2001, this canton court, with the approval of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, tried nine low-level indictees – three Croat and six Muslim ex-soldiers accused of committing war crimes in and around Mostar – in two separately conducted cases. The trials rapidly descended into farce and then fiasco, as key prosecution witnesses inexplicably withdrew, while a detained Croat had to be released for lack of evidence and a detained Muslim was freed on grounds of mistaken identity. Eventually both trials ended in acquittals. A newly formed judiciary in a deeply divided town, set in a deeply divided region within a deeply divided country, was clearly not the appropriate site for a pilot project in locally conducted war-crimes trials. Far from furthering the cause of truth and reconciliation, the trials exposed the deeply opposed perceptions in the town, again typical of Bosnia as a whole, regarding what happened in Mostar during the war and who was responsible. A Croat resident of west Mostar acidly commented that it was ‘about time someone has been put on trial for committing crimes against Croats’. A Muslim resident of the east bank approved of the concept of retributive justice, but expressed frustration that only ‘minor criminals’ had been charged. ‘Will anyone [in positions of authority] ever be held accountable for shelling us, for killing, persecuting and starving us for months?’ she asked.8
Dimensions of the divide: economy and infrastructure, education, culture and media, symbolic partition Mostar’s political divide is paralleled and reinforced by deep schisms and antagonisms in other spheres. The city’s sole profit-making firm is an aluminium plant, Aluminij Mostar, which employed more than 5,000 Mostarians before the war. It now employs less than a quarter that number but has, nonetheless, been described by The Financial Times as ‘efficient, profitable and exporting to some of the world’s top companies’.9 The architect of this success story is the hard-line Croat politician Mijo Brajkovic, who took over the company during the war, revived it with generous infusions of
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‘private’ capital from Croatia soon after the fighting ended, and turned it into a Croats-only company which has partnerships with firms in Croatia, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. According to the Muslim leader Orucevic, Aluminij is ‘the principal means to fight for the division of [Mostar and] the Federation’.10 Aluminij certainly has been one of the economic pillars of the ‘Herceg-Bosna’ regime, along with other shady firms such as the Stolac-based Renner Company. It was subjected to an OHRsponsored audit in 2001 but its transformation is likely to be a long haul. The remnants of Mostar’s other major pre-war industry, an engineering firm called ‘Soko’ (Falcon), which used to produce military and civilian helicopters among other products, has also been in the hands of Croat hard-liners since the end of the war. East Mostar’s only sizeable enterprise is a state-owned tobacco factory, Fabrika Duhana Mostar, which produces the inexpensive local cigarette brands. Unemployment is rampant on both sides of the city, as it is in BiH as a whole, along with associated social ills like drug abuse and petty crime. The Neretva valley has three hydro-electric plants close to Mostar: HE Salakovac, HE Grabovica and HE Mostar. According to Mostar’s Interim Statute, these plants belong to the joint city administration. But in practice, the Salakovac and Grabovica plants, which are in Muslim-controlled territory, are operated by Sarajevo-based Elektroprivreda BiH and supply power to east Mostar, while HE Mostar is the property of Elektroprivreda HZHB (‘Croatian Community of Herceg-Bosna’) and feeds into the west Mostar grid. In May 2000, a World Bank loan worth 12 million dollars to build a modern water supply and sanitation system for the entire city was salvaged by international efforts at the last minute, in the face of tenacious opposition from controlling interests in the west Mostar water company, Vodovod. A contorted compromise formula was devised whereby a future common water-supply and sanitation company would have joint management supervised by the city authorities but would, nonetheless, retain ‘two branch units’. Mostar’s schooling system is segregated on national lines. The existence in BiH of three different curricula in three separate and highly politicized educational systems has been a major challenge for the international community. Given the realities of the post-war context, restoration of integrated schooling and an identical curriculum is practically impossible. On the other hand, it is essential to build bridges across the three systems if the agenda of the most retrograde partitionist and segregationist forces is to be thwarted. In May 2000, the OHR mediated an ‘Education Agreement’ signed by the FBiH’s education minister and deputy education minister (a Bosniac and Croat, respectively), as well as the RS’s education minister. This agreement stipulated that: While each constituent people of BiH is entitled to preserve and develop its own cultural and linguistic heritage, common and shared elements
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Subsequently, some progress was made in expunging ‘offensive material’ from three sets of textbooks and appending ‘supplementary annexes’ to textbooks published in Belgrade and Zagreb. However, the OHR noted a lack of progress in July 2000 on the teaching of the second, Cyrillic or Latin alphabet in all schools and on the introduction of ‘shared and common’ curricular modules for language, literature, culture and religion. Mostar has a notable tradition of intellectual and educational excellence. Its elite high school, the Gimnazija (gymnasium), housed in an elegant Austro-Hungarian period building in the town centre, was known throughout BiH and beyond for educating generations of Mostar’s best and brightest. In 1993–1994, this building, located just off the city’s Boulevard, found itself on the frontline bisecting the city and was extensively damaged. It lay unused, a gutted shell, for several years. In 1999, the hard-line HDZ Mostar South-West municipality unilaterally started repairs to the building, and in 2000 classes began for west-side children in the repaired section under the banner of ‘Fra. Dominik Mandic Grammar School’. In June 2000, the OHR’s regional office responded to Muslim objections to this development – the building falls in the area designated as the neutral ‘central zone’ – by mediating an agreement between the two sides on ‘future joint use’ of the premises. Under the terms of this agreement, ‘Grammar School Fra. Dominik Mandic shall provide the conditions for Grammar School Aleksa Santic [Muslim-run] to be accommodated at the same premises. The building shall be [thus] used when its reconstruction is complete’, possibly with the aid of funds provided by the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries.11 So, largely separate existences for the time being, albeit under the same roof, provided the basis for compromise, with the international community stressing the virtues of mutual tolerance and with time, greater interaction and cooperation between the communities. In a striking fashion, the issue of the structuring of education encapsulates the international dilemmas of reconstructing Bosnia’s divided society. Mostar continues to have two universities as well – a Croat-controlled ‘University of Mostar’ and a Muslim-dominated ‘University Dzemal Bijedic’ (the name of the pre-war university, named after a top Bosnian/Yugoslav communist leader from Mostar). After a visit to Mostar in October 2000, high representative Petritsch ‘stressed … that resources for higher education in Mostar should be pooled’, and ‘expressed the hope that cooperation between the two existing universities becomes the norm’.12 These are well-chosen words, and reflect a sound approach to the complicated problem of post-war Bosnia.
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Systematic encouragement of cooperation across the dividing lines, not ‘integration’, represents the best way forward for this fractured society and the most effective strategy for international intervention. Mostar’s cultural life is also highly segmented. There are two sets of theatres, puppet theatres, and cultural centres – indeed, even fashion shows and beauty contests come in duplicate versions, with the Croat-run Hotel Ero and the Bosniac-run Hotel Bristol providing the alternative venues. During 2000, Mostar’s new Deputy Mayor, Croat liberal Neven Tomic (expelled from the HDZ a year later), breached a psychological barrier when he started attending, with his wife, concerts held in the Pavarotti Music Centre, located in the heart of the east bank. But in August 2000, a Mostar concert by the popular Bosnian singer Dino Merlin, who is a Muslim from Sarajevo’s Stari Grad district and has a history of campaigning for the SDA, scheduled in the Bijeli Brijeg stadium, located on the western outskirts of town, had to be cancelled at the last minute after a rash of threats. Unlike the early post-war years, newspapers and magazines now circulate freely across Mostar regardless of political tilt or content. But readership is segmented between Croats, who read Jutarnji List or Slobodna Dalmacija, dailies published in Croatia (Dalmatia), and Muslims, who usually prefer Sarajevo’s Dnevni Avaz. As for local and regional radio and television, a human rights monitoring group noted in its report for January–June 2001 (coinciding with the peak of the HDZ-led ‘Croat self-rule’ campaign) that ‘a real media war is raging in Mostar between the east and west sides … Each side claims that whatever the other side does is bad.’13 Civil society groups working to develop the rule of law on a non-communal basis do exist in Mostar – one such group is the Association of Citizens for Human Rights Protection, which runs an office in the central zone – but tend to be isolated and marginalized. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Mostar’s divide consists of visual symbols used to mark zones and boundaries of the space dominated and controlled by each community. The periphery of ‘Muslim’ territory on the west bank, off the eastern edges of the Boulevard, is demarcated by a long line of slender minarets of dzamije (mosques) erected since the war. Just across the Boulevard and the former frontline, the beginning of Croat turf is signalled by an enormous Catholic cathedral, also newly constructed, its towering spire reaching high into the sky. The concept of shared, intercommunal space, which has been the key to co-existence in Bosnia for decades if not centuries, has been grievously damaged by the end of Yugoslavia, the eclipse of the Yugoslav idea, and the destruction wrought by the Bosnian war. In June 2000, the HDZ and HVO added further fuel to the fire by installing an enormous cross – symbolizing Christianity and Catholicism – amid much pomp and ceremony on Mount Hum, the rugged range overlooking Mostar. This cross is visible from almost every part of town, and serves as a daily reminder of the poisonous politics that has blighted this once-beautiful town on the banks of the Neretva.
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Conclusion: the lessons of Mostar The change of regime in Croatia in early 2000, following the death of Franjo Tudjman, raised expectations in some international circles of an imminent breakthrough in re-integrating Mostar. Indeed, there were some optimistic signs. In May 2000, the Hercegovina-Neretva cantonal parliament adopted, after a delay of two years caused by HDZ obstruction, two laws on local self-government and distribution of public revenues in Mostar, under which the joint city government, which had lacked a financial base, is supposed to receive 30 per cent of all revenues collected in the six municipalities. The liberal Tomic assumed the deputy mayoralty of the city, with the apparent support of HDZ-BiH chief Ante Jelavic, around the same time. Other winds of change from Croatia blowing through Hercegovina included a reduction in Zagreb’s financial support for various kinds of HDZ-BiH parallel structures, including the HVO, and for patronage mechanisms such as pension funds for war invalids and elderly people. In June 2000, international officials announced the commencement of a bus service connecting the western and eastern banks. In July the new Croatian Prime Minister Ivica Racan visited Mostar. He walked around the Old Town, announced a Croatian government donation towards reconstruction of the Old Bridge, and attended a dinner hosted by Orucevic and Tomic, which had local Serb Civic Council leaders, including a returned Orthodox prelate, in attendance. However, in a clear indication of the complicated equations of local power in Mostar, Racan’s itinerary also included a visit to the Aluminij plant and a meeting with Brajkovic. The initial surge of optimism was belied by developments in late 2000 and 2001. In April 2000, the HDZ-BiH held its own in local elections, winning outright control of twenty-seven Croat-dominated municipalities in BiH, although voter turn-out was low in some traditional party strongholds. Between then and general elections to state, entity and cantonal bodies due in November, the party appeared somewhat torn between different perspectives on what sort of political stance to adopt in the post-Tudjman era – an unreconstructed hard-line stance (the majority view in Hercegovina), a calibrated, pragmatic approach vis-à-vis the Bosnian state and the international community (advocated by Jelavic at the sixth Party Congress held in Sarajevo in July), and a more thoroughgoing liberal reconstruction (a position associated with a small minority in the party, including the figures of Tomic and Jadranko Prlic, both of whom are no longer in the HDZ). By autumn, catalyzed by a confrontation with the OSCE regarding a change in electoral rules disadvantaging HDZ’s seat prospects in the upper house of the Federation parliament, the dilemma appeared to have been resolved. The demise of the patron regime in Croatia appeared to have increased the insecurity of BiH Croats and encouraged the HDZ-BiH to adopt a more radical stance, at least in the short term. The HDZ went to the polls in November on the slogan ‘self-determination or extinction’ (for the Croat people in BiH), and its campaign gained notoriety for patently anti-Muslim rhetoric
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and television advertising. Essentially, the party strategy was tapping widespread Croat dissatisfaction with internationally enforced cohabitation with Muslims in the framework of the Muslim–Croat federation, which was born of American prodding in 1994. Despite the power-sharing, equalitybased structure of the Federation, most Croats, outnumbered 4:1 by Muslims, tend to view themselves as the subordinate partner in an unwanted marriage blighted by mutual suspicion. In the elections, the HDZ-BiH won 80 per cent of all votes cast by Croats; small HDZ allies mobilized in the newly formed HNS took another 13 per cent. In a parallel referendum organized by the HNS on ‘full cultural and political equality’ for BiH Croats – an exercise declared illegal by the international community – 71 per cent of all Croats registered to vote in BiH participated and 99 per cent of those affirmed the HDZ/HNS line. The confrontation between the HDZ and Bosnia’s international supervisors – simmering since late 1999 and early 2000, when international peacekeepers raided Croat intelligence buildings in west Mostar and then closed down a hard-line Croat TV station in the city – subsequently escalated into full-blown crisis in the first half of 2001. West Mostar, daubed with graffiti proclaiming SFOR an occupation force and calling on Croats to resist, was the epicentre of the revolt. Highlights included a riot in west Mostar after a SFOR-led international raid on the main office of Hercegovacka Banka, the temporary evacuation of international civilian staff from their base in the Croat-run Hotel Ero, where the first EUAM administrator Hans Koschnick had narrowly escaped assassination by a anti-tank rocket in September 1994 and was almost lynched by a mob in February 1996, a temporary walkout from the Federation army by most of the 8,000 officers and soldiers in Croat units stationed in Hercegovina, central Bosnia and northern Bosnia (Posavina), and a declaration of solidarity with the HNS by the Croat police in Mostar’s canton. As of early 2002, the crisis has blown over but its root causes remain unresolved. The events of 2000–2001 expose the fallacy of the notion that Bosnia’s troubles are solely or even largely the result of malign interference by and from Serbia-Montenegro and Croatia. It is true that the most extremist elements and agendas among BiH Croats were politically, militarily and financially sustained throughout the 1990s by the disproportionate influence of Hercegovina Croats at the heart of the Tudjman regime in Zagreb. However, deeply troubled relations between the peoples of BiH, and their conflicting aspirations, have provided an endogenous motor of conflict throughout the past decade. The legitimacy of the Bosnian state among BiH Serbs and Croats remains weak, and in any case, Serb and Croat citizens of BiH have a fundamental, normal democratic right to establish and nurture links with the two other successor-states of Yugoslavia in which most of their co-nationals live. That is why the Dayton settlement has established consociational structures (within the Muslim–Croat Federation and at the level of state institutions), and confederative structures (between the
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Federation and RS and between the two Entities and Croatia and SerbiaMontenegro, respectively). The emphasis on communitarian rights and autonomy is ironic given the recent history of Yugoslavia and of Bosnia, but it is also necessary, perhaps even inevitable. At any rate, it is far preferable to the alternatives – unpopular (and ultimately, even more divisive) ‘integration’, or de jure partition. The case of Mostar reveals the limits to internationally sponsored state-building in post-war Bosnia and shows that prospects of ‘integration’ are tenuous at best. But over the years, international intervention has had a softening effect on the hard line of division running through the town centre of Mostar, as it has in BiH as a whole. Even the most intransigent BiH Croats know that the Greater Croatia project, in the form conceived by the Tudjman–Susak–Mate Boban triumvirate, has failed. In the absence of vigorous political, financial and military support from Croatia, ‘the pre-conditions for “Herceg-Bosna” no longer exist’.14 So Mostar remains a divided city, but its transition – by definition a dynamic process – to a post-conflict and post-Yugoslav future is yet ongoing. When the international community arrived in Mostar in 1994, peacekeeping troops built a suspension footbridge across the Neretva gorge at the point which used to be spanned by the Old Bridge for 427 years until 9 November 1993. In late 1999, that footbridge was washed away by floods which caused a sudden rise in the river’s water-level, perhaps a reflection of the tenuous nature of the bridge across the Neretva crafted over the years by international intervention. By late 2000, the temporary bridge had been reconstructed by Hungarian peacekeepers. A World Bank–UNESCO project to reconstruct the real bridge is in progress, with finances from the governments of Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. The bankers of the project are Hrvatska Banka (Croatian Bank), a Mostar-based bank linked to some of the more moderate figures in the HDZ-BiH. Many of the original slabs of limestone have been painstakingly recovered from the river bed, and more will come from the quarry close to Mostar that supplied the Ottoman sultan Sulejman’s commissioned architect, Mimar Hajrudin, with his raw materials in 1566. On 7 June 2001, the reconstruction formally began with a ceremony at the site, in the Old Town. It is scheduled for completion by 2003–2004. Emir Balic, a Stari Grad resident aged sixty-seven, holds the record for the maximum number of dives from the Stari Most into the Neretva by any individual – over one thousand (the annual diving festival, held every August, has for decades been a highlight of Mostar’s calendar). ‘My biggest wish is to jump from the new Old Bridge, health permitting’, he says.15
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Notes 1 For a much more detailed account of Mostar between 1994 and 2001 see S. Bose, Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention, London: Hurst and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, Chapter 3. 2 The official term for BiH’s Muslim population is ‘Bosniac’. I have generally chosen to use the less official but locally more prevalent term, ‘Muslim’, in this chapter in the interests of consistency. 3 UNHCR, Registered Minority Returns from January 1, 2001 to September 30, 2001 in Bosnia and Hercegovina, Sarajevo: UNHCR Statistics Unit, November 2001. 4 UNHCR, Registered Minority Returns from January 1, 2002 to September 30, 2002 in Bosnia and Hercegovina, Sarajevo: UNHCR Statistics Unit, November 2002. 5 See Bose, Bosnia after Dayton, Chapter 5, for an exhaustive analysis of the limits to electoral integration in BiH, together with an assessment of the contemporary Bosnian case in light of debates over federalism and federation, power-sharing and consociation, and the structure and configuration of competitive party systems. 6 See Bose, Bosnia after Dayton, Chapter 2, for a detailed overview and analysis of post-Dayton BiH’s complicated, multi-tiered constitutional and institutional structure. 7 These results are available from the OSCE-BiH Internet site http://www.oscebih.org (accessed 7 June 2001). 8 M. Behram, ‘Mostar divided over trials’, Balkan Crisis Reports, 220, 21 February 2001, available at http://www.iwpr.net (accessed 20 November 2002). 9 ‘Survey of Bosnia and Hercegovina’, The Financial Times, 14 December 1999, 36. 10 Ibid. 11 ‘Gimnazija Mostar, Central Zone: Terms of Agreement’, 28 June 2000 (obtained by the author from OHR-South, Mostar). 12 ‘OHR clarifies statement on Mostar’s universities’, OHR press release, Sarajevo, 23 October 2000. 13 Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in BiH, Analysis of the State of Human Rights in Bosnia and Hercegovina, January–June 2001, Sarajevo: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in BiH, July 2001, p. 15. 14 European Stability Initiative, Reshaping International Priorities in Bosnia, Part III: The End of the Nationalist Regimes and the Future of the Bosnian State, Sarajevo, 22 March 2001, p. 10, available at http://www.esiweb.org/ (accessed 27 August 2002). 15 ‘Reconstruction of Bosnia’s famous bridge begins’, Reuters, 8 June 2001.
5
When our men arrive UNMIK’s post-conflict administration of Kosovo Emmanuela C. del Re
Resolution 1244 and UNMIK On 9 June 1999, the same day as Miloševiæ assented to what was effectively a ‘treaty of surrender’, the UN Security Council during its 4011th meeting adopted Resolution 1244.1 Through this resolution the Council sought not only to resolve the difficult humanitarian situation in Kosovo, allowing the refugees and internally displaced to return to their homes, but also to reorganize the province from a political and administrative point of view. Resolution 1244 has been compared to the constitutional charter of a sovereign country but, while reaffirming the call for substantial autonomy and meaningful self-administration for Kosovo, it also reaffirmed ‘the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’.2 The basic structure established by Resolution 1244 is the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). This is headed by a Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG). The first incumbent was Bernard Kouchner, former French Minister of Public Health and founder of Médecins sans Frontières. The current SRSG is Michael Steiner.3 The structure of UNMIK can be compared to the façade of a classical temple, with the architrave representing the headquarters, supported by four organizational pillars, each with different responsibilities: civil administration falls under the remit of UNMIK itself; humanitarian assistance is the preserve of the UNHCR; democratization and institution building is covered by the OSCE; and economic development by the EU. According to Resolution 1244 UNMIK’s duty is: to perform basic civilian administrative functions; promote the establishment of substantial autonomy and self-government in Kosovo; facilitate a political process to determine Kosovo’s future status; coordinate humanitarian and disaster relief of all international agencies; support the reconstruction of key infrastructure; maintain civil law and order; promote human rights; and – finally – to assure the safe and unimpeded return of all refugees and displaced persons to their homes in Kosovo.4
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The Civil Administration (CA) of UNMIK effectively fulfils the bureaucratic duties of a state. It collects taxes, ensures security and order, administers justice and runs public services, including registry offices. It is also responsible for reconstruction and promotes a return to normality through the implementation of initiatives for democratization. UNMIK is the first such UN mission to build an entirely new civil administrative structure ex novo without any reference to the local pre-existing system. Many analysts maintain that this is a mistake, but the decision can, at least in part, be explained by the fact that the greater portion of the previous Yugoslav executive, administrative and judicial system was swept away during the withdrawal of the Yugoslav armed forces from Kosovo at the end of the war and the subsequent flight of 70 per cent of Serb civilians.5 Not only was much important administrative material destroyed at this time, including the contents of registry offices, but the dominant position of the Serbs within the bureaucracy also made it practically impossible, due to lack of staff, for offices to continue to function normally.6 The situation was also further complicated by the fact that under Miloševiæ the Albanians had established their own ‘parallel state’ in order to bypass administrative structures modelled on the criteria of the province’s Serbian minority. The Serbs had tolerated the parallel state, even though it was clandestine, while the Albanians had invested it with the characteristics of a sovereign state.7 This, together with the fact that the Albanians felt that the previous administrative pattern had been an arbitrary Serbian imposition, further counted against the resurrection of old forms. The UNMIK civil administration faces many problems in fields as diverse as housing, education, security and freedom of movement, justice, employment, health, social welfare, elections, inter-ethnic relations, and the return of refugees and internally displaced people.8 Emblematic of the dimensions and complexity of the problems it faces is the fate of the properties abandoned by the fleeing Serbs. These have either been occupied by Albanians, sold at ridiculously low prices, or put under the control of KFOR to prevent illegal occupation. UNMIK has been harshly criticized for its handling of this issue, but its position was made difficult by the destruction of the land registries. The problems surrounding private property, however, pale into insignificance when compared with those involving the ownership of industries and enterprises. Some of these were previously owned directly by the Yugoslav state, while others were entrusted to the workers (the so-called Socially Owned Enterprises). UNMIK has taken over the administration of the entire public sector, handing the management of 370 socially owned enterprises to a department which, in September 2001, was staffed by only twenty-one people, eleven of whom were internationals.9 Owing to a lack of legislation on ownership, many of the enterprises have been forced to close and, again, UNMIK has been criticized, although many of the problems pre-date its establishment. Previously, Yugoslav enterprises operated within a socialist ideology. This made them responsive to internal
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market needs in the past, but limits their ability to find new outlets within a capitalist system now. Three years after its installation, the score-sheet of the UNMIK administration shows successes, failures and shortcomings but any judgement of its overall performance cannot be divorced from other significant changes in the region, including those in Serbia following the ousting of Miloševiæ, and the fact that, as Mark Thompson has noted, UNMIK has to govern ‘a province not yet at peace, with an immature and divided local leadership and a population recovering from years of oppression followed by months of atrocious violence’.10
Critical views The breadth of UNMIK’s responsibilities and the many actors engaged in Kosovo have created a mosaic of often conflicting interests, interrelations and attitudes. This makes it easy to criticize a peacekeeping mission whose aims from the start were highly ambitious and whose promised high standards were always going to be difficult to keep. What emerges from an analysis of the various critiques of UNMIK, which range from the political propaganda of the Serbian Socialist Party to the well-documented but aseptic and chronicle-like reports of Human Rights Watch, is that they frequently mirror the political stance of the critics themselves. The tesserae of the Kosovo mosaic and their current condition can be briefly summarized as follows: •
The Albanians: there are increasing signs of strain in their relationship with UNMIK. In May 2002 the Parliament of Kosovo passed a resolution rejecting an agreement delimiting the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. The SRSG, Steiner, exercised his right of veto and annulled their decision, thereby reminding them that ultimate authority in Kosovo still remains with UNMIK and that the moment for the Albanian political leaders to decide upon the future of the province has yet to come.11 This drew protests from the Albanians, the majority of whom think that UNMIK should confine itself to protecting them from the Serbs, leaving the Albanians responsible for all other matters.12 Disagreements between the Albanian and Serbian communities are often manufactured out of other concerns, but when fanned by elements of the Albanian press they can become inflamed. For example, in the middle of a debate about the disorganization of the postal service in Kosovo, on 9 September 2002, the daily newspaper Bota Sot published a front-page article headlined ‘Why is Northern Mitrovica still tied to Serb Telecom?’13 It must be underlined that Bota Sot is not new to this kind of polemics. On 3 September 2002 it was fined 17,500 euros by UNMIK for some libellous articles that contravened UNMIK’s press rules.14 Yet, the press often does act as
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•
•
•
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an index of the broader situation and, while some inter-ethnic problems have decreased since the establishment of UNMIK, others remain. The political climate remains far from calm and the opposing forces of reconciliation and conflict are well caught in two articles published in the same edition of the daily newspaper, Koha Ditorë. The first was headlined ‘Municipal encouragement for ethnic dialogue in the village of Zhegër’, while the second was entitled ‘Serbs beat two Albanians in Zubin Potok’.15 The Serbs: their acute problem remains lack of freedom of movement due to the security environment. The Serbs are obliged to collaborate with the international organizations in a multi-ethnic environment but they remain strongly influenced by the official policy of Belgrade, which for much of the period was strongly critical of UNMIK and KFOR.16 Since the overthrow of Miloševiæ there have been signs of a slight thaw. On 26 February 2001 the new President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Vojislav Koštunica, proclaimed a General Amnesty which released hundreds of Albanians serving prison sentences for political crimes.17 The Albanians had been protesting against their detention since 1999, with relatives of the prisoners organizing road blocks, but the decisive turning point came with the release of the paediatrician and writer Flora Brovina in October 2000.18 Brovina, who had been detained for her support of the Albanian separatist movement, refused to leave prison unless all her fellow political prisoners were also released, and her stand seems to have prompted Koštunica’s decision to proclaim an amnesty. Extremists on both sides: while the amnesty proclaimed by President Koštunica is an indication of a change in the attitude of Serbia, extremist groups within Kosovo continue to act against both Serbs and Albanians. Kidnappings and murders occur in Serbian areas, even though they are under tight KFOR control, while elsewhere Albanians are targeted because they were ‘collaborators’ or have openly spoken in favour of reconciliation.19 Those at greatest risk are journalists who are threatened by both extreme political groups and by criminals. They often complain of a lack of cooperation from UNMIK’s police force,20 and some are forced to move around under escort, because of threats from groups which define themselves as former members of the UÇK.21 Other ethnic groups: Bosniac, Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian have been appointed to the new local government bodies but they have few funds and limited freedom of movement, due to security reasons.22 Their scarce participation in political life derives mainly from the fact that little space for action is left for them.23 KFOR: this is a largely NATO force which has been enlarged to include countries not belonging to the Treaty.24 The fact that the various national contingents all act under precise rules does not prevent them from having their own interests. One example is the French, whose
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Emmanuela C. del Re widely alleged sympathy for the Serbs in Mitrovica has caused some transatlantic tensions.25 UNMIK, OSCE, the EU: although their tasks are distinct, they are all bureaucratic pachyderms with their own particular interests.26 They have difficulty in communicating within and outside their own structures. Acting under international political pressures, they also find it hard to coordinate their activities in the field.27 Local and international NGOs: there are more than 600 of these working in Kosovo.28 They come from all corners of the world and are dedicated to a wide range of tasks stretching from religion to gender. When part of the UNHCR registry, they try to coordinate their activities, but their reports often betray the fact that they are in a marginalized position in relation to UNMIK.
The development of political institutions and the democratization process in Kosovo can be seen in terms of a sharing or balancing of political space. As John Cockell has noted, this balance has to be achieved on two planes. On the one hand, it has to be secured between the different organizations present in Kosovo and, on the other, between the international community and the local actors.29 Problems with the latter emerged as early as September 1999, when an article published in the New York Times reported that the ‘internationals’ and the Albanians, against a backdrop of continuing violence in Kosovo and a general feeling that they had benefited little from the presence of UNMIK, KFOR and the OSCE, had engaged in mutual criticism over the slowness of reforms.30 Criticism has also come from Serbian sources. In July 2000, the Chief of Mission of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to the UN, Vladislav Jovanovic, wrote a letter to the President of the Security Council, Jean David Levitte, in which he stated that the claimed successes of the UN mission were false and that KFOR and UNMIK had failed to create minimum security conditions for Serbs and other non-Albanians in Kosovo.31 Numerous less official critiques have poured from the Serbian side. Basing their arguments on the lack of security of the Serbian minority in Kosovo, many amount to little more than political propaganda.32 Criticism, however, has come also from American sources, with Pentagon officials suggesting during a meeting on Balkan strategies held in Paris in March 2000 that the crisis in Mitrovica might not have become so acute ‘had UNMIK been more successful in establishing a more functioning civil administration in the province, including police, courts, and services such as garbage collection’.33 Harsh criticism of UNMIK’s performance has also been levelled by numerous NGOs. A June 2001 report by the Norwegian Refugee Council, for instance, stated that ‘two years into the UNMIK administration, civil remedies remain virtually non-existent.’34 Even the international organizations working in Kosovo have at times attacked each other. The field of
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justice has been particularly contentious, with UNMIK facing accusations that it failed to adequately consult and involve local and international organizations in drafting legislation. Indirect censure has come from the OSCE which has criticized the performance of local tribunals that fall under the mandate of UNMIK, stressing the absence of habeas corpus procedures and the lack of effective access to defence counsels as well as the bias in convictions.35 Relations between UNMIK and OS CE have also been strained in the field of media relations. A recent report from the Media Department of the OSCE states that cooperation between UNMIK’s UN leadership (UNMIK-UN) and OSCE-MIK ‘has not run smoothly’.36 And, although the author of the report, Mark Thompson, tries to excuse UNMIK by saying that it has been very busy and that it may not have been well informed about the agreements it had made regarding the media, he did note that in August 2000 ‘UNMIK-UN had sought to curb the OSCE’s role, especially over media regulations and built up a parallel media department.’37 It is perhaps not unnatural that UNMIK would want its own media department to promote its image in the local and international press but the dispute is symptomatic of relations between the two organizations, with Isa Blumi even characterizing them as ‘rivals’.38 The controversy between the OSCE and UNMIK over the media department can be taken as emblematic of the general lack of cooperation between organizations working in the same field, often due to a lack of communication. This is a chronic problem that cannot be solved by the meetings regularly called to discuss common problems. These often end up focusing on minor questions rather than serious issues and can just be a façade behind which outright rivalry sometimes hides.39 The competition based on the struggle to raise funds, which is closely linked to prestige gained in the field, often displaces any efforts to work towards a common goal. The 2002 Human Rights Watch Report identifies many examples of this, including the fact that ‘NATO in a number of cases refused to share information with UN officials investigating serious crimes in which members of the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) were thought to be implicated.’40 One group of actors that are often forgotten in an analysis of a mission such as UNMIK are those who actually work on the ground. Little attention is paid to their personality, career aspirations and attitude to post-conflict situations. Without trying to work out a typology, some common features can be identified and these are well summarized by Blumi’s statement that in Kosovo the ‘UN and its appointed team of bureaucrats are under pressure.’41 This pressure though does not derive from the difficult working conditions in Kosovo, it comes from having to work under the magnifying lens of world scrutiny.42 This is perhaps why the so-called ‘internationals’ tend to create a community of their own, rarely mingling with ‘the locals’, recreating spaces where they feel ‘at home’ and developing the group dynamics that are familiar to anthropologists,
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including special rites and a new lexicon where acronyms are omnipresent.43 Blumi rightly affirms, the fact ‘that personal success can take precedence over the fate of Kosova’s inhabitants is nothing new’ but, nonetheless, naked pursuit of career interests and political grandstanding do pose threats.44 In a briefing for the New Atlantic Initiative, Lane pointed out that opinions towards missions can be influenced by personal interests, noting that the attitude of American officers towards the US ground role in Kosovo might have been influenced by promotion prospects and that opinions were often voiced in language more reminiscent of a political campaign.45 More articulated criticisms of UNMIK, such as that of Isa Blumi, offer a multi-level analysis based on diachronic elements. According to Blumi, UNMIK, to a certain extent, has reproduced the administrative strategies that Miloševiæ’s apartheid system mobilized in the 1990s as part of his attempt to assert unambiguous state power over Kosovo’s population.46 The international community continues to centre self-conscious collective action in the Balkans on the state, paying scant attention to local government structures and pre-existing local structures: UNMIK has brought with it an attitude of extreme administrative distance, refusing to all intents and purposes to take into account this long history of self-government and communal independence. Its answer was that of introducing universal standards of human exchange, which are apparently diametrically opposed to Kosovo’s ‘closed’, ‘primitive’ and ‘patriarchal’ society. UNMIK ignored local communities and was slow to institute civil structures.47 The local population is therefore resisting UNMIK partly because it has created a highly centralized model of administration similar to that previously imposed by Belgrade, and at present there is little sign of the international community deviating from this strategy. The OSCE, for instance, in a 2002 report recommended that in the field of justice UNMIK should abolish the parallel system of courts: ‘A negotiated absorption of their staff into the UNMIK system is preferable, with a clear statement from the Belgrade authorities that such courts are no longer legitimate and that inhabitants of Kosovo must use the UNMIK courts.’48 Aided by KFOR, UNMIK has imposed a centralization policy which gives some grounds for critics as extreme as Michael Chossudovsky, who has termed the new government of Kosovo ‘paramilitary’, and ‘an accomplice of the criminal KLA’ and Vera Vratusa-Zunjic, who talks about a ‘humanitarian disaster’ caused by what she terms ‘humanitarian bombing’.49 Zunjic justifies her criticism by pointing to the increase in violence, crime and insecurity since the arrival of KFOR and UNMIK and the steep rise in the number of refugees within the remainder of Yugoslavia.50
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Approving views Alexandros Yannis, who was a political advisor to Bernard Kouchner, in his study of the first two years of UNMIK’s activity, writes from a point of view that can be seen as both privileged and uncomfortable. He summarizes the goals achieved as well as the problems still to be solved.51 Among the latter are the inherent ambiguities and contradictions of the UN mandate, the diametrically opposed aspirations of the Kosovo Albanians and the Serbs and the continuing violence. However, beside these he also stresses one critical – albeit fragile – accomplishment of UNMIK and KFOR, and this is that they have finally won the confidence and cooperation of both Kosovar Albanians and Serbs. Although some might challenge this statement, it would seem to have some validity. Yannis believes that if Resolution 1244 were applied more rigorously, it could prevent Kosovo from ‘sliding back to open conflict’ but this would have to be matched by long-term outside commitment to the development of the region. By this he does not imply an indefinite international military presence or endless financial aid, but rather substantive assistance to build effective democratic institutions. Unfortunately, as has been suggested above, this is exactly what UNMIK has been accused of not supplying or not being able to supply. In November 2001 the Washington Post published an article entitled ‘The Kosovo Formula’ which affirmed that ‘Kosovo offers Afghanistan a timely demonstration of how the combination of international peacekeeping and UN-led nation-building can get results even in a war-wrecked and povertystricken country.’52 The article made this assertion on the basis that the subject of the West’s last military intervention, Kosovo, has taken an extraordinary step toward stability … OSCE successfully staged general elections in November 2001, attracting strong turnout not only from the majority ethnic Albanian population, but from the Serb minority … .Kosovo elections succeeded first and foremost because 36,000 NATO troops including 5,400 Americans are still deployed there as peacekeepers … who have not stopped all violence between Serbs and Albanians but prevented major new episodes of conflict or ethnic cleansing.53 The article presents a particularly rosy view of the situation in Kosovo, suggesting that many of the difficulties faced by UNMIK, from the military to the humanitarian, are close to being resolved. Besides the fact that many of the arguments within the article may be questioned – elections, for instance, cannot be taken as the main determinant of democratization – the overall subtext would seem to be the Bush administration’s continuing desire to arrange a pull-out of troops from Kosovo.54 In June 2001 the incoming US administration had avoided undermining the stability of Kosovo and the Balkans as a whole by declaring that they had no intention of withdrawing
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troops unilaterally from the region, but by November 2001,with the growing need for troop deployments in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the question had reappeared.55 Indeed, the Washington Post article ends by suggesting that the ‘Kosovo formula’ was worth remembering when considering the future of Afghanistan. The activities of UNMIK have finally been blessed with the status of a formula, but before accepting this uncritically it would be wise to extend the analysis, posing questions that go beyond the practical aspects of the mission, because in order to make a formula work the ingredients and their use have to be carefully studied.
A question of values From the outset it could perhaps have been intuited that Kosovo might become a ‘model’ for future missions given the positive evaluations of its performance both from a military and civil intervention perspective. In particular the conflict was presented as one between values. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was unambiguous when he stated, ‘This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values.’56 And, as the bombing continued, Javier Solana, the NATO Secretary-General, repeated, ‘NATO is determined to uphold our values – because values mean nothing if we are not willing to take action to defend them.’57 As Sean Kay has pointed out, NATO has always sought to reflect the values that are stated in the preamble of its treaty and the ‘Kosovo conflict was one in which Western values, rather than territory, were threatened.’58 Nevertheless, NATO’s credibility as a bearer of values is open to question, because, as Kay notes, ‘[its intervention] begs the question of why the human rights of the Kosovar Albanians are more important that those of the Turkish Kurds.’59 From the start, the dominant position adopted by the military alliance within what was supposedly a humanitarian operation posed significant questions. According to Tatjana Pirc, it ‘raises a series of problems for the future. The decision of the EU and other humanitarian aid organizations, such as the UNHCR, to work with NATO deviates from the traditional norm that humanitarian assistance has to be impartial and neutral.’60 Machiavelli would probably reply that the ends justify the means, but the risk remains that the humanitarian aspect will be overshadowed by the interests that lie hidden behind such apparently well-motivated actions.61 Among many others, Renner has noted: such operations are in fact problematic because they are likely to serve the interests of the intervening military alliance more than the interests of humanity as a whole. In Kosovo KFOR was born of an end-run by the US and its NATO allies around the UN Security Council when NATO initiated a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia and forced Yugoslav military forces to withdraw from Kosovo.62
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The presence of the military is explained partly by the fact that, until now, the countries of the region have been ‘consumers of peace’ rather than ‘producers of peace’. This has confined them to the status of ‘recipients’, a term whose meaning, limits and opportunities are still mainly defined by the ‘donors’.63 Although there will probably be no rapid change in this state of affairs, it is encouraging that UNMIK is unfolding at the time when both within the UN and elsewhere the concept of peacekeeping is coming under sustained scrutiny.64 This stems from the 1990s, when peacekeeping operations began to evolve into what NATO calls ‘peace support operations’.65 There has also been a regained awareness of the costs of such operations – including the ‘human’ ones – which under the influence of public opinion is questioning the utility of such ‘expensive’ operations.66 New orientations are emerging but the UN and its missions remain beset by a chronic lack of funds, bureaucratic obduracy, the absence of permanent and reliable peacekeeping structures, a lack of conflict-prevention training for staff, as well as an ‘improvisation syndrome’ that seems never to be curable through any lessons learned.67 The numerous international agencies also need to define their individual ‘personalities’ from a humanitarian and a military standpoint. As far as Kosovo is concerned, a first step in this direction was taken in April 2000 when KFOR came under the direction of Joint Chiefs of Staff external to the Atlantic Alliance: the Eurocorps (which had already supplied 150 cadres to SFOR in Bosnia in 1998). This has created close links between the top executives of NATO and the EU, which until 2000 did not exist. From a philosophical point of view, Blumi defines Kosovo as a case of neo-Kantian ethnical and performative injunction, which seeks to impose supposedly transcendent values on a subject people. In the case of UNMIK, presumptions of state seek to achieve a set of universal moral and interactive imperatives based on ‘shared values’ … and regulative norms.68 Apart from the contentious notion of ‘shared values’, the idea of ‘regulative norms’ may also be questioned, since the model of state craft adopted by UNMIK, according to Blumi, can be seen as an inheritance from the era of developmentalism. The proposed/imposed model is that of the Western nation-state with little space left for alternatives. Noam Chomsky has questioned whether Kosovo was really a multinational effort waged solely for humanitarian reasons or whether it marked the establishment of a new world order headed by self-proclaimed ‘enlightened states’ with enough military might to ignore international law and world opinion.69 Marxists have often noted that after military interventions Western states have failed to engage local inhabitants in post-conflict reconstruction and this is exactly the accusation that is now being levelled at UNMIK. In its quest to assume all responsibilities, it is said to have created an international protectorate. It could be argued that this was the only way to ensure stability, but the danger
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is that a ‘dependency culture’ will be created similar to the one which has already had disastrous consequences in Albania.70 Indeed, according to Ian Guest, UNMIK’s reconstruction strategy ‘has undermined Kosovo’s indigenous capacity for recovering’.71 The conflict in Kosovo has become a conflict between different Weltanschauungen. This is why the ‘model’ elaborated by UNMIK seems to Blumi and others as far from being a bearer of ‘true’ values. Instead they charge that UNMIK is merely repeating mistakes that had been made before: at the most fundamental level, Bernard Kouchner and his spin doctors have orchestrated a reassertion of ethnic boundaries, boundaries that have been part of the understanding Europeans have had of the Balkans since the last decades of the Ottoman Empire.72 Indeed, Blumi goes as far as affirming that ‘Kosovo, since June 1999, was far from a functioning apartheid state, yet operating along modern state line UNMIK has successfully reimposed Miloševiæ’s racialist administrative vision of separate “populations”.’73 UNMIK undoubtedly embraces values: it is moved by values, it propagates values, and intrinsically it is constituted of values. The question is whether, after having proposed values, it will also be able to ‘share’ values and convince the recipients that those values are the just ones.
When our men arrive, and … stay This chapter has described some of the trappings of the ‘circus’ that is set up in a post-conflict situation. After all, the rain of money that pours on a needy country after a war also falls on the many organizations that hasten to help. It is like the pot full of gold at the end of the rainbow after a thunderstorm, only, in this version of the tale, the pot is found. While this might seem intrinsic to such operations, one that pessimists say makes peacekeeping operations go the way they go, never learning from ‘lessons learned’, what remains is the fact that UNMIK is temporary by definition and that the future of Kosovo still has to be defined. While the philosophy at the basis of infrastructure reconstruction is that it must last forever, political and social network reconstruction is still affected by a sense of ‘indeterminacy’ that cannot satisfy any of the actors involved: no one is entitled to be in full control of the situation, neither the Albanians, nor the minorities, nor UNMIK. This is probably the reason behind many difficulties, including the lack of mutual understanding between the actors. A resolution of the problem of the status of Kosovo might provide a sense of ‘stability’, dissolving this cloud of ‘temporariness’ that renders roles and responsibilities out of focus. It would also stop UNMIK being the centre of the local universe. At the moment UNMIK
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still operates closely with the military, but could an autonomous Kosovo within Yugoslavia exist without the presence of KFOR? Since autonomy would, among other things, imply an ability for self-defence, can one talk of true autonomy with the presence of KFOR? Whatever the achievements of UNMIK, which are both good and bad, it is clear it cannot be taken as a wider model because the characteristics of the Kosovo case are very specific. It was created after a military intervention that has had heavy consequences for the stability of a region which is geostrategically and geo-politically highly relevant for Europe and the USA. The overall equilibrium of the Balkans still has to be restored. The intervention may have helped end Miloševiæ’s regime but it has also established a disquieting precedent.74 Although a final resolution of the question of the status of Kosovo still seems far away, the impending reduction of donations may lead to a quicker than expected resolution.75 Once the status of Kosovo has been settled, UNMIK can be transformed into a much smaller mission with the task of supporting the autonomous local administration. But that would be another story.
Notes Author’s note: This chapter was completed in November 2002. 1 On 9 June 1999 the Yugoslav army and UN representatives signed the ‘Technical agreement between the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the United Nations’, that led to the cessation of the NATO bombardment. 2 Resolution 1244, available at http://www.un.org/Docs/scres/1999/99sc1244.htm (accessed July 2002). 3 Michael Steiner succeeded Hans Haekkerup as SRSG. Steiner is an experienced diplomat and former foreign and security policy adviser to German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. 4 This part of Resolution 1244 is also available at http://www.unmikonline.org (accessed July 2002). 5 Around 150,000 according to IOM data, available at http://www.iom.ipko.org (accessed November 2002). 6 Registries were also destroyed in Bosnia, presumably with the aim of destroying the memory of the population. 7 The citizens who adhered to this particular form of public management paid taxes both to the legal state (Serb) and to the clandestine one (Albanian). The taxes to the latter were given voluntarily. The parallel state provided its own school curricula which diverged from the official ones, with lessons often being held in the sitting rooms of private homes. It was also concerned with health issues. Although the Yugoslav administration guaranteed a public health service, Serb doctors would rarely pay a home visit to Albanians. Instead, Albanian doctors unrecognized by the Yugoslav state had to provide a service, although they often held a degree obtained in a foreign country or Belgrade, prior to Miloševiæ’s repression. Justice within the Albanian community was almost entirely administered by Albanians, since an Albanian would never denounce an Albanian to the state police. Observations based on many years of fieldwork carried out by the author and Franz Gustincich in Kosovo.
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8 These are analysed in the Ninth Assessment of the Situation of Ethnic Minorities in Kosovo, Pristina: OSCE, May 2002, available at http://www.osce.org/ kosovo/documents/reports/minorities/min-rep-09-eng.pdf (accessed July 2002). 9 The Lessons Learned and Analysis Unit of the EU Pillar of UNMIK in Kosovo together with the European Stability Initiative (ESI) has published an interesting report on this question: The Ottoman Dilemma: Power and Property Relations under the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, Pristina: EU/ESI, August 2002, available at http://www.esiweb.org/pdf/ESI_rep_lla_01.pdf (accessed July 2002). 10 M. Thompson, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia (FYROM) and Kosovo: International Assistance to Media, Vienna: OSCE, 2000, p. 64, available at http://www.osce.org/fom/documents/reports/country/rep_balkan.pdf (accessed October 2002). 11 E. Yulber, ‘Cutting Kosovo’s independence wings’, Stina, 5 June 2002, translation by Andrea Ferrario in Notizie Est, 559, available at http://www.ecn.org/ est/balcani (accessed July 2002). 12 Public opinion surveys suggest this view is shared by the Albanian populace and it also emerged as a theme among politicians during the last election campaign. 13 Bota Sot, 9 September 2002, 1, 9. 14 See http://www.osce.org/news/generate.php3?news_id=2697 (accessed September 2002). 15 Koha Ditorë, 4 September 2002, 7, 9. Fieldwork carried out by Franz Gustincich since 1999 has shown that the village of Zhegër, which has welcomed numerous refugees from the Preshevo Valley, is a stronghold of the KLA and smugglers with Serbia. 16 An interesting analysis of the political situation of the Serbs is N. Bogovic, ‘What the new pragmatic policy of Belgrade has given Kosovo’, Danas Vikend, 20–21 April 2002, translation by Andrea Ferrario in Notizie Est, 547, available at http://www.ecn.org/est/balcani (accessed July 2002). 17 See http://dfn.org/focus/yugoslavia/serbamnesty.htm (accessed September 2002). 18 See http://dfn.org/focus/yugoslavia/flora-release.htm (accessed September 2002). 19 F. Gustincich, ‘UCK: Uno, Nessuno, Centomila’, unpublished manuscript, Rome: Military Centre for Strategic Studies, 2000. 20 See http://www.osce.org/kosovo/features/in_focus/journalists_restricted.php3 (accessed September 2002). 21 F. Gustincich, ‘UCK’. 22 The Egyptian minority in Kosovo and Macedonia is supposedly descended from Egyptians who migrated to Greece during the reign of Alexander the Great. Ashkali is the name the gypsies who speak Albanian and live in Kosovo and Macedonia use to define themselves. The two are often confused, partly due to the fact that in the 1991 census neither were accorded a distinct status. 23 Ninth Assessment of the Situation of Ethnic Minorities in Kosovo. 24 The states currently participating in KFOR are: Italy, Spain, France, the UK, Canada, the USA, Greece, Germany, Turkey, Russia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Norway, Finland, Ukraine and Sweden. 25 C. Lane, Briefing Paper, Meeting on Balkan Strategies, Paris, 10–12 March 2000, Washington, DC: New Atlantic Initiative, American Enterprise Institute, 2000. 26 The EU is Kosovo’s main donor providing 362.5 million euros in 2001. 27 An interesting volume that explores the co-existence of different organizations in Kosovo is D. Mahncke (ed.), Old Frontiers, New Frontiers: The Challenge of Kosovo and its Implications for the European Union, Bern: Peter Lang, 2001. 28 UNHCR Report, 2000, available at http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/ home?page=statistics (accessed November 2002).
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29 J. Cockell, paper delivered at the international seminar Reframing Post-Conflict Rehabilitation: Beyond Clichés from the Past, The Hague: Netherlands Institute of International Relations ‘Clingendael’, Conflict Research Unit, 2001, available at http://www.clingendael.nl/cru/pdf/Rehabilitation.PDF (accessed October 2002). 30 C. Gall, ‘NATO commander says armed Serbs are slipping back to Kosovo’, New York Times, 14 September 1999. 31 ‘KFOR and UNMIK have not done their jobs’, SerbiaInfo News, 2 July 2000, available at http://www.serbia-info.com/news/2000–07/02/19725.html (accessed July 2002). 32 See, for instance, http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/justice.htm (accessed July 2002). 33 Lane, Briefing Paper, p. 3. Mitrovica is a particularly difficult issue. It is split by the Ibar river into two sections: the northern section inhabited by Serbs, the southern by Albanians. The area around the town is considered highly strategic by both groups, because of the nearby Trepca mine complex, which is the most significant industrial site in Kosovo. Mitrovica is also important to the international community, which sees it as the last opportunity to create a multi-ethnic community, given the large Serb population still remaining in the city. See S. Cispel, ‘Une dégradation prévisible, liée à l’ambiguité du mandat onusien’, Le Monde, 15 February 2000. 34 Norwegian Refugee Council, Report, 7 June 2001, available at http://www.nrc.no/ Annual01/NRC-AnnualRapport-2001.pdf (accessed July 2002). 35 The OSCE is particularly critical of several convictions of Kosovo Serbs and Roma for war crimes and genocide, which its monitors found inconsistent with the evidence presented in the courtroom. 36 Thompson, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia (FYROM) and Kosovo, p. 65. On 1 July 1999 the Permanent Council of the OSCE established a mission in Kosovo (OSCE-MIK) as a ‘distinct component within the overall framework’ of UNMIK, being responsible for democratization and institution building. Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media. See http://www.osce.org (accessed July 2002). 37 The problem arose when ‘the Principal Deputy SRSG insisted that the frequency spectrum belonged under the “Civil Administration” organized by UNMIK-UN, not with the OSCE at all.’ Thompson, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia (FYROM) and Kosovo, p. 64. 38 I. Blumi, ‘One year of failure in Kosova: chances missed and the unknown future’, Southeast European Politics, 1: 1, 2000, 15–24. 39 For example, in a meeting in November 1999 in Ferizaj/Urosevac, a discussion on reconstruction slipped into a protracted monologue over the difference between 10 cm. and 20 cm. nails. Witness asked not to be mentioned. 40 In July 2001 President Bush blacklisted five senior KPC officers for their support of the ethnic Albanian armed insurgency in Macedonia. The five were promptly discharged by the head of UNMIK. US officials came under criticism, however, for their alleged failure to support criminal investigation involving top KPC officials and in some cases for attempting to unduly influence the investigations. (Human Rights Watch, World Report 2002, p. 387, available at http://www.hrw.org/wr2k2/ (accessed July 2002)) The KPC is the product of the transformation of the KLA. It is staffed by Albanians and is charged with civil protection and intervention in the case of natural disasters.
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41 Blumi, ‘One year of failure in Kosova’, 16. 42 The difficult working conditions include, inefficient or insufficient public services like water and electricity (a major problem at the moment), poor infrastructure, and ongoing security problems. 43 A perfect Irish pub has been built on the right-hand side of the Hotel Grand, the main hotel in Pristina, and an Italian restaurant is daily provided with fresh parmesan cheese from Italy. Goliardic-style ‘initiation rites’ have been created for newcomers. 44 Blumi, ‘One year of failure in Kosova’, 15. 45 Lane, Briefing Paper, p. 5. 46 I. Blumi, ‘Internalized marginality: ethnic borders to democratic growth in Kosova’, unpublished paper presented at the First Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting, Florence, 22–26 March 2000. 47 … strong networks of intercommunal commerce, decision-making and task sharing, self help in services such as education, basic healthcare and self policing have gone a long way in providing basic needs. They did not, however, form a unified monolith. They had their own internal logics of order that respected other communities’ own social needs … These strong informal networks, structured by Albanians, constituted an administrative lifeline for most rural communities. (Blumi, ‘One year of failure in Kosova’, 18) 48 Ninth Assessment of the Situation of Ethnic Minorities in Kosovo. 49 M. Chossudovsky, ‘NATO’s reign of terror in Kosovo’, Variant, 10, 1999, available at http://www.ndirect.co.uk/-variant (accessed July 2002). 50 The number of refugees increased by 40 per cent. V. Vratusa-Zunjic, ‘NATO “humanitarian” bombing disaster and humanitarian aid’, available at http://www.anglia.ac.uk/geography/d&scrn/nl_humanitarianaid.htm (accessed July 2002). 51 A. Yannis, ‘Kosovo under international administration’, Survival, 43:2, 2001, 31–48; A. Yannis, Kosovo under International Administration: An Unfinished Conflict, Athens: ELIAMEP and PSIS, 2001. 52 ‘The Kosovo Formula’, Washington Post, 23 November 2001. 53 Ibid. 54 The question of the legitimating power of elections in democratization processes, and the role of international organizations, like the OSCE in Kosovo, in the process is the subject of scholarly and political debate. See, for example, T. Carothers, ‘The end of the transition paradigm’, Journal of Democracy, 13: 1, 2002, 5–21. The author of this chapter is completing a thesis on ‘The role and impact of international electoral observation in democratization processes’ at the European University Institute, Fiesole (Florence). 55 Human Rights Watch World Report 2002, p. 387, available at http:// www.hrw.org/wr2k2/ (accessed July 2002). 56 Quoted in K. Booth, ‘Ten flaws of just war’, in K. Booth (ed.), The Kosovo Tragedy: The Human Rights Dimensions, London: Frank Cass, 2001, pp. 314–324. 57 Speech delivered by Javier Solana, NATO Secretary-General, at the XVIth International NATO Workshop, Budapest, 21 June 1999. 58 S. Kay, ‘After Kosovo: NATO’s credibility dilemma’, Security Dialogue, 31: 1, 2000, 77. In the preamble to the treaty it is stated that the NATO members must ‘Safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their people, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.’
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The Washington Treaty, 4 April 1949, available at http://www.nato.int/docu/ basictxt/treaty.htm (accessed September 2002). S. Kay, ‘After Kosovo’, 77. T. Pirc, ‘The European Union and the refugee crisis’, in D. Mahncke (ed.), Old Frontiers, New Frontiers: The Challenge of Kosovo and its Implications for the European Union, Bern: Peter Lang, 2001, p. 146. For instance, the setting up of ‘Camp Bondsteel’ in Kosovo can be interpreted in many ways, with commentators suggesting that its dimensions and the expenditure involved are out of proportion to the logistic needs of the American KFOR troops. See: F. Gustincich, ‘Da Camp Bondsteel a Camp Monteith’, Alfabravocharlie, 2 April 2000, available at http://www.alfabravocharlie.com/ anno_2000/aprile_htm/aree_di_crisi-Aprile.htm (accessed July 2002). Another puzzling question is the relation between the construction of the camp and any possible pipelines to be built in the region for the transportation of Caspian oil. See M. Cohn, ‘Pacification for a pipeline: explaining the US military presence in the Balkans’, Jurist: The Legal Education Network, April 2001, available at http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forum/forumnew22.HTM (accessed July 2002); M. Collon, ‘Caspian Sea’s oil reserves’, speech delivered at the International Tribunal for US/NATO War Crimes in Yugoslavia, June 2000; S.E. Cornell, ‘US policy in Caspian-Asia: imperatives of strategic vision’, Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, Washington, DC, 27 July 2000. M. Renner, ‘UN peacekeeping: an uncertain future’, Foreign Policy, 5:28, September 2000, available at http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org (accessed July 2002). An interesting case pointing in the opposite direction is the recent creation of the South-Eastern Europe Brigade (SEEBRIG). Comprising the Balkan countries, Italy and Turkey, SEEBRIG is a regional rapid intervention force designed to quickly resolve limited crises. It is at present stationed in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, but has yet to see action. Peacekeeping implies consent and the use of force only in self-defence. Peace operations include both traditional peacekeeping taken pursuant to Chapter VI of the UN Charter and peace operations authorized under Chapter VII. See United Nations, An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-Keeping, A/47/277 – S/24111, 17 June 1992, p. 4, where peacemaking and peacekeeping are distinguished. Some missions, like Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda, are widely seen as failures, diminishing the importance of successes like Nicaragua, Mozambique, Namibia and Eastern Slavonia in Croatia. V. Gligorov and N. Sudström, The Costs of the Kosovo Crisis, Current Analysis and Country Profiles, no. 12, Vienna: Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, April 1999; IMF–WB, The Economic Consequences of the Kosovo Crisis: A Preliminary Assessment of External Financing Needs and the Role of the Fund and the World Bank in the International Response, 16 April 1999, available at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/kosovo/041699.htm (accessed November 2002). Regarding the human costs, the controversial use of depleted uranium has led to the creation of scientific and political commissions of inquiry in Europe. See F. Gustincich, ‘I misteri del Kosovo radioattivo’, Limes, 3 October 1999. In August 2000 the ‘Brahimi Report’ acknowledged the shortcomings of UN Peacekeeping operations and proposed wide reforms, available at http://www.un.org/peace/reports/peace_operations/ (accessed July 2002). For the absence of permanent peacekeeping structures, see D. Carment and A. Schnabel, Building Conflict Prevention Capacity: Methods, Experiences, Needs, Working Paper No. 5, Tokyo: UN University and Ottawa: Peace-building and Reconstruction Program Initiative, IDRC, June 2001.The chronic lack of funds
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is partly due to the continued non-payment by the USA of its arrears, which, in July 2000, stood at $1.36 billion, about two-thirds of the amount owed by all UN members. The problem of response and lessons learned is complicated. It is true that the warnings of analysts are often ignored in the face of more contingent factors. See, for instance, regarding the Albanian crisis of 1997, E.C. del Re, ‘Le radici della crisi albanese: fattori di destabilizzazione interni e regionali’, in A. de Guttry (ed.), Alla ricerca di un sistema europeo di gestione dei conflitti: il caso della crisi albanese del 1997, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998, pp. 23–47. However, each crisis does present its own peculiarities, allowing only ad hoc policies of prevention and intervention. Blumi, ‘One year of failure in Kosova’, 17. N. Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo, London: Pluto, 1999. This is a topic that I have explored in several studies. See E.C. del Re, ‘Albanian society in evolution: the migration factor’, in C. Lanni (ed.), Albania, a Country of Europe: The Migration Factor, Turin: EGA, 2000, pp. 9–43; E.C. del Re, ‘Crimine e stato in Albania’, Limes, 2, 2000, 49–64; E.C. del Re, ‘Albania: social, political and economic questions in the process of democratization’, AWR Bulletin, 1, 1999, 28–38; E.C. del Re, ‘Albania in transition: the question of identity and the customary law’, in S. Bianchini and G. Schopflin (eds), State Building in the Balkans: Dilemmas on the Eve of the 21st Century, Ravenna: Longo, 1999, pp. 167–194. I. Guest, Misplaced Charity Undermines Kosovo’s Self-reliance, Washington, DC: Overseas Development Council, February 2000, available at http:// www.odc.org/commentary0/vpfeb00.htm (accessed July 2002). Blumi, ‘One year of failure in Kosova’, 16. Ibid. N. Malcolm, ‘Did no good really come of intervention in Kosovo?’, Daily Telegraph, 24 March 2000; P. Hassner, ‘Kosovo, Balkans, Europe: brève rencontre ou mariage durable?’, Esprit, May 2001. Jacques Rupnik suggests four options: (1) a division of Kosovo; (2) a prolonged international protectorate; (3) a revived Yugoslav federation; (4) conditional independence. J. Rupnik, ‘L’après-guerre dans les Balkans et la question du Kosovo’, in D. Triantaphyllou (ed.), ‘Quel statut pour le Kosovo?’, Cahiers de Chaillot, no. 50, Paris: Institut d’Etudes de Sécurité, Union de l’Europe Occidental, October 2001.
6
International intervention in Macedonia From preventive engagement to peace implementation Alice Ackermann
Introduction On a cold November morning in 1992, when Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov appealed at the United Nations headquarters in New York for the dispatch of a preventive peacekeeping mission to his country, little did he know that it would mark the beginning of an international involvement in Macedonia that would still be ongoing ten years later.1 For what was a relatively successful example of preventive engagement, not only on the part of the UN but also the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia’s (ICFY) Working Group on Ethnic and National Communities and Minorities, has, nearly a decade later, turned into a large-scale peace implementation exercise, following the eight-month violent conflict that erupted in Macedonia in early 2001. The role of third parties in zones of conflict is highly contested in literature and practice.2 This is partly because there is such a broad spectrum of third-party involvement, ranging all the way from direct military intervention to peace enforcement, peace-maintenance, peace-building and preventive deployment, and from humanitarian relief to economic assistance, democratization, nation/state building and what is generally referred to as ‘good offices’, that is, mediation and negotiation. Although direct military interventions are frequently the most contested, other forms of third-party intervention, including humanitarian actions, can also face criticism, because outside actors are able to change the dynamic of a conflict and even its settlement. Indeed, the very term ‘intervention’, particularly in its usage in international law, regularly invokes negative connotations and is often equated with the unilateral action of one country against another or with the use of force.3 The former Yugoslavia is an example of the ambiguities surrounding intervention by third parties, not only because of the various forms of international intervention that have occurred – including direct military action, humanitarian intervention, preventive deployment, peace enforcement, peace-maintenance – but also because of differing views as to whether these
106 Alice Ackermann interventions were politically expedient and accomplished their objectives or merely changed the dynamics of the conflict by indirectly supporting one contending party over the other. The same is true of existing international engagements in the Balkans, with doubts often being raised about whether they are achieving the purpose for which they were initially established. This chapter will explore the various forms of international engagement which have occurred in Macedonia, once the most southern republic of Yugoslavia. The analysis is limited to collective third-party engagements, particularly those on behalf of regional and international organizations. It is not concerned with the actions of individual state actors. Throughout, the terms ‘international intervention’, ‘international involvement’ and ‘international engagement’ will be used interchangeably to refer to a form of conflict management whereby third parties have acted in Macedonia either for the purpose of preventing a conflict turning violent or to implement a peace accord. The history of international intervention in Macedonia can be divided into three phases which correspond to the different stages of the conflict cycle: (1) the pre-violent or latent conflict stage; (2) the overt conflict stage; and (3) the post-peace agreement stage. In the first phase international engagement was directed towards preventing the outbreak of open conflict. The second phase was initiated once the conflict had turned violent and was primarily concerned with mediation and finding a solution to the armed confrontation. The third phase, which is still ongoing and will probably continue in the near future, focuses on managing the post-peace agreement environment. While the first phase was unique in the history of international involvement because of its emphasis on conflict prevention, the second and third phases took a more traditional form, in that they were centred on bringing about a negotiated settlement, and, thereafter, on peace implementation tasks, such as assisting with the disarmament and demobilization of an insurgency movement, providing protection for international observers, and monitoring the implementation of the peace agreement terms. The main thesis of this chapter is that, while international involvement in Macedonia in general has been beneficial to the country, particularly in the early years after independence, there have also been unintended negative consequences. The international community has been able to exert an enormous influence on Macedonia, leaving the country over-dependent on outside actors and creating among many Macedonians a perception that they live within an international protectorate.
The first phase: preventive diplomacy, 1991–2000 Between 1991 and 2000 international involvement was primarily preventive in nature and Macedonia was frequently hailed as one of the most successful examples of such diplomacy.4 Preventive engagement began almost immediately following Macedonia’s declaration of independence in
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September 1991 and involved a multitude of international actors: the ICFY’s Working Group on Ethnic and National Communities and Minorities, the United Nations Preventive Deployment Mission (UNPREDEP) and the OSCE. All these third-party actors shared the same rationale for intervening in Macedonia: to prevent a spillover of war from elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia and the outbreak of ethnic hostilities between the country’s Macedonian and Albanian populations. International engagement was based on the consent of the Macedonian government, and, in the case of UNPREDEP, preventive action had come specifically upon the request of President Gligorov. Among the earliest international preventive actors to arrive in Macedonia was the ICFY’s Working Group on Ethnic and National Communities and Minorities. With a mandate from UN Secretary-General, Boutros BoutrosGhali, the Working Group under the chairmanship of the German diplomat, Geert Ahrens, first began its preventive endeavours in October 1991 as part of the Conference on Yugoslavia. When the Conference was dissolved, the Working Group met the same fate, only to be revived with the establishment of a second and longer-lasting peace conference, the ICFY. A collective international effort that included the European Union and the UN, the ICFY quickly shifted its attention to securing a peace settlement in Bosnia, leaving the safeguarding and protection of minority rights in the other Yugoslav states, including Macedonia, to the Working Group. Considering the principal threat to peace and stability in Macedonia to be the tensions between Macedonians, Albanians and militant Serbs supported by Belgrade, the Working Group performed a mediating role in Macedonia, relying on three major preventive devices: frequent fact-finding visits to the country, personal shuttle diplomacy, mostly out of the limelight of public and media attention, and the creation of trilateral forums. It was in these trilateral forums in which Macedonian government leaders, Albanians and Serbs met with members of the Working Group that intensive negotiations yielded several crucial agreements that probably headed off ethnic violence during the early years after independence. In return for government concessions on Albanian demands, such as changes in the constitution, greater access to education and the media, and the sharing of political power, the Working Group was able to dissuade the Albanian leaders from seeking territorial autonomy. Although there was only minor progress on implementing several of the more pressing and controversial demands, such as those for the recognition of the Albanians as a constituent nation, acceptance of the Albanian language as a second official language, the creation of an Albanian-language university and a law on local self-government, these efforts in the early years of independence, when the country was politically and economically weak, helped avert an eruption of ethnic violence. In 1992 the Working Group also defused a crisis involving the Serb minority which had engaged in a series of provocative incidents culminating in the proclamation of a Serb republic with its own
108 Alice Ackermann constitution. Employing an approach similar to the one adopted with the Albanians, the Working Group convinced the Serbs to give up their territorial claims in exchange for greater cultural and educational rights and more access to the media. In general, the Working Group provided an effective and broadly neutral international forum for the discussion, negotiation and mediation of minority issues in Macedonia. Crucially, after it was dissolved in January 1996, along with the ICFY, following the Dayton Peace Accords, there was no similar institution which could take its place, as neither UNPREDEP nor the OSCE had a mechanism that could function in the same mediating capacity.5 The CSCE/OSCE employed two preventive mechanisms in Macedonia characteristic of its approach to managing post-Cold War security problems: the creation of a field mission and regular fact-finding and mediation visits from its High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM).6 The CSCE Spillover Monitor Mission to Skopje, which was established in late September 1992, with US Ambassador Robert Frowick as its first head of mission, had as its explicit mandate the prevention of spillover of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and the protection of Macedonia’s territorial integrity. This was mostly to be accomplished through the monitoring of the borders with Serbia and Albania, an almost impossible task, given the Mission’s relatively small staff at the time – between six to eight monitors – and its lack of logistical support.7 Nevertheless, the Spillover Mission managed to defuse several border incidents in 1993, and filed reports on a number of incidents involving Macedonia’s ethnic minorities, especially Albanians and Serbs. Indeed, between 1992 and 1994 much of the Mission’s monitoring focused on Serbia’s attempts to destabilize the country, mostly through incursions into Macedonian territory and provocative statements on the part of the Serbian leadership which questioned the continued existence of Macedonia as a state.8 Mission members regularly visited the countryside to investigate potential sources of unrest, to record human rights violations, border encroachments and inter-ethnic tensions. In fact, the strength of the Mission lay in the access it had to a wide range of individuals at both an official and unofficial level. It maintained frequent contact not only with political elites, party and religious leaders, and various political organizations but also with journalists, trade union leaders, and the local population. Crucial for the success of the CSCE/OSCE mission were also the regular fact-finding visits of the HCNM to Macedonia. Created in 1992 as an instrument for conflict prevention, the High Commissioner’s mandate was kept deliberately vague when it came to early warning and preventive diplomacy, leaving much to the interpretation of the incumbent. Until June 2001, the post was held by the former Dutch foreign minister Max van der Stoel. His contribution to preventive diplomacy in Macedonia is evident from the many recommendations he submitted to the government relating to minority rights. These spanned such contentious issues as job discrimination against
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Albanians, demands for increased TV and radio programming in the Albanian language, changes to the citizenship law, and greater educational and language rights for Albanians. Van der Stoel was also particularly involved in finding a solution to the contentious issue of the illegal university in Tetovo which had been founded by Macedonia’s Albanian leadership as an institution of higher learning in the Albanian language.9 He suggested as a compromise the creation of a multilingual institution of higher learning, the so-called South East Europe University (SEEU) in Tetovo. This opened its doors in autumn 2001 and currently has 1,000 registered students.10 Van der Stoel also issued an important early warning in May 1999 during the Kosovo conflict, warning of Macedonia’s destabilization, the first ever such statement since the creation of an early warning capacity within the OSCE.11 It is difficult to measure how far van der Stoel’s mediating missions were solely responsible for policy changes in Macedonia as far as ethnic rights were concerned, especially since other actors, such as the Working Group, were also engaged in a similar dialogue. However, his was an outside voice with political influence and access to Macedonia’s leadership insisting that there be accommodation of minority demands and progress in managing interethnic tensions. Also, by identifying sources of ethnic conflict, and bringing them to the attention of a regional organization and its member states, he compelled the Macedonian government to address contentious issues and muster the political will to accommodate some of the minority demands. Together with the Spillover Mission, the HCNM had a moderating influence on the Macedonian and Albanian political leadership and probably contributed to keeping the more nationalist forces on both sides at bay.12 UN preventive involvement came primarily upon the request of President Gligorov, who, in November 1992, made a plea to the Security Council for the deployment of a preventive force. That the situation in Macedonia was perceived to be critical is evident from the fact that the preventive peacekeeping mission was deployed in a relative short period of time following the passing of UN Resolution 795 on 11 December 1992 authorizing the force. Initially a part of UNPROFOR, the UN Protection Force that was to oversee the cease-fire and demobilization of troops in Croatia, UNPREDEP became an independent mission in spring 1995 – the only preventive diplomacy mission in the history of the UN. UNPREDEP’s mandate, based on a three-pronged approach, was clear and precise: (1) to monitor the border with Albania and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; (2) to deter any threats to Macedonia and strengthen the country’s stability; and (3) to use good offices. With no more that 1,000 soldiers under its command at any one time and only a small civilian staff, UNPREDEP was not a force that would have been able to ward off any Serbian military incursion into Macedonia. Its strength instead rested in its deterrent function, even if this was largely
110 Alice Ackermann symbolic. Its advantage lay in the fact that it had the support of the Security Council and the major actors within the international community, especially the United States, which in 1993 contributed personnel to the preventive force, signalling to Belgrade that Washington was committed to the prevention of the spillover of violence and the ignition of a wider Balkan conflagration. At the same time, however, the United States also made clear that, while it was committed to supporting the UN in Macedonia, it was not prepared to fight a war in the country, and this was evident in UNPREDEP’s mandate which was strictly preventive in character. The UN preventive mission rested on three pillars: military, political, and humanitarian. The military aspect of the mandate was mainly carried out through the preventive force. Supported by UN civilian police its task was to monitor and observe developments along Macedonia’s border with Serbia and Albania through fixed and temporary observation posts. The monitoring of political, economic and social conditions was mostly the responsibility of the civilian staff and UNPREDEP’s chief of mission, the Polish diplomat Henryk Sokalski, who also acted as a mediator between Macedonia’s political and ethnic leaders in a number of crises. The third pillar was concerned with more long-term social problems, addressing them through a number of UN-sponsored projects, including infrastructure development. UNPREDEP cooperated closely with the CSCE/OSCE, particularly since the respective mandates were similar and because it was only UNPREDEP that had sufficient manpower and the logistics to carry out the portion of the CSCE/OSCE mandate that called for the monitoring of the borders.13 The first phase of international involvement in Macedonia came to an end in March 1999, following the termination of UNPREDEP’s mandate by a Chinese veto in the Security Council on 26 February 1999, after Macedonia had granted diplomatic recognition to Taiwan.14 Unfortunately, this came at a time when Macedonia was facing a severe crisis over the war in neighbouring Kosovo which produced a flood of refugees. With the ICFY’s Working Group’s mandate already terminated, this left only the OSCE to manage the political and economic instability created by the crisis. The first phase of international engagement in Macedonia rested on a clear and precise objective shared by all three third-party actors: the prevention of a wider Balkan war. It demonstrated that preventive action can make a difference in newly independent states, if conflict prevention is the shared goal of all third-party intervenors, if it is timely, if it is multidimensional and coordinated, and if it has the support of major actors. Crucial, however, was also the fact that the domestic political elite were moderate in their behaviour. They abstained from the pursuit of extreme nationalist, exclusionary agendas, were generally committed to accommodation and pluralism, and favoured and supported preventive engagement. There was also widespread public support for the involvement of third parties in Macedonia. What proved detrimental was that preventive engagement in
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Macedonia decreased over time and was not followed by long-term conflict prevention measures. Not only did UNPREDEP have to withdraw at a time when a war was raging in neighbouring Kosovo but in general throughout the first phase of intervention not enough was done by the international community to assure that the more contentious minority rights questions were tackled. Instead, there was only minor progress on such important issues as the constitutional recognition of the Albanians as a nation, the recognition of Albanian as a second language, and the implementation of a law on local government, all of which had been on the agenda since Macedonia’s independence. Nor was the preventive phase used effectively to strengthen Macedonia in terms of national identity and sovereignty vis-à-vis neighbours such as Greece – for example, the name of the country remained an unresolved issue – or with regard to political, military security, and economic conditions. Thus, Macedonia still remained a weak and fragile state. Moreover, little attention had been paid to the impact of the crisis in Kosovo and in particular the failure to resolve the status of the province.15
The second phase: third party mediation, spring–summer 2001 The outbreak of armed hostilities in Macedonia in late January 2001 eventually triggered a second phase of international involvement, after a militant organization, the National Liberation Army (NLA), appeared on the scene. A group that styled itself on the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and which claimed to be fighting for the equal rights of Macedonia’s Albanians, the NLA engaged Macedonian military and security forces for several months in the vicinity of Tetovo, Kumanovo and even the capital, Skopje. Although it is still not entirely clear why the insurgency movement appeared in 2001, it is generally assumed that it was unresolved grievances and unmet demands with regards to political and cultural rights that triggered militant mobilization. The weakness and instability of the Macedonian state, the lack of mutual trust between the two major ethnic communities, and the inability to create a common civic identity also contributed, as did the unresolved status of Kosovo, the existence of a pan-Albanian movement, the influence of the Albanian diaspora, and, possibly, linkages with criminal activities among Albanians.16 International involvement – mostly on the part of NATO, the OSCE, and the European Union – during the second phase largely focused on crisis management and containment rather than escalation prevention. Initially the engagement was limited, as the Macedonian government in the first few months tried to solve the conflict militarily. When this approach failed and the violence threatened to spiral out of control, the European Union, NATO and the OSCE stepped up their mediating efforts. The three European institutions adopted a coordinated approach to the crisis, although the OSCE remained more on the sidelines, as the European Union’s
112 Alice Ackermann foreign policy and security chief, Javier Solana, and NATO’s SecretaryGeneral, Lord George Robertson, came to the fore. Solana and Robertson played a crucial role in mediating cease-fires, establishing a government of national unity and bringing Albanian political leaders and their Macedonian counterparts to the negotiating table to work out a political agreement. Moving beyond shuttle-diplomacy, they often acted as ‘troubleshooters’ keeping the search for a negotiated settlement on track, as they worked to soften entrenched tit-for-tat positions and mend internal divisions within the different political parties. In early May 2001 Solana played a crucial role in negotiating the creation of a government of national unity – consisting of all political parties – thereby permitting a collective approach to the crisis. Then, only a few weeks later, he was equally involved in preventing the break-up of this government after it was made public that the leaders of the Albanian parties, the DPA (the Democratic Party of Albanians) and the PDP (the Party of Democratic Prosperity), had allegedly signed a separate ‘peace agreement’ with Ali Ahmeti, the leader of the NLA. Both Solana and Robertson were also actively involved in negotiating several cease-fires between the government and the insurgents, and twice, on 6 May and 6 June, they were able to convince the Macedonian Prime Minister, Ljubco Georgievski, not to proclaim a state of war, a move which would have led to a serious escalation in the conflict.17 International involvement during the crisis was not necessarily perceived in a benign way by the ethnic Macedonian population or by their leaders. The international community was often seen as applying undue pressure, and accusations that it was supporting the Albanian side in the conflict were frequently employed by Macedonian nationalists to discredit the international mediation efforts. Two incidents provoked particular outrage. One involved the so-called peace agreement between the NLA and the DPA and PDP in which they agreed upon common political demands, such as the need for changes in the constitution, the recognition of Albanian as a second language of the state, an increase in proportional representation and more local autonomy. Reports quickly leaked that the representative of Mircea Geoana, the OSCE Chairman-inOffice, Ambassador Robert Frowick, who had been appointed to his office on 21 March in order to implement a coordinated approach within the OSCE, had played an ‘assisting’ role in concluding the agreement. It was also alleged that Frowick had more or less acted on his own without informing either the Macedonian government or the OSCE. Frowick in a meeting with Geoana, on 25 May, contended that he never had direct contacts with the NLA but had only met with Albanian leaders from Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo.18 Nevertheless, the political fallout was considerable with the more nationalistic elements within the Macedonian leadership using the incident to make a case against the intermediary efforts of all the third-party actors.
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In late June, the European Union’s role as a neutral third-party mediator became equally discredited when Solana negotiated a cease-fire in Aracinovo, a village near the airport, less than ten kilometres from Skopje, which had been occupied by 500 NLA fighters. The occupation of Aracinovo by the NLA not only threatened the capital and the country’s oil refinery and fuel reserves, which are located in the vicinity of the airport, but also KFOR supply lines into Kosovo. The size of the occupying force led to predictions that it could take weeks rather than days for the military to dislodge the fighters, most likely with significant human casualties. Accordingly, Solana negotiated an evacuation which led to the NLA contingent leaving with their weapons under NATO escort to a KFOR base near Kumanovo. Solana’s negotiations created outrage among Macedonians and, on 25 June, 5,000 protesters, chanting anti-Albanian and anti-Western slogans, attacked the parliament building demanding the resignation of President Boris Trajkovski and the continuation of military action against the NLA.19 Following the 25 June riots, there were also violent clashes on 24 July when Macedonians attacked Western embassies and offices, including those of the OSCE Spillover Mission, and destroyed OSCE vehicles. International pressures on the Macedonian government during the crucial months and weeks leading to the 13 August 2001 peace accord elicited serious anti-Western sentiments in Macedonia, which had never been the case prior to the outbreak of the crisis. Such sentiments were not only widespread among the general public but were also shared by members of the government, particularly within the Prime Minister’s party. Throughout June and July, a number of negative remarks were made by the government and the media, in which NATO and the United States were accused of siding with the ‘terrorists’ – the official term used by the government for the NLA insurgents. And, once negotiations for a peace agreement began, Georgievski even publicly proclaimed that the West was interfering in Macedonia’s internal affairs and was attempting to force the country to accept federalization.20 Despite such comments, in early July, the international community finally managed to bring the Macedonian government and the leaders of the Albanian political parties to the negotiation table. US representative, James Pardew, and European Union representative, François Leotard, after bringing about a cease-fire, served as the intermediaries in a series of negotiating rounds in which all three parties – the Macedonian government, Albanian leaders, and the EU/US mediators – submitted a series of draft proposals for a new legal framework. Throughout, outside actors played a key role in keeping the negotiations on track and, when they broke down without agreement, because of the unwillingness of the Macedonian delegation to agree to provisions in the EU/US draft proposal, Solana, Robertson and Geoana all rushed to Skopje with promises of international assistance for the implementation of a peace accord.21 Eventually, a peace agreement, also referred to as the Framework Agreement, was signed in Ohrid on 13 August 2001 by all the major political parties – two Macedonian, the VMRO-DPMNE (Internal
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Macedonian Revolutionary Organization-Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity) and the SDSM (Social Democratic Alliance of Macedonia), and two Albanian, the DPA and the PDP. The Agreement, among other provisions, prescribed the use of Albanian as an official language in areas where Albanians comprise 20 per cent of the population; non-discrimination and equitable representation for Albanians in the public sector; an increase in the number of Albanian police by 500 by July 2002, and another 500 by July 2003; a change in the preamble of the constitution to replace the word ‘ethnic’ by ‘citizens of Macedonia’ and ‘peoples’, and the term ‘nationalities’ by ‘communities’; the introduction of a so-called ‘double majority’ so as to prevent ethnic minorities being outvoted in parliament; more educational rights for Albanians; the decentralization of government and the introduction of a law on local self-government; greater respect for national symbols; and an amnesty for NLA fighters.22 Although international mediation prevented more widespread violent conflict in Macedonia and led to an agreement whose provisions, once they are fully implemented, should significantly improve the status of the Albanian population of the country, neither Macedonia’s leadership, particularly the hawkish circles around the Prime Minister and Interior Minister, nor large segments of its population, showed much enthusiasm for the international engagement. More nationalist elements in the Macedonian government used the presence of international intermediaries to stir up anti-Albanian and anti-Western sentiments, suggesting that the international actors forced them to make concessions when they would have preferred to pursue a long-term military campaign to eliminate the NLA. Despite such domestic sentiments, this phase of concerted international mediation was probably crucial in preventing a more protracted armed conflict in Macedonia.
The third phase: the post-peace agreement period, August 2001–present The Framework Agreement did not terminate international involvement in Macedonia. The post-peace agreement environment continues to be characterized by a substantial international engagement in the country and this looks set to continue for the foreseeable future. International actors not only played a key role in securing the Framework Agreement but also remain crucial for its implementation. The Macedonian parliament was initially slow to ratify the amendments specified in the Agreement, only passing a package of fifteen amendments on 16 November 2001 after nearly two months of delaying tactics.23 The restart of negotiations in parliament was again largely orchestrated through the good offices of international mediators, particularly the European Union representative, Alain Le Roy. He played a key role in securing the passing on 24 January 2002 of one of the most contested amendments, the law on local self-government, largely by making the convening of an international donor’s conference on 12 March 2002 contin-
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gent on the passing of this and an amnesty law for former NLA members. In mid-May, with the assistance of US envoy, James Holmes, Le Roy was also instrumental in securing the passage of a new election bill which included provisions for proportional representation in six electoral districts.24 In a dual-track approach, constitutional reforms have been monitored by the European Union and OSCE, while disarmament and demobilization of the NLA was undertaken by NATO. Following a June 2001 request by President Trajkovski, on 27 August, NATO deployed about 3,500 personnel in Macedonia as part of Operation Essential Harvest, a thirty-day mission to disarm and demobilize NLA fighters. Prior to deployment, a separate agreement with precise rules of engagement was concluded with the NLA leader, Ahmeti, regulating the conditions for the demobilization and disarmament of the insurgents. Operation Essential Harvest was able to collect approximately 3,875 weapons and 200,000 mines, explosive devices, and other types of ammunition within the thirty days stipulated. A follow-on mission, Operation Amber Fox, also requested by the Macedonian president, was then deployed as part of NATO’s ‘stabilization’ policy towards Macedonia and the region. The mandate of the 700-strong Amber Fox force is more restricted both in terms of tasks to be performed and time limit than Essential Harvest, with its duties confined to the protection of the OSCE and European Union monitors overseeing the implementation of the peace plan. Its initial deployment was for a period of three months, but the mission has already been renewed several times.25 The OSCE and the European Union also remain major components of the international presence in Macedonia’s post-peace agreement environment, with their responsibilities stretching from overseeing the implementation of the peace accord to initiating specific confidence-building measures among the ethnic communities. With the blessing of the Macedonian government the OSCE has expanded its mission to more than 200 members and revised its mandate to reflect its new responsibilities in a post-conflict peacebuilding environment. It contributes to confidence-building; facilitates meetings within ethnically divided communities; reports on the humanitarian situation, including the return of refugees and internally displaced people; monitors illicit arms and human trafficking, and, most importantly, with the assistance of the NATO forces and European Union monitors, oversees the phased redeployment of police into 120 ethnically-mixed villages.26 It has also assumed responsibility for the training of a new multi-ethnic police force, as stipulated in the Framework Agreement, and in late May 2002 the second class of multiethnic police officers graduated from the Police School in Idrizovo, near Skopje, concluding the first stage of the training programme.27
Conclusion To sum up, international intervention in Macedonia has been a mixed blessing, especially in the last two phases analysed here. While it can be
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generally argued that international engagement in the first few years of Macedonia’s independence was crucial in warding off major violence, it also had some unintended negative consequence. In particular, it has produced a growing awareness of Macedonia’s limited sovereignty and a widespread sense that the country has been turned into an international protectorate. These sentiments have become more pronounced after international intermediaries negotiated the peace accord in the summer of 2001. Since then, many Macedonians have come to view the Framework Agreement as an ‘internationally-induced arrangement’, which rewarded violence and increased Albanian security and identity at the expense of the Macedonians. Nevertheless, preventive action of the kind seen in Macedonia in the first phase can assist newly independent states to consolidate themselves domestically and in their external environments, specifically in this case, the spillover of ethnic war from Croatia, Bosnia, and later Kosovo, was successfully avoided. The role of domestic elites should also be emphasized, particularly their commitment to preventing ethnic violence and their willingness to pursue a strategy of political accommodation. One major lesson to be learnt from the Macedonian case is that any preventive involvement must be forward looking and long term in nature, especially if the internal and external environment remains unstable. As far as Macedonia is concerned, the sudden termination of the mandates of the ICFY Working Group and UNPREDEP significantly increased the chances of conflict. The removal of UNPREDEP during the Kosovo war was particularly destabilizing, leaving the country without an adequate force to monitor ethnic mobilization across the Kosovo–Macedonia divide. In the future Macedonia seems likely to remain highly dependent for its security on international organizations, such as NATO, the European Union, and the OSCE, with the mediating influence of the latter two crucial in keeping the peace among the ethnic communities. Already there are discussions that the European Union may take over the peace implementation mission from NATO, although such an idea remains controversial in NATO circles. It is crucial that the next phase of international engagement in Macedonia focuses on long-term, comprehensive conflict prevention and national reconciliation efforts. This would include the deployment of a new international force, modelled on UNPREDEP, within the country. Unfortunately, because so much violence has already occurred, and there are now high levels of mistrust among the two ethnic groups, prevention and reconciliation measures will be much more difficult to implement. Moreover, there is much more elite and public opposition to international involvement in Macedonia, especially since the perception is deep-rooted that international and regional organizations have taken the side of the Albanians, a sentiment that became further fossilized during the 2001 conflict. It can only be hoped that Macedonia is able, with the assistance of third parties, to quickly move to a condition of stable peace.
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Notes 1 The name ‘Macedonia’ will be used throughout this text. The country was admitted into the UN in 1992 under the temporary name the ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’ (FYROM) because of objections from Greece, which has a province of the same name bordering the Macedonian state. Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski requested that the country’s official name be changed to the ‘Republic of Macedonia’ but as yet no agreement has been reached. Despite the name issue, Macedonian–Greek relations have improved, with Greece becoming Macedonia’s largest foreign investor and on 23 May 2002 the two countries signed a military cooperation agreement. 2 See, for example, L.F. Damrosch (ed.), Enforcing Constraints: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts, New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993; S.J. Stedman, ‘The new interventionists’, Foreign Affairs, 72: 1, 1992–1993, 1–16. 3 See also Damrosch, ‘Introduction’, in Damrosch, Enforcing Constraints, pp. 1–26. 4 A. Williams, Preventing War: The United Nations and Macedonia, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000; A. Ackermann, Making Peace Prevail: Preventing Violent Conflict in Macedonia, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000; M. Lund, Preventing Violent Conflicts: A Strategy for Preventive Diplomacy, Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 1996. 5 There is little specific literature on the ICFY and its Working Group. For references and some analysis see Ackermann, Making Peace Prevail, pp. 102–112; S.L. Burg, ‘The international community and the Yugoslav Crisis’, in M.J. Esman and S. Telhami (eds), International Organizations and Ethnic Conflict, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995, pp. 235–274; D. Owen, Balkan Odyssey, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1995; S.L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995. See also the document collection by B.G. Ramcharan (ed.), The International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia: Official Papers, The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1997. 6 The CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) was renamed the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) at the Budapest Summit on 5–6 December 1994. 7 Statement of the Head of the CSCE Spillover Monitor Mission Regarding Agreement on Understanding on Operations on the Mission, Prague: OSCE Office for Documentation and Information, 1992. 8 See, for example, ‘Report of Ambassador G. Norman Anderson, Head of Mission, CSCE Mission, Skopje’, CSO Meeting, Rome, 27–29 November 1993; ‘Report of Ambassador William B. Whitman, Head of Mission, CSCE Spillover Mission, Skopje’, CSO Meeting, Prague, 2 February 1993. 9 The so-called Tetovo University was founded by Fadil Sulejmani, its Rector, and other Albanian intellectuals after Pristina University in Kosovo became inaccessible to Macedonian Albanians. Operating mainly in private houses donated by Albanians, the university opened in February 1995, but the Macedonian government never recognized its legitimacy and attempted to close it down several times. In 2000 Albanian political leaders agreed on the creation of a separate South East Europe University (SEEU) but the Tetovo University continues to exist and the two institutions compete for students. See ‘Mazedoniens umstrittene Hochschulpolitik’, Neue Züricher Zeitung, 22 May 2002, 7. 10 Although Macedonians continue to oppose the SEEU, the main contention has been between Albanian groups with those around Fadil Sulejmani being particularly vocal. The issue is party-political with the DPA supporting the SEEU and
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the rival PDP Tetovo University. See ‘Mazedoniens umstrittene Hochschulpolitik’. The early warning was issued at the 229th Plenary Meeting of the Permanent Council. See OSCE, PC Journal, 229, 12 May 1999. On the role of the OSCE and the HCNM in Macedonia, see Ackermann, Making Peace Prevail; A. Ackermann, ‘The Republic of Macedonia and the OSCE: preventive diplomacy in practice’, in Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (ed.), OSCE Yearbook 1997, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1997, pp. 73–80; S. Troebst, ‘Präventive Friedenssicherung durch internationale Beobachtermissionen? Das Beispiel der KSZE-Spillover-Monitormission in Makedonien, 1992–1993’, in Wolfgang Puehs, Thomas Weggel, and Claus Richter (eds), Sicherheitspolitisches Symposium Balkankonflikt, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1994, pp. 125–156; Foundation on Inter-Ethnic Relations (ed.), The Role of the High Commissioner on National Minorities in OSCE Conflict Prevention: An Introduction, The Hague: Foundation on Inter-Ethnic Relations, 1997. On UNPREDEP’s role in Macedonia, see, for example, Williams, Preventing War; Ackermann, Making Peace Prevail; A. Ackermann and A. Pala, ‘From peacekeeping to preventive deployment: a study of the United Nations in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’, European Security, 5: 1, 1996, 81–97; C. Archer, ‘Conflict prevention in Europe: the case of the Nordic states and Macedonia’, Cooperation and Conflict, 29: 4, 1994, 367–386. China denied that its decision was linked to Macedonia’s recognition of Taiwan, arguing that because the preventive force had stabilized Macedonia it was no longer necessary. See ‘China vetoes extension of UN force’s mandate in Macedonia’, RFE/RL Newsline, 3: 40, part II, 26 February 1999. In exchange for its recognition, Taiwan promised Macedonia $300 million in cash and $1 billion in long-term investment; http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-pacific/ newsid_1394000/1394486.stm (accessed 30 May 2002). For similar observations, see also Henryk Sokalski, ‘Early preventive action: lessons from UNPREDEP in Macedonia’, Speaking Notes, 10 May 2001, Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace. On the emergence of the NLA, see S. Troebst, ‘Gross-Kosovo oder unabhängiges Kosovo?’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 June 2001, 10; International Crisis Group, ‘The Macedonian Question: reform or rebellion?’, ICG Balkans Report, 109, Skopje/Brussels, 5 April 2001; A. Ackermann, ‘Auf des Messers Schneide – Mazedonien zehn Jahre nach der Unabhängigkeit’, in Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (ed.), OSZEJahrbuch 2001, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2001, pp. 125–144. An analysis of the background to the crisis can be found in Ackermann, ‘Auf des Messers Schneide’; D. Perry, ‘Macedonia: small potatoes or a big deal?’, International Spectator, 36: 2, 2001, 5–12; International Crisis Group, ‘The Macedonian Question’. See here Frowick’s comments to Geoana in OSCE Chairman-in-Office, ‘Chairman-in-Office meets with Personal Representative Frowick’, press release, 26 May 2001. On 1 July 2001 former HCNM van der Stoel replaced Frowick as Geoana’s personal envoy. He arrived in Macedonia on 10 July. See RFE/RL Newsline, 5:121, part II, 26 June 2001; V. Jovankovski, ‘Skopje politicians sober up’, IWPR Balkan Crisis Reports, 261, 4 July 2001. See, for example, ‘Macedonian Prime Minister says West back “terrorists”’, RFE/RL Newsline, 6: 135, part II, 19 July 2002; P. Moore, ‘Skopje’s own goals’, RFE/RL Balkan Report, 60, 24 August 2001. See Ackermann, ‘Auf des Messers Schneide’.
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22 See ‘Macedonia filling the security vacuum’, ICG Balkans Briefing, 8 September 2001; ‘Macedonia: war on hold’, ICG Balkans Briefing, 15 August 2001. A copy of the Framework Agreement is available at http://www.usip.org.library/pa/macedonia/pa_mas_08132001.html. (accessed 28 August 2001). 23 The Framework Agreement stipulated that the series of constitutional amendments were to be passed within forty-five days. The first phase of the parliamentary debate was to begin on 6 September, but it was not until 21 September that the parliament passed the first three amendments. See RFE/RL Newsline, 5:181, part II, 24 September 2001; ‘Macedonia filling the security vacuum’, ICG Balkans Briefing, 8 September 2001. 24 The Amnesty Law, which went into effect on 8 March 2002, granted amnesty to all former NLA fighters who did not commit offences that could be indicted by the Hague International War Crimes Tribunal. For the election law, see ‘Macedonian government approves key legislation’, RFE/RL Newsline, 6: 90, part II, 15 May 2002. 25 See ‘Operation Essential Harvest’, NATO Update, September 2001, available at http://www.nato.int/docu/update/2001/0903/e0905d.htm (accessed 26 December 2001); ‘Skopje requests NATO assistance’, NATO Update, 20 June 2001, available at http://www.nato.int/docu/update/2001/0618/e0620a.htm (accessed 26 December 2001); ‘Operation Amber Fox’, NATO Press Release, 27 September 2001, available at http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/2001/p01–133e.htm (accessed 26 December 2001). Initially scheduled to depart on 26 December 2001, Amber Fox was first extended until 26 October 2002, with the Netherlands taking command from Germany in late June. See ‘Nato extends mission in Macedonia’, RFE/RL Newsline, 6: 95, part II, 22 May 2002. Its mandate was subsequently further extended to December 2002. 26 Up until February 2002, sixty villages experienced redeployment. The redeployment began on 22 October 2001 with five ‘pilot villages’. The first phase was concluded on 19 December 2001, with the redeployment of police in fifteen villages. The process was completed in June 2002. A. Petruseva, ‘Macedonia: police return to rebel villages’, IWPR Balkan Crisis Report, 305, 20 December 2001; ‘Macedonian police enter two more villages’, RFE/RL Newsline, 6:24, part II, 6 February 2002; ‘Multiethnic Macedonian police enter former guerrilla stronghold’, RFE/RL Newsline, 6:49, part II, 14 March 2002. See also, ‘Building peace piece-by-piece’, OSCE in Focus, available at http://www.osce.org/ news/in_focus/fyrom_confidence_building_in_focus.php3 (accessed 10 May 2002). 27 The first group of ninety-seven officers graduated in April 2002. The OSCE Mission’s Police Development Unit, the Ministry of Interior, senior Macedonian police instructors, and legal experts from the University of Skopje’s Law Faculty have designed the curriculum. See ‘Another 152 multi-ethnic Macedonian police cadets successfully conclude training’, OSCE Latest News, Spillover Monitor Mission to Skopje, 23 May 2002, available at http://www.osce.org/news/ generate.php3?news_id=2474 (accessed 31 May 2002). As of July 2002, about 630 police cadets had finished their training under the multi-ethnic police training programme. This number includes more than 500 police recruits from minority communities and about 100 ethnic Macedonian recruits. See ‘Graduation of Macedonian police officers meets OSCE commitment within peace framework’, OSCE Latest News, Chairman-in-Office, 29 July 2002, available at http://www.osce.org/news/generate.php3?news_=2623 (accessed 19 November 2002).
7
The impact of international intervention on domestic political outcomes Western coercive policies and the Miloševiæ regime Jasna Dragoviæ-Soso
The use of coercive policies in international conflict resolution, particularly economic sanctions and air strikes, has been hotly debated both in academic scholarship and in the media. Disagreements abound about the appropriateness of such measures for reaching specific objectives – ending ethnic conflict, preventing state aggression, reversing man-made humanitarian disasters, stopping international terrorism or dealing with ‘rogue states’ – as well as about their impact on international institutions, alliances and power relations.1 One important aspect of this debate concerns the impact of external coercion on domestic political outcomes, particularly the perpetuation of those very regimes that such coercion targets.2 Indeed, many analysts have argued that long-term peace and stability in South-East Europe – as elsewhere – depend on the establishment of genuinely democratic governments in the region, which will adhere to internationally acceptable norms when pursuing their interests.3 But does international coercion actually contribute to domestic democratization processes? Or does it in fact hinder them, helping undemocratic regimes stifle potential or existing alternatives to their rule? The Yugoslav case study has been at the centre of considerable controversy within this wider debate, provoking conflicting assessments of both the successes and the costs of coercive policies that were employed by Western states and international organizations in the 1990s against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY, consisting of the republics of Serbia and Montenegro). Hence, some analysts argue that the economic embargo against the FRY was key in bringing about peace in Bosnia-Hercegovina, whereas others believe that it only had an undefined and marginal impact.4 Similarly, some defend the 1999 NATO bombing of the FRY as both justified and appropriate to end Serbian repression of Albanians in Kosovo and ‘prevent another Bosnia’, while others see it as a deeply flawed policy which achieved dubious results at great cost to both Albanian and Serbian civilians.5 The impact of external factors on internal political developments in the FRY seems to have been less of an issue in Western policy debates. Analyses of the Miloševiæ regime have tended to focus on the domestic
Western policies and the Miloševiæ regime 121 sources of stability in the 1990s: Serbia’s political culture, Miloševiæ’s exploitation of nationalism, the regime’s control of economic, political and media resources, as well as the opposition’s disunity, political opportunism and ineffectiveness.6 While recognizing these internal factors, most of the Serbs who were active throughout the 1990s in the myriad of opposition parties, nongovernmental organizations, anti-war groups, independent media and anti-regime demonstrations, nevertheless consistently argued that the policies of the international community – particularly those of the Western liberal democracies to whom they looked as a model for their own country – in fact strengthened the Miloševiæ regime and made their own struggle for democratic change more difficult. They provided much evidence showing that economic sanctions ‘hit the wrong people’ and that democracy was in fact the main ‘collateral damage’ of NATO’s bombs.7 Yet despite such claims, Western governments maintained coercion as their principal policy orientation until October 2000, greeting Serbia’s ‘democratic revolution’ and Miloševiæ’s fall as vindication of their policies.8 With this paradox in mind, this chapter will try to assess whether Western coercive policies against the FRY weakened the Miloševiæ regime and helped bring about Serbia’s democratic revolution in October 2000, or whether, to the contrary, they actually contributed to the consolidation of Miloševiæ’s power during the 1990s and the postponement of democratic change. It will do so by examining, first, the effects of the international sanctions against the FRY from their imposition in 1992 to their partial removal in 1995; second, the ‘interlude’ of 1996 and 1997 when external coercion was relaxed; and finally, the period from 1998 to 2000 which saw renewed international pressure against the FRY and whose highpoint was the NATO bombing campaign of spring 1999.
Economic sanctions and the Serbian regime, 1992–1995 The Miloševiæ regime was generally recognized as a hybrid form of governance – a ‘semi-authoritarian’ regime. On the one hand, it was characterized by a highly personal form of rule, the fusion of state structures with those of the ruling Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), the concentration of political, economic and coercive power in the hands of a small elite close to Miloševiæ, and constant obstruction of the development of civil society and genuinely democratic politics. On the other hand, it maintained certain attributes of democracy, including party pluralism, an operating parliament and regular elections, and, for most of the 1990s, it allowed the opposition to engage in extensive criticism of the leadership in mass demonstrations and a small but flourishing independent press.9 In order to assess the impact of coercive policies on the Serbian regime, it is, therefore, necessary to examine how both its power resources and popular support were affected.
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On 30 May 1992, the UN Security Council imposed a universal blockade on all trade and scientific, cultural and sports exchanges with the newly proclaimed FRY. In the words of Warren Zimmermann, the last US Ambassador to the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), the rationale behind the sanctions was not only to deprive the Bosnian Serbs of their main supply of fuel and ammunition and force Miloševiæ to give up his aims in Bosnia, but also to ‘humiliate a dictator, making it clear that he wasn’t fit to deal with the civilized world’ and – ‘in time’ – to ‘help the Serbian people to turn on their leader’.10 The economic effects of the sanctions, together with the disintegration of the common Yugoslav economy and the cost of the wars, resulted in a dramatic impoverishment of Serbia’s population and the depletion of the country’s resources. In 1993, GDP fell by 30 per cent, 1.3 million workers were placed on ‘paid leave of absence’ and 750,000 were unemployed; the average monthly salary by the end of that year was $15 and the monthly inflation rate skyrocketed to 313 million per cent.11 Yet, despite the hardship, the sanctions did not actually lead to regime collapse. According to Yugoslav analysts, private foreign currency reserves acted as a buffer against total impoverishment, the country’s agricultural wealth prevented starvation and smuggled goods helped shelter the population from unbearable penury.12 In fact, the economic blockade created favourable conditions for the rise of a ‘grey economy’, which ranged from small-scale street-vending of smuggled gasoline and the resale of foreign exchange to more important semi-legal and illegal economic activity, and which quickly became controlled by the regime. In the words of Belgrade sociologist Mladen Laziæ: The needs of the war followed by the UN sanctions necessarily channelled the state itself towards illegal international market transactions, with private firms providing the necessary services, thus ensuring enormous profits for themselves. As a result, their owners, along with a number of managers of state companies (also involved in illegal business), as well as individual members of the state apparatus, form a narrow strata of the extremely rich at the top of the social pyramid.13 The links between the regime and the new economic elite became more formal with the creation in March 1994 of the United Yugoslav Left (JUL), a coalition of small parties led by Miloševiæ’s wife, Mira Markoviæ. Faced with increasing pressure to either join the new political grouping or be deprived of the necessary authorizations and subjected to various kinds of harassment, many private entrepreneurs chose to support and finance JUL and, through it, the regime.14 The regime also managed to circumvent the negative effects of the sanctions and gain new sources of financing by relieving citizens of their hard currency savings during the hyperinflation of 1992–1994. In his best-selling 1995 book, Yugoslav economist Mladjan Dinkiæ (now Governor of the Yugoslav
Western policies and the Miloševiæ regime 123 National Bank) showed how the regime sponsored the hyperinflation in order to force citizens to spend their foreign currency savings on the regimecontrolled market, with dubious financial institutions, such as the two nominally ‘private’ (but actually state-linked) banks, Jugoskandik and Dafiment, offering huge rates of interest for hard currency deposits until they collapsed in spring 1993.15 Such ‘pyramid schemes’ – in contrast to other cases in post-communist South-Eastern Europe – thus served to strengthen the regime rather than undermining it. The new sources of financing allowed the state to pay wages and pensions at crucial moments, particularly just before elections, and thus ‘buy’ votes.16 If they did not weaken Miloševiæ’s control of power resources, did the sanctions at least erode popular support for his regime? Evidence, at least in the initial period, seems rather to indicate the contrary. First of all, the circumstances in which sanctions were introduced gave popular credence to the official Yugoslav position that they were ‘unfair and undeserved’. Although sanctions were apparently motivated by evidence of disproportionate attacks and atrocities committed by the Bosnian Serbs and had already been agreed upon by Western governments on 26 March 1992, it was the Sarajevo ‘breadline massacre’ which took place the following day that provided the main public justification.17 The problem was that the Bosnian Serbs were immediately blamed for the incident without conclusive proof; in fact, UNPROFOR investigators cast doubt on this explanation and suggested that it might even have been the Muslim side that was responsible, in an attempt to galvanize Western public opinion and provoke intervention.18 In any case, the West’s reference to this unresolved incident when imposing sanctions heightened the sense of injustice in a Serbian public which was either uninformed or unaccepting of the Bosnian Serbs’ responsibility for most of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the republic. Furthermore, the question that immediately arose was why no sanctions were imposed on Croatia, which was known to have its army and paramilitaries directly involved in Bosnia and which had begun ‘cleansing’ Serb villages at the same time as the Bosnian Serbs had launched their own campaign.19 In fact, UN Security Council Resolution 752 of 15 May 1992 expressly demanded that – like the Yugoslav People’s Army – ‘elements of the Croatian Army’ be either withdrawn or put under the authority of the Bosnian government.20 Yet, three days later, the Security Council recommended that Croatia be formally admitted to the United Nations (Resolution 753) and, although Resolution 757, which imposed sanctions against Yugoslavia, reiterated the demand that ‘all forms of interference from outside Bosnia and Hercegovina cease immediately’, no sanctions were imposed against Croatia.21 Such differential treatment inevitably fed public perceptions in Serbia that sanctions were unfair and that the West was ‘antiSerb’.22 Indeed, public opinion polls undertaken during this period show that a large segment of the population believed that there was a ‘conspiracy of
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foreign powers’ against Yugoslavia and that this conspiracy, rather than Miloševiæ, was responsible for Serbia’s difficult situation.23 As jurist and human rights campaigner Vojin Dimitrijeviæ pointed out, ‘the numerous professional and humanitarian associations concerned with the sufferings of pensioners, patients, children, etc. have sent their appeals to lift sanctions to all imaginable addresses abroad, but none to the presidents and governments of FRY or Serbia.’24 In a survey of a representative group of 1,555 adults in October 1993, 42.6 per cent of respondents saw sanctions as ‘a tool for the realization of interests of the great powers’ and 35.5 per cent blamed them on the ‘bad and incompetently led policy of the Serbian regime’ – only 2.2 per cent saw them as a ‘deserved punishment because Serbia is, after all, the most responsible party in this war’.25 Particularly those aspects of the sanctions whose effect was merely punitive, such as the ban on participation in sports events, cultural exchanges and air transport, irked ordinary people and isolated those who opposed the regime and wanted contact with the West. The first general election contested by the opposition since the proclamation of the FRY, held in December 1992, showed that – at least in the short term – sanctions actually helped the Miloševiæ regime. The ruling SPS emerged victorious and Miloševiæ himself decisively won the presidential race with over 50 per cent. Although international observers found some evidence of fraud, this could not disguise the opposition’s resounding defeat.26 The impact of the sanctions on the failure of the opposition cannot, of course, be divorced from the general context of the war and nationalist mobilization among Serbs since the late 1980s, as well as from the opposition’s own shortcomings. What is significant, however, is that promises of Western support played a key role in the strategy of the opposition parties and their presidential candidate, Federal Prime Minister Milan Paniæ – a US citizen of Serbian origin. Paniæ’s relentless lobbying of Western governments for at least some concessions – a sixty-day suspension of the sanctions until after the elections or an exemption of heating oil for the winter – produced no results, while giving the regime ample material for its media bashing of Paniæ as an American lackey and a foreign agent. The United Nations’ short-sighted reinforcement of the sanctions in November 1992 – a mere month before the elections – particularly damaged the opposition’s chances. As Mihailo Markoviæ, the Socialists’ chief ideologue, correctly foresaw: Whatever [the Serbs] do, we are punished. This gives people reason to think that Miloševiæ was right because Paniæ only got a tightening of the sanctions. They will cling to the present leadership and be even more obstinate. It will help Miloševiæ win the election.27 This disregard of Serbia’s domestic political situation was only compounded when Western policy-makers subsequently decided to sideline
Western policies and the Miloševiæ regime 125 the Bosnian Serb leadership and deal with the more amenable Miloševiæ in the period leading up to the 1995 Dayton Agreement. Despite the logic of this choice, in Serbia it contributed to the sense that Miloševiæ was the only one who could deliver the lifting of the sanctions and the reintegration of Yugoslavia into the international community. Indeed, the Serbian regime’s imposition of an economic blockade against the Bosnian Serbs in August 1994 was rewarded by the symbolic easing of sanctions applying to communications and cultural exchanges.28 The signing of the Dayton Agreement a year later produced an indefinite suspension of the economic embargo (although an ‘outer wall’ of sanctions was maintained by Western governments, barring Yugoslavia from international institutions).29 What the opposition for some time had been calling for was, in the end, achieved by the regime.
Interlude: Miloševiæ, the ‘guarantor of Dayton’, 1996–1998 Although the suspension of sanctions in December 1995 reinforced the regime in the immediate, the return of ‘normalcy’ in Yugoslavia represented a more serious threat to Miloševiæ’s power. Now that ‘external enemies’ and Western sanctions could no longer be blamed, the main challenge for the regime was to redress the country’s disastrous economic situation. Miloševiæ came under increasing domestic pressure to deliver on his promise of economic recovery. For a regime so reliant on its ability to ‘buy’ votes and public peace, finding new sources of income became a matter of survival. In spring 1996, a number of strikes erupted in state-owned companies, signalling discontent among workers and, by April 1996, independent media were reporting that the regime was ‘in crisis’.30 This crisis was compounded by a new challenge from the hitherto loyal Montenegrin leadership, where a faction led by Milo Djukanoviæ, the republic’s prime minister, became increasingly critical of Belgrade’s resistance to economic reform. Although in July 1997, Miloševiæ managed to muster enough votes from the Montenegrin party in the Federal Parliament to be elected President of Yugoslavia, Djukanoviæ’s victory in the Montenegrin presidential election in October 1997 meant that Miloševiæ had lost control over one of Yugoslavia’s two federal units. It is in these circumstances that Miloševiæ faced his greatest threat: the emergence of a unified, mobilized political opposition, which came to the fore following the November 1996 local election, when the regime annulled the victory of the opposition coalition Zajedno in Serbia’s largest cities.31 Miloševiæ’s refusal to accept these results sparked large-scale and unremitting demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people, which lasted for over three months and consolidated a wide front of regime opponents.32 Even Miloševiæ’s most loyal bases of power, the Yugoslav Army and the Socialist Party, began to experience internal dissent; the army chief-ofstaff, General Momèilo Perišiæ, met with the leaders of the student
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opposition in January 1997, as did several leading members of the political and economic elite.33 Support for the demonstrators came also from the governments of Montenegro and the Republika Srpska, as well as from prominent spokesmen of the Sand¿ak Muslims and Kosovo Albanians.34 Many analysts predicted that the days of the Miloševiæ regime were numbered. Western policy-makers were remarkably slow to react to the changing domestic situation in Serbia and did very little to help the opposition. This was due primarily to the fact that ‘throughout most of the mid-1990s, Miloševiæ was considered by the United States, and the bulk of the international community, as a potential partner for peace in the Balkans and not as an intractable foe of democracy and stability.’35 His cooperation had been crucial in bringing about the Dayton Peace Accords and he was still perceived as the main guarantor of Serbian compliance with the agreement. In contrast, Western media and policy-makers saw Serbia’s political opposition and public as war-mongering nationalists and did not immediately acknowledge the pacifist and pro-Western character of the anti-Miloševiæ demonstrations.36 The regime’s repression of domestic dissent and the independent media in the aftermath of Dayton thus only sparked empty admonitions that there were ‘some areas where democracy in Serbia [was] not as complete as it should be’.37 In response to the 1996–1997 mass demonstrations, Western governments limited themselves to routine assertions about the need for democracy – at one point even urging the opposition to stop being ‘unrealistic’ and accept that the regime would not recognize the election results.38 When the United States came round to the idea that stronger measures were needed, the most it could offer ‘to help’ the demonstrators was a threat to reimpose sanctions – which was immediately rejected as sure to lead to the opposition’s being branded a fifth column.39 Later, even the chief American negotiator on Bosnia, Richard Holbrooke, admitted that ‘Washington missed a chance to affect events; except for one ineffectual trip to Washington, Zajedno had no contact with senior American government officials.’40 It was only at the end of December 1996 that the opposition finally received some Western support, when an OSCE commission headed by the former Prime Minister of Spain, Felipe Gonzalez, ruled that the results of the election were indeed valid and called upon the Serbian regime to accept them.41 By February 1997 Miloševiæ decided he had more to lose than to gain from the stand-off and accepted the results, ending the demonstrations. The fire had been put out to the relief probably not only of the Serbian regime but also many Western policy-makers. Indeed, the sale of 49 per cent of Telekom Srbija to Italian and Greek companies in June 1997 provided Miloševiæ with a quick fix to his endemic cash-flow problem, enabling him to pay off the backlog of wages and pensions and thus contributing to his regime’s electoral victory later that year.42
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From the Kosovo crisis to the Serbian revolution, 1998–2000 Showing the futility of maintaining the ‘outer wall’ of sanctions against FRY as a means of preventing a new outbreak of violence, in 1998 the situation in Kosovo deteriorated into a low-intensity war between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the Serbian security forces. The response of the United States and the European Union was to reimpose an arms embargo, halt export credits and stop issuing visas for Serbian officials involved in the crackdown in Kosovo. In April 1998, they also froze Yugoslav and Serbian assets abroad, banned all new foreign investment and excluded Yugoslav airlines from flying to Western countries – making the lifting of these renewed sanctions conditional on the withdrawal of the special police from Kosovo and Miloševiæ’s acceptance of a foreign role in negotiations.43 In addition, the United States increasingly began to call for NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia. Far from forcing Miloševiæ to back down, however, these measures merely induced him to consolidate his position internally by inviting members of the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party to join his government in March 1998 and passing new laws to break the two main areas of opposition to his regime – the university and the remaining independent media.44 In November 1998, Miloševiæ also orchestrated a series of purges in the army leadership and the intelligence services.45 Once again, sanctions did not weaken the regime, but sparked the reinforcement of the regime’s control over the levers of power in Serbia. Western coercive diplomacy also had the effect of rallying the Serbian public around the flag and of undermining those forces that had during the 1990s tried to engage in a peaceful dialogue with representatives of the Kosovo Albanians.46 In spring 1998, Miloševiæ capitalized on such sentiments and staged a referendum on whether Serbia should allow foreign mediation in the Kosovo crisis, which resulted in a resounding rejection of Western involvement.47 For the vast majority of Serbs, spanning almost the whole political spectrum, the threat of sanctions at the time did not alter their view that the KLA was a terrorist organization which deserved to be repressed and that Western negotiators were anything but ‘honest brokers’. The subsequent photographs of the US chief negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, with KLA fighters while on a visit to Kosovo, the bomb threats, and the lack of Western reaction when the KLA used the US-brokered cease-fire agreement of October 1998 to reoccupy its positions throughout Kosovo merely served as confirmation that the United States had taken the Albanian side in the conflict. In an echo of the 1992 ‘breadline massacre’ and the two Markale incidents of 1994 and 1995 in Sarajevo, it was the killing of forty-five Albanians in the village of Raèak that galvanized both Western and Serbian public opinion – albeit in opposing ways.48 For Western media and public opinion this incident represented further proof of the Serbian regime’s barbarity and heightened pressure for international intervention. In Serbia, however, it was
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believed that the Albanians were KLA fighters killed in combat, so when the head of the OSCE Verification Mission, US diplomat William Walker, publicly endorsed the Albanian version of events before getting conclusive evidence, this caused an immediate outcry.49 Things were made worse by the fact that prior to this incident Walker had refused to condemn the massacre of unarmed Serb civilians in a café in Peæ by KLA gunmen for ‘lack of proof’.50 When the Serbian government accused Walker of deliberately misrepresenting events and ordered him to leave the country, the independent Belgrade weekly NIN noted: ‘On the domestic level, this has forged an almost unanimous political front, so that hardly anyone in Serbia would fault the federal government’s attitude towards Walker. Never was public opinion here more united.’51 The strategy adopted by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at the Rambouillet Conference on Kosovo in February 1999 also gave every appearance of favouring the Albanian side. As she herself put it to the Albanian negotiators: if both sides signed, they would get NATO in Kosovo (and hence a foreign, American-led protectorate in the province); if they signed and the Serbs did not, NATO would bomb Yugoslavia; and only if both refused to sign, would they lose American support (implying that until then they had it).52 Whatever the logic of this approach and whether the Serbian delegation was genuinely interested in coming to an agreement or not, in the eyes of the Serbian population, Rambouillet resembled a ‘diktat’. Not only did its provision for a final settlement for Kosovo after three years – based partly on ‘the will of the people’ – appear as a concession to the Albanian demand for independence.53 The document also contained a clause allowing NATO to ‘enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters’.54 Even non-nationalist Serbs who were long-time opponents of the regime saw Rambouillet as a stark choice between foreign occupation and bombing.55 It is in this sense that the public endorsement of the Yugoslav regime’s refusal to sign the agreement needs to be understood.56 Following the collapse of the Rambouillet and Paris talks and Miloševiæ’s refusal to bend to American pressure during Holbrooke’s last visit to Belgrade in March 1999, NATO began its air campaign against Yugoslavia. As journalist Tim Judah has noted, at this point, ‘the rule of Miloševiæ, an issue which had caused such dissension in recent years, and particularly in middle class society, became irrelevant. There was only one issue now, which was that the country was being attacked.’57 Sentiments of patriotism and outrage were reinforced when NATO extended its target list to include civilian objectives, such as Serbian state television and the electricity grid, and the toll of civilian victims rose.58 Yet, despite the casualties and the destruction of the country’s industry and infrastructure, the NATO bombing – like the economic sanctions before it – did not bring down Miloševiæ.
Western policies and the Miloševiæ regime 129 Miloševiæ’s power base did not crumble and the internal coup d’état predicted by many failed to materialize. The army withdrew from Kosovo virtually intact, without any signs of demoralization or mutiny.59 Indeed, General Dragoljub Ojdaniæ, Yugoslavia’s Minister of Defence, warned that the army would never allow ‘those who had sold their souls [and become] vassals of the West’ to ‘forcibly change the regime and drag the country into a new catastrophe’.60 The indictment of Ojdaniæ and several other officials by the International War Crimes Tribunal, along with Miloševiæ, merely raised the stakes of their political survival and closed ranks at the top. None of the pillars of the regime experienced significant factionalization.61 Although some analysts judged the more targeted (or ‘smart’) sanctions – travel bans, the blocking of foreign accounts and embargoes on business with companies of individuals close to the regime, which were introduced during the NATO intervention and updated subsequently – to be more effective in causing discontent within Miloševiæ’s economic elite, no mass defections from the ruling parties (SPS and JUL) took place.62 On the other hand, the NATO campaign and the continuing sanctions weakened the pro-Western opposition, which was denounced as a fifth column and persecuted even more harshly.63 While the opposition unsuccessfully called upon Western governments to lift the sanctions, new Russian and Chinese loans allowed Miloševiæ to stave off total collapse and even to launch a limited but highly publicized reconstruction programme.64 The European Union’s attempt of providing ‘energy for democracy’ to opposition-led towns in Serbia to provide heating for the winter had little effect; a mere 2.3 per cent of the promised aid had arrived by the end of December 1999 and this only after being blocked for two weeks at the border.65 The mass demonstrations which had resumed in summer and autumn 1999 (and which were confirmation of a longer-term trend rather than a direct result of the bombing) eventually gave way to a deep sense of despair and apathy in the population as Miloševiæ continued to hold onto power.66 In March 2000, one year after the NATO campaign, Western officials were forced to admit that their predictions of Miloševiæ’s impending fall had been wrong and Serbian analysts noted that ‘the bombing has changed little here and that the war was simply a tragic diversion from what has been going on for a decade.’67 A frustrated Madeleine Albright wondered why the continuing sanctions were not ‘helping’ the Serbian people ‘blame Miloševiæ for its suffering’ and bring down his regime.68 Miloševiæ’s continued survival convinced at least some Western decisionmakers that a different approach was needed. Already the European Union’s introduction in June 2000 of a ‘white list’ of Yugoslav firms exempt from the trade embargo signalled this change in thinking.69 Yet it is only after Miloševiæ made his cardinal mistake in July 2000 of calling federal legislative and presidential elections for 24 September that Western governments decided not to miss this new opportunity and began to step up their aid to the
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opposition. From mid-1999 to late 2000 the USA channelled over $40 million to Serbia’s political opposition and elements of civil society (student and other activists, labour unions, independent media outlets) and trained over ten thousand opposition members in election monitoring and campaign methods.70 Similar amounts and types of aid also came from the European Union.71 Yet, as has correctly been pointed out, this aid may have ‘facilitated’ change in Serbia, but it did not act as the ‘engine of change’; that role belonged to those internal forces in Serbian society that opposed the regime.72 It was Serbia’s political opposition, supported by the country’s workers and ordinary people in a mass popular revolt, that forced Miloševiæ to accept that he had lost the presidential election of 24 September 2000 and relinquish power. In view of the fact that – although the majority of Serbia’s citizens favoured a rapprochement with Europe – they still held the United States as primarily responsible for the NATO bombing and blamed the international community for their hardship of the past ten years, Western aid to the opposition could only be useful if it was not visible – particularly considering that Miloševiæ’s main campaign strategy was to attack the opposition as ‘NATO lackeys’ whose victory would mean the disintegration and ‘colonization’ of the country.73 The Democratic Opposition of Serbia’s choice of Vojislav Koštunica – an uncorrupted former dissident who was as much of a nationalist as a democrat – as its presidential candidate was key to its success. Critical of Western ‘meddling’ in Serbia’s domestic affairs, Koštunica even set up his own campaign structure, independent of the US embassy in exile created in Budapest in August 2000 to aid the opposition.74 As he told the demonstrators in Belgrade on October 5, ‘We do not need Moscow or Washington … Serbia is capable of fighting for its freedom by itself, and your presence here in such great numbers is proof of this.’75 The West’s coercive policies of the 1990s had also increased the likelihood that the army would act to prevent the fall of the regime. Yugoslavia’s security apparatus was still dominated by generals loyal to Miloševiæ, who were themselves indicted by the Hague Tribunal, and were, if anything, even more staunchly committed to safeguarding the country’s independence and not bowing to Western pressure. Indeed, the chief-of-staff, General Nebojša Pavkoviæ, ominously referred to election day as ‘D-Day’.76 In the end, it was probably the sheer scale of the national revolt that convinced the army leadership to ignore Miloševiæ’s orders and accept Koštunica’s victory.77 The decision not to intervene possibly also hinged on the perception that Serbia’s new leadership would not blindly follow instructions from the West and – in view of Koštunica’s criticism of the Hague Tribunal – perhaps even resist pressures to hand over indicted generals.78
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Conclusion: coercive diplomacy and regime change As economic sanctions and airstrikes are increasingly employed as tools of international diplomacy after the end of the Cold War, questions are inevitably raised about their utility in bringing about change of dictatorial or semi-dictatorial regimes. In this respect, the Yugoslav case provides important insights into the consequences of using coercive diplomacy against such a regime. Although Western coercive policies against Serbia postdated the establishment of the Miloševiæ regime (which came to power in 1987) and were only one among a number of interlinked factors affecting the regime’s survival in the 1990s (including the disintegration of the pre1991 Federation and the ensuing wars, the weakness of domestic alternatives, ideology and political culture, as well as the role of other external actors), they nevertheless had an important influence on domestic political outcomes and greatly affected both sources of regime stability: its power resources and its popular support. Coercive diplomacy inevitably did contribute to economic hardship and civilian suffering – and thus to longer-term public dissatisfaction with Miloševiæ – but this potentially ‘positive’ (though costly and morally dubious) outcome was offset by other and undeniably counter-productive effects that enabled the regime to shore up its power. Throughout the 1990s it did not weaken Miloševiæ’s control over the ruling party coalition, the new ‘grey’ economy, the coercive apparatus or the media, but even increased the dependence of the new elites on the regime. Sanctions-busting and endemic corruption, along with the various ways of depleting citizens’ hard currency savings, maintained a steady source of revenue to the regime to build up military and police forces, ‘buy’ social peace and votes and even finance private business ventures. Although the NATO campaign accelerated the destruction of Serbia’s already weak economy, like the sanctions, it also provided the regime with a perfect alibi for this disastrous state of affairs. The controversial incidents used to publicly justify the introduction of sanctions and the NATO air strikes, along with the West’s differential treatment of Serbia from other former Yugoslav belligerents, increased the sense of injustice and absolved the regime in the eyes of many ordinary Serbs. It also weakened those elements of society that represented a democratic, pro-Western alternative and blamed the regime for the hardship being experienced in Serbia. Finally, by focusing exclusively on coercive policy tools, Western governments missed at least two valuable opportunities (1992, 1996–1997) to aid and advise the opposition to bring about regime change. The adoption of such a role by Western governments in preparation for the 2000 elections – although constructive – could not undo the legacy of ten years of economic sanctions and seventy-eight days of bombing. In the final balance, Serbia’s ‘October Revolution’ took place despite Western intervention, not because of it.
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Acknowledgements Among those who commented on this chapter, I particularly thank Susan Woodward, Xavier Bougarel, Aleksa Djilas and Dejan Djokiæ. They, naturally, bear no responsibility for any of its shortcomings.
Notes 1 On economic sanctions, see notably the debate between R.A. Pape and D. Baldwin in International Security, 22: 2, 1997, 90–136; 23: 2, 1998, 189–198; 24: 3, 1999/2000, 80–107; and D. Cortright and G.A. Lopez, The Sanctions Decade: Assessing UN Strategies in the 1990s, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000. On ‘coercive diplomacy’, defined as using the threat of economic and military force to bring about an adversary’s change of behaviour, see A.L. George and W.E. Simons (eds), The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994; and P.V. Jakobsen, Western Use of Coercive Diplomacy after the Cold War: A Challenge for Theory and Practice, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. On ‘humanitarian intervention’, see particularly A. Schnabel and R. Thakur (eds), Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention: Selective Indignation, Collective Action and International Citizenship, Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2000. 2 Such criticisms are voiced mainly in regard to economic sanctions. See, for example, R.N. Haass, ‘Sanctioning madness’, Foreign Affairs, 76: 6, 1997, 79–80; or R.A. Pape, ‘Why economic sanctions do not work’, International Security, 22: 2, 1997, 106–109. 3 See, for example, S.L. Woodward, ‘International aspects of the wars in former Yugoslavia’, in J. Udovièki and J. Ridgeway (eds), Burn this House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 215–244. 4 For opposite views, see Cortright and Lopez, The Sanctions Decade, pp. 63–86 and S.L. Woodward, ‘The use of sanctions in former Yugoslavia: misunderstanding political realities’, in D. Cortright and G.A. Lopez (eds), Economic Sanctions: Panacea or Peacebuilding in a Post-Cold War World?, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995, pp. 141–151. See also S.L. Burg and P.S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina, London: M.E. Sharpe, 1999, pp. 205–206. 5 W.J. Buckley (ed.), Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions, London: Eerdmans, 2000, provides a useful compilation of different views. 6 The most comprehensive such analyses are E. Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999; R. Thomas, Serbia under Miloševiæ, London: Hurst, 1999; and L. Cohen, Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall of Slobodan Miloševiæ, Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000. 7 On sanctions, see, for example, V. Dimitrijeviæ, ‘Post scriptum to UN sanctions against Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro)’, in F. Tanner (ed.), Effects of International Sanctions, Malta: Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies, 1996, pp. 45–54; and M. Prokopijeviæ and J. Teokareviæ (eds), Ekonomske sankcije UN, Belgrade: Institute for European Studies, 1998. On the NATO bombing, see Šta ste radili u ratu: Glasovi iz crne rupe, Belgrade: B92, 1999; and ‘Srbija i NATO (I): Srpski diskurs rata’, Nova srpska politièka misao, special issue, 1999. 8 See, for example, the statement of John Spellar, Britain’s Armed Forces Minister, in The Independent, 25 October 2000. 9 Thomas, Serbia under Miloševiæ, pp. 1–10; Cohen, Serpent in the Bosom, pp. 97–140.
Western policies and the Miloševiæ regime 133 10 W. Zimmermann, Origins of a Catastrophe, New York: Times/Random House, 1999, p. 213. 11 M. Deleviæ, ‘Economic sanctions as a foreign policy tool: the case of Yugoslavia’, International Journal of Peace Studies, 3: 1, 1998, 76–81. 12 V. Dimitrijeviæ and J. Pejiæ, ‘UN sanctions against Yugoslavia: two years later’, in D. Bourantonis and J. Wiener (eds), The United Nations in the New World Order: The World Organization at Fifty, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995, pp. 145–146. 13 M. Laziæ, ‘Transformation of the economic elite’, in M. Laziæ (ed.), Society in Crisis: Yugoslavia in the Early ’90s, Belgrade: Filip Višnjiæ, 1995, p. 19. 14 O. Pribiæeviæ, Vlast i opozicija u Srbiji, Belgrade: Radio B92, 1997, pp. 118–119. 15 M. Dinkiæ, Ekonomija destrukcije, Belgrade: VIN, 1995. See also Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia, pp. 169–176. 16 They also enabled the regime to continue supporting the war effort of the Bosnian Serbs as long as it wished. See V. Dimitrijeviæ, ‘Post scriptum’, pp. 49–51. 17 Burg and Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina, pp. 204–205. 18 For the controversies concerning this incident, see ibid., pp. 165–166. 19 Ibid., p. 119. 20 In S.L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995, p. 403. 21 In Tanner, Effects of International Sanctions, p. 79 (emphasis added). 22 Woodward, ‘The use of sanctions’, p. 147. 23 S. Brankoviæ, ‘Sankcije i stav Zapada prema Srbiji’, in Prokopijeviæ and Teokareviæ (eds), Ekonomske sankcije UN, pp. 119–123. 24 Dimitrijeviæ, ‘Post scriptum’, p. 52. 25 Z. Goluboviæ, B. Kuzmanoviæ and M. Vasoviæ, Društveni karakter i društvene promene u svetlu nacionalnih sukoba, Belgrade: Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, 1995, pp. 257–258. 26 For the results see Vladimir Goati (ed.), Elections to the Federal and Republican Parliaments in Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) 1990–1996, Berlin: Sigma, 1998, pp. 193–196. 27 Cited in Thomas, Serbia under Miloševiæ, pp. 130–131. 28 UN Security Council Resolution 943, 23 September 1994, in Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 422. 29 UN Security Council Resolution 1022, 22 November 1995, in Tanner, Effects of International Sanctions, pp. 95–97. 30 Vreme, 6 April 1996, 8–11. 31 For the results, see V. Rakiæ-Vodineliæ et al., Izborna kradja: Pravni aspekt, Belgrade: Medija Centar, 1997, p. 14 and Goati, Elections to the Federal and Republican Parliaments, p. 194. 32 See M. Laziæ (ed.), Protest in Belgrade, Budapest: CEU Press, 1999, p. 19. 33 Ibid., p. 307 and The Economist, 4 January 1997, 33. 34 See Thomas, Serbia under Miloševiæ, p. 297 and T. Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 133. 35 Cohen, Serpent in the Bosom, p. 203. 36 T. Garton Ash, ‘In the Serbian soup’, New York Review of Books, 24 April 1997, 25–30. For an example of Western reporting, see C. Hedges, ‘Student foes of Belgrade leader embrace fierce Serb nationalism’, New York Times, 10 December 1996. An analysis of the demonstrations and their participants is provided by Laziæ, Protest in Belgrade and Cohen, Serpent in the Bosom, pp. 206–220. 37 US Assistant Secretary of State, John Kornblum, quoted in Thomas, Serbia under Miloševiæ, p. 261. 38 Italy’s Foreign Minister Lamberto Dini, quoted in ibid., pp. 300–301. 39 Prokopijeviæ and Teokareviæ (eds), Ekonomske sankcije UN, pp. 117–118.
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40 R. Holbrooke, To End a War, New York: Random House, 1998, p. 345. 41 ‘Izveštaj g: Felipea Gonzaleza predsedavajuæem OEBS’, in Rakiæ-Vodineliæ, Izborna kradja, pp. 210–212. 42 For the final results, see Naša Borba, 10 December 1997. 43 The Financial Times, 20 March 1998. 44 The laws were introduced in May and October 1998 respectively. 45 See Vreme, 7 November 1998, 12–14. 46 Some of these dialogues are documented in Vreme, 29 March 1993, 36–40; 27 March 1995, 20–28; 17 April 1995, 13–15; 3 July 1995, 18–21; and 7 February 1998, 27–42; and in Republika, particularly special issues nos. 9, February 1994 and 186, 1–15 April 1998, 9–12. See also O. Karabeg (ed.), Dijalog na buretu baruta: srpskoalbanski dijalog 1994–2000, Belgrade: Medija Centar, 2000. 47 Of the 73 per cent who voted, over 95 per cent were against foreign mediation. NIN, 31 December 1998, 7. 48 The Markale marketplace massacre of 5 February 1994, which led to the first NATO bombing threat against the Bosnian Serbs, and the second shelling of Markale of 28 August 1995, which was used to justify the NATO airstrikes, were also never actually proven to have been caused by the Bosnian Serbs. See Burg and Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina, pp. 164–169. For the importance of the second Markale incident in the US decision to intervene, see Holbrooke, To End a War, pp. 92–93. Serbia’s President Milan Milutinoviæ directly referred to the ‘Markale scenario’ in response to Raèak, Vreme, 23 January 1999, 9. 49 On Walker’s attitude and the reaction of the US administration, see A. Little, Moral Combat, BBC2 documentary, 12 March 2000 and the article in the Sunday Telegraph, 27 February 2000. For Serbian perceptions of the Raèak incident, see Vreme, 23 January 1999, 6–11 and NIN, 21 January 1999, 10–14. On 17 March 1999, two months after the event, the Finnish head of the European Union Forensic Expert Team stated that Raèak was indeed a ‘massacre’ and a ‘crime against humanity’, but the team’s report, published two years later, concluded that ‘the manner of death remained undetermined by the EU-FET’. J. Rainio, K. Lalua and A. Penttila, ‘Independent forensic autopsies in an armed conflict: investigation of the victims from Raèak, Kosovo’, Forensic Science International, 116: 2–3, 2001, 171. For criticisms of the investigation, see Vreme, 20 March 1999, 10, and NIN, 18 March 1999, 13–14. 50 Little, Moral Combat. 51 NIN, 21 January 1999, 9. 52 Little, Moral Combat. 53 Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo, 23 February 1999, Chapter 8, Point 2, available at http://www.lemonde.fr/actu/international/ exyougo/kosovo/txramb.htm (accessed 24 May 1999). On Madeleine Albright’s personal guarantee of a referendum, see Judah, Kosovo, p. 215. 54 Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo, Appendix B, Point 8. 55 Vesna Pešiæ, leader of the Civic Alliance, in NIN, 18 March 1999, 15. 56 Although there was much confusion about the agreement, a poll taken two weeks before the bombing showed that, while only 9.5 per cent of respondents would accept the stationing of NATO troops in Kosovo (which was a non-negotiable condition of the Rambouillet Agreement), 76 per cent believed that the Kosovo problem could be solved by negotiation. NIN, 18 March 1999, 16–19. 57 Judah, Kosovo, p. 238. 58 Human Rights Watch, ‘Civilian deaths in the NATO air campaign’, 12:1 (D), February 2000, available at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/nato (accessed 11 February 2000). 59 Little, Moral Combat.
Western policies and the Miloševiæ regime 135 60 Vreme, 24 July 1999, 2. 61 See S. Staletoviæ, ‘Socialists think Miloševiæ may have ten more years yet’, Institute of War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) Balkan Crisis Report, 61, 27 July 1999, by email on 2 August 1999 from
[email protected], and Vreme, 23 October 1999, 7. 62 M. Vasoviæ, ‘Travel bans more effective than most sanctions’, IWPR Balkan Crisis Report, 75, 14 September 1999, by e-mail on 24 September 1999 from
[email protected], and NIN, 21 October 1999, 18–19. 63 See Human Rights Watch, ‘Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Curtailing Political Dissent: Serbia’s Campaign of Violence and Harassment against Government Critics’, 12: 6 (D), April 2000, available at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/ serbia (accessed 6 June 2000). 64 According to the non-governmental group of experts G-17, in the year after the NATO campaign, approximately 5 per cent of the damage estimated at around $3.8 billion had been repaired, thanks in part to Russian and Chinese credits, Danas, 20 June 2000, 1. 65 C. Samary, ‘West thwarts Serbian opposition’, Le Monde diplomatique, February 2000, available at http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr (accessed 21 Feb. 2000). 66 Surveys carried out in 1999 and the first half of 2000 showed that over 60 per cent of respondents had no confidence either in the regime or in Miloševiæ, who could count on the support of only around 20 per cent of Serbia’s population; but these results were not significantly different from those of 1997 – a period in which Western pressure against Miloševiæ had been eased. Both can be found in Z.D. Slavujeviæ and S. Mihailoviæ, Dva ogleda o legitimitetu: Javno mnjenje o legitimitetu treæe Jugoslavije, Belgrade: Institut društvenih nauka/Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1999. See also Centar za prouèavanje alternativa/Udru enje za unapredjivanje empirijskih istra ivanja, Javno mnjenje Srbije, Belgrade: CPA/CPS, 2000. 67 International Herald Tribune, 25–26 March 2000. 68 Vreme, 18 March 2000, 12–14. 69 This attempt did not meet much success, as already by July a number of directors from these firms were asking the European Union to be taken off the list because the benefits accrued were far outweighed by the regime harassment they now had to endure. Beta, 25 July 2000. 70 T. Carothers, ‘Ousting foreign strongmen: lessons from Serbia’, Carnegie Endowment Policy Brief, 1: 5, 2001, 2–3. 71 Le Monde, 19 September 2000. 72 Carothers, ‘Ousting foreign strongmen’, pp. 4, 7. 73 See the survey conducted for B92 in April 2001 by Strategic Marketing Agency, in S. Logar and S. Bogosavljeviæ, ‘Vidjenje istine u Srbiji’, Reè, 62/8, June 2001, 7–34. 74 New York Times, 4 September 2000. 75 Quoted in Cohen, Serpent in the Bosom, p. 425. 76 NIN, 21 September 2000. 77 According to General Pavkoviæ, ‘it was unthinkable to us to create Tienanmen in Belgrade, or something of the sort’. D. Bujoševiæ and I. Radovanovic, 5 Oktobar: Dvadeset èetiri sata prevrata, Belgrade: Medija Centar, 2001, p. 246. 78 This might explain why the indicted generals were not extradited to The Hague along with Miloševiæ and why General Pavkoviæ remained chief of staff for so long.
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From kanun to capacity-building The ‘internationals’, civil society development and security in the Balkans Steven Sampson
Introduction Any development organization operates with certain ‘articles of faith’. In the opaque world of Balkan democracy assistance, one encounters an almost religious belief that civil society organizations will help create dialogue, reconciliation, and stable institutions. From the perspective of ‘Balkan security’, the building of civil society is supposed to generate more internal security in the region. A ‘healthy’ civil society sector – often equated with a large number of NGOs – is supposed to provide the proper ‘climate’ for the development of democratic culture, for the promotion of human rights, and for an effective, accountable government. Civil society development, it is argued, will help communities take more control over their lives. Civil society will act as a watchdog on irresponsible or incompetent officials, and civil society development will empower groups to make decisions and improve their lives. In this sense, a healthy civil society is supposed to enhance individual and group security. Following this line of thinking, civil society development makes political life more secure. It enables and pushes governments to respect human rights. Civil society development is seen as a win-win solution. This chapter argues that such efforts to build civil society also create new forms of tension: both internal tensions within Balkan societies and tensions between the various local and international actors. Paul Stubbs has gone so far as to call international interventions to build civil society a form of ‘colonialism’.1 Inasmuch as colonialism is a source of insecurity, a more serious reflection on foreign interventions is certainly called for. Regrettably, such reflection tends to take the form of ‘donor bashing’ in which donors are criticized by Western scholars or by disgruntled locals for being uninformed, patronizing, naïve or corrupt. This critique fails to problematize the complex links between donors, recipients and the many intermediaries in the democracy assistance ‘chain’. Understanding these links can help elucidate those factors that increase or imperil the security climate in the Balkans. Civil society development, then, is not a win-win solution. There are costs, and a failure to understand these may ultimately impede the development of Balkan societies towards long-term political stability, social justice, and non-violent conflict resolution.
From kanun to capacity-building 137 Civil society programmes, I argue, may in fact stimulate new kinds of tensions and fissures in these societies. My conclusion will be that we must deal better with the contradictions generated by local social structures. The same social mechanisms which create trust and solve problems, the ‘homegrown models’, are also those which may create uncertainty and anxiety in the Balkans. The same social structures which provide people with security in an otherwise insecure social and political environment may also create the climate for insecurity and perpetuation of tensions in other contexts. The same informal loyalties which help groups survive oppression and resist authority are also those which carry out smuggling operations, corrupt police, erupt into ethnic violence and keep silent at the suffering of others. To put it more concretely, the Balkans – so well known for family loyalty, effusive hospitality, blood brotherhood, the customary law such as the Albanian kanun, the colourful weddings, quaint traditions, intense friendship networks, and ethnic solidarity – the Balkans also contains eternal blood feud, vicious banditry, pervasive baksheesh, endemic corruption, murder for revenge, and ethnic cleansing. Civil society development projects are supposed to eliminate the latter as threats, replacing the dominance of primordial ties with ties of interest and citizenship. Such changes do not come about without costs, and invariably lead people to stubbornly, even violently, defend the maintenance of these ties. Programmes to alter tradition, I will argue, create new tensions, and these tensions may even aggravate the security situation. Dealing with this problem requires a new understanding of ‘home-grown models’. It requires an understanding of how to establish trust between donors and recipients and how to maintain this trust. It is, after all, trust which resolves conflicts, and it is a failure of trust which allows them to get out of hand. Understanding how these structures of trust operate can help elucidate the costs involved in even the most well-intentioned civil society development schemes. This chapter focuses, therefore, on the nature of civil society development and its dual role in both enhancing security and insecurity in the Balkans. It begins by outlining an anthropological concept of security. It then describes the ways in which civil society projects, with all their laudable intentions, can also generate insecurity, especially for those groups who feel themselves (or are pushed) outside the Balkan development process. Finally, it offers some conclusions about how our Western models can be combined with homegrown models of Balkan associational life. Many of my examples and the analysis come from my own participation in various civil society development projects in the region, where I have worked for various agencies in Romania, Bosnia and Albania, and where I am currently researching democracy assistance in Kosovo.
Civil society intervention As is the case with so many international empowerment discourses, civil society is replete with virtue.2 Programmes emphasizing ‘openness’,
138 Steven Sampson ‘accountability’, ‘transparency’, ‘good governance’ and ‘community empowerment’ via ‘advocacy’ are so unimpeachable that no one could possibly oppose them in principle. All that’s needed, in the language of international aid, is to ‘build capacity’. Building capacity requires a concerted effort from the various actors in the ‘donor community’. These capacity-building efforts take the form of projects, programmes and training. Successful mobilization of these resources requires continuing ‘donor coordination’. Foreign interventions for democracy operate on the premise that something is missing. That ‘something’ is ‘civil society’. In fact, civil society, here understood as informal groups and independent formal civic organizations, existed in the Balkans even in the socialist period (notably in Yugoslavia). Many operated as opposed or subversive to the state (the parallel institutions of the Kosovar Albanians; various groups of intellectuals, sports clubs, etc.). In this sense, civil society had the characteristics of being oppositional or underground. The interventions that we now term ‘civil society development’ began in earnest immediately after the end of the Cold War, partly financed by the EU-Phare programme in Eastern Europe. What began as post-communist development initiatives in the early 1990s evolved into postconflict assistance after the wars in Bosnia and in Kosovo. Post-communist assistance appeared in Albania in 1994 and more recently in post-Miloševiæ Serbia (it should be remembered that the Soros Foundation, as usual, was far ahead of similar EU and USAID initiatives). The results of civil society development are impressive if one peruses the statistics, websites and other activities. In Romania, a country now governed by some of the same people who crushed the civil society movements of early 1990 and allowed ethnic riots and miners’ rampages, civil society and NGO development has been proceeding apace for nearly a decade, so that the country has 25,000 registered NGOs and several hundred high-profile organizations.3 In Bulgaria there are 7,000. At last count, Albania had about 900 NGOs, Bosnia some 1,500 and Kosovo about 700. The figures are meaningful only as an indicator of legal registrations, but do form some kind of index of organized social activity in which foreign grants also play a role. There exist innumerable studies of the civil society sector in all these countries. I have personally participated in some of these and am familiar with numerous studies, as well as critiques.4 After years of assessing, planning, implementing, and evaluating, some reflection on these efforts is sorely needed. From a security standpoint, such reflection is also imperative, since security in the Balkans now involves not so much the security of national borders and territories, but also more everyday problems of human security: protection from ethnic violence, and the ability to control one’s own future by having a secure home, adequate health, education, environment and civil administration. As borders become stabilized and the various governments establish their EU accession schedules, their association agreements and their NATO cooperation plans, the non-military, human security aspects
From kanun to capacity-building 139 have taken on more importance. Like ‘human rights’ and ‘development’, the concept of ‘security’ has now become ever more inclusive. In this sense, a ‘vibrant civil society sector’ is now perceived not only as a precondition for democracy, but also as a precondition for ensuring security, as, for example, in the Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe. From a security standpoint, the many civil society initiatives in the Balkans – foreign, local, governmental, multilateral and private – present us with a paradox. On the one hand, there is a large, prominent NGO sector, with dedicated activists passionately trying to achieve community improvements or influence decision-makers. These people have their own networks of cooperation, as well as their everyday competitions and conflicts. These NGO activists speak their own language, the language of projects and donors, and they interact regularly within the plethora of projects, meetings, conferences and training seminars which characterize NGO life. On the other hand, despite the prominence of the NGOs, many security problems seem to persist, in many ways untouched by this intervention. In other words, the creation of civil society organizations in these countries, while it may create new opportunities for selected individuals and groups (Anglophone intellectuals familiar with Western donor concerns), civil society development may also create insecurity for those who see themselves ‘outside the loop’. Let us examine, therefore, how civil society development as a Western project affects the security situation. In pursuing this discussion, I will begin by presenting my own anthropological view of a security environment in the Balkans.
An anthropology of security Security has to do with perception of capacities and threats. In this sense, any definition of a specific security situation – individual, group, national or regional – is linked to the factors which cause a person, group or state to view their environment as insecure. Hence, to understand what creates a ‘sense of security’ requires an understanding of the sources of ‘insecurity’. Insecurity is not an objective, observable state. It is an interpretation. Insecurity hinges on the perceptual state of the actors involved. It is about perceptions of external threats and the way these particular perceptions, fears and threats become sources of action. What the Ottoman and AustroHungarian empires saw as a state of insecurity in the Balkans a century ago, what today’s international community regards as insecurity, and the kinds of insecurities perceived by people living in the Balkans differ substantively. It is only in times of international crisis – when international actors must react quickly to social movements, revolutions, wars, campaigns – that these perceptions coalesce. Let me provide an example of how the security situation was viewed by a particular set of actors known as ‘the international community’ in Kosovo. The setting is a provincial town in Kosovo in late 1999, where I was carrying
140 Steven Sampson out an NGO survey. In order to meet various aid organizations working with local NGOs, I would attend aid coordination meetings. In most of these meetings, a key topic included a ‘security briefing’ for the international aid workers. ‘Security’ in this context was understood simply as personal safety. Breaches of security had to do either with strangers disrupting international aid work or with unreasonable risk-taking by foreign personnel, such as not reporting itineraries, driving around alone at night or not wearing plastic ID badges. This was the security situation for ‘the internationals’. The ‘security situation’ for minority Serbs at that time was rather different. They were complaining that their houses were being set on fire, there were drive-by shootings, stoning of their escorted buses, kidnappings and murders, and fortified checkpoints beyond which they could not go. Finally, Kosovar Albanians talked about their security in terms of robberies and violent crimes, as well as the security of Kosovo from Serb military intervention if NATO withdrew its forces. In post-conflict Bosnia and Kosovo, then, the security environment was different for ethnic majority, minority and international populations. These differences are founded on both objective and subjective factors, with assessments being considered by others to be accurate, understated or exaggerated. Zygmunt Bauman, in discussing the human consequences of globalization, has tried to explain the various understandings of security and insecurity. Bauman’s discussion has relevance for the current Balkan situation, and for the way in which internationally funded civil society initiatives in the region affect security perceptions.5 Bauman distinguishes between three understandings of security/insecurity. First, there is an understanding of insecurity as ‘uncertainty’, as a cognitive state of affairs in which we are unable to adequately assess those factors in our environment which affect our behaviour. The solution to the problem of uncertainty is knowledge, especially knowledge about risks. In Bosnia in 1997, security assessments had changed drastically compared to a year earlier. The risk of violence was assessed as acceptable by hundreds of Serb youths who came to Sarajevo to attend a rock concert by the group U2, and indeed, there were no incidents. Today in Pristina, some Serbs may walk, still escorted, from the Grand Hotel a few metres down the main street to a pizza restaurant, something extraordinary compared to two years ago. An assessment of their security situation would not permit much more, however. As some Kosovar Serbs have cynically remarked, the threat to Serbs in Kosovo has been reduced because so many Serbs have simply left. The point here is that risk, uncertainty and security are viewed as cognitive and evaluatory processes. Of course, all security assessments are not equally authoritative. Ultimately, interpretations of security/insecurity reflect the authority of those carrying out the risk assessment. An assessment becomes accurate insofar as it is given legitimacy by others. Authority derives from the ability to control the assessments of others, to dismiss or censure the assessments of those who may not have a ‘full understanding of the entire situation’.
From kanun to capacity-building 141 Where security is seen as an evaluative assessment, knowledge about the world is supposed to make us realistically understand risks. With more certainty, we achieve more control, therefore less fear, and we act in ways which do not intimidate others, hence less violence. This is the logic of pursuing security understood as certainty. It is the work of think tanks, public policy institutes, risk-assessment exercises and consulting tasks. Enhancing security is also the work of the various ‘dialogue’, ‘reconciliation’ and ‘confidence-building’ measures, so beloved by international development projects, in which efforts are made to change the perceptions of others so that they obtain a realistic picture of their potential sources of insecurity. Bauman’s second understanding of security is emotional. Here insecurity comes from anxiety. This anxiety results from a lack of control over our environment and produces emotional rage, hatred and a desire for revenge on others. It leads to violence and even genocide, conceived as a form of self-defence. Since these fears and anxieties are also interpretations, albeit intensely meaningful ones, they can be allayed by providing certain symbolic markers. In Bosnia and Kosovo the various military checkpoints and patrols of the international security forces (SFOR/KFOR) are supposed to ease fears and create a climate of security. They do this not so much by preventing actions as by creating a tone. The resultant reduction in angst is supposed to enable a better judgement of the uncertainties of a situation, insofar as control over fears enables a more objective assessment of risks. Emotionally insecure environments – those which produce anxiety – are therefore also environments of uncertainty. And uncertainty makes us fearful. At the cognitive level, it leads to explanations which focus not on causes but on scapegoats, and it produces understandings which are conspiratorial. ‘Why is this happening?’ invariably becomes ‘Whose fault is it?’ Seen in anthropological terms, the search for scapegoats is a modern form of witchcraft accusations. The dual understanding of insecurity as uncertainty and anxiety, says Bauman, is most apparent when we try to concretize these existential fears. This is the discourse of personal safety, and for Bauman ‘safety’ is the third understanding of security with which we operate. A quest for physical safety in the form of safe spaces, of bodies kept safe from the violence of others, is our concrete response to the more abstract forces of uncertainty and anxiety. The Yugoslav wars were often about turning ambiguous, co-inhabited spaces into ethnically cleansed areas, places safe for Serbs, or for Croats or for Muslims, since mixing itself was perceived by some actors as a source of insecurity. The military solutions inflicted in the Serb enclaves of Croatia, throughout Bosnia, and in Kosovo were all about banishing uncertainty and insecurity through the creation of safe, physically demarcated space. The contradictions of this creation of safe spaces is no more graphically illustrated than in Mitrovica, the divided city in northern Kosovo, where the UN administration, with KFOR military support, has established a ‘zone of confidence’ in which Albanians, Serbs, Roma, and Slavic-speaking Muslims
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known as Bosniacs, and Roma, can meet members of other groups. The problem is that this small area near the bridge separating the largely Albanian south and the largely Serb north is surrounded by barbed wire and military guards. The confidence zone, adjoining the bridge, is also monitored by the socalled Serb ‘bridge watchers’, who may attack Albanians who try to visit the Serb side or Serbs who have been in the zone or seem to be too friendly with their Albanian guests. Anyone in this zone can be seen by their co-ethnics as ‘consorting with the enemy’. The militarized ‘zone of confidence’, ostensibly a place of safety, has made life insecure for those who walk across the bridge back to the Serb enclave, or who leave the zone to rejoin the Albanian community in the south of Mitrovica. Security and insecurity are contextual, linked in the spatial and social perceptions of the various actors. An anthropology of security and insecurity would therefore have the following elements: instead of a top-down analysis of capacities and desires by various parties, it would seek to describe how the actors themselves experience fears and threats to their person, group, or political environment. An anthropology of security and insecurity would seek to describe how people articulate these fears: the kinds of explanations (or conspiracies) they offer to account for uncertainty or insecurity. An anthropology of security and insecurity, therefore, would describe the relationship between how people view the world and how they act upon it, i.e. the kind of cultural practices intended to deal with pervasive uncertainty, existential anxiety and personal safety. It would attempt to understand how people try to control their world through manipulating concepts, how they legitimize or undermine the authority to certain discourses, and how they act to make their world more certain, less intimidating and more safe. This understanding of security presented here is both larger and smaller than the kind of understandings normally purveyed in ‘security studies’. The ‘world’ in security studies is a geo-political one of interests, political units (nations, states, regions), of threats to these units, and of global forces. The security I speak of here, anthropologically, is about an experiential world, in which certainty, emotional tranquillity and safety may coexist in time and space with other people’s interpretations of uncertainty, anxiety and danger. The same setting or event (a KFOR police unit searching a car in a minority enclave on a dark night) may generate security or insecurity depending on the actors and the context. Security is not a property of a given space or territory but of a social group. ‘Balkan security’ is therefore a misnomer. The question is not security in region ‘X’, but security for whom. Security is never a property of individuals, since individual understandings of security are always articulated in terms of a social world. Security is ‘in the head’, to be sure, but there are social factors which cause some perceptions to be interpreted in security/insecurity terms. In Albania, for example, thousands of villagers cannot leave their homes because their families are in a blood feud with another family; they do not have the same security environment as their neighbours in the same villages. However, all of them share the same security
From kanun to capacity-building 143 perceptions in terms of personal safety: that if you are ‘in blood’, it’s not good to leave your home. Similarly, the thousands of Serbs in Kosovo whose daily life is now limited to a stroll between two KFOR checkpoints at each end of the village perimeter, with the occasional military-escorted bus trip, are in a security environment quite different from the Kosovo Albanians who live in the same area. The same is true for the Muslims who have now returned to communities in eastern Bosnia. They have their homes, but not much of a public life. The Roma in their various quarters on the margins of Romanian, Macedonian or Kosovo towns live in different security environments from their neighbours, and from Roma elsewhere, and reveal this in their safety practices. We thus need to understand the various sources of uncertainty, anxiety and danger in order to produce the kind of certainty, tranquillity and safety which is supposed to accompany any process of stabilization. The research task, then, is to discover what it is that makes people insecure in their daily lives, to understand their perception of fears and threats. Since these will differ for various social and ethnic groups as well as outside actors, a full understanding of the security situation in the Balkans will require a mapping of the kinds of uncertainties that exist, the types of anxieties which these generate and the concrete safety problems that must be addressed. This ‘security map’ would be a complex patchwork of uncertainties, anxieties and safety dilemmas overlapping ethnic and social groups and social classes. In those post-conflict settings subjected to international intervention – Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan – security perceptions differ not only among the various social (citizens/political leaders) and ethnic (majorities/minorities) groups but also reflect the interaction of these perceptions with those of outsiders (aid personnel, international organization functionaries, peacekeeping forces, etc.). In the Balkans, as elsewhere, both the very presence of outsiders and the outsiders’ authoritative perceptions of uncertainties, anxieties and safety risks affect how local groups view their own security environment. The hasty departure of foreign observers before the Kosovo bombing in 1999 was a signal of profound insecurity to the local population, just as their return afterwards signalled a new security environment.
Civil society and security At the local level, the problems generated by uncertainty, anxiety and safety/risk/danger are the spark that mobilizes people to join forces and find solutions, what we now call ‘civil society’. In this definition, civil society may comprise local initiatives among specific groups, informal community associations, political parties, and all the associational forms which lie above the ascriptive family, below the regulatory efforts of the state, and alongside the ruthless market. Understood as social activity rather than as a specific form of organization, civil society is nothing less than social problem-solving. It is a practical means of alleviating what people regard as their own insecurity and enhancing their security as they themselves see it. Such solutions for one
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group, of course, may entail increasing insecurity for others. Hence the need for a neutral public sphere to articulate and negotiate these needs. A vibrant civil society can exist only if its political and resource environment is stable: if there is a state apparatus able to deliver basic services, a genuine public sphere, and a viable economy which can create a middle class. A society where people feel they have something to lose can create the support for associational life and institution-building. Under conditions of political chaos or economic downturn, which creates insecurity (anxiety), social self-organization takes on more desperate, subversive, even violent forms. These types of solutions, characterized by a lack of trust in institutions, are what we could call ‘uncivil society’. Where social life becomes a battleground between the forces of uncivil and civil society, civil society may be viewed as ‘weak’. It is this latter situation which has characterized many transitional and postconflict societies. The solution on the part of the international community is therefore to ‘build’ civil society. The question, however, is ‘to build on what?’ The conceptual question is whether there are ‘foundations’ on which to ‘build’ civil society, or whether civil society has to be or, indeed, can be ‘imported from outside’. While all development actors (foreign and local) agree on the need to locate indigenous foundations, i.e. to mobilize the home-grown models for finding solutions, the practice of civil society development reveals a tendency towards implanting, exporting, or even cloning ‘outside models’ onto local realities. It is precisely this gap between idea and reality which forms the source of so many donor-bashing discourses. Even more important is the question of whether a vibrant civil society can in fact be created by the kinds of outside interventions associated with ‘civil society development’ schemes. Usually following on the heels of humanitarian or emergency assistance, civil society development is supposed to improve the security environment. Insofar as it identifies problems, it is supposed to facilitate a more rational understanding of the world. Insofar as it creates dialogue, it should facilitate common understandings among competing parties, or common knowledge of the perceptions of others. Insofar as it produces initiatives to cope with problems, it is also supposed to reduce anxiety by organizing citizens into purposeful activity. Civil society thus counteracts uncertainty/anxiety/risk and danger by creating zones or contexts of predictability/security/tranquillity. Civil society is supposed to make the world safer (Bauman’s third understanding of ‘security’), thus reducing the possibility of social conflict or violence. However, this effort can succeed only if those intervening to improve civil society understand the pre-intervention situation, including the locals’ own interpretation of their past, their social memory. Probably the greatest error made in civil society development in the Balkans is the assumption that there was no social problem-solving prior to the arrival of foreign civil society development programmes in the early 1990s. Balkan societies have often been interpreted as atomized, disorganized, tribalized or corrupt, and therefore lacking the institutions for problem-solving, conflict resolution or coalition-building which is the goal of so many civil
From kanun to capacity-building 145 society programmes. In fact, Balkan societies have always contained mechanisms for dealing with everyday problems of uncertainty and insecurity, mechanisms based on kin groups, clan alliances, village communities, social networks, informal associations, charities, patron–client relations and strategic alliances of various kinds and duration. Such alliances hinge on the exchange of resources and relations of trust. As such, they closely resemble civil society practices. In contrast, an uncivil society is one of isolation and lack of trust; it is atomized, or molecular. Its security perceptions are articulated not as assessments but as accusations or conspiracy theories. An appraisal of ‘the state of civil society’ in a given country is an assessment of whether the mechanisms for finding solutions (i.e. those listed above) are equipped to deal with problems generated by uncertainty, anxiety or risk/danger. At the most tragic level, the recent wars and conflicts in the Balkans revealed that traditional mechanisms lacked the capacity to operate in situations of extreme uncertainty (political and economic), social anxiety, and the kind of dangers produced by nationalist politics, pervasive media manipulation and ruthless repression. During the communist era, the elites sought to subvert or destroy social self-organization. In Yugoslavia, unresolved ethnic tensions only made this task easier. Different ethnic groups might have lived side-by-side in the past without violence, as is so often commented upon, but the public sphere was apparently limited to solving local problems in locally approved ways. Existing institutions – political, economic, legal, social – were unable to provide certainty and security. Under such crisis conditions, people were left with the social mechanisms of kin and network, which were effective to solve individual problems or detour around state institutions (honour/shame, informal economy, black markets, etc.). Civil society was strong in terms of individual problem-solving (networks, etc.), but impotent in affecting government policy. Understanding of problems was limited, and solutions could not be implemented because the institutional environment was also unstable. Major economic crisis and the political opportunism of ex-communist leaders made local communities (both multi- and mono-ethnic) vulnerable to state-nationalist mobilization, diaspora extremist ideologies, and mass media manipulation. People became Others. Neighbours turned on each other and thousands were killed and exiled. The aim of foreign military and then civilian intervention has been to create stability by creating a viable civil society: building an appropriate institutional environment, a strong state, viable market, social safety net, the rule of law, etc.
New actors Throughout the last decade, various local estimations of the security environment in the Balkans have been supplemented by the security perceptions of a whole new set of actors coming from abroad. These international actors have entered the scene with their own concepts of uncertainty, anxiety, risk, security and insecurity, and their own resources to make their concepts
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authoritative. The Balkans has become an arena of contest between various security perceptions; not only between local groups, divided by class, religion, ethnicity and place of origin and residence (urban/rural); but also contests among various global actors, be they European or American, large multinational organizations or individual donors, humanitarian aid organizations or grassroots-oriented NGOs, foreign governments or private foundations. Added to this are the ‘network contests’ between competing alliances of outside donors and their local implementing clients in government ministries or in the NGO sector. In sum, there are new sets of conflicts in the Balkan societies which create an uncertain environment for local communities. The uncertain environment comes to the fore when donors suddenly change priorities, or when they simply pull up stakes and go elsewhere, abruptly breaking the chain. To understand the depth of feelings one only needs to hear the frustrations of local officials or community residents when a security force is suddenly reduced, a local OSCE office closed down, or a Scandinavian assistance project phased out (as, for example, Denmark is doing in Albania). At the local level, these moves are interpreted as ‘betrayal’ by the West, and this rhetoric, frequently voiced in Bosnia, is now also increasingly heard among frustrated local cadres in Kosovo. These foreign development actors on the Balkan security scene are usually termed ‘the international community’, a convenient term which masks the variety and even contradictions within the group. In the Balkans, the international presence takes on a myriad of different forms. There are the military/security forces in the form of armed units and international police. There are bilateral assistance programmes, such as the Swedish SIDA or USAID, and inter-governmental organs, such as the OSCE missions. There are also the foreign or multinational aid organizations, who not only try to ameliorate humanitarian problems but also attempt to build community organization. These can be large bureaucracies, such as UNHCR or UNDP, or well-endowed NGOs such as Care International, Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam, Save the Children or Danish Refugee Aid. These international NGOs often set up local offices or chapters, creating their own chains of assistance and training. There are also private foundations, such as the Soros/Open Society Foundation, as well as Western government-funded NGOs which carry out institution-building on contract, such as the American National Democratic Institute and the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, or the British Westminster Foundation and the many German political party-affiliated foundations. Finally, the international community taps the resources of consulting NGOs, private companies and one-man development entrepreneurs, all of whom compete for EU or other aid funds and who then hire local staff or contract local NGOs as staff. Calling these varied organizations and the individuals within them ‘the international community’ hides more than it delineates. Locals usually understand this, so they use the term ‘internationals’, which may mean either foreign organizations or foreigners themselves. The behaviour and mistakes of ‘the internationals’ are frequent topics of conversation in any
From kanun to capacity-building 147 gathering of local Balkan staff members, and are a common scandal-making headline at public meetings or in the press. Those individuals who form part of the international scene are usually easily identifiable from a distance by their white jeeps, busy schedules, and the plastic ID cards hung around their necks.6 Some of the jeeps may have bigger antennas, some of the offices are more well equipped, some of the people do more foreign travelling, and some have more ID cards than others but there is usually little doubt about their ultimate affiliations. The ID cards are supposed to provide foreigners with more security – like fetish objects, they are supposed to protect from getting harassed by local bandits or unscrupulous police. Hence the international outrage when humanitarian aid workers are robbed or attacked in conflict zones such as Chechnya or Afghanistan, and most recently, in Kosovo’s capital of Pristina. (Local staff also carry such paraphernalia, and for minority group members they are often the only real security they have.) This ‘foreign presence’ in the Balkans can thus be analysed at two levels: institutions, which normally employ both outside supervisors and local staff, and the foreign individuals, ‘the internationals’, who have their own work routines, social life and daily practices. Traditionally, the internationals have come from Western Europe or the United States but in international protectorates with UN operations, such as Bosnia and Kosovo, they may also come from West Africa, South Asia or elsewhere; the relatively high salaries and per diem payments are attractive incentives. The foreign presence – both institutional and personal – is highly varied and it would be presumptuous to assume that all internationals operate with the same mind-set, despite locals’ perceptions. The variation among the foreigners is tremendous: there are American, Romanian, Ghanaian and Pakistani policemen currently patrolling Kosovo’s towns together with their Albanian Kosovar counterparts; there are young activists from Minnesota or history PhDs from Berlin working for the OSCE, and there are career diplomats and foreign ministry officials from Denmark, Slovakia, Bulgaria and elsewhere who are ‘seconded’ to the various international institutions and UN missions; all of whom interact with fly-in fly-out consulting teams from Brussels, Strasbourg, Washington and other capitals. Nevertheless, it is unmistakable that ‘the internationals’ have some commonalities in their discourse, perceptions and daily practices. Obviously, they do not live permanently in the Balkans. They are stationed there on a mission, to do good. Some are also very well paid to do good, as local Kosovars or Macedonians may remark. But there are in fact very few foreign businessmen there. The most precise concept with which to describe the mission of the internationals is ‘benevolent colonialism’. ‘Colonialism’ because, despite the rhetoric of ‘partnership’ with local actors, there is an unequal relationship between the foreign donor and the local supplicant. Colonialism also, because the project is to intervene in these societies to make them more amenable for Western interests. ‘Benevolent’ because the relationship is not based on exploiting the locals and plundering their resources, but on converting them to ‘our’ way of thinking
148 Steven Sampson for their own good; to ‘hand over’ capacity. One might think of this as a civilizing mission, as did the French and British in their respective colonies, but in these cases, colonization was also tied to ruthless exploitation of natural and human resources. In the Balkans, these material and human resources are simply not utilized. The locals may be well educated but, if they are working at all, it is as drivers, translators, secretaries and low-level functionaries. Large portions of the skilled workforce have already emigrated, while many of the remainder are unemployed or live off remittances. Those in the larger towns – Pristina, Sarajevo, Tirana, Skopje – are increasingly adapting themselves to a service economy built on the foreign missions. Like the old-style colonies, visible foreign enclaves have started to appear with their associated lifestyles. Balkan capitals once viewed as hardship posts are now quite comfortable. The irony is not lost on either the internationals or the locals. The primary mission of many of those working within the international community, the purpose of all these hundreds of organizations containing managers, staff and their affiliated retinue of advisors, translators, drivers and secretaries, is ‘institution-building’. Applied to the development of civil society, institution-building entails identifying the correct people to implement civil society development projects, determining the most efficient way to donate money, establishing or identifying the appropriate organizations and making sure that they operate in the right way. It is these activities which form the basis of ‘project life’.
Project society Civil society in the Balkans once existed as an outgrowth of social life, of kinship, of customary law such as kanun, of social communities and local associations. Building civil society involves quite different kinds of structures. It is about formulating and executing ‘projects’. The practices of building civil society in the Balkans create a project society.7 The Balkans has become a veritable world of projects. The family conflicts of kanun are now being replaced by the project applications for capacity-building. Project society entails a special kind of activity: short term, with a budget and a time schedule. Projects always end, ostensibly to be replaced by policy, but normally to be replaced by yet another project. Project society entails a special kind of structure, beginning with the donor, the project identification mission, the appraisal, the selection of an implementing partner, the disbursement of funds, the monitoring, the evaluation, and of course, the next project. Project society is about the allocation of resources in an organized, at times bureaucratic, fashion. There is no project without a project application, a waiting period, a preliminary assessment, and the monitoring and accounting procedures that follow. The practices of project society demand a special kind of language, almost like the wooden language of Stalinism. Passing on knowledge is called ‘training’. Passing on knowledge to selected cadres is called ‘training of trainers’ or TOT. Getting better at something is called ‘capacity-
From kanun to capacity-building 149 building’. Being able to say what you want to do is a ‘mission statement’. When we understand what’s going on we speak of ‘transparency’. Trying to find out what’s going on is called ‘networking’. Figuring out who will benefit is ‘stakeholder analysis’. Finding the money is called ‘fund raising’. Making sure you don’t waste it is called ‘donor coordination’. Surviving after the money runs out is called ‘sustainability’. People with money who don’t see results are suffering from ‘donor fatigue’. Taking your money somewhere else is an ‘exit strategy’. Failure to find a recipient is called ‘absorption problems’. And when there are too many donors and not enough recipients, you have ‘donor constipation’. Participation in this world of projects requires knowledge of the latest key words and concepts capable of magically generating money: this year it’s ‘empowerment’, then ‘good governance’, now ‘income generation’, but don’t forget ‘trafficking’ and ‘anti-corruption’; and of course, there is the ubiquitous ‘partnership’. In civil society development, the ultimate goal is to create NGOs which are not only service providers but can also carry out ‘advocacy’, i.e. influence decision-makers. In trying to help people in the Balkans solve problems, what I call ‘civil society’, international intervention has now re-created ‘civil society’ as a bureaucratic funding category. Project society is about the traffic in money, knowledge, people, and ideas. Project life is about what people do with these resources. It is a world with a premium on the most abstract of knowledge. Hence, those who manipulate symbols and concepts can occupy strategic positions in the chain of resource allocations; they become as important as those donors and programmes which actually help people with concrete problems. If businessmen and Mafiosi manipulate money, project managers manipulate money attached to concepts, with the key term being ‘increasing capacity’. Since ‘capacity’ is never absolute, it can continually be built. And building capacity requires training. Trainers used to be brought in from the West. Now the trainers can come from other Balkan countries or they can be Western-trained locals who have passed the TOT courses. One of the key elements of development is to assess needs, including ‘training needs’; hence the emerging industry known as ‘training needs assessment’ (TNA). It is this world of projects which ‘the internationals’ bring into the Balkans, and it is the ideas and practices of this world which are utilized by a specific group of Balkan project managers and staff, their ‘local partners’ or ‘counterpart organizations’. It would be premature to call these hundreds of local project staff a ‘class’ or an ‘elite’, even though some of them clearly live differently, act differently and think differently from their fellow citizens. Many were activists in another era before the conflict or the post-socialist transition. Others have been fortunate enough to work as translators and then acquired organizational skills or been sent on training courses. The local staff have their own private projects of career, family or emigration, and these private projects entail holding open as many options as possible. Being Western oriented or educated, many of them have passports or permanent residency privileges in the West, and virtually all their children are studying
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or will study in the West. As a strata with a specific lifestyle, they distinguish themselves by an attentiveness to what is new in the West, by their relations with actual and potential foreign donors, by intense relations (cordial or hostile) to specific internationals, and by an insecurity about what will happen when the donors leave. Most local staff are working on projects of one or two years’ duration, having jumped from one project to another for career, salary or personal reasons. Unlike NGO staff in the West, however, they have little aspiration to obtain employment in the state or private sector. Jobs in the state sector in the Balkans are generally low paid and hold low status, while the private consulting market is virtually non-existent, though Romania and Bulgaria are exceptions. The problem for these local project elites is assessing the donors’ future plans and strategies in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Foreign staff may themselves be uncertain of what their donors back home are planning; and they may not communicate this information to the local staff. Even a major international actor such as the World Food Programme or the OSCE can make drastic cuts in staff in just a few months; sometimes closing down entire departments. Internationals can be replaced by local staff. At the OSCE missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, for example, the foreign (or ‘international’) staff running the democratization programme have been replaced by Bosnians and Kosovars, who are called ‘national democratization officers’. Changing the staff, however, usually comes with a reduction in the budget for activities and resources, giving the impression that the priority of a project or programme is measured by the number of international staff rather than by its importance in building democracy or civil society. This world of projects, project resources, project hierarchies, project ideologies, project discourses and project practices has been exported to the Balkans. Like any such world, it operates with premises and assumptions that provide benefits to some and disenfranchise others. The world of projects rests on several assumptions. The most basic of these is that practices of democracy and models of civil society can be exported from one society to another. It also operates on the belief that the models of civil society exported are based on the realities of its own societies. The problem for civil society development is that those who formulate the projects, those who are implementing them and those who are the targets have swallowed the whole model in an unreflective way. This is hardly surprising, since asking questions could result in a donor taking his money elsewhere. The world of civil society projects operates with other premises as well: there is the illusion of the ‘international community’, which is neither international nor communal; the illusion that Western NGOs and international organizations cooperate effortlessly with each other and with their home governments; the illusion that professional Western NGOs are based on voluntary commitment rather than paid staff, and that requests by Balkan NGOs for paid staff are somehow selfish; the illusion that the activities of Western NGOs are based on the formulation of long-term strategies rather
From kanun to capacity-building 151 than improvisation and following the money when new funding categories suddenly appear; the illusion that the right technique can somehow replace the missing social self-initiative which lies at the basis of civic movements; the illusion that because people are constantly busy that they must also be efficient, conveniently overlooking the proliferation of wasted trips, delayed decisions, unread reports, and useless meetings common to virtually any large organization; the illusion that the only capacities that need building are those ‘down there’, and not their own; the illusion that organizations ‘down there’ are chaotic rather than adaptations to changing uncertainties (how many Western NGOs could survive very long on unclear laws, two or three accounting systems, political harassment, electricity blackouts, computer viruses, jealous citizens, unscrupulous journalists and inadequately translated jargonistic project proposals, and doing all their activity in a language which is not their native tongue?); finally, there is the illusion that the number of foreign-funded NGO organizations is some kind of index of democracy.
Does civil society development make a difference? How much has the Western-inspired civil society intervention improved the security climate in the Balkans? In some ways, the Western projects have done little to alter the basic relationship between an inefficient, at times incompetent, administration and a sceptical society.8 The low level of impact reflects the initial assumption that building more NGOs was the solution for a weakly developed society However, since these programmes were dominated by Western donors’ priorities and models, many NGOs tended to focus their energies on pleasing their donors instead of connecting with the public. They became an enclave within society. Throughout the Balkans, the boundaries between institutions – public/private, state/civil, formal/informal – have often been so imprecise as to make these societies both mysteriously opaque and extraordinarily resilient. Foreign interventions and democracy assistance, here in the form of civil society development, attempt to clarify and demarcate these institutional boundaries. Rights and obligations are now spelled out via contracts and terms of citizenship, and governments are made responsive to advocacy programmes or forced to adhere to their promises of accountability and transparency. Opacity is seemingly simplified, as each actor – individual, group, institution – becomes aware of their respective rights, obligations and interests. The complication comes from the fact that there is also contestation about how these rights, obligations and interests are determined. In simple terms, it is a contestation between the demands of foreign donors versus those of local authorities. These external demands of benevolent colonialism intersect with the local structures, partly changing them, partly being absorbed by them. This leads to the kind of uncertainties which create a climate of insecurity in these rapidly evolving societies. The enclavization of the NGO sector is one indicator of this climate of insecurity.
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The problems of NGOs The presence of hundreds of NGOs in the Balkans has led to some notable successes. There are many organizations. They meet in larger forums. The state pays attention to them. Some are known to the public (though not always positively). The NGOs provide some employment, and they often act as a moral force in debates on human rights, social welfare or combating corruption. They link society with Western donors. However, the NGO scene in the Balkans is beset with problems as well, some of which create the perception of fears and threats which we may term ‘insecurity’. Let me comment on a few of these: •
•
•
•
Jealousy from the state. State officials continue to be jealous of the resources given to NGOs in terms of equipment, training, trips, and foreign attention. NGOs are seen as competing with ministries for aid. And the NGOs’ easy cooperation with Western donors, their relative ease of communicating with Westerners and the more relaxed, alternative nature of the sector all leads to a certain degree of jealousy on the part of government officials. There are complaints from local government officials that ‘they’ (the NGOs) are spending ‘our money’, that ‘we’ (in the government) need to ‘control’ them. Elitism within the NGOs. Among many NGOs, there continues to be a lack of understanding of how government actually works, of how policies are formulated and implemented. NGOs seem to think that if policies are not working then the government must be sabotaging them. Such accusations overlook the fact that most government officials are young and inexperienced, having had to learn on the run during the rapidly evolving ‘foreign assistance’ climate of ‘EU integration’. Gaps between the professional, well-funded NGOs and all the rest. There continues to be a major gap between the small number of professionalized NGOs with good connections to Western donors and the newer, more grassroots organizations which see themselves as being cut off from funding. Since donors like to go with winners (less risk, less work) and since NGOs themselves are in competition for funds, the gap between the elite NGOs and the rest is perpetuated. It is a local conflict between NGOs who insist that ‘we are really doing something’, while the other, upstart NGO ‘does nothing’. The gap reflects the difference between those who have a long-term donor commitment (and then receive funds and professional training in the world of projects) and those who do not. The complaints of the upstart NGOs are not without merit. One notices the same old faces and organizations at the conferences, partly because the Balkans lacks the natural mobility whereby competent NGO administrators would move to jobs in the state or private sector, leaving spaces open for newcomers. Continuing scepticism among the public. The opaque character of project society is reflected in numerous public opinion surveys, which show that all too many citizens view NGO development as something external, and just another means of personal enrichment used by that segment of the
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population who cannot work with their hands or will not risk starting a business. Indeed, working for a foreign-funded NGO can be relatively lucrative in Balkan terms. The fact that so many NGOs in Eastern Europe operate as foundations – i.e. as non-member organizations with only a board and staff – only increases the scepticism of the public and reinforces their misgivings about voluntarism in general. Lack of voluntary elements or scepticism about voluntarism. With NGOs increasingly seen as echoes of Western aid organizations, there is a prevalent view among locals that projects can only be carried out by paid staff equipped with jeeps and similar accoutrements (the Oxfam model). While many local staff are dedicated to their jobs and work long hours, mobilizing volunteers remains a problem.
NGOs in the Balkans remain crucially dependent on foreign funds. Neither government donations nor private philanthropy has filled this gap. In the light of donor fatigue and the shift of interest elsewhere by the Soros Foundation and others, the lack of permanent local income sources remains a serious problem. The issue here is not that the funds come from abroad, but the fact that outside funding is contingent on foreign perceptions of local needs. It is the donors who determine which region or which issue is ‘sexy’, and which region or issue represents a ‘security’ problem. The capriciousness of such judgements has serious consequences at the local level. One can conclude that the numerically strong Balkan NGO sector, with its thousands of organizations, remains very much foreign-focused and foreignfunded. The foreign donors and their agents determine the priorities and the use of funding resources. The real question, regardless of sets of priorities, is whether all these organizations actually make civil society stronger. The optimistic view, prevalent among many donors, is that substantive change has taken place, although more commitment must now come from the locals to make the changes sustainable. The pessimistic view, often held by local citizens and even some frustrated NGO activists, is that the local NGOs remain a foreign enclave in the midst of societies where there is increasing alienation and disillusionment with the West, where uncivil populist organizations persist, and where NGO staff are seen as only highly paid functionaries holding elite seminars for visiting foreigners. The situation is most acute in Kosovo, where the influx of hundreds of foreign organizations rapidly generated an aid-dependent culture and hired away potential local NGO activists as staff, leaving local Kosovar NGOs extremely underdeveloped and donor-dependent. By 2002, many of the original humanitarian aid donors were leaving the country, reducing their staff as they turn to Serbia, Afghanistan or other new aid frontiers or trouble spots. This reduction in foreign inputs has occurred after the new NGOs and the new interim government structures had effectively supplanted the former parallel structures which had existed under the Miloševiæ regime. The result is that some of the social energy and voluntary initiative which would have been used
154 Steven Sampson to develop an independent locally grounded civil society has been dissipated: the newly created aid-dependent NGOs are searching for funds, and the UN–Kosovo government is unable to provide sufficient welfare services. The situation in Bosnia resembles that of Kosovo, inasmuch as the state institutions and market forces remain weak, and NGOs, via their donors, continue to supply a host of social services which in normal situations would be provided by government agencies. However, these NGOs, too, are threatened by loss of donors. In Romania, Macedonia and Albania, we find a schizophrenic situation, an island of about 10 per cent well-functioning organizations, many of them supplying services, and a state which remains sceptical of NGOs, creating its own rival quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (QUANGOs) and cooperating with NGOs only to attract donors.
Conclusion: ‘foreign models’ and security NGOs are now part of the local democracy assistance landscape throughout the Balkans. Are uncertainty and anxiety reduced? Security enhanced? Civil society stronger? Social capital – the capacity of people to find solutions to their problems – increased? Is there more trust ‘out there’? The answer to all these questions seems to be ‘No’. Part of the problem lies in the way Western democracy models have been exported. We tend to believe that the export of ‘foreign models’ is problematic because they are foreign, i.e. that they must be adapted to local conditions. I would argue, however, that the real problem is that they are models, i.e., that they are simplified representations of reality, or worse, models for what we would like NGOs to be. Were we to study how our own Western NGOs really work, instead of accepting our idealized representations of them, we would discover that many of our organizations suffer from the same dysfunctions seen in the Balkans. West European NGOs also display nasty signs of careerism and opportunism, experience problems working together, and receive nearly all their funds from the state, which in another context would lead us to call them ‘fronts’. The Western NGO scene, too, is replete with organizations which exist in name only, and which dissipate as soon as funding dries up. Models travel. They travel in the heads and in the practices of those policy experts, project managers and staff members who decide what kinds of programmes and projects are to be carried out. Those who participate in the export of democratic models should be cognizant of what happens to these models when they reach their destinations, i.e. the context. Yet, it is not simply a problem of implementing the models correctly. Equally significant is the lack of critical reflection about what these models are all about. Are they models of civil society? Models for civil society? I would argue, in fact, that they should simply be convenient devices for making local practices more adaptable to new conditions. What creates a climate of security is the ability of local, home-grown structures to deal with uncertainty and insecurity. Replacing these local structures, denying their ambiguous character to produce both security and violence, or dismissing them as tradition, features which are often the result or policy of
From kanun to capacity-building 155 many civil society development programmes, only leads to further uncertainty and insecurity. Hence, without meaningful discussion between donors and recipients on these issues, NGOs and civil society development remain rituals of capacity-building according to the donor’s definition, with projects and reports substituting for the mobilization of social self-initiative. Only through greater reflection about models can civil society become more than a grant category or a project. In the rush to make application deadlines and fulfil the benchmarks for the quarterly reports, we are missing this more profound reflection of how civil society should develop. The real ‘dialogue’ and ‘reconciliation’ are not so much a problem for locals – they can figure things out when conditions are right – they are dialogue and even reconciliation between the internationals and the locals. This is the overlooked element in creating more security in the Balkans. As one OSCE staff member complained about their efforts to build democracy in Kosovo, ‘How do we know when it’s time to leave?’ As another complained after being scolded by a ministerial functionary for having done nothing for two years, ‘Well, now the locals are taking revenge, it’s time to leave.’ Let me return to the problem of civil society and security. The import of foreign models and their appropriation by a small clique of isolated individuals has been a continuing process in Balkan and East European history. Models of French constitutionalism, of Western liberalism, of Italian/Spanish corporatism, of Soviet Stalinism, of third world national liberation, of the virtue of ethnic purity in a single territory, all were outside models introduced into the Balkans in order to modernize the region. The foreign character of these models generated a climate of insecurity throughout society, a situation that the Romania literary scholar and politician Titu Maiorescu, a century ago, called ‘form without foundation’. And this continues to be present under the conditions of today’s humanitarian-oriented benevolent colonialism. The imposition of Western civil society based on the presumed effectiveness of NGOs is the latest such foreign model. Like so many other schemes for social development, civil society development came with the benevolent intentions of foreigners who persuaded an enthusiastic cadre of local advocates to follow a new and exciting path, the path of NGO project life. Overlooked was the fact that new inputs, however laudable, also fed resources into existing political conflicts and spawned new forms of competition. It is not that the models destabilize a tranquil society. Rather, it is that new resources are pumped in, while unresolved power differentials remain. Competition over these resources in the absence of transparent power relations thus generates a climate of insecurity on the part of the aspiring elites and in other segments of the population. The competition for resources leads to the perversion of the NGO model: NGOs become sycophants for donors, the NGO staff pursue their own private projects, or the NGO resources are used as political platforms, market possibilities or substitute services for an underdeveloped state. Uncertainty and anxiety about Western models are thus not symptoms of cultural lag but products of the concrete conditions of democracy assistance. The power differential between foreign donors and local Balkan recipients generates conflicts and jealousies
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among NGOs and within Balkan societies. There are conflicts between NGOs and the state, the public remain suspicious of NGO activists and their motives, and ultimately, there is donor fatigue and exit. From the donor perspective, their rhetorical reaction to this situation is the passionate appeal for ‘more donor coordination’, ‘more transparency’ and ‘more partnership’. Yet donors already spend inordinate amounts of time sharing information and coordinating. ‘Transparency’ is useless if the interests are in conflict. ‘Partnership’ is meaningless when donors are beholden to their donors back home, and where recipients’ own perceptions of needs are far down the chain of priorities and information. It has been a long-standing feature of Balkan political rhetoric to blame problems and tensions, including security problems, on the machinations of outsiders. Today these outsiders are ‘the donors’ or ‘the internationals’. They may have noble intentions, with the discourse of civil society development emphasizing empowerment, participation, accountability and democracy. Yet they fail to see that the people in the Balkans grow ever more disillusioned with the very NGOs that are supposed to help them. Civil society groups are criticized as instruments for individuals trying to ensure their own personal projects and for leaving the rest of society out in the cold. We all know what happens when broad social groups feel frustrated and isolated. Hence the need to re-evaluate the kind of models that are being exported and how they can be linked to the existing structures of Balkan society. Indigenous development models would seek to resonate with people’s everyday lives and with local concepts of uncertainty and anxiety, of fears and threats. In the Balkans, such models may entail forms of associational life which take their point of departure in kinship, family, informal networks, friendship, religious organizations and community, even the much maligned ‘ethnic community’. Up to now, these types of organizations, often based on codes of trust, honour and shame, have been seen as a survival of the past, or as the nucleus of uncivil, even criminal, activity. Yet trust, honour and shame are also the pillars of alliance, the very values which form the social capital so desired by the civil society programme managers. In Balkan history, primordial structures of kinship, ethnicity, religion and community provided high levels of security and fulfilled social needs. They produced trust. If we were to conceive of these primordial structures in civil society terms, we would discover that they can contribute to building security instead of threatening it. Civil society would not be a foreign model but a home-grown Balkan one. Such an approach would produce the capacitybuilding and generate the sought-after sustainability. But it would also mean that donors would have to adjust their practices: awarding grants to such anomalous entities as a kinship group or an informal network. It would mean extending concepts of trust to go beyond the signing of grant contracts or quarterly monitoring reports. It would entail Western donors and recipients working as equal partners, sharing risks and accepting moral relationships. It
From kanun to capacity-building 157 remains to be seen whether Western project organizations can deal with such partnership arrangements and the risks they entail. Uncertainty and insecurity are often depicted as ‘regional issues’ far from everyday concerns. In fact, the lack of knowledge which we call uncertainty, and the emotional ‘dis-ease’ which we call insecurity, are always based on locally grounded interpretations of people’s existential conditions. The policy statements of Brussels and Washington and the human rights declarations from Geneva are our own interpretations of security issues. But to fully resolve dilemmas of uncertainty and insecurity, it is best to start with the local Balkan interpretations. Hence, we must devote more energy to examining how trust is constructed among the primordial organizations which have formed the fabric of Balkan societies. Security in the Balkans will not be achieved by creating 2,000 or even 20,000 new NGOs, nor by everyone attending yet another training session in conflict management. Security is not created by organizational capacity-building but by building structures of trust. As long as power differentials between donors and recipients remain as great as they are, constructing this trust will remain difficult, and the climate of security in the Balkans will remain fragile.
Notes 1
2 3
4
5 6 7 8
P. Stubbs, ‘Partnership or colonization: the relationship between international agencies and local non-government organizations in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, in Bob Deacon (ed.), Civil Society, NGOs and Global Governance, Sheffield: Globalism and Social Policy Programme (GASPP), 2000, pp. 23–32. M. Ottoway and T. Carothers (eds), Funding Virtue: Civil Society and Democracy Promotion, Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2001. Foundation for Civil Society Development, Geographical Distribution of NGOs in Romania, 2001, available at http://www.fdsc.ro; D. Petrescu, ‘Civil society in Romania: from donor supply to citizen demand’, in Ottoway and Carothers (eds), Funding Virtue, pp. 217–242. I. Smillie, Service Delivery or Civil Society? Non-Governmental Organisations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zagreb: Care Canada, 1996; D. Bekkering, The World of Bosnian NGOs, Sarajevo: UNOV Bosnian NGO Development Unit, 1996; Dialogue Development, Survey of Bosnian Civil Society Organisations: Mapping, Characteristics and Strategies, consulting report, EU Commission/Phare, 96–1024.00, 1996 (
[email protected]); Dialogue Development, Bosnia Civil Society Development: Mapping Analysis, Strategy Options and Programme Priorities, consulting report, EU Commission/Phare, 1997 (
[email protected]); Dialogue Development, Kosovo Civil Society Development: NGO Mapping Analysis, consulting report, EU Commission, 1999 (
[email protected]); S. Sampson, ‘The social life of projects: importing civil society to Albania’, in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 121–142; S. Sampson, Human Rights Assessment for Albania, Copenhagen: Danish Center for Human Rights Project Department, 2000; Stubbs, ‘Partnership or colonization’. Z. Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, London: Polity Press, 1998. Stubbs, ‘Partnership or colonization’. Sampson, ‘The social life of projects’. Petrescu, ‘Civil society in Romania’.
9
Securing the community? An examination of international psychosocial intervention Vanessa Pupavac
Introduction International security strategies have expanded from the narrower notion of negative peace to the more expansive notion of positive peace. While negative peace concerns the absence of war, positive peace involves the creation of tolerant, inclusive and functional relations within states. Contemporary security strategies are also no longer confined to the traditional focus on inter-state relations. They have broadened to encompass initiatives in both the public and private spheres, from politics and economics, to education and personal development. In the post-Yugoslavia states such strategies do not just touch upon the political and economic or aspects of inter-ethnic relations, but upon relations in society in general, including relations within the family. Social policy has become an important part of the new security strategies to promote secure and sustainable communities. It is informed by AngloAmerican perspectives and often takes the form of what is referred to as ‘psychosocial intervention’. This may consist of ad hoc programmes or social policy reforms, yet it is under-theorized by many advocates. Although psychosocial intervention is extremely popular with donors and appears in many international reports, there is much confusion over its meaning among aid agencies and a surprising absence of discussion of the concept in security studies. This chapter critically examines international psychosocial intervention and particularly the problems that have arisen when adopting this approach in the post-Yugoslav states, because the lessons to be learned from the Yugoslav experience are important for international policy in other war-affected societies.
Defining psychosocial intervention One is likely to come across the term ‘psychosocial intervention’ in even the most cursory glance at international aid programmes. It is considered vital for the rebuilding of societies that have been at war, with an UNICEF document on reconstruction in the post-Yugoslav states arguing that addressing
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‘the psycho-social recovery of the younger generations’ is a crucial issue.1 The belief in the need for the psychological rehabilitation of societies that have been at war has led UNICEF to define new policy areas: ‘best practice in the context of psychosocial counselling; how to demobilize and detraumatize child soldiers; how to deal with the conditions of social breakdown in the “failed state”’.2 In the early 1990s UNICEF and UNESCO’s Joint Committee on Education called for priority to be given to psychosocial trauma counselling and education for peace.3 Since then, UNICEF has included psychosocial programmes as a standard part of its work, evidenced in its devotion of a separate heading for psychosocial activities in its country programme reports. Yet, despite its popularity, there is both uncertainty over the concept of psychosocial work, and a lack of analysis and proper evaluation of its benefits. Although the term is frequently used and appears in many humanitarian aid programmes, its meaning is assumed. Psychosocial intervention is rarely defined in documents and aid agency staff express confusion over its meaning and the activities it covers.4 These range from trauma counselling and non-violent conflict resolution programmes to life skills education, parenting classes and self-esteem building initiatives. In essence, psychosocial intervention may be characterized as psychological approaches to social problems. The perspectives underlying psychosocial intervention derive from social psychology. This has been defined by a leading textbook on the subject as ‘the scientific study of how people think about, influence, and relate to one another’.5 In short, it is concerned with how groups of people or individuals interact with one another. Quincey Wright’s seminal Study of War contended that social psychology ‘has contributed most of all the social disciplines to an understanding of the efficient causes of war, in a manner to suggest cures’. The cures of social psychology emphasize therapeutic forms of intervention at the level of the individual and the group to change attitudes and re-orient behaviour. We can see the influence of social psychology on the founders of UNESCO whose constitution states: ‘Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.’6 However, although social psychology informed the views of UNESCO’s founders, such an approach was not to predominate internationally in the context of East–West rivalry. Instead, economic development strategies came to the fore, manifested in the establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions and their modernization policies. Development, it was hoped, would iron out disparities between countries and therefore promote common values and international stability. By the late 1960s doubts were being expressed about whether the economic development approach was promoting international stability. Reports by international organizations concluded that economic growth strategies were only targeting a small proportion of the population and were
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not meeting basic needs. The modernization paradigm with its linear causal link between development and security was questioned. There were concerns that the international economic approach was failing to promote greater social harmony and rapprochement. Informed by Anglo-American social policy, development strategies began to move away from the modernization paradigm towards psychosocial approaches emphasizing intervention to promote functioning sustainable development and sustainable communities. In the new paradigm, linear causal links based on psychological conditioning replaced the economic ones of the modernization model. With this shift, the psychosocial functionalist concept of well-being, implying a healthy, well-adjusted mental state, became the goal of development instead of universal prosperity.
Therapeutic governance International psychosocial approaches informed by contemporary AngloAmerican social policy aim to promote the psychosocial functionalism of individuals and their communities. As previously indicated, social psychology traces back the origins of social conflict to dysfunctional emotional development. Poverty or crime, for example, are discussed, in terms of cycles of deprivation and delinquency. The rise of fascism has been explored in relation to Hitler’s childhood experiences, and contemporary race relations have been conceptualized in terms of traumatized identities.7 The idea of past trauma leading to future dysfunctionalism is now being applied to war. So whereas Clausewitz wrote of war as the continuation of politics, increasingly today war is understood in psychological terms as the continuation of trauma. In the international psychosocial model, war leads to mass trauma, which in turn causes mass psychosocial dysfunctionalism. In other words, trauma is not merely regarded as a consequence of war, but a cause of war, with professional intervention being required to break the cycles of trauma and dysfunctionalism. A central theme of this approach is the cultivation of ‘emotional literacy’, the promotion of better self-understanding, a sense of well-being and improved emotional communication.8 By fostering emotional skills and self-esteem, feelings of frustration, alienation and aggressiveness are countered and social divisions overcome, rejuvenating citizenship and promoting a sense of communal responsibility.9 Indeed, cultivating selfunderstanding and one’s emotional skills is now considered part of an individual’s duties as a responsible citizen.10 In the last decade there has been a proliferation of therapeutic programmes in the United States and Britain. Ranging from relationship counselling and anti-bullying initiatives to parental education, these are now being exported to other societies.11 Thousands of international projects have been established not just in the post-Yugoslavia states but across the globe. Understanding social problems and conflict as arising from psychosocial dysfunctionalism, they seek
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to rehabilitate victims and re-establish their psychosocial functionalism. Indeed, the psychosocial approach is now becoming so integral to how officials relate to populations that it represents a new form of therapeutic governance in which politics becomes about validating and managing the insecure and dysfunctional self.12 A ‘therapeutic mode of social control’ has precedents.13 One might recall the Soviet Union’s own therapeutic state institutions – the psychiatric hospitals where dissident writers like the Russian poet Irina Ratushinska or other social deviants would be sent for rehabilitation to correct their political attitudes. However, unlike the political ideology of Soviet psychiatric programmes, contemporary psychosocial policies aimed at promoting domestic and international order do not appear to be coercive or even manifest a clear set of moral or political values. The self is the reference point. Incursions into individual autonomy are paradoxically made in the name of self-empowerment and self-actualization, and against authoritarian practices and the authoritarian personality.14 Nevertheless, the mistrust of individuals running their lives without professional support presents alarming implications for democracy, civil rights and national self-determination. The international management of the social psychology of populations represents unprecedented intervention in the internal affairs of states and citizens. Although conducted in the language of self-empowerment and self-actualization, the outside imposition of emotional functionalism in the name of conflict prevention denotes pacifism transformed into pacification. As the leading post-war liberal thinker, Isaiah Berlin, warned, intervention to ensure ‘individual self-perfection’ may create ‘an authoritarian state obedient to the directives of an élite of Platonic guardians’, or rather in contemporary society, emotional guardians.15
Psychological intervention in the post-Yugoslav states Psychosocial programmes have been a central aspect of the international humanitarian response in the post-Yugoslav states. The funding pattern, perhaps rather cynically, has been characterized as “‘the year of emergency food aid” … followed by “the year of the psycho-social project”, then by “the year of conflict resolution”, “the year of rebuilding civil society”’.16 Whether psychosocial projects, conflict resolution programmes or civil society initiatives, they are all informed by a therapeutic understanding of social problems. The population is deemed to be suffering from mass trauma and therefore is prone to psychosocial dysfunctionalism. A key European Commission Task Force (ECTF) report, Theory and Practice of PsychoSocial Projects under War Conditions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia reckoned that ‘about 700,000 people … have a severe trauma response condition and are in need of professional help.’17 Taking on board such estimates, the US-based Common Bond Institute contends that ‘the pervasive
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presence of such a large segment of traumatized members in all areas of these societies poses perhaps the most formidable barrier to peace.’18 Following the therapeutic notion that trauma leads to psychosocial dysfunctionalism, the authors of the ECTF report viewed therapeutic intervention as imperative to prevent future wars, arguing that ‘The consequences of lack of assistance will have a massive impact in the next generations, and can even ignite new wars.’19 These reports exemplify how the international community projects the populations of the post-Yugoslav states as traumatized, and, therefore, dysfunctional and in need of psychosocial programmes. Policy-makers, academics, human rights advocates and journalists frequently deploy therapeutic concepts in explaining the actions of the protagonists or in elaborating their policy recommendations.20 Bogdan Denitch, for example, writes of ‘the powerful reservoir of traumatic memory’ transmitted from generation to generation as being behind ethnic conflict.21 The therapeutic notion of ‘social catharsis’ not only informs the sponsorship of the numerous specific psychosocial programmes, but peace and security initiatives from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to smaller projects such as the Center for Decontamination, Denazification and Pacification in Belgrade or the study The Road to War in Serbia: Trauma and Catharsis.22 Policy response after policy response is debated within a therapeutic framework. Proponents of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Bosnia, for example, advocate it in terms of representing ‘massive psychotherapy’,23 while opponents have argued against a Commission on the grounds of Bosnians not being ‘psychologically ready’.24 The ascendancy of a psychological understanding of the war has been reinforced by receptivity to therapeutic approaches among professionals in the post-Yugoslav states. As the most westernized East European state in the post-1945 period, particular developments in Yugoslav society and thought paralleled those in the West. The peace movement’s psychological turn in the West and its emphasis on self-transformation influenced the 1968 generation of Yugoslav youth. More recently, atomization through the penetration of market relations has encouraged individualistic outlooks and psychological approaches. Studying psychology has grown in popularity. Meanwhile, economic or structural approaches to the problems of the region too easily smack of the failed policies of the discredited former communists. Many are disillusioned with politics because of their experiences over the last decade of war, yet are still seeking answers to the conflict. Not surprisingly, witnessing enmity between neighbours who previously enjoyed cordial relations, they are cynical about human nature and more distrustful of their fellow citizens. This mistrust and disillusion with local politics have created a responsiveness towards psychosocial programmes, even in Serbia.
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The status of psychologists and other professionals, already elevated in former Yugoslavia, has risen even further.25 Many schools have their own psychologists and they form an important constituency receptive to international psychosocial approaches. In addition to the thousands of internationally-funded psychosocial counselling programmes, international organizations have been systematically promoting the dissemination of therapeutic approaches and the development of local professionals.26 Training in Bosnia has been directly incorporating therapeutic approaches for a number of years through seminars run by western universities. To cite just three examples, the University of Munich has been running seminars on trauma for the Universities of Sarajevo and Banja Luka, the University of London psychosocial programmes in Mostar, and the University of Pittsburgh seminars on education policy.27 The influence of therapeutic approaches is also extensive in Montenegro and Serbia. Indeed, as far back as 1993, UNICEF set up a Self-Esteem Project in Vojvodina, which over two years involved over 400 teachers and 15,000 children. The School of Education at the University of Nottingham has run seminars for Montenegrin education officials and an Education for Conflict Resolution and Corrective Experience for Traumatic Stress Programme has been implemented by the Institute of Psychology of the University of Belgrade with the aid of UNICEF. Those involved were trained to be trainers and they in turn have trained pre-school and primary school teachers who organized weekly workshops for 8,000 children in 1994 alone.28 Western therapeutic approaches are also being disseminated through the publication of manuals and the translation of such works as those of Thomas Gordon on P.E.T. (Parent Effectiveness Training) and T.E.T (Teacher Effectiveness Training) sponsored by the Centre of Anti-War Action in Belgrade.29 Despite the explosion of psychosocial programmes, proper evaluation has been lacking in the post-Yugoslav states as elsewhere. The few detailed evaluations that do exist indicate that the demand for psychosocial intervention has been donor or agency, not recipient-led.30 Anecdotal evidence suggests hostility from domestic populations with refugees repeatedly expressing a preference for practical, material assistance. A Kosovo Albanian woman running a women’s centre in Pristina is quoted as saying that ‘people here don’t need the psycho-social counselling offered by lots of aid groups. What they need is jobs and homes to live in.’31 Surveys also indicate that refugees find psychosocial assistance stigmatizing, with the ECTF report quoting refugees as saying, ‘First we lose our home and family and have to live as foreigners here. Then they tell us that we are crazy.’32 This pathologization of the population has been picked up by writers such as the Sarajevan Miljenko Jergoviæ and Dubravka Ugrešiæ from Zagreb.33 They have both satirized Western therapeutic regimes. In Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream, Ugrešiæ draws upon personal experience in the United States to ridicule the therapeutizing of war:
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Vanessa Pupavac I enumerate dates, names, I give the results of democratic elections in percentages, I list the parties in power and those in opposition, I list the names of leaders, events, cities … ‘Milosevik… Vu-ko-var.’ The shrink struggles with the names … ‘Tell me about your personal problem’, she says, stressing personal, as though all the above does not belong to the register of personal problems.34
More bleakly, Jergoviæ’s hero in his short story A Diagnosis is declared insane even though, as the narrator comments, his behaviour is no different from anybody else’s. Incarcerated in an asylum he acquiesces to the therapeutic regime, but maintains a critical stance towards his treatment. When asked what he would do to the murderers of his family his reply is that he would either kill them or ‘I would give them a pen and paper and tell, as you tell me, to DRAW.’35 International field staff are aware of local hostility to mental health labels and the reluctance to take up psychosocial assistance unless it is described in other terms.36 Indeed, to the extent that refugees have embraced psychosocial programmes, their willingness is not unrelated to the prominent role international agencies assume in any war-affected economy. It is sensible for refugees to accept psychosocial counselling when participation creates connections with international staff and might facilitate applications for asylum or lead to work with the particular organization as cleaners, drivers, interpreters, or indeed, therapists, since these are often recruited from the beneficiaries of programmes. Although there is a presumption that war-affected populations are traumatized en masse, studies suggest that they are more resilient than the psychosocial model posits.37 This is not to say that there are not individuals who have been traumatized, but it is striking that for all the preoccupation with trauma, the focus has been on mass psychosocial programmes as opposed to the diagnosis and treatment of individuals suffering clinical trauma. Indeed, both assessors and field staff have expressed concern that refugees ‘are being exposed to psychosocial programs that could be harmful’.38 However, there has been a lack of proper records and follow-up of individual cases to assess the impact of interventions, a lacuna noted in various evaluations. At issue is not simply the appropriateness of individual programmes. It is the pathologization of the community together with informal community support networks through a model, which sees the origins of conflict in the social psychology of the community itself. Psychosocial intervention is seen as necessary to tackle the local mentality, ‘inspire authentic community’, create ‘a new set of values and traditions’, ‘towards empowerment, fostering systemic change … helping to build civil society’.39 Psychosocial programmes have even been included among the
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strategies of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe which notes that: ‘To achieve the aims of the Stability Pact process, the social, ethnic and other groups of South Eastern Europe will have to go through … very demanding processes of learning … changing behaviour … with relatively permanent effect.’40 The idea of emotional literacy programmes to teach the population how to relate emotionally to each other initially appeared in ad hoc NGO projects. Typically, projects have provided role-playing exercises for children and adults to raise self-esteem and empathy and thereby inculcate new norms of behaviour. Prominent in the provision of these therapeutic programmes have been the sister NGOs Suncokret in Bosnia and Croatia and Zdravo da ste in Serbia. The latter, for example, has provided ‘activities designed to enable adults to re-establish their emotional stability and confidence in others as well as their own self-confidence’.41 With international organizations having adopted a therapeutic understanding of development and security, emotional literacy is set to become institutionalized in national social policy. The therapeutizing of policy is clearest in the sphere of formal and informal education with a whole generation of children deemed to need rehabilitation.42 Not content with eradicating nationalist content from the curriculum, the Council of Europe, Office of the High Representative in Bosnia-Hercegovina, UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank are seeking to replace traditional teaching methods condemned by UNICEF as ‘factology’ by therapeutic approaches promoting self-esteem and interpersonal skills.43 As indicated above, informal dissemination has already taken place through numerous ad hoc professional training programmes. Meanwhile international childhood development and parenting programmes effectively envisage the transformation of parents into therapists to implement rehabilitative/preventive therapeutic regimes to promote functional emotional development.
The efficacy of psychosocial intervention Any discussion about the authoritarian implications of psychosocial intervention has been overshadowed by the imperative to secure functional communities. However, there are questions that need to be raised about the assumption that psychosocial intervention may provide ‘safeguards for society’.44 Fundamental problems have been identified with the methodology of the international psychosocial trauma model and its universal applicability.45 Not only are the populations of the post-Yugoslavia states regarded as damaged per se, effectively treating them as collectively sick, but, at the same time, the benefits of psychosocial programmes for these societies are assumed, apparently rendering programme evaluation redundant. Yet, leading trauma experts, such as Derek Summerfield and Yvonne McEwen, have not only expressed doubts over the universal relevance of Anglo-American psychosocial models, but also suspect that psychosocial
166 Vanessa Pupavac intervention may hinder spontaneous recovery from traumatic situations.46 Likewise, Simon Wessely has suggested that intervention ‘actively professionalizes distress, thereby impeding normal processes by which we assimilate adversity’.47 There has been confusion between adaptive and maladaptive responses. Often overlooked by many international psychosocial counsellors is that anger, fear, stress, suspicion of strangers, hyperalertness, and sleeplessness are rational responses to dangerous circumstances linked to survival strategies.48 Hence, psychosocial intervention to eradicate such symptoms may undermine coping strategies. Since stress and anger can be a spur to action, psychosocial intervention may disempower people and encourage passivity in the long term.49 Proponents of psychosocial intervention would not agree with such criticism, since one of the key themes of psychosocial work is to promote self-esteem, encourage active citizens and facilitate the coping strategies of individuals. However, this is to confuse motivations with outcomes. The good intentions of the international officials do not guarantee the efficacy of outcomes, as David Chandler’s analysis of international initiatives in Bosnia demonstrates.50 In the USA research has indicated that even if pupils have absorbed the values of the self-esteem approach, their self-confidence is not reflected in their actual performance when measured against that of their peers in other countries.51 While some critics have attacked the selfesteem approach for failing to deliver the good it promises, others have questioned the proposition that self-esteem is a prerequisite for moral behaviour and warned that the approach may actually be harmful.52 It could encourage children to be narcissistic and therefore aggressive in their dealings with others. Debates over the merits of the self-esteem approach have raged in the US national press and psychological education journals.53 Yet, international psychosocial programmes continue to be implemented in the postYugoslavia states, where, ironically, they may even promote the very attitudes they seek to eradicate and prevent. Disturbingly, the ascendancy of the therapeutic approach in US education and social policy coexists with a sharp rise in the number of children diagnosed with behavioural disorders and prescribed behavioural drugs such as Ritalin.54 There is controversy over whether this rise represents actual pathologies or the pathologization of difficult behaviour. Nevertheless, the figures demonstrate how social issues and individuals are pathologized under the therapeutic approach. The pathologization of the societies of former Yugoslavia has further implications. Leaving aside the implications for civil and political rights, the focus on personal attitudes and behaviour within psychosocial programmes may confound the possibility of conflicting parties moving beyond their opposing subjective perspectives. On the one hand, there is a danger of mystifying social causes and neglecting structural issues, while, on the other hand, there is the risk that the emphasis on promoting self and group esteem reinforces divisions.55 Furthermore, international initiatives in inter-communal
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and interpersonal relations attempting to facilitate, recover and re-create sustainable communities and family relations may unwittingly undermine community and family ties. It is an error to treat personal relationships as being analogous to impersonal relations in the public sphere and responsive to corresponding skills training programmes. Outside intervention and professionalization of relations erodes the sense of intimacy necessary for communal and family cohesion and invites identification with and dependence upon the intervening bodies, thereby weakening local institutions.56 The fostering of dependency is not just a side effect of psychosocial programmes, but the very logic of a model which posits populations as dependent on professional intervention. The therapeutic model of populations ‘in recovery’ (never recovered) and the professionalization of coping strategies presuppose comprehensive long-term intervention. The creation of relations of dependency through psychosocial programmes is again a paradox, since one reason for the popularity of such programmes with policy-makers has been concern over traditional material relief damaging local economies and making populations dependent on external aid. Yet, the impact of international mediation of the psychological responses of populations is more insidious in its intrusion into the intimate feelings and beliefs of individuals and communities. International involvement in education and social policy illustrates how international security policy is not confined to mediating inter-ethnic relations but now encompasses relations in general. Yet, the population’s sense of well-being cannot be treated as an independent variable divorced from the ongoing insecurities of their lives. If the presence of depression is relatively high, this is not to be wondered at given the level of external determination when the connection between self-determination and good mental health is well documented.57 While the negative view of the mentality of the population is reinforced by the continuing ethnic divisions, there remains a lack of acknowledgement of how international responses have had unintended dysfunctional effects and prolonged divisions.58 The dysfunctional consequences of the psychosocial approach alluded to above can only foster a further cycle of intervention in the post-Yugoslav states. International officials express dismay over the development of a culture of dependency and the absence of exit strategies.59 However, ever since the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995 and the entry of KFOR into Kosovo in 1999, the pattern has been for international organizations to become ever more involved in the region. In exasperation, successive High Representatives in Bosnia have increasingly resorted to the use of decrees, by-passing local institutions. Misunderstanding how intensive international intervention is debilitating local institutions and relations further, pessimistic conclusions are being drawn about the mentality of the populations of the post-Yugoslav states, leading to the expansion of psychosocial work in the region, rather than its contraction.
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Conclusion The aim of international psychosocial intervention is to secure the psychosocial functionalism of communities. Yet, rather than securing the community, psychosocial management problematizes local coping strategies, destabilizes communal ties and increases the sense of vulnerability of individuals. The pathologization of war-affected societies perhaps tells us more about the insecurities of western societies than that of recipient populations. One cannot escape the suspicion that it is the therapeutic needs of the West that are being projected onto other countries. Indeed, Ugrešiæ has described the war as giving Europeans ‘an unexpected collective psychotherapeutic gift’. While the efficacy of psychosocial intervention has been treated as selfevident, examination of its functionalism is long overdue.
Notes 1 UNICEF, UNICEF in the Countries of Former Yugoslavia: A Social Agenda for Reconstruction, UNICEF, 1995, p. 2. 2 M. Black, Children First: The Story of UNICEF, Past and Present, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 272. 3 UNESCO, Round Table on an Agenda for Peace: A Challenge for UNESCO, Paris: UNESCO, 1993. 4 P. Wiles et al., Independent Evaluation of Expenditure of DEC Kosovo Appeal Funds, Phases I and II, April 1999–January 2000, vol. II, London: ODI in association with Valid International, 2000. 5 D.G. Myers, Social Psychology, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988, p. 3. 6 UNESCO Constitution, 1945, available at http://ftp.unesco.org/general/eng/ about/constitution/index.html (accessed 10 June 1999). 7 E. Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution, New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. 8 D. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, London: Bloomsbury, 1996. 9 A. Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda, London: Collins, 1995; A. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994; Goleman, Emotional Intelligence; J. Keane, Reflections on Violence, London: Verso, 1996; B. Reardon, ‘Militarism and sexism: influences on education for war’, in R.J. Burns and R. Aspelagh (eds), Three Decades of Peace Education around the World: An Anthropology, New York: Garland, 1996, pp. 143–160. 10 Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, pp. 16, 119. 11 J. Nolan, The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at the Century’s End, New York: New York University Press, 1998. 12 V. Pupavac, ‘Therapeutic governance: psychosocial intervention and trauma risk management’, Disasters, 25: 4, 2001, 358–372. 13 C. Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times, London: W.W. Norton, 1984, p. 47. 14 For critiques of empowerment discourse see, for example, R. Abrahamsen, Disciplining Democracy: Development Discourse and Good Governance, London: Zed Books, 2000 or B. Cooke and U. Kothari (eds), Participation: The New Tyranny?, London: Zed Books, 2001.
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15 I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 152. 16 P. Stubbs, ‘Non governmental organisation and global social policy: towards a socio-cultural framework’, Globalism and Social Policy Programme, University of Sheffield, available at http://www.stakes.fi/gaspp/gaspp.htm#RESEARCH (accessed 16 June 1999). 17 I. Agger with S. Vuk and J. Mimica, Theory and Practice of Psycho-Social Projects under War Conditions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, Zagreb: ECHO/ECTF, 1995, p. 9. 18 Common Bond Institute, available at http://www.aphweb.org (accessed 4 May 2001). 19 Ibid. 20 For example, L. Ray, ‘Memory, trauma and genocidal nationalism’, Sociological Research Online, 4: 2, 1999, available at http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/4/2/ray.html (accessed 30 July 2002). 21 B. Denitch, ‘Dismembering Yugoslavia: nationalist ideologies and the symbolic revival of genocide’, American Ethnologist, 21, 1994, 367. 22 N. Popov and D. Gojkovic (eds), The Road to War in Serbia: Trauma and Catharsis, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000. 23 ‘Group readies “massive psychotherapy” for Bosnia’, Reuters, 7 February 2001, available at http://www.centraleurope.com/bosniatoday/news.php3?id=28463 (accessed February 2002). 24 ‘Just Watch discussion list’, 9 February 2001, available HTTP:
[email protected]. 25 B. Deacon with M. Hulse and P. Stubbs, Global Social Policy: International Organizations and the Future of Welfare, London: Sage Publications, 1997, p. 181. 26 See, for example, G.D. White, ‘Trauma treatment training for Bosnian and Croatian mental health workers’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 68: 1, 1998, 58–62. Some of the thousands of programmes are listed in Agger, Theory and Practice of Psycho-Social Projects under War Conditions. 27 UNICEF, UNICEF in the Countries of Former Yugoslavia: A Social Agenda for Reconstruction, UNICEF, 1995, pp. 46–47; ‘OHR, High Representative’s diary for Dnevni Avaz’, 12 November 1999, available at http://www.ohr.int/articles/ a991120a.html (accessed 17 December 1999). 28 UNICEF, ‘Emergency Programmes in Former Yugoslavia’, Monthly Report, May 1995, 12. 29 Centre for Anti-War Action, Voice of Peace & Human Rights, 13, 1997, 4. 30 Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Evaluation of Norwegian Support to Psycho-Social Projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Caucasus: Final Evaluation Report, Oslo: Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1999; Wiles et al., Independent Evaluation of Expenditure of DEC Kosovo Appeal Funds. 31 Quoted in J. Hilder, ‘Post-war Kosovo women must work to overcome trauma’, 27 November 1999, available at http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/s/ OAC6BE6B6C172DD8C1256838003C4AE3 (accessed 26 April 2000). 32 Agger, Theory and Practice of Psycho-Social Projects under War Conditions, p. 18. 33 M. Jergoviæ, Sarajevo Marlborough, London: Penguin, 1997; D. Ugrešiæ, Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream, London: Jonathan Cape, 1994; D. Ugrešic, The Culture of Lies, London: Phoenix House, 1998. 34 Ugrešiæ, Have a Nice Day, pp. 54–55. 35 Jergoviæ, Sarajevo Marlborough, p. 11. 36 Wiles et al., Independent Evaluation of Expenditure of DEC Kosovo Appeal Funds. 37 International Rescue Committee, IRC Kosovo Psychosocial Needs Assessment, Delegation Visit, 7–13 September 1999; Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
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40 41 42 43
44 45
46 47 48
49
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Evaluation of Norwegian Support to Psycho-Social Projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Caucasus, Oslo: Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1999; Wiles et al., Independent Evaluation of Expenditure of DEC Kosovo Appeal Funds. International Rescue Committee, IRC Kosovo Psychosocial Needs Assessment, p. 8; Wiles et al., Independent Evaluation of Expenditure of DEC Kosovo Appeal Funds, p. 115. Common Bond Institute, available at http://www.aphweb.org (accessed 4 May 2001); C. Hedges, ‘Diplomat rules Bosnia with a strong hand’, New York Times, 10 April 1998, available at http://www.ohr.int/articles/a980410a.htm (accessed 17 December 1999). Society for Psychological Assistance, Zagreb, Croatia, http://www.ishhr-conf-2001.org (accessed 4 May 2001). ‘Stability pact for South Eastern Europe’, available at http://www.stabilitypact.mzt.si (accessed 4 May 2001). Project: Zdravo da ste / Hi Neighbour, Programme of Social Integration and Psychological Support for Children and Youth at Refugee Centers, Belgrade, undated. C.F. Doebbler, ‘Children in War’, Children and War Newsletter, 1994, 4; UNICEF, Children Under Siege: Sarajevo 1992–1993, UNICEF Office of the Special Representative to the Republics of Former Yugoslavia, 1993. Council of Europe, Education in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Governance, Finance and Administration, Report by the Council of Europe for the World Bank, Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 10 November 1999; World Bank, Bosnia Herzegovina, Education Development Project, Project ID: BAPE58512, 21 June 1999, available at http://www.worldbank.org/pics/pid/ba58512.txt (accessed 22 February 2000); UNICEF, ‘Creating active schools’, available at http:// www.unicef.org/bosnia/ (accessed 22 February 2000). W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, London: E. Benn, 1919, p. 240. P.J. Bracken and C. Petty (eds), Rethinking the Trauma of War, London: Free Association Books, 1998; P.S. Jensen and J. Shaw, ‘Children as victims of war: current knowledge and future research needs’, Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 32: 4, 1993, 697–708; J. Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, New York: New York University Press, 1998; W.J. Scott, The Politics of Readjustment: Vietnam Veterans Since the War, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993; D. Summerfield, ‘A critique of seven assumptions behind psychological trauma programmes in waraffected areas’, Social Science & Medicine, 48, 1999, 1449–1462; A. Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Personal communication on forthcoming study conducted by McEwen, 1 March 2001. Personal communication, 14 November 2000. J. Boyden, ‘Children’s experience of conflict related emergencies: some implications for relief policy and practice’, Disasters, 18: 3, 1994, 261; R. Persaud, Staying Sane: How to Make Your Mind Work for You, London: Metro, 1997, p. 47; D. Summerfield, ‘The invention of post-traumatic stress disorder and the social usefulness of a psychiatric category’, British Medical Journal, 322, 2001, 95–98. T. Dineen, Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People, London: Constable, 1999, pp. 84–85; Persaud, Staying Sane, p. 47; J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System, Boston: Beacon, 1987, pp. 368–372. D. Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton, London: Pluto, 2001; M. Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity, New York: Free Press, 1997.
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51 Nolan, The Therapeutic State, p. 169. 52 J.P. Hewitt, The Myth of Self-Esteem: Finding Happiness and Solving Problems in America, New York: Worth, 1998, p. 142; B.J. Bushman and R.F. Baumeister, ‘Threatened egotism, narcissism, self-esteem, and direct and displaced aggression: does self-love or self-hate lead to violence?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1998, 219–229; R.M. Dawes, ‘The social usefulness of selfesteem: a skeptical view’, Harvard Mental Health Letter, October 1998; ‘Narcissism, self-esteem, and aggression’, Harvard Mental Health Letter, June 1999; N. Emler, Self-esteem: The Costs and Causes of Low Self-Worth, York: York Publishing Services, 2001. 53 S. Begley, ‘You’re OK, I’m terrific: “self-esteem” backfires – unjustified feelings of self-worth cause aggression’, Newsweek, 13 July 1998, 69, available at http://psych-server.iastate.edu/faculty/bbushman/newsweek.htm#Newsweek (accessed 26 April 2000); R.L. Colvin, ‘Losing faith in self-esteem movement’, Los Angeles Times, 25 January 1999, available at http://www.freeyellow.com/ members5/fflc/selfestm.htm (accessed 26 April 2000); M. Fox, ‘Building kids’ esteem may backfire into narcissism and violence’, Sightings, 20 July 1998, available at http://sightings.com/health/selfesteem.htm (accessed 26 April 2000). 54 Nolan, The Therapeutic State, pp. 12–13. 55 C. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, New York: W.W. Norton, 1978, p. 30. 56 T. Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 140. 57 Persaud, Staying Sane. 58 Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton; R.M. Hayden, Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999; S.L. Woodward, ‘The West and international organisations’, in D.A. Dyker and I. Vejvoda (eds), Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation, Despair and Rebirth, Harlow: Longman, 1996, pp. 155–176. 59 Hedges, ‘Diplomat rules Bosnia with a strong hand’.
10 Beyond intervention? The Balkans, the Stability Pact and the European Union David Phinnemore and Peter Siani-Davies
Introduction At the beginning of the twenty-first century the approach of the international community towards the Balkans appears to be uneasily poised between intervention that at times borders on colonization and integration which in the long term offers the prospect of eventual accession to the European Union (EU). The historic approach since the creation of the first Balkan nation-states has often been intervention. This was driven by a desire to preserve European and Balkan balances of power, ameliorate the condition of minorities perceived as being oppressed – previously predominantly Christian now increasingly Muslim – secure economic advantage, and propagate ‘civilized’ European values. Intervention was based on a belief that the stability of the Balkans was of consequence to wider European security but also that problems could be contained in a region that, although it was geographically part of Europe, was peripheral to the European mainstream.1 European integration as an approach to the region has appeared in more recent years. It is based on the twin beliefs that the Balkan states are interdependent and that the problems of this geographically contiguous area necessarily impacts on the EU. Hence a two-pronged approach has been adopted: regional cooperation and closer ties with the EU. In widening the strategy of integration to include the Balkans, the members of the EU seem to have come to share the view long espoused by the elite of the region that it is not a peripheral area suspended between East and West but an integral part of the European mainstream. The policy of integration was foreshadowed in Greece largely due to the country’s geo-political significance during the Cold War. Along with Turkey, Greece was admitted to NATO in 1952 before an association agreement was concluded with the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1961. In the context of the consolidation of post-dictatorship democracy, a treaty of accession was signed in 1979 and full membership of the European Community (EC) achieved in 1981. The spread of the integration approach to the remainder of the region has been patchy. During the Cold War limited trade pacts were signed by the EC with Yugoslavia and Romania but it was only after 1989 that more substantial
The Balkans, the Stability Pact and the EU 173 steps were taken. Further trade agreements were concluded with Bulgaria and Romania in the early 1990s, and the PHARE programme extended to these two countries as well as Albania. Of greater significance were the Europe Agreements that the EC signed with Romania and Bulgaria in 1993. These recognized the desire of the two countries to accede to the EU and were designed to facilitate the achievement of such a goal. Being classified as ‘Central and Eastern European Countries’ meant that Bulgaria and Romania were also covered by the EU’s Copenhagen commitment of 1993 to admit those ‘associated countries of Central and Eastern Europe that so desire’. Hence, the two countries became part of the EU’s pre-accession strategy, launched in 1995, and the ‘inclusive and evolutive’ accession process established in early 1998. Likewise, Slovenia concluded a Europe Agreement with the EU in 1996 and opened accession negotiations two years later before receiving a 2004 date for membership in December 2002. The process of integration has since accelerated. Following NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, full accession negotiations were opened with Romania and Bulgaria and a Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP) launched for what the EU terms the ‘Western Balkans’: Albania, BosniaHercegovina, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The EU, through the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe, the SAP, and other mechanisms, has committed itself to the transfer of resources and the spread of its norms and values to the European periphery on an unprecedented scale. The aim is the creation of a string of secure and politically stable democracies each with a thriving free market economy. This process of integration and ‘Europeanization’ (broadly defined) seems to have been enthusiastically adopted by both the elite and people of the region, even though its exact meaning and full consequences remain, as yet, uncharted. Indeed, such is the attraction of integration and Europeanization that throughout much of the region they have effectively become a hegemonic discourse.2 Within the EU, belief in integration and Europeanization has also become something of an article of faith. So much so, that the signing of the first Stabilisation and Association Agreements (SAAs) can be seen as representing a turning point in the development of the EU’s relations with what Smith has argued, in all honesty, is ‘terra incognita’ in more ways than one.3 This chapter considers some of the instruments of EU policy towards the Balkans, primarily the Stability Pact and the SAP, within the framework of the two separate but closely interrelated processes of regional cooperation and European integration. The first is, in effect, a symbolic reversal of Balkanization which is seen as a necessary complement to the second.
The Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe The Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe was not the first regional initiative to be launched in the Balkans following the end of the Bosnian war. In
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July 1996 seven countries – Albania, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Turkey, and Yugoslavia – adopted the Sofia Declaration on ‘Good-Neighbourly Relations, Stability, Security, and Cooperation in the Balkans’. Later, following the Thessaloniki Summit of June 1997, with the addition of FYROM, this was formalized as the South East European Cooperation Process (SEECP). Meanwhile, in December 1996, under the auspices of the USA, the ‘organizational meeting’ of the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative (SECI) was held in Geneva. SECI was established to encourage regional cooperation, wider European integration and private sector investment.4 Earlier, in late 1995, the EU had launched its own Royaumont Process for stability and good neighbourliness in the region.5 In 1996 this was augmented by a Regional Approach to the Balkans. Designed to supplement the Dayton Peace Accords and foster political stability and economic reconstruction, this belied its name by being a largely bilateral process focusing on the political and economic conditions necessary for developing relations with the EU. The countries of the region were not treated as a whole but divided between those eligible to conclude Cooperation Agreements with the EU (FYROM and Albania) and those which were not (Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia and Yugoslavia) because they were directly involved in the Dayton peace process and had to fulfil certain conditions first.6 The direct origins of the Stability Pact can be traced to a number of initiatives taken immediately prior to and during the Kosovo conflict of March–June 1999. The Vienna European Council in December 1998 called for a broader and more integrated approach to the region and the same line was taken at a joint World Bank and IMF gathering convened in Washington in April 1999. In May a meeting of the G-8 foreign ministers also called for a ‘comprehensive approach to the economic development and stabilization of the crisis region’.7 This idea was enthusiastically championed by the German Presidency of the EU and, following further discussions, the idea of a Pact was approved by the EU’s General Affairs Council on 17 May 1999. It was formally presented at the Cologne special international meeting on 10 June 1999 before being officially launched at a major international summit in Sarajevo on 30 July 1999. The Pact had direct antecedents but nonetheless it was presented to the world as a novel instrument heralding a new policy towards the region. It was a ‘turning point’ and ‘the first serious attempt by the international community to replace the previous, reactive crisis intervention policy in Southeastern Europe with a comprehensive long term conflict prevention policy’.8 Addressing the root causes of conflict, the Pact was to be distinct not only from the policy failures of the early 1990s but also from the Balkan congresses of the nineteenth century. Taking as a model Western European reconstruction after the Second World War – many analogies at the time were made with the post-1945 Marshall Plan – a massive programme of reconstruction was proposed in the belief that sustained economic growth
The Balkans, the Stability Pact and the EU 175 would help foster liberalization and, eventually, integration into wider European structures.9 The Pact was shaped in the shadow of both the policy failures of the 1990s and the continuing need to stabilize the Balkans after the Kosovo conflict. It was founded on a growing awareness of the interdependence of the region but it also filled specific political needs. Within the region there was a need to reward those states, which often in the face of considerable domestic opposition had supported the NATO action, and to demonstrate to Serbia the costs of continuing international isolation – the efforts to effect regime change in that country eventually taking concrete shape in the Pact’s Szeged Process.10 Outside the Balkans, the Pact offered Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister and leader of an ostensibly pacifist Green Party, a positive programme to offset criticism of his support for the bombing of Yugoslavia. It reassured the USA, which had taken the lead in the military campaign, that the EU was willing to play its expected role in post-conflict reconstruction, and, after a period of tension, it allowed Russia to be reintegrated into the wider Balkan peace process. The Pact has been called the ‘most complex political venture of the 20th century’.11 More than forty partner countries and international organizations have signed the founding document: the beneficiary states, Albania, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, FYROM, Romania, and, after October 2000, Yugoslavia, and, June 2001, Moldova; the neighbouring countries of Hungary, Slovenia and Turkey; members of the EU; non-EU members of the G-8, the USA, Russia, Canada and Japan; other states, such as Norway and Switzerland; as well as a host of international organizations, including the EU and European Commission, the UN, OSCE, Council of Europe, UNHCR, NATO and OECD; international financial institutions (IFIs), such as the IMF, World Bank, European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Council of Europe Development Bank; and regional organizations such as the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC), the Central European Initiative (CEI), SECI and the SEECP.12 A forum for cooperation with no independent financial resources or implementing structures, the Pact is an intergovernmental body rather than an organization. At its centre lies a Regional Table which meets annually at the end of each year. This chief decision-making body of the Pact is chaired by a Special Co-ordinator. The first incumbent of this post was Bodo Hombach, a former chief of staff of the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder. The current Special Co-ordinator, in office since 1 January 2002, is Erhard Busek, a former Vice Chancellor of Austria and coordinator of SECI. He is supported by a small office of staff seconded from participant governments, which is funded by the EU. This coordinates, monitors and supports but does not direct the Pact’s projects. The cost, but also, to a certain extent, the effectiveness of the office, is limited by the number of staff, which barely exceeds thirty. Within each beneficiary country there is
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also a national representative of the Pact, usually based in the appropriate foreign ministry. The Pact is broadly modelled on the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) with three working tables matching the three dimensions of this body. Each working table has a permanent chair, who holds office for two years, and co-chairs who, since July 2002, rotate every twelve months. The tables meet formally in session once a year. Working Table I is concerned with democratization and human rights. It focuses on inter-ethnic dialogue and cross-border cooperation, refugee matters, media and education and youth. Working Table II is concerned with economic reconstruction, development and cooperation and encourages infrastructure construction, trade and investment. Working Table III, devoted to security issues, is divided into two sub-tables. The first, defence and security issues, covers matters such as the demobilization of army officers, small-arms control, mine clearance and disaster preparedness and prevention. The second, justice and home affairs, tackles issues such as police training, organized crime and corruption, although the latter is a cross-table issue. Attached to the Working Tables there are also various task forces covering fields as diverse as human rights and minorities, good governance, media, education and youth, parliamentary cooperation, gender and trafficking in human beings. There is also a Stability Pact Business Advisory Council. Two bodies act in a wider consultative capacity. The Informal Consultative Committee (ICC), established in March 2002, brings together representatives from the European Commission, the EU Council Secretariat, the EU Presidency and the SEECP as well as the Special Co-ordinator; while the High Level Steering Group, jointly convened by the European Commission and the World Bank, includes finance ministers of the G-8, the country holding the EU Presidency, the Netherlands, and representatives of the IFIs as well as the Special Co-ordinator. Meetings also take place with other regional organizations, including the CEI, the BSEC, SECI and the Adriatic-Ionian Initiative. The importance of the Pact is political as much as practical. It is a visible sign of the outside world’s supposed long-term commitment to the region. Its stated original aim was to strengthen the countries of South-Eastern Europe ‘in their efforts to foster peace, democracy, respect for human rights and economic prosperity in order to achieve stability in the whole region’.13 To this end, the Cologne Declaration of June 1999 spoke not only of safeguarding human and minority rights, creating market economies, and fostering peaceful and good neighbourly relations, but also of combating organized crime, preventing forced population movements, and supporting the return of refugees and other displaced people. More recently ‘the founding principle’ and ‘basic cornerstone’ of the Pact has been restated by Busek as ‘support by the international community in exchange for reforms and regional cooperation’.14 Aside from conditionality, three other principles remain central to the approach of the Pact. First, for those who seek it,
The Balkans, the Stability Pact and the EU 177 the Pact and implementation of its objectives ‘facilitate’ integration into Euro-Atlantic structures, with the focus currently on achieving complementarity with the EU accession process and the SAP. Second, on the basis of a widely held belief that the region can only recover collectively, the Pact prioritizes support for regional cooperation, with a concentration on crossborder and intra-regional issues. Third, it seeks to ‘associate’ the countries of South-Eastern Europe ‘closer to the decision making process’ by promoting ‘regional ownership’ of this stabilization process, mostly recently through an enhanced role for the SEECP within the ICC.15 The Pact has achieved some successes. It has held two regional conferences during which donors pledged considerable sums to the region – the March 2000 Brussels Conference, for example, raised 2.4 billion euros. It has played a role in stabilizing the Balkans and helped settle long-standing controversies, such as the dispute over the location of the new bridge across the Danube between Bulgaria and Romania. The Pact has, however, also not been without its critics.16 Despite the pledges, money has been disbursed slowly and often not to the direct benefit of the countries within the region.17 This was not just because of a lack of political will. Cumbersome bureaucratic procedures and limited capacity on the part of the donors also played a role, as did legal, administrative and technical weakness within the beneficiary states, which curbed absorption capacity.18 In response to charges of slow implementation, the Pact launched the Quick Start Programme (QSP) in March 2000. 244 projects were earmarked and, as of December 2001, 94 per cent were said to have been started.19 The Pact, though, was only able to coordinate and monitor, not instigate and implement, projects. Under the QSP umbrella a loose grouping of programmes were gathered, which often bore little coherence. Similar issues were tackled by different working tables and cross-table coordination frequently seemed weak. The rapid set-up time and slowness of the donor decision-making cycle also meant that the QSP mostly encompassed pre-existing projects, not new initiatives. The biggest lay within the field of infrastructure. These projects were costly, slow to implement and lacked immediate tangible benefits for the people of the region. To meet some of these criticisms the Pact has started to rationalize its activities. An Infrastructure Steering Group created in 2002 earmarked forty-six projects, although only twenty-three had started by June 2002. A new focus was also placed on ‘achievables’. The six identified at the June 2001 regional meeting and currently prioritized are trade and investment, refugee return, small arms and light weapons control, organized crime, sub-regional cooperation and infrastructure, including electricity supply.20 Coordination has not been easy with so many actors involved in the Pact both as donors and agents. Within the beneficiary states ensuring transparency, protecting against corruption and avoiding the fostering of a culture of dependency rather than initiative have been general concerns. Indeed, it may be said, more so than the lack of transparency and failure to
178 David Phinnemore and Peter Siani-Davies avoid overlap within the donor international institutions.21 The regional approach of the Pact also raises questions. The region is treated as a whole but it is not homogeneous, wide disparities existing in levels of political stability and economic development. Much is made of ‘regional ownership’ within the Pact but this seems to rest primarily on the construction of institutions within the Balkans, that, while useful, still remain to a large extent symbolic. The language of the Pact is of ‘shared values’ and ‘partnership’ but arguably, in the words of Vladimir Gligorov, it is still an ‘international intervention’ in order to ‘achieve a certain set of goals’.22 European Commission President, Romano Prodi, has talked of the EU taking a ‘moral lead’ within the Balkans but it is questionable whether national interests have been entirely discarded. In launching the initiative, the German Foreign Office argued for the Pact by suggesting that it would help control migration and provide a market for goods as well as lucrative reconstruction contracts for German industry. Although the pursuance of such national interests is not necessarily inimical to the interests of the Balkans, since it arguably motivates action, it nonetheless skews agendas and prioritizes certain sectors. Indeed, there remains confusion as to the extent that the objectives of the Pact are established by actors from within or without the region.
The Stability Pact and regional cooperation Regional cooperation is not a new concept within the Balkans. For much of the past five hundred years the Balkans were integrated as part of the Ottoman or Habsburg empires. Within the twentieth century there have also been attempts by communist, socialist and agrarian groups at Balkan Federation.23 The liberal Balkan Union Movement of the 1930s even produced its own flag and Balkan anthem.24 Even in the Cold War ties continued to be built across the Iron Curtain, with the Greek Prime Minister, Constantine Karamanlis, convening a conference in Athens in 1976 attended by all the, then existing, Balkan states, except Albania, which discussed 154 proposals for regional cooperation in fields such as energy, transport, telecommunications and the environment.25 Nonetheless, despite these political initiatives, prior to 1989, the Balkans remained weakly integrated, with only a vague and limited concept of regional identity. The Yugoslav wars and the collapse of the Soviet Union drastically changed the political geography of the Balkans, nearly doubling the number of states. In terms of regional cooperation the post-1995 Balkans can be divided into two. On the one hand there are the former Yugoslav lands, previously integrated within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, where market forces, to a certain extent, resisted political fragmentation. Trade between the various Yugoslav republics remained important and within recent years the successor states have shown signs of reactivating these economic ties.26 This sub-region, however, is not economically integrated with the other area which comprises the remainder of the Balkans,
The Balkans, the Stability Pact and the EU 179 where the states have minimal ties with each other. Albania, Bulgaria and Romania all send less than 10 per cent of their exports to other states within the region.27 Far more important as a market is the EU, except for Moldova, which still relies to a large extent on the countries of the former Soviet Union. To promote Balkan cooperation the Pact has launched a number of regional initiatives. These include the Investment Compact, the Stability Pact Anti-Corruption Initiative (SPAI), the Stability Pact Anti-Organized Crime Initiative (SPOC), the Media Charter, the NGO charter, and the e-Balkans, social cohesion, migration and asylum, disaster preparedness and prevention, and regional return initiatives. In Zagreb in October 2000 a Regional Arms Control Verification and Implementation Assistance Centre (RACVIAC) was opened and in Belgrade in May 2002 a regional clearing house for control of small arms and light weapons was set up under the auspices of the UNDP. In December 2002 the Sava River Agreement was signed between Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Slovenia and Yugoslavia, aimed at (re-)establishing and developing international navigation on the Sava, Drina and Una rivers as well as instituting management programmes for the prevention of floods and hazardous spills. The procedure for establishing these initiatives is broadly the same in each case. The participating states first write a basic text outlining the problems to be tackled. A joint action plan is agreed and a management structure created as well as a modest budget. The target countries then delegate senior officials to draft a national action plan.28 This well-established model is easy to implement, costs little money and needs no formal ratification. However, it is also difficult to manage at a regional level, as it largely depends on the enthusiasm and effectiveness of national officials. Often it is only alarm at being outpaced by neighbours in the quest to meet EU targets which spurs action. Duplication has also been a common fault, with the region sprouting a plethora of anticorruption initiatives alongside SPAI, and SPOC being broadly mirrored by the Council of Europe and European Commission’s Octopus II programme and the activities of the SECI Regional Centre for Combating Transborder Crime, established in Bucharest in November 2000. The first steps towards rationalization now seem to be taking place, with SPOC being effectively merged with the SECI centre in Bucharest. Likewise, the Pact Business Advisory Council is due to be merged with its SECI counterpart. Economic cooperation is seen as a first step towards political cooperation and long-term stabilization. The model is broadly that of Western Europe, where the EEC/EC has become part of a larger EU. Functional integration, on the lines of the 1950 Schuman Plan and the European Coal and Steel Community, is being sought in the energy sector, especially, electricity. A South East European Electricity Regulatory Forum was created in June 2002 and, in November, a ‘Memorandum of Understanding on the Regional Electricity Market in South East Europe and its Integration into the
180 David Phinnemore and Peter Siani-Davies European Union Internal Electricity Market’ was signed in Athens by Albania, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, FYROM, Romania, Turkey and Yugoslavia.29 In his speech at the signing ceremony Busek underlined the rationale behind regional cooperation: As elsewhere in Europe, national boundaries will become much less relevant in terms of electricity supply. The smart choice is to help each other out across the region, the expensive choice of going it alone will not work, as it cannot be financed and is therefore not sound economics. By trading electricity, gaps can be bridged while exporters and traders of electricity can earn money at the same time. These are the typical win-win situations created by regional cooperation.30 The chief instrument for economic cooperation has been bilateral regional free trade agreements, which are also a key part of the SAP. In June 2001 a memorandum of understanding on trade liberalization and facilitation was signed by all the beneficiary states except for Moldova, which associated itself through a statement of intent. Twenty-one bilateral agreements covering the whole region were due to be signed by the end of 2002. As of October 2002, ten were finalized, nine under active negotiation, and only two, Bulgaria/Bosnia-Hercegovina and Bulgaria/Albania, were still outstanding.31 Trade barriers are seen as hampering growth and fostering trafficking and corruption but, as noted above, outside the Yugoslav space trade remains limited and the initial benefit is more likely to be from ‘increased freedom to trade and do business than from a large jump in the volume of regional trade’.32 Indeed, just as electrical integration needs political goodwill – otherwise states are liable to be left hostage to power cuts, as Moldova has been with Transnistria – so free trade needs more than the removal of tariff barriers. Aside from products and markets, it requires improved transportation links, the removal of non-tariff barriers, harmonization of standards and the simplifying of border procedures as well as stability, the application of the rule of law, and good governance, both public and private. The attempts to foster regional cooperation have not been without problems. These do not just involve transcending recent conflicts, political instability and weak economies. There also seems to have been failures in distinguishing between common and regional problems.33 The former, due to common factors, such as the weak nature of many Balkan states, may be found across the region. Corruption, distrust of governmental institutions, discrimination against minorities, such as the Roma, are all widespread and the subject of Pact programmes. These, however, are not necessarily regional problems requiring coordinated collective action. The issues may be the same, but the context is often different and the application of a universal template risks doing more harm than good. It is transnational issues, such as organized crime and human trafficking, which arguably require a regional
The Balkans, the Stability Pact and the EU 181 approach, as do wider problems, such as refugee return and certain minority issues. Finally, there is the complicated link between regional cooperation and wider EU integration. Within the Balkans there has been a fear that regional cooperation is intended to be a substitute for EU integration.34 This has often led states to view regional projects with suspicion, especially if they feel it tars them with the Balkan brush, as has happened with Croatia. However, reassurances that regional cooperation is part of a wider project of integration can also have the opposite effect, leading states without the necessary resources to eagerly embrace programmes in a display of ‘European spirit’. The problem is compounded by the EU’s approach to the area, which broadly rests on the contradictory pillars of regionalism and conditionality.35 While the former rests on a multilateral base, the latter is strictly bilateral in form, since it judges and rewards each state on individual performance. The result has been that, instead of seeing the region as a stable whole, the EU has tended to differentiate between the various Balkan states, compartimentalizing them into different groups, as they proceed uncertainly towards the wider goal of European integration.36 In the process, despite the stipulation that before they can even open negotiations for a SAA states must display a ‘proven readiness’ to establish good neighbourly relations with other countries, regional cooperation is always likely to come off second best to EU integration. And, it is perhaps a consequence of this, that the Stability Pact, as it searches for a longer-term role, is increasingly projecting itself as some kind of bridge between the SAP states of the Western Balkans, the candidate countries of Romania and Bulgaria, and the Republic of Moldova.
The Stabilisation and Association Agreements Any aspirations towards closer European integration by the states of the Western Balkans had traditionally generated little support within the EU. At best the EU had envisaged a limited integration via trade and cooperation agreements and some form of association, possibly along the lines of the Europe Agreements. Trade and cooperation agreements had been concluded with Albania in 1993 and FYROM in 1997 but prior to 1999 the focus chiefly remained on implementing the Royaumont Process. As noted already, the launch of the Stability Pact was to radically alter the EU’s approach. Not only would the Pact, in the words of the German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, ‘anchor the countries of South East Europe firmly in the values of and institutional structures of the Euro-Atlantic Community’, it would also hold out the prospect of eventual membership of the EU.37 To achieve such a goal, the EU would contribute to the Pact through the development of a new ‘Stabilisation and Association Process’ (SAP) designed specifically for the countries of the Western Balkans. It would consist of six elements: (a) the development of existing economic and trade
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relations with and within the region; (b) the development and a partial redirection of existing economic and financial assistance; (c) increased assistance for democratization, civil society, education and institution building; (d) cooperation in the areas of justice and home affairs; (e) the development of political dialogue, including at a regional level; and (f) the conclusion of new Stabilisation and Association Agreements (SAAs). By far the most important of these was the last since it would ultimately provide the main mechanism for delivering the others and, in theory at least, act as a stepping-stone to eventual EU membership. Indeed, in setting out its proposals for the SAP, the European Commission noted that the SAAs would have ‘a perspective of EU membership’.38 This new emphasis on integration with and ultimately membership of the EU was confirmed by EU leaders during the European Council at Santa Maria da Feira in June 2000. Not only did they declare that their objective ‘remains the fullest possible integration of the countries of the region into the political and economic mainstream of Europe through the Stabilisation and Association process, political dialogue, liberalization of trade and cooperation in Justice and Home Affairs’, they also conferred on the countries of the Western Balkans a new status: they were formally ‘potential candidates for EU membership’.39 Alongside this rhetoric of integration and eventual membership, the EU also began implementing the different elements of the SAP. EU figures suggest that 80 per cent of exports from the Western Balkans were entering the EU duty-free by 2000, with the value of preferential trade concessions amounting to 100 million euros. To increase this further, a package of measures reducing quotas, extending duty-free access for industrial goods and improving openings for agricultural goods was adopted in November 2000. A new regulation on the CARDS (Community Assistance for Reconstruction, Development and Stabilisation) programme was also adopted in 2000 which committed the EU to providing 4.65 billion euros worth of assistance for the period 2000–2006. The regulation sought to establish a more strategic approach with greater emphasis being placed on supporting the reforms and institution-building necessary to implement the obligations contained in the SAAs. This was followed by the adoption of Country Strategies and a Regional Strategy for 2002–2006 which placed greater emphasis on key priorities of the SAP, such as essential reconstruction, institutional capacity-building, implementation of core elements of the EU acquis and entrenchment of the rule of law. To date, only two countries – FYROM and Croatia – have concluded SAAs. FYROM was the first to do so in November 2000. The formal signing ceremony was held in Luxembourg on 9 April 2001.40 In the case of Croatia, negotiations began in Zagreb in November 2000 before being successfully concluded on 11 May 2001. The SAA was then signed on 29 October 2001.41 Neither agreement has yet entered into force, however. At the time of writing (December 2002), both still required full ratification, a
The Balkans, the Stability Pact and the EU 183 lengthy procedure involving each of the EU member states, the European Parliament (EP), and FYROM and Croatia formally approving the respective agreements. Ratification in neither instance proceeded smoothly. In the case of FYROM, dissatisfaction with the government’s implementation of the Ohrid Agreement of 2001 opened up the possibility of delays on the EU side, while in the case of Croatia, the UK government suspended ratification in October 2002 as a result of the Croats refusing to act on an indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia of a former army chief of staff. The delays in ratification have not, however, precluded key elements of the agreements being implemented. The trade provisions quickly entered into force via interim agreements and political dialogue has also been established.42 In addition, both countries have been invited to attend meetings of the essentially symbolic European Conference. In addition to FYROM and Croatia, only Albania has so far been given the green light to open negotiations on a SAA, the EU Council of Ministers approving a mandate on 22 October 2002. Originally, negotiations had been scheduled to begin in February 2002 but were postponed due to EU concerns about corruption and organized crime in the country as well as the political situation following the resignation of Prime Minister Ilir Meta.43 As regards Bosnia-Hercegovina and Yugoslavia, the European Commission has yet to conclude that sufficient political and economic reforms have been introduced to justify the opening of negotiations. However, the ousting of the Miloševiæ regime and increased political stability in Yugoslavia have improved the country’s chances of negotiations in the medium term, as has the decision of the Montenegrin authorities not to pursue independence and instead become part of a looser EU-inspired union with Serbia to replace Yugoslavia. As regards Bosnia-Hercegovina, accession to the Council of Europe in May 2002 represented a step in the direction of SAA negotiations, although, as the European Commission noted the same month, further political and economic reform, not least progress in making the country a self-sustaining state based on the rule of law, was urgently needed. Only then would the EU start negotiations.44 Even though SAAs have only been concluded with FYROM and Croatia, it is likely that Albania, Yugoslavia and Bosnia-Hercegovina will eventually conclude similar agreements. Assuming they do, all five countries will enter into a relationship with the EU not dissimilar to that created by the Europe Agreements with Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia. Indeed, in content the SAAs draw heavily on these agreements.45 In terms of structure the SAAs signed to date are the same. Each consists of a preamble and ten titles indicating the scope of the agreement. The preamble sets out the context of the agreements and hence refers to existing links and the importance of the SAA for stability within South-Eastern Europe. It then lists various principles and objectives to which the parties are committed, including democracy, a free market, free trade, the rule of law, respect for the rights of persons belonging to minorities, and the provisions
184 David Phinnemore and Peter Siani-Davies of the UN Charter, the OSCE, and the Charter of Paris for a New Europe. In the case of Croatia, commitments to the right of return for all refugees and compliance with the 1995 Dayton Agreement are also reaffirmed. Following on from these, the preamble describes the purpose of the association being created: essentially the establishment of political dialogue; legislative approximation with the EC; the development of a climate conducive to increased trade and investment; and EC support for reform. Finally, and arguably most importantly in terms of the long-term purpose of the agreements, the preamble recalls not simply the EU’s readiness to integrate ‘to the fullest possible extent’ FYROM and Croatia into the ‘political and economic mainstream of Europe’, but also the status of the two countries as ‘potential’ candidates for EU membership. The main body of the two SAAs then begins with the formal establishment of an ‘association’ between the EC, its member states and FYROM and Croatia respectively. The aims of the association are then spelt out. They reflect the overall goals of the SAP and underline the shift in EU policy towards integration. Hence, the associations are to provide an appropriate framework for political dialogue, allowing the development of close political relations between the parties. Second, the associations are to support each associate’s efforts to develop economic and international cooperation. Third, the associations are to support efforts to complete the transition to a market economy, to promote harmonious economic relations and gradually develop a free trade area between the EC and the associate.46 Fourth, emphasis is placed on fostering regional cooperation in all fields covered by the SAA. Finally, as regards the development of relations with the EU, the agreements detail the timetable for realizing the association being created. In the case of FYROM a timeframe of ten years divided into two successive stages is set down. For Croatia it is a single stage of six years. The shorter timeframe and the absence of stages reflect the clear belief among EU member states that Croatia is in a better position economically and politically to meet its obligations under the SAA. A ten-year transition period was deemed to be too generous.47 In both cases, provision is made for regular review of the association. Having expressed the general principles of timetables for the new associations, the SAAs set out the purpose and mechanisms for political dialogue. This is designed to ‘accompany and consolidate the rapprochement between the European Union and [the associate] and contribute to the establishment of close links of solidarity and new forms of cooperation between the Parties’. More specifically, political dialogue is intended to promote both an increasing convergence of positions on issues, particularly international ones, that are likely to have substantial effects on the EU and the associates, and common views on security and stability in Europe, including cooperation in the areas covered by the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). Unlike, Bulgaria and Romania, FYROM and Croatia are not automatically included in the countries receiving regular information on the EU’s
The Balkans, the Stability Pact and the EU 185 activities under the CFSP. This is primarily because the Western Balkans are often the object of sensitive CFSP discussions. They may, however, be involved in a multilateral framework of ‘regional dialogue including other countries of the region’. Although whether this refers to the Western Balkans, South-Eastern Europe or something larger is not made clear. Thanks to intense lobbying, political dialogue with Croatia will also promote the country’s ‘full integration into the community of democratic nations and its progressive rapprochement with the European Union’. Finally on the purpose of political dialogue, the SAAs make an explicit reference to the promotion of ‘regional cooperation and the development of good neighbourly relations’. The emphasis placed on regional cooperation sets the SAAs apart from the Europe Agreements concluded with Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia. Admittedly, Slovenia’s Europe Agreement did require special attention to be devoted to measures capable of fostering cooperation between it and the CEE associates, but no reference was made to its southern neighbour or other states of the former Yugoslavia. And if the obligations vis-à-vis regional cooperation were not enough to underline its significance for the future of the association, the SAAs also prescribe exactly what is expected of FYROM and Croatia. First, negotiations towards conventions on regional cooperation must be opened within one year of each SAA being signed and concluded within two years of the SAA entering into force. And it is made clear that the readiness of FYROM and Croatia to conclude such conventions will be a condition for the further development of relations with the EU. By implication, membership prospects therefore will be conditioned, at least in part, by the pursuit of regional cooperation. Moreover, the EU is prescriptive with regard to the content of the required conventions. They must include political dialogue; the establishment of a free trade area; mutual concessions equivalent to those in the SAA on the movement of workers, the supply of services, current payments and the movement of capital; provisions on cooperation in other fields whether or not covered by the SAA, notably justice and home affairs; and the creation of ‘necessary institutional mechanisms’. Moreover, cooperation is not to be pursued with other SAA signatories alone. FYROM and Croatia are obliged to engage in regional cooperation with all the Western Balkan states. They may also foster cooperation and conclude conventions with ‘candidate’ countries for EU membership. Here, the aim is the gradual alignment of bilateral relations with those between the candidate country and the EU. As with all association agreements the EU has concluded, a prominent feature is trade. In the case of the SAAs, timetables have been agreed for the establishment of free trade areas, with the provisions also being found in the Interim Agreements which have already entered into force. The free trade area with FYROM is scheduled to be completed within ten years and that with Croatia within six years. As is generally the case with such timetables, the area is to be established asymmetrically with the EC abolishing customs
186 David Phinnemore and Peter Siani-Davies duties, quantitative restrictions and measures having equivalent effect faster than the associate. However, it should be noted that the free trade area is restricted to industrial goods and that special arrangements apply to steel, textile, agricultural and fishery products. Although the measures contained in the SAAs and the concessions granted to all Western Balkan countries in autumn 2000 clearly facilitate trade, they have not been without their critics. The Croatian government, in particular, has been highly critical of the EU’s failure to include the SAA associates in the system of pan-European rules of origin for goods which the CEE associates have enjoyed since the mid-1990s. This means, according to some estimates, that over 50 per cent of Croatian exports do not have duty-free access to the EU market. Joint declarations adopted at the time the SAAs were signed do, however, envisage negotiations on more flexible rules. Turning to the remaining provisions of the SAAs, it is clear that the Europe Agreements with the CEE countries influenced the EU in terms of what it was willing to offer FYROM and Croatia. Provisions on the movement of workers, the supply of services and capital are similar and confer essentially the same rights and obligations on the SAA associates, although they are on occasions arguably less generous. As regards the approximation of laws, emphasis is placed on meeting ‘the fundamental elements of the Internal Market acquis’. Owing to differing levels of economic development, approximation in the case of Croatia will begin immediately the SAA enters into force whereas in FYROM it will be staged. Contrary to the situation with the countries of CEE, there is no provision for EC technical assistance within the SAAs. Different levels of economic development also help explain the fact that provisions regarding competition are more detailed for Croatia than for FYROM. The essential principle that associates follow EC competition policy applies though to both countries, although transitional periods for the opening up of public procurement to EC companies have been granted. They also have transitional periods of five (FYROM) and three (Croatia) years to ensure that their levels of protection for intellectual, industrial and commercial property are similar to those of the EC. As regards cooperation, thirty-two dedicated areas are listed in the SAA with Croatia and thirty in the SAA with FYROM. These range from tourism and culture to money laundering and the control of illegal immigration. In addition to the areas listed, both SAAs also include provisions on financial cooperation. This, in practice, is to be provided through the CARDS programme. In theory this is designed to support the cooperation envisaged in the SAAs. However, early allocations of CARDS funding suggest that Croatia is receiving less than an equal share, with little to support adaptation to the acquis communautaire, while in the case of FYROM, most financial assistance is directed not at implementing the SAA, but at supporting the Ohrid Agreement of 2001.48 This situation may in due course change. Equally, in time, FYROM and Croatia may, as
The Balkans, the Stability Pact and the EU 187 Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia have been, be invited to participate in EC framework programmes, even though no explicit provision is made for this in the SAAs. Finally, in order to implement cooperation and ensure the proper functioning of the association, the SAAs contain provisions establishing dedicated institutions. The most significant of these for each associate country is the Stabilisation and Association Council which meets ‘at an appropriate level at regular intervals’ and ‘when circumstances require’. Such Councils include members of the EU Council of Ministers and are chaired by the latter’s President. They are charged with supervising the application and implementation of the SAA. The Council is augmented by a Stabilisation and Association Committee, which meets more regularly, and also a Stabilisation and Association Parliamentary Committee, comprising representatives of the EP and the associate’s parliament. The content of the SAAs and the associations they create have clearly been inspired by the Europe Agreements although they do differ, not least with regard to regional cooperation. Indeed, the wording of the different agreements does suggest that the Europe Agreements create a more developed form of association, in terms of both the institutional relationship envisaged and the intensity of cooperation, than the SAAs.49 Moreover, the emphasis on regional cooperation in the SAAs means that FYROM and Croatia are subjected to greater conditionality requirements in their pursuit of integration with and ultimately accession to the EU.
Stabilisation and Association and the question of EU membership As argued already in this chapter, the SAAs represent a qualitative shift in the EU’s approach towards the Balkans. With them, the entire region is now being offered not only the prospect of integration with the EU but also, like neighbouring Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania, the possibility of membership. Indeed, for many of the states, the membership perspective within the Stability Pact and the conferral of ‘potential candidate’ status in June 2000 are the most significant political elements of the SAP. The SAAs reaffirm the commitment to the membership perspective and this is important, since it effectively precludes an abandonment of enlargement. It also confers on the SAAs, whether intentionally or not, the function of providing a means through which the goal of EU membership can be realized as well as providing the associate with a justification for difficult political and economic decisions. As witnessed in the CEE countries, the ‘carrot’ of membership has been a useful tool for encouraging governments and electorates to support reform. Indeed, in discussions surrounding the launch of the Stability Pact, it was widely felt that the only worthwhile ‘carrot’ the EU could offer countries in the Western Balkans in exchange for concerted efforts to promote peace and stability in the region was the prospect of membership.50
188 David Phinnemore and Peter Siani-Davies However, it is clear that the inclusion of the reaffirmation comes against a background of reticence towards a firm commitment to admit the SAA countries into the EU at a future date. As Biermann observes, there was considerable debate over whether to offer a membership perspective as part of the Stability Pact.51 Indeed, in the course of drawing up and adopting plans for the SAAs, the strength of the commitment was watered down.52 Moreover, it is evident that the conditions the SAA signatories must meet prior to accession are greater than has been demanded of the CEE countries. Not only is fulfilment of the Copenhagen criteria a prerequisite, but there is also the need for regional cooperation. This must be pursued if the EU is not only to retain its readiness to integrate the SAA associates but also to continue to recognize them as ‘potential candidates’.53 This brings us to the meaning of ‘potential candidate’, a term which has no official definition and does not confer on the holder a de jure right to EU membership. Politically though, the term recognizes the likelihood of membership and implicitly it suggests a willingness to see such ambitions fulfilled. Yet, whereas the EU noted in the preambles to the Europe Agreements that they would make a positive contribution to achieving membership, it has not done so in the case of the SAAs. Nor has it acknowledged accession as the ultimate objective of either FYROM or Croatia. Such an observation may be regarded as overly pedantic. Arguably, the conferral of ‘potential candidate’ status at the Feira European Council and its subsequent reiteration in the SAAs clearly imply a membership perspective. And, as Schimmelfennig and others have argued, such statements matter and effectively commit the EU to enlarge.54 Yet, question marks have been raised over the commitment of the EU to the membership perspective. Not only is it less frequently referred to in speeches on the Western Balkans, but alternatives to membership such as more institutionalized regional cooperation have also been canvassed.55 Indeed, European Commission President, Romano Prodi, has even floated the idea of ‘virtual membership’ for the region.56 Moreover, with memories of the Kosovo conflict fading and relative stability existing in the Western Balkans, urgency has arguably decreased. It is not surprising therefore that prior to the European Council’s meeting in Copenhagen in December 2002, leaders of the SAP countries issued a call for ‘a reference to our prospects for EU membership and a strong message and impetus to continue on our way to EU integration’.57 An alternative reading of ‘potential candidate’ is that, in accepting SAP countries as such, the EU is simply acknowledging in positive yet diplomatically cautious manner the political and economic reality of the situation in which FYROM and Croatia find themselves. Neither is at present in a particularly strong position to argue that it is ready for membership. And, indeed, neither has yet submitted a membership application, although these are expected to come. However, membership is the shared goal of the EU and the SAP countries. The Croatian government, for example, has indicated that it is aiming for membership by the end of 2006.58 This may be
The Balkans, the Stability Pact and the EU 189 overly optimistic, but the possibility of Croatia joining, or even ‘leap-frogging’, Bulgaria and Romania in the accession stakes has not been ruled out. Moreover, as Friis and Murphy argue, although the EU may not have really meant what it said when announcing the membership perspective, ‘this promise, however vague and conditional, cannot be withdrawn … it will force the Union to increase its level of engagement with the region and to advance the on-going enlargement process … [the] genie is now out of the bottle’.59 However ‘potential candidate’ is interpreted, the value of any membership perspective will depend very much on the dynamics of EU enlargement. It certainly provides an important incentive for reform, stability and cooperation. Yet, the status and position of any SAP country in the enlargement process will be significantly influenced if not dominated by the EU’s approach to enlargement. And here there are already concerns about when and whether the EU will progress beyond the ‘big bang’ enlargement scheduled for 1 May 2004.60 The actual preparedness of the EU to admit more member states is openly questioned. The Treaty of Nice may have facilitated enlargement but it leaves many important institutional issues unresolved.61 Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and the Structural Funds has not addressed the implications of more than the ten countries acceding. Moreover, the impact of a ‘big bang’ enlargement is unknown. It will unleash new dynamics within the EU as additional member states make fresh demands and power constellations within the Union shift. These may easily result in a further cooling of the apparent commitment towards enlargement into South-Eastern Europe, significantly undermining the value of ‘potential candidate’ status.
Conclusion The involvement of the Balkans in the processes of Euro-Atlantic and European integration has entered a new, seemingly more decisive, era, since the Kosovo conflict of 1999. The launch of the Stability Pact and the accompanying SAP marked a significant shift in the approach of the international community and, in particular, the EU towards the region. The new emphasis on contractual integration, whether with the EU or in the context of regional cooperation, arguably signals a move away from the West’s more traditional involvement based on containment and intervention. Whether, however, this shift will lead to full integration into the Euro-Atlantic mainstream remains to be seen. The decision of NATO at its Prague summit in November 2002 to admit, among others, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia in May 2004 and of the Copenhagen European Council in December 2002 to enlarge the EU at the same time to include Slovenia certainly suggest a commitment to integrating the region. Yet the enlargements of both organizations, especially the EU, are still essentially seen in terms of an expansion into Central and Eastern Europe and not the Balkans.
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So the full participation of the Balkans in the processes of Euro-Atlantic and European integration remains more an aim than a reality. If the statements of the EU are to be believed, it is an aim which will be realized, but this cannot be guaranteed. First, it is far from certain that the political will to integrate the Balkans will continue to exist. The experience of the unprecedented ‘big bang’ enlargement planned for 2004 may make member states and EU institutions alike more reluctant to accept further members in the future and deter them from moving as quickly as Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania might like towards another round of enlargement in 2007. The impact that the new members will have on the EU’s priorities is also as yet unclear. They may try to stymie further expansion, so as to safeguard receipts from the Structural Funds and the Common Agricultural Policy. Admitting Bulgaria and Romania will also raise significant budgetary issues which will have to be resolved by an EU of twenty-five member states each having a veto over any further enlargement. Second, although there is currently high popular and official support for integration within the Balkans, there can be no guarantee that this will translate into sustained efforts to meet the EU’s accession criteria. The problems which Bulgaria and Romania are facing with regards to their administrative capacities to implement the EU acquis are major obstacles to their entry. But they hardly compare to those faced by their neighbours in the Western Balkans. The European Commission has made this clear, drawing attention in particular to the need to build effective, democratic states, tackle poverty and social deprivation, and enhance regional cooperation.62 The challenge of meeting the accession criteria is considerable. Moreover, there can be no guarantee that countries in the Balkans – several of which have recently fought wars – will successfully overcome their respective differences and fulfil their commitments to pursue regional cooperation. The carrot of EU membership may well encourage reform, rapprochement and reconciliation. It cannot, however, ensure that the Balkans will become fully part of the mainstream of European integration.
Notes 1 Even the one instance when this was not true, 1914, can be seen as a fatal miscalculation on the part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 2 See H. Grabbe, ‘How does Europeanization affect CEE governance? Conditionality, diffusion and diversity’, Journal of European Public Policy, 8:6, 2001, 1013–1031; L. Demetropoulou, ‘The Europeanisation of the Balkans: EU membership aspiration and domestic transformation in South-East Europe’, in D. Phinnemore and P. Siani-Davies (eds), South-Eastern Europe, the Stability Pact and EU Enlargement, Cluj: European Studies Foundation, 2002, pp. 178–200. 3 M. Smith, ‘Negotiating new Europes: the roles of the European Union’, Journal of European Public Policy, 7: 5, 2001, 806–822. 4 R. Schifter, ‘The Southeast European Cooperative Initiative: its origins and its development’, Mediterranean Quarterly, 9: 4, 1998, 1–13. SECI has twelve
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5
6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
members: Albania, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, FYROM, Moldova, Romania, Slovenia, Turkey and Yugoslavia. For the evolution of the Royaumont Process, see S. Shtonova, ‘Regional cooperation and strengthening stability in Southeast Europe’, available at http://www.nato.int/acad/fellow/96–98/shtonova.pdf (accessed 25 November 2002). W. Bartlett and V. Samard ija, ‘The reconstruction of South East Europe, the Stability Pact and the role of the EU: an overview’, MOCT-MOST, 10:2, 2000, 253. Albania had concluded a Trade and Economic Cooperation Agreement in March 1993. At the time a distinction was also drawn between Miloševiæ’s Yugoslavia and the other countries of the region. ‘Statement by the Chairman on the conclusion of the meeting of the G-8 Foreign Ministers on the Petersberg’, 6 May 1999, available at http://www.seerecon.org/ KeySpeeches/KeySpeeches-002.htm (accessed 23 November 2002). ‘About the Stability Pact’, available at http://www.stabilitypact.org/stabilitypactcgi/catalog/cat_descr.cgi?prod_id=1806 (accessed 27 November 2002). V. Gligorov, ‘Notes on the Stability Pact’, Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 1: 1, 2001, 15. Following the accession of Yugoslavia to the Stability Pact, an enhanced Szeged Process was extended to Albania, Bosnia-Hercegovina and FYROM. P. Welfens, Stabilizing and Integrating the Balkans: Economic Analysis of the Stability Pact, EU Reforms and International Organizations, Berlin: SpringerVerlag, 2001, p. 9. ‘About the Stability Pact’. ‘The Cologne Document’, available at http://www.stabilitypact.org/stabilitypactcgi/catalog/view_file.cgi?prod_id=226&prop_type=en (accessed 23 November 2002). http://www.stabilitypact.org/stabilitypactcgi/catalog/view_file.cgi?prod_id=5974& prop_type=en (accessed 23 November 2002). ‘Stability Pact policy outline 2002 presented to EU-General Affairs Council by Special Co-ordinator Erhard Busek’, 11 May 2002, available at http://www.stabilitypact.org/stabilitypactcgi/catalog/view_descr.cgi?&prod_id=6461&prop_type= product_descr (accessed 25 November 2002). M. Emerson, On the Forming and Reforming of Stability Pacts: From the Balkans to the Caucasus, Policy Brief no. 4, Brussels: CEPS, May 2001, p. 2. J.M. van Brabant, ‘Southeastern Europe, transitions, and the EU – is ever widening desirable?’, MOCT-MOST, 11: 4, 2001, 311. Welfens, Stabilizing and Integrating the Balkans, pp. 102–103. ‘2½ Years of Stability Pact: lessons and policy recommendations’, December 2001, available at http://www.stabilitypact.org/stabilitypactcgi/catalog/view_file.cgi?prod_id=5735&prop_type=en (accessed 27 November 2002). ‘Progress report: “Stability Pact achievables for 2002”’, available at http://www.stabilitypact.org/stabilitypactcgi/catalog/view_file.cgi?prod_id=6542 &prop_type=en (accessed 28 November 2002). Welfens, Stabilizing and Integrating the Balkans, pp. 107–115. Gligorov, ‘Notes on the Stability Pact’, 17. L.S. Stavrianos, Balkan Federation: A History of the Movement toward Balkan Unity in Modern Times, Hamden, CT: Archon, 1964. A. Braun, Small-State Security in the Balkans, London: Macmillan, 1983, p. 41. Ibid., pp. 28–29. M. Uvaliæ, ‘Regional cooperation in Southeast Europe’, Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 1: 1, 2001, 55–75. Bartlett and Samard ija, ‘The reconstruction of South East Europe’, 248. The figures are for 1997.
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28 EastWest Institute and European Stability Initiative, ‘Democracy, security and the future of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe’, April 2001, 14, available at http://www.esiweb.org/reports/stabilitypact/showdocument.php?document _ID=15 (accessed 23 November 2002). 29 Kosovo was associated through UNMIK, Croatia indicated it would join shortly, and Moldova issued a unilateral statement of intent. 30 ‘Integrated SEE electricity market decided at Athens ministerial meeting – vital for economic growth in region’, 15 November 2002, available at http://www.stability pact.org/stabilitypactcgi/catalog/view_descr.cgi?&prod_id=6590&prop_type=prod uct_descr (accessed 25 November 2002). 31 ‘Before year end effort needed in free trade and regional electricity market – Busek tells Pact member states’, 1 October 2002, available at http://www.stabilitypact.org/stabilitypactcgi/catalog/view_descr.cgi?&prod_id=6495&prop_type=pro duct_descr (accessed 27 November 2002). 32 Gligorov, ‘Notes on the Stability Pact’, 14–15. 33 EastWest Institute and European Stability Initiative, ‘Democracy, security and the future of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe’. 34 See O. Anastasakis and V. Bojicic-Dzelilovic, Balkan Regional Cooperation and European Integration, London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2002. 35 Bartlett and Samard ija, ‘The reconstruction of South East Europe’. 36 For an explanation of terms, see D. Papadimitriou, ‘The EU’s strategy in the post-communist Balkans’, Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 1: 3, 2001, 71. 37 L. Friis and A. Murphy, “‘Turbo-charged negotiations”: the EU and the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe’, Journal of European Public Policy, 7: 5, 2000, 771. 38 European Commission, The Stabilisation and Association Process for Countries of South-Eastern Europe, COM(1999) 235 final, Brussels: European Commission, 26 May 1999, p. 3. 39 European Council, Presidency Conclusions – Santa Maria da Feira European Council, 19 and 20 June 2000, Press Release No. 200/1/00, Sta Maria da Feira, 19 June 2000, point 67. 40 European Commission, Stabilisation and Association Agreement between the European Communities and their Member States, of the One Part, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, of the Other Part, COM(2001) 90 final, Brussels: European Commission, 19 February 2001. 41 European Commission, Stabilisation and Association Agreement between the European Communities and their Member States and the Republic of Croatia, COM(2001) 371 final, Brussels: European Commission, 9 July 2001. 42 European Commission, Interim Agreement on Trade and Trade-related Matters between the European Community, of the One Part, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, of the Other Part, OJ L124, Brussels: European Commission, 4 May 2001; European Commission, Interim Agreement on Trade and Trade-related Matters between the European Community, of the One Part, and the Republic of Croatia, of the Other Part, OJ L330, Brussels: European Commission, 14 December 2001. The agreements entered into force on 1 June 2001 and 1 March 2002 respectively. 43 ‘Albania urges Brussels to set firm date for stability pact talks’, The Financial Times, 20 May 2002. 44 European Commission, The Stabilisation and Association Process for South East Europe: First Annual Report, Brussels: European Commission, 2002. 45 D. Phinnemore, ‘Stabilisation and association agreements: Europe agreements for the Western Balkans?’, European Foreign Affairs Review, 8: 1, 2003, 77–103.
The Balkans, the Stability Pact and the EU 193 46 In the case of the SAA with FYROM, there is no reference to ‘supporting efforts to complete the transition to a market economy’. 47 According to the World Bank, GNP per capita in Croatia in 1999 was 5,330 euros compared with 1,967 euros in FYROM. See European Report, 20 December 2000, V.11. 48 R. Biermann, ‘Stabilitätspakt und EU-Balkanpolitik: Von der Stabilisierung zur Integration?’, Integration, 25: 3, 2002, 221–222. 49 Phinnemore, ‘Stabilisation and association agreements’. 50 R. Biermann ‘Die europäische Perspektive für den westlichen Balkan’, Osteuropa, 51: 8, 2001, 922–937; Friis and Murphy, ‘Turbo-charged negotiations’, 770. 51 Biermann, ‘Die europäische Perspektive’, 927. 52 This was evident early on in the language that eventually appeared in the Stability Pact. See R. Biermann, The Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe: Potential, Problems and Perspectives, ZEI Discussion Papers No. C56, Bonn: Zentrum für Europäische Integrationsforschung, 1999, pp. 15–19. For a more detailed discussion of the commitment, see Phinnemore, ‘Stabilisation and association agreements’. 53 European Commission, The Stabilisation and Association Process for South East Europe: First Annual Report, p. 11. 54 F. Schimmelfennig, ‘The community trap: liberal norms, rhetorical action, and the eastern enlargement of the European Union’, International Organization, 55: 1, 2001, 47–80. See also K. Fierke and A. Wiener, ‘Constructing institutional interests: EU and NATO enlargement’, Journal of European Public Policy, 6: 5, 1999, 721–742. 55 See Biermann, ‘Stabilitätspakt und EU-Balkanpolitik’, 216–217. 56 ‘EU enlargement echoes Alexander’s vision’, Irish Times, 7 April 2001, 14. 57 Associated Press, 9 December 2002. 58 European Report, 20 December 2000, V.11. 59 L. Friis and A. Murphy, contribution to forum on ‘Enlargement of the European Union: impacts on the EU, the candidates and the “next neighbors”’, ECSA Review, 14: 1, 2001. 60 ‘Balkan EU hopefuls fear door may be shut in 2007’, Reuters, 4 December 2002. 61 K. St C. Bradley, ‘Institutional design in the Treaty of Nice’, Common Market Law Review, 38: 5, 2001, 1095–1124. 62 European Commission, The Stabilisation and Association Process for South East Europe: First Annual Report, pp. 9–12.
11 Gaps of concern An inconclusive conclusion Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers
International intervention is not enacted upon spaces empty of meaning to the people who live there. Local ‘webs of significance’, to use Clifford Geertz’s synonym for ‘culture’, exist.1 Social, political, economic and territorial interests and their symbolic expressions, the experiences and the construction of various pasts, perceptions of the present and hopes and aspirations for the future inform the ways in which local inhabitants regard international intervention in all its short- and long-term forms and consequences. They also impact on the character of the intervention and its prospects of success, and it is the ways in which those who enter from outside take or often fail to take account of local culture and concerns, that is the subject of this final chapter. Most of the contributors to this book have chosen to present critical assessments of the recent international interventions in the Balkans. In different ways they have produced contemporary and historical ‘deep ethnographies’ of the political cultures of intervention with a focus on the rationale of the international actors. In his contribution, Steven Sampson highlights the importance of identifying home grown civil capital rather than imposing foreign concepts, and suggests that trust may most effectively be built within informal networks and the family. In developing this idea, this (inconclusive) conclusion will argue that short-cut understandings of local culture only sustain internal and external structures of exclusion. And that without a differentiated understanding of the local background and concerns the efficacy of long-term intervention must remain in doubt. In assessing the balance sheet of effort and efficacy the contributors to this book often express disillusionment with international intervention and, occasionally, provide a devastating critique, but they also acknowledge real achievements. They do not suggest that international intervention in regions of crisis is totally disqualified. Rather, they call for greater reflection about the ambiguous character of intervention, especially the divergence between local and foreign perspectives, and the necessity of adopting a more integrative approach. Overall, they clearly point towards the need to modify or abandon particular practices. They emphasize the need for detailed
An inconclusive conclusion 195 evaluations of means (forms) and ends, and they insist that in order to improve efficacy the categories of thought which drive and shape intervention need to be questioned. Thus, Peter Siani-Davies in the Introduction situates Balkan intervention in a comparative historical context, revealing a legacy of dependency on external power structures as he documents shifting relationships between international and regional actors (from the coercive to the more contractual). He shows that markers of difference were both internally and externally constructed and reproduced, justifying either intervention or nonintervention, depending on the time-context of particular political interests. In Chapter 10, discussing the Stability Pact and European integration, produced in conjunction with David Phinnemore, Siani-Davies suggests that contemporary EU political practices and agreements are ambiguous in whether they actually foster ‘integration’ or ‘intervention’ – the latter implicitly a means of political exclusion. Greater reflexivity and awareness of the immanent hypocrisies situated between the high-political discourses of ‘ratification’ and ‘decisions’ and actual interventionist practice on the ground might produce more explicitly integrative objectives and clear and predictable time-frames, thereby avoiding the unintended and counterproductive outcomes which result from feelings of disillusion and frustration among those excluded from the EU. Mary Kaldor and Vesselin Popovski address the question of unintended consequences. Kaldor disentangles the consequences of adopting a geopolitical, as opposed to a cosmopolitan or humanitarian, approach in international politics. In particular, she warns of the unintended empowerment of local radical interest groups, which were legitimized in the recent Balkan conflicts when they were recognized by the outside world as negotiating partners. Popovski offers a critical interpretation of the legal culture of intervention in discussing the old question of whether the end justifies the means, here the use of military force against a sovereign state in order to protect its own citizens against that state’s transgressions. Both local and international perspectives and rationales are the subject of the chapters by Miroslav Had iæ, Jasna Dragoviæ-Soso, Sumantra Bose and Alice Ackermann. Had iæ focuses on the Serbian experience during the bombing of Yugoslavia, as he identifies international security policy and global agents, such as NATO and the Euro-Atlantic Alliance, as being driven by the aim to redefine their purposes and justify their existence after the end of the Cold War. Dragoviæ-Soso supports this proposition in relation to Miloševiæ’s Yugoslavia in the 1990s, providing evidence of how diplomatic and military coercion, particularly the regime of economic sanctions, helped to consolidate nationalist rule and failed to support civil opposition movements. Serbia’s ‘October Revolution’ thus appears to have taken ‘place despite Western intervention, not because of it’. Bose, in taking the example of the divided city of Mostar, points to the ways in which rigid, outside reproduced, dichotomous categories (such as ethnic ‘integration’
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versus ethnic ‘partition’) blur targets and fail to recognize the fluid, ambiguous, dynamic, but also slow, processes of transition. Ackermann discusses preventive diplomacy and post-conflict peacekeeping in Macedonia from 1992 to 2001, describing the ambiguities which arise when an initially successful preventive mandate fails to meet its targets because UN regional priorities have shifted (in this case because of the Kosovo war) and is temporarily forced to terminate. Finally, Vanessa Pupavac, Emmanuela del Re and Steven Sampson emphasize different aspects of cultural hegemony embedded within the practice of intervention. Pupavac points to the paradoxes of psychosocial intervention (originating in US societal needs) and alerts us to the dangers of subscribing to a general pathologization of post-conflict Balkan societies on the basis of externally rooted psychotherapeutic paradigms. These may ignore the internal and structural roots of trauma and act as a self-fulfilling prophecy, in some cases actually reinforcing the separatist ethnic ‘group confidence’ which they claim to be seeking to prevent. Del Re writes a balanced account of the international administration of post-1999 Kosovo, juxtaposing positive assessments with critiques of its structure and practices. Finally, Sampson discusses the paradigms behind the concept of Civil Society. Through participant observation he investigates the implementation of democracy-assistance programmes and produces a critical ethnography of what he calls the new ‘project societies’. He reveals how existing local social capital is distorted in the practices of humanitarian intervention and proposes, as mentioned above, an innovative definition of the term ‘civic’ which takes into account the complexities of local cultures. International actors have, to a considerable extent, succeeded in keeping hostile communities apart within the Balkans and provided a framework for negotiations under third-party control. For better or worse, they have succeeded in replacing the disgraced institutions of previous political systems with new structures shaped by the international culture of intervention. Yet, these results are, to say the least, ambiguous, as peace within the Balkans remains fragile and communities continue to be polarized. Indeed, on the basis of these and other perceived shortcomings there has been a pronounced trend within the literature to engage in ‘intervention-bashing’.2 This book, however, in the same way as Katy Gardner and David Lewis when addressing the international ‘aid industry’ attempt to move ‘beyond the simple rhetoric of the “aid as imperialism” school of thought’ in their critical Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge, in recognizing ‘intervention’ as a fact of contemporary practice, seeks not to be a prompt for discussion of its basic pros and cons but rather to offer ‘a riddle, a problem to be solved, an anthropological [or simply, intellectual] puzzle’.3 After all, intervention is driven by a multitude of actors and agencies, each of which attempts to make a difference while being subject to structural constraints. As an anthropologist of development previously pointed out:
An inconclusive conclusion 197 whatever interests may be at work, and whatever they may think they are doing, they can only operate through a complex set of social and cultural structures so deeply embedded and so ill-perceived that the outcome may be only a baroque and unrecognisable transformation of the original intention.4 All the authors in this book identify a culture of intervention rooted in structures situated outside the place of intervention. This negatively impacts on efficacy and explains why at both the international and local level the practices of intervention seem flawed when compared with the initial high intentions; why there is competition between locals and foreigners over resources (posts, ideas); why local pre-existing structures of self-help are distorted; why international efforts may become subject to manipulation by locals; and, finally, why ethnic differences have been consolidated and institutionalized within the superstructure of the newly imposed social and political systems. Implicitly, the chapters within this book call for imaginative solutions to improve interventionist practices. Explicitly, they call for self-reflective recognition of the roots and limits of intervention and the framework of power and thought in which it is embedded. If intervention is to meet the targets it claims, it needs to tackle the immanent structures of dependency or hypocrisy located within decision-making processes. If integration but not intervention, as Phinnemore and Siani-Davies elaborate, is the ultimate target of policy, local specificity needs to be taken better into account when applying universal recipes for the improvement of post-conflict conditions. Outside actors and decision-makers need to be aware of the ‘ethnocentrism’ which results from the fact that intervention practices stem more from a legacy of crisis and processes in their own home countries or the international realm than from recognizing the local perspectives and histories of a given place of intervention. Anthropological observation of local arenas of intervention reveals an implicit symbolic geography marking the division between the local and the international (foreign). In fact, it reveals an institutionally rooted segregation, exclusion and construction of difference, which may represent the unintended motor of intervention, driving worlds apart rather than integrating. Phinnemore and Siani-Davies critically touch upon the question of whether the implicitly exclusive structures of intervention can produce ‘development’ and, indeed, a true prospect of integration. Beyond the openly declared political objectives, divisions exist which are rooted in the fact that the individuals who shape intervention, both locals and internationals, follow different concerns and objectives. Those who in their everyday life experience the symbolic geography of long-term intervention, with its boundaries and segregation, may in disillusionment adopt a cynical world-view and turn away from the vision they are offered – thus rejecting the idea of integration, whether or not it really exists. If not addressed, the
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implicit exclusion within interventionist practice may turn into a selffulfilling prophecy, strengthening the very extremist forces, which intervention originally set out to ‘tame’.
‘Assemblages’ of foreign and local concerns As Georg Simmel pointed out in his classic text on ‘the stranger’ (‘der Fremde’, which also translates as ‘the foreigner’), the ontological difference between locals and foreigners (in this case the ‘internationals’) is constituted through the fact that the locals, in contrast to the foreigners, are engaged in geographically close and territorially grounded social patterns of interest and loyalties which are part of their social, political and economic concerns. The stranger is by his nature no owner of land – land not only in the physical sense but also metaphorically as a vital substance [of life] which is fixed, if not in space, then at least in an ideal [rather: spiritual, ideological] position within the social environment.5 Even those who have been displaced from the local environment as migrants or through expulsion, may still be considered as attached to it, because their measure remains directed by the fact that they have ‘dwelt’ on the land in Heidegger’s sense of culturally embedded living.6 This chapter will argue that intervention within its arenas of interaction creates new assemblages of concerns. Within these assemblages, foreign and local concerns are of a different nature and gaps exist between them. These ‘gaps of concern’ are reproduced in symbolic boundaries as well as through the everyday practices of intervention, its institutions and ideology, and a failure to bridge these gaps through true engagement with local concerns not only amounts to an abuse of power by the outside world but also negatively affects the efficacy of intervention. Embedded living – the nature of local concerns The intensity of local concerns over land, in conjunction with family history and lifetime experiences, can be illustrated by looking at the ways in which wartime strategies in Kosovo rationally targeted local social patterns.7 Independent of the question of the extent to which the perpetrators were aware of these social patterns, perhaps because they often shared the same particular culture as their victims, these strategies struck at the heart of local concerns and afterwards may have shaped post-conflict perceptions. In the Yugoslav wars, ethnic cleansing effectively targeted the territorial boundedness of the locals by committing gross atrocities within familiar spaces, such as the family home or garden. In Bosnia this effectively destroyed localized memory of the home space, fostering long-term expulsion.8 However, in Kosovo, in sharp contrast to Bosnia, after Resolution
An inconclusive conclusion 199 1244 was ratified, the majority of Albanians expelled during the 1999 bombing campaign quickly returned to their destroyed houses. This may partly be explained by the fact that in Kosovo, in contrast to Bosnia, the war lasted no more than three months, so that emptied and looted houses were not left to rot without roofs for years. However, particular cultural patterns relating to home and land ownership also played a role. Extended, compound settlement structures and large multi-storied houses are quite common in rural Kosovo. They are inhabited by extended families and signify power, status and prestige within the wider community. Up to three generations of patrilinear and fratristically related nuclear families reside under various roofs within the compound or under one roof of a multi-storied house, with each nuclear family typically occupying one floor. These large, impressive Albanian houses were built through remittances sent by male members of the extended family who worked as Gastarbeiter abroad, usually in Switzerland or Germany. In interviews conducted shortly after the 1999 conflict, gjurbet (or kurbet) – long-term living away from home and family as a labour migrant to finance the building of such houses – was a recurrent theme, depicted in terms of ‘sacrifice’.9 The systematic looting of such houses during the war (more than 120,000 houses were damaged in the twenty-nine municipalities of Kosovo) was thus an attack not only on property but an attack both on a way of living and on an extended family’s history.10 Those whose houses were destroyed spoke in terms of the loss of a lifetime’s work and of ‘sacrifice in vain’. After the war, family solidarity produced a concerted effort of re-building with the help of international aid orchestrated by the European Commission and remittances from a new generation of migrants, many of whom had sought asylum as refugees from the war in various European countries, including England. Unwittingly, in this case international assistance helped reinforce extended family structures, particularly in instances when these had already split apart. The emergency plan gave aid to those families whose houses could be reconstructed on the condition that they took in others whose houses could not be repaired. Most families chose to invite previous neighbours who – as a result of specific social patterns – were usually kin-relatives through the father’s line. Yet, even in post-war Kosovo, some Albanians remembered times of good neighbourliness with Serbs, and the deterioration of these relationships was still conceived as traumatic. Teachers, still struck by hurt feelings, frequently told us how their former Serb colleagues suddenly started to ignore them. Parents recalled the daily fears of sending their children to Albanian parallel schools with their books hidden. Adult women remember how they had to queue in vain for milk or bread for their children, while Serb neighbours were favoured. Pregnant women told of how they were harassed when seeking medical assistance in a hospital, while young men kept a low profile to avoid being taken into custody for no reason or beaten up. The war reinforced these memories and produced the grounds for the reproduction of interethnic fears, although, as stated above, reminiscences of
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previously trustful relationships could still be detected. Disappointment in human relationships, sorrow over loss of family members and property, as well as a general sense of loss of security and trust, were all part of the local experience of disrupted socio-cultural patterns in post-war Kosovo. They shaped concerns that were not only different from those of foreign administrators and consultants who entered the space of war wounds, often without realizing local sensibilities, they also informed local sensitivities towards new structures of exclusion and discrimination. Marking the ‘gaps of concern’ As the above examples suggest, the composition of local culture and society may be as complex as international agencies – whose varied composition, background and interests have been extensively highlighted in this volume. In the practice of international intervention local and international complexities meet. They form an ‘assemblage’, to use the concept of Deleuze and Guattari, in which contested passions, values and desires meet and in which justice, cruelty and pity may carry different associations and significance for the various actors involved.11 Issues which are emotionally loaded (‘hot’) for the locals are often treated by the bureaucracy of intervention in a ‘cold’, administrative and emotionally uninvolved manner, and a failure to recognize and bridge such ‘gaps of concern’ may in part account for the failings of intervention, particularly when they are perceived locally as a renewed form of discrimination or power abuse. The local–international dichotomy is, of course, not the only ‘gap of concern’, such gaps also exist within the respective realms, but the notion does serve as a heuristic device to illuminate the specific confrontations which arise within local arenas of international intervention. In contrast to the locals, the history and future affiliations (including career plans) of foreigners rest with kin, family, and power-structures which are often far away. What Simmel suggests for the relations between foreigners and locals in general terms of territorial boundedness is thus true for the relationship between international and local actors in the Balkans. The assignment of the ‘internationals’ to the region is only temporary. They are not land-bound, because they are likely to find themselves in other foreign countries in need of intervention soon (according to some UN rotation systems, normally within two years). Thus, their gaze on the locals and their concerns – by the very nature of the temporary nature of their posting – will be of a liminal character. Disengaged from the past experience of the locals and their perceptions of the present, the foreigners at the same time introduce models which may be alien to the locals, even if they have proven efficacious in other contexts. Pupavac’s critique of psychosocial intervention in the post-war Balkans, shaped by American experiences of dealing with the traumata of Vietnam veterans, is a case in point, as is del Re’s description of the administrative distance of UNMIK.
An inconclusive conclusion 201 Many contributions to this book document the de facto symbolic construction of difference between locals and foreigners in the assemblage of intervention. The authors describe the ways in which gaps of concern are marked and take various symbolic expressions. Sampson writes that the ‘gamut of international actors are usually easily identifiable from a distance by their white jeeps, busy schedules, and the plastic ID cards hung around their necks’. Poorly paid locals are also often acutely aware that the salaries of the internationals follow standards set outside the local context (with mixed forms existing for those locals that are employed by the internationals).12 Foreigners may also occupy buildings, which carry particular meanings – perhaps of abuse by the previous regime and its agents. In such cases, the foreigners unconsciously prevent rituals of ‘purification’, for example, through looting or destruction, or, more rarely, painting. How practice embodies symbolic distance could be observed on television screens world-wide in 1999. Then, in Macedonian refugee camps both international and local helpers assisted Albanians fleeing Kosovo. The difference between the Macedonian helpers and the Kosovo Albanian helped was symbolized by the white facemasks worn by the former, probably to protect them from viruses. In this example, the difference between donors and recipients (note the universal hierarchy of donors over recipients in gift exchange) was expressed as an analogy between the ‘clean’ (protected) and the ‘polluted’.13 The ‘polluted’ were actually refugees who had left their local setting and temporarily entered a neighbouring country, Macedonia. ‘Intervention’ and power relations were, thus, inverted. The Macedonian nation, as Ackermann describes in her contribution, was itself crisis-ridden, marginalized in international decision-making and feeling under threat from both its Albanian minority and neighbouring states. It may, literally, have perceived the influx of refugees as an ‘infection’ or ‘inflammation’ of the Macedonian ‘body’ politic. The use of the symbols of disease and pollution are not unusual in any context where ‘locals’ enter the international world as foreigners, as can be observed in the ongoing debate in Britain about asylum and Albanian criminality.14 Symbolic dichotomies of pollution and danger, however, when assigned to ethnic difference, may carry racist connotations, and cannot be separated from structural frameworks of power and legitimacy. Thus, the powerful foreigner entering the local world may be seen as a saviour, while the powerless local entering the foreign world becomes ‘vermin’ in need of control. The boundary between the locals and the internationals is not impermeable. Some locals attempt to cross it by adopting the dress codes and insignia of power introduced by ‘international fashion’. During the 1990s, in Albania men increasingly adopted multi-pocketed field vests, Ray Ban sunglasses and white Jeeps (and other four-wheel-drive vehicles) as markers of status, wealth and power shaped according to international models. The addressees of these messages of prestige were usually other locals, occasionally foreigners from ‘small’ NGOs, but never those internationals in explicit positions of
202 Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers power.15 These local adoptions of style are indicative of the general desire to join the financial exchange system of the ‘intervention industry’. Sampson in this book points to the particular language of ‘project society’, which many locals effectively and deliberately learn in order to gain employment opportunities with outside agencies or to develop externally funded projects themselves. Such ‘wanderers between worlds’ may trespass security controls after the appropriate initiation ritual has been successfully conducted (security checks, assigning of an identification card, English language training, personal recommendations, the production of a CV, etc.). There are also those locals who have achieved the mana (or ‘symbolic authority’, as Sampson suggests) of special international protection, such as some of the Serb leaders in Kosovo, who, in fact, are able to use their special status as a performance of power, thus evoking new antipathies – which does not augur well for post-intervention times.16 Foreign personnel in Kosovo or Albania often speak with great appreciation of those Albanians they work with on a daily basis (drivers, translators, secretaries, cleaners) while expressing almost racist attitudes towards Albanians at a general level. Indeed, while the outside world was promoting ‘inter-ethnic communication’ between Serbs and Albanians at a time when looted houses still dominated the post-war landscape, comparatively few foreigners, even those who have been present for a long time, seem to have made, or followed through, the effort of learning Albanian or Serb. It is not the foreigners who trespass the boundaries of difference in everyday intervention life by acquiring new language skills. It is the local employees, often young women, who move from dangerous local ‘problem zones’ into the safe territory of ‘international immunity’.17 Young and sophisticated, possessing the necessary language skills and stripped of any threatening local culture, they become familiarized and quasi-temporarily ‘domesticated’ in the institutionalized world of international ‘mobile sovereignties’.18 Yet, as Sampson points out in his contribution, the longterm opportunities are limited for such local personnel, unless they develop personal bonds, such as marriage. There are also those locals who are either part of the international cosmopolitan elite (leaders of local NGOs, politicians, academics, poets) or at least cannot legitimately be classified as either local or international because they have regularly been part of both worlds. Among these are a number of individuals who have strong reservations about international practices, such as the author, Dubravka Ugrešiæ, cited in Pupavac’s contribution. In Pristina University philosophers and literary theorists, who are used to studying their sources in various original languages, sometimes deliberately avoid contact with the internationals and their educational reform programmes and explicitly refuse to speak English, ‘the language of hegemony and dominance’.19 As with most national languages, the global language has become a signifier of power relations. It can serve to include or exclude from either the local or the international world, and its usage may be
An inconclusive conclusion 203 deliberately or unintentionally managed by either side, in this case through local elite strategies of subversion and resistance. The Kosovo Ombudsman’s report 2002 revealed severe deficiencies in providing translations, presenting a good example of institutional exclusion on the part of the foreigners: An early UNMIK Regulation provided that all UNMIK Regulations would be published in English, Albanian and Serbian. Three years later, important UNMIK Regulations remain in English only, although efforts have been made to accelerate translations into Albanian and Serbian. Delays in publishing laws considered by UNMIK to be in force remain a problem, even in the event that publication on the internet can be considered adequate where a large proportion of the population does not have access to computer services.20 Local perceptions and interests inform the ways in which locals regard the ‘interventionists’, and the ways in which they choose to cooperate or cope with their programmes or subvert them. For example, in Kosovo, the fact that NATO helped the Albanians to return to their land evoked an initial feeling of gratitude but as political interests began to collide the mood changed to a confrontational and subversive informal opposition.21 As del Re suggests, a new ‘parallelism’ has developed in which local Albanians compare the international presence to the previous hegemonic YugoslavSerb regime. Informal local politics may be related to structural exclusion, and this is a proposition which deserves further study. In suggesting an ‘anthropology of security’, Sampson notices that the concept of security seems categorically different for locals or internationals in terms of perceptions of threat as well as in terms of actual exposure to risk and danger and access to protection and security. The symbolic geography of Balkan intervention maps out boundaries separating different local and international groups along these lines. This is not, however, to suggest that such divisions are not omnipresent in post-conflict regions independent of any international presence. Bose describes the religious symbols (notably a huge cross overlooking the city) marking internally constructed boundaries of ethnic difference inscribed on the cityscape of Mostar. In fact, the distance and difference between the locals and internationals are even more pronounced, as hierarchical power structures (and difference in rights to security) are usually taken for granted. The security controls, checkpoints and barbed wire of the foreigners demarcate both internal ethnic divides as well as the boundary between local and international spaces.22 Indeed, as Kaldor points out in Chapter 1, these may actually re-enforce ethnic divides as they delineate ‘ethnic problem zones’. They symbolically divide not only ‘chaos’ (local) and ‘order’ (international institutions) but also different zones of security through the literal construction of spaces of ‘diplomatic immunity’.
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‘Security’ within the world of ‘diplomatic immunity’ In Chapter 5, del Re points to the creation of quasi-familiar ‘home spaces’ (an Irish pub, parmesan cheese import, etc.) as a strategy used by many foreigners to cope with a socially threatening and unfamiliar environment. The ways in which internationals create social groups among themselves, visit particular bars and restaurants, but hardly ever include locals within their sociable leisure time, also tells of segregation in the everyday practice of intervention. As we have seen above, there are codes and rituals involved in trespassing from local into international spaces of immunity, but this symbolic geography is not only engraved in space. The protective practices of foreigners also visualize difference (and, indeed, ‘human value’) in terms of exposure to risk and access to security. Although the high salaries they receive may be offered to compensate for the increased risks they face during international deployment, in reality the foreigners, and their insurance companies at home, are rarely willing to expose themselves to the same risks and dangers as the locals or to make the local security problems truly their own. The foreigners intervene and engage only as long as they are not exposed to real security threats. Their security stands paramount to that of the locals, and the first responsibility of any intervening international institution is to protect its international employees irrespective of the fact that its mandate may require it to establish security on the ground. For example, the heavy international military presence deployed during the Albanian elections of 1997 to protect the OSCE observers was instructed to withdraw immediately (along with the international observers) from any polling station if trouble arose. The locals were puzzled as well as offended by this open indication that their democratic aspirations and personal safety were apparently not accorded the same worth as those of foreigners. They misunderstood that different risk and security measures applied, and that even if the armoured vehicles and guns of the outside forces could have easily scared away any gangs of young men, the international military was not, perhaps rationally enough, prepared to make local problems its own.23 As Sampson has also realized, exemplary symbolic boundaries are constructed in international security briefings. I attended such briefings for newly arriving UN and OSCE personnel in Kosovo 2001 when male personnel were warned against contact with local girls because ‘her brother may shoot you – there still exist here traditions of honour and feuding’. Independent of the accusations that the international presence in the region is responsible for the mushrooming of brothels, and the cases of international officials allegedly involved in the lucrative trade of trafficking women, such short-cut construction of local Albanian ‘traditions’ creates problems which will be further addressed below.24 At this point, the emphasis rests on the way such guidance constructs Albanian ‘tradition’ as a threat in order to justify the avoidance of contact with the locals. Subsumed under the Ottoman-times term kanun, tradition becomes a symbolic short-cut to delineate purported exotic primitivism from which it would be advisable to stay away.25
An inconclusive conclusion 205 In the Introduction, Siani-Davies points to the powerful symbolism immanent in policy rhetoric, which distinguishes between those international powers which may intervene, but are never subject to intervention, and those less powerful countries or regions which may ‘legitimately’ be objects of intervention. As the continuing debate about ‘Balkanism’ has revealed, static and essentialist concepts of culture have actually contributed to a history of political and social exclusion, as their production has become embedded within wider political and economic power relations.26 Accordingly, the image of the Balkan countries and peoples, as being fragmented and shackled by ancient traditions of violence, which is embodied in the term ‘Balkanization’, has come to inform international policy and serve the gratifying self-superiorization of some international leaders. As some of the contributors to this book suggest, such images have not only served to justify military intervention but also the segregation on the ground which is embodied in the symbolic boundaries and practices described within this chapter. In the following section, such imageries and practices will be juxtaposed with research results from post-conflict Kosovo about local perceptions of security. Security within ‘ethnic problem zones’ Both inside and outside the Balkans, ‘ancient hatred’ has frequently been cited as a reason for the interethnic aggression and other security problems of the region, and has led to international third-party action to separate the adversaries. Many scholars, such as Siani-Davies and Kaldor in this book, have pointed to the problems of such reductionist representations and have instead preferred to explore the historical, political and economic contexts of the outbreak of Balkan violence.27 However, less attention has been paid to how the locals themselves perceive efforts to keep ethnic communities apart and the prospects for future interethnic coexistence. In research undertaken in Kosovo immediately after the war, more than 300 Albanian respondents of both urban and rural background across all ages and genders could hardly envisage future interethnic coexistence (see Table 11.1). Recent experiences led to 60 per cent of all focus groups agreeing that ‘the Serbs’ were the greatest threat, more than the, at the time, still uncleared minefields or criminality. The perceptions of danger in post-war everyday life suggest that it was less inter-ethnic hatred than mutual fear which fuels the local desire to keep ethnic groups apart. ‘Fear’ constitutes a different motive for violence than ‘hatred’, in that it informs strategies of avoidance rather than attack. However, if ‘fear’ cannot be abated through protection and long-term security measures, just like ‘hatred’, it may become a justification for self-defence or even pre-emptive violence. In such circumstances the two become hard to differentiate.28 The sizeable international military deployment in Kosovo would appear to offer sufficient protection to lessen fears and improve
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An inconclusive conclusion 207 labelling the actions ‘criminal’. In the multi-ethnic city of Prizren, both Roma and Albanians blame ethnic violence on criminals from outside the city. In the same way that internationals trust ‘their Albanians’, so Albanians exempt people of other ethnic communities who they personally knew from accusations of collective guilt. The prospect of interethnic coexistence in the future was not comprehensively excluded but it was seen as being conditional on the establishment of the rule of law and the prosecution of crimes committed during the recent war (see Table 11.2).30
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However, the internationally juridical regime, not least for pragmatic reasons, given the number of crimes committed during the war, has so far chosen to only prosecute the leading war criminals in The Hague. In the process, the local Albanian farmer who daily sees his stolen tractor used by his Serb neighbour (who ‘saved’ it during the Albanian expulsion of 1999) has been left with no legal recompense, unless he chooses to take the law into his own hands.31 It is therefore not always ‘extremists’ who are responsible for post-war violence in Kosovo. Frustrated individuals have also taken ‘justice’ into their own hands, reinforcing the general atmosphere of interethnic insecurity and leaving ‘many, in particular Serbs and Roma … isolated in ghettos’ and facing ‘great danger should they venture out of those ghettos without armed international escorts’.32 Unfortunately, UNMIK’s record regarding juridical reform is one of the weakest aspects of its administration of post-conflict Kosovo. In his report the current Ombudsperson documents severe problems. The international implemented ‘rule of law’ appears to harbour authoritarian and undemocratic features, and is utterly insufficient to protect individual human rights. In contradiction to the principles of democracy and the separation of powers, not only can the high UNMIK administrative authority overrule the judiciary but it has also granted itself and the international military presence (KFOR) total immunity from the legal process in Kosovo. The legal insecurities that result from UNMIK’s appropriation of juridical powers, the competition among different international institutions as well as the coexistence of different legal traditions (Yugoslav, informal-clientelist – deriving from the period of ‘parallelism’ – and international), prevents the locals establishing a sense of trust in the legal system. The juridical and legal security, identified above as a prerequisite for long-term peaceful interethnic coexistence in Kosovo, has simply not been achieved.33 Interethnic trust-building measures, deemed a priority in many peacebuilding workshops, can hardly precede the establishment of security and the rule of law. They can also hardly succeed in the generally insecure and uncertain environment produced by the failure to resolve the long-term status of Kosovo. The fact that Kosovo on the basis of Resolution 1244 should remain part of Yugoslavia is inconceivable to Albanians because of their recent experience and continuing fear of Serbs (equalized with ‘Yugoslavs’ by most Albanians). After three years of intervention, this ‘failure to address the nature of Kosovo now and to resolve the question of its final status in the future’ creates everyday problems for many Albanians. People ‘remain in a limbo’ and ‘are entangled in a bureaucratic web spun by the politicians. Individuals needing to obtain identification documents, travel documents, birth, marriage or death certificates, and so forth, face lengthy delays.’34 Thus, explaining occasional ‘revenge killings’ through ‘primitive Albanian tradition’ of blood feuding may actually distract from the fact that major security issues remain unresolved three years after UNMIK first intervened, and that no sense of justice and equal access to human rights
An inconclusive conclusion 209 exists in Kosovo. Moreover, this lack of equality may, to some extent, be the result of a structural and institutional segregation of locals and internationals in which local perceptions are not treated as real concerns. Indeed, as will be argued below, short-cut explanations of killings through ‘Albanian traditions of feuding’, which are part of the canon of ‘Balkanist’ images, can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy and actually strengthen those local interest groups who have a particular interest in promoting a reputation of violence (perhaps for criminal ends) or of traditionalism (nationalists defining ethnic difference).35 The structural distance maintained between internationals and locals in the new assemblages of intervention helps reproduce a static picture of local culture, which both strengthens local extremism and consolidates outside ‘Balkanist’ images of the region.
Taking ‘culture’ into account The importance of taking local concerns and perceptions into account has generally been recognized in concepts such as ‘sustainable development’, and in the fact that some international agents, such as the World Bank, increasingly employ social and cultural anthropologists as consultants alongside economists and technical experts (the Kosovo 2000 research widely cited in this conclusion is a case in point). The United Nations Peacekeeping Handbook for Junior Ranks under the heading ‘cultural awareness’ also advises: The greatest enemy of a United Nations peacekeeper is the failure to understand the culture, language, local customs and practices of the people in the mission area. This must be the subject of specialized training prior to deployment, as well as the adoption of an attitude of tolerance and understanding by the individual.36 In practice, taking ‘local culture’ into account evokes a number of pragmatic, ethical and epistemological problems. ‘Culture’ may prove a ‘hyper-referential term’ if: culture shifts from something to be described, interpreted, even perhaps explained, … [to be] treated as a source of explanation in itself. This is not to deny that some form of cultural explanation may be useful enough, in its place, but appeals to culture can offer only a partial explanation of why people think and behave as they do, and of what causes them to alter their ways. Political and economic forces, social institutions, and biological processes cannot be wished away, or assimilated to systems of knowledge and belief.37 In short, cultures are complex. Static, ahistorical definitions fail to explain why social patterns shift, the role individual agency plays, or the new opportunities which arise with a changing political, economic and social context. In
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the Balkans, as anywhere else in the modern world, social processes cannot be understood without investigating varying experiences of statehood, and the shifting economic and political structures of inclusion or exclusion brought about by changing global power relations. Yet, short-cut definitions of local culture, which ignore such contexts, are part of interventionist routines. Steven Weine, for example, on the basis of the testimonies of exiles from the Bosnian war, has argued that the concept of ‘good neighbourliness’, merhamet, romantically described as the essence of Bosnian culture, should be taken into account, when treating the traumata of war survivors.38 Weine’s respondents were resident in the USA and the diaspora setting may partly account for their nostalgia, but in a similar fashion regarding Kosovo, Roland Littlewood has suggested that understandings given by the kanun may supplement universal forms of trauma treatment and lead to a better understanding of the supposed ‘stoicism’ and ‘retribution’ of Albanian culture when coping with loss.39 This view, perhaps unknowingly, accords with those of the travel writer, Robert Carver, whose The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania has become favourite reading for many of the foreigners encountering Albanians for the first time during their missions to Kosovo or Albania.40 Carver does not speak to any Albanian without a translator, but he identifies, generalizes and constructs an exotic Albanian character in terms of selected pre-communist traditions of banditry, male honour, heroism and feuding with some reference to the early traveller and anthropologist Edith Durham (in whose footsteps he places himself).41 Carver recommends that every international official deployed to Albanian lands reads The Kanun of Lekë Dukagjin. Within this ethnographic collection of late Ottoman Albanian customary codes of practice he found: A profound psychological portrait of contemporary Albania. It was not that Albanians ‘followed’ the kanun, as if a rule book or book of laws; rather, the kanun represented what Albanians, in their deepest essence, believed was right and wrong … In my view no official should be allowed to negotiate with Albanians, or visit Albania, who has not mastered this quintessential code, which lays bare the very soul of an ancient, proud and much misunderstood people.42 For many foreigners, who have actually engaged with local life, whether they take part or not in interventionist practices, such assumptions are as bewildering as they are for Albanians, who have no interest in constructing the ‘essence’ of their nation. Nevertheless, Kosovar Albanian society is often represented as a patriarchal clan society and subsumed under the term kanun are notions that it is prone to violence and revenge killing and suppresses women within the family. The murder of Serbs and Roma, and the looting of their houses, immediately after the 1999 war, were thus widely associated with traditional Albanian forms of revenge killing. One of our interests during research in Kosovo in 2000 was therefore to identify traditional
An inconclusive conclusion 211 patterns at work in Kosovar Albanian society, and to understand how the Kosovo Albanians themselves relate to ‘tradition’, gender relations, violence, and the concept of kanun. Some cultural features of kanun traditions, such as the customary rule of post-marital virilocal residence and a highly gendered social organization (men working outside, women inside the house), seem never to have fully ceased to exist in rural Kosovar Albanian society, even during communism. However, from the 1970s, these structures slowly dissolved as increasing numbers of women found employment outside the house, with communist emancipatory policies lifting many into leading public roles as teachers, nurses, professors and politicians.43 From the 1990s, a process of re-patriarchalization accompanying the period of so-called ‘parallelism’ reversed some of these gains particularly in rural areas, where state law and official institutions did not guarantee survival, dignity and security for Albanians, only family tradition.44 Accordingly, in the difficult times immediately after the 1999 war, the large majority of respondents replied to the question of who they saw as the most vulnerable persons, or groups of persons, as ‘those without family’ and particularly ‘those who have lost the men of the family’ – men being perceived as the generators of income (either abroad or through work outside the house) and the protectors of the family (see Table 11.3). 7DEOH 3HUFHSWLRQVRIYXOQHUDELOLW\LQ.RVRYR 0RVWYXOQHUDEOHJURXSV
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Despite the significance assigned to ‘the Albanian family’ and to traditional gender roles by most respondents, in the interviews many young girls said that they did not feel they had been denied equal opportunities in education and working life because of ‘patriarchal traditions’ (‘village mentality’, mentalitet katundar). Instead, they blamed poverty and the lack of security. Even in remote villages, they and their parents alike said they wanted the girls to continue schooling and make a career, providing the family could afford to send them to higher educational institutions in the bigger cities, and the post-war situation was not too dangerous in terms of criminality. In all generations, education for both sexes was seen as the most promising avenue to creating a better future but at a time when resources were in short supply and security problems remained, it seemed a rational decision to prioritize the education and work chances of sons.45 As indicated above, Albanians, like other Kosovo respondents, did not support revenge killings and instead highlighted the urgent need for the prosecution of criminals through legal channels. Revenge was occasionally seen as an option for acquiring justice where there was no alternative, and some respondents explained that a particular Albanian ‘tradition of violence’ offered an illegitimate excuse, or cover, for criminal activities. It was believed that most killings occurred because of rivalry within the informal economy, out of personal frustration over injustices, or due to political extremism. Most urban middle-class Albanians clearly distanced themselves from notions of revenge. They perceived the kanun traditions of self-regulation and feuding as atavisms from the past to be found only in the most remote, backward villages of Albania or Kosovo, although even here we found attitudes towards these traditions were ambiguous. Across the urban/rural divide, attitudes were consistently oriented towards the future, not the past. Future prosperity was seen to lie in education and the development of micro-business ideas coupled with integration into ‘Europe’ or ‘the West’, which many associated with previous experiences of long-term labour migration.46 Beyond informing the subsistence and defence strategies of individual families during a time of ethnic exclusion (‘parallelism’), ‘Albanian traditions’ were rediscovered to affirm a distinct ethnic identity and produce internal cohesion. Famously, in 1990, in reaction to increasing pressure from the Serbs and the exclusion of Albanians from official structures, the professor of folklore at Pristina University, Anton Çetta, set out to settle all the remaining vendettas in rural Kosovo according to the rules of reconciliation of the kanun as documented in Albanian folklore studies. Apparently, there were thousands of latent cases, but little remaining knowledge of how to settle these legacies of history and local culture. With the help of Albanian students and local functionaries, Çetta arranged for the inhabitants of remote villages to attend mass rituals, in which they renounced, according to re-invented kanun rituals, their alleged ‘family
An inconclusive conclusion 213 right’ to take revenge for the greater cause of national unity. Such besë-lidhje (‘besa-binding’, the taking of a collective ‘oath of allegiance’) did occur in the past but only as a temporary expedient. When the outer threat receded, feuding re-emerged, as internal conflicts over scarce resources regained significance.47 Today, violence and other ‘Albanian traditions’ are located in the specific realm of the local and transnational informal economy as well as in certain political organizations where codes of honour, notions of masculinity, and means of violent self-regulation have acquired new meanings.48 Here, they serve as a justification for control over resources, such as commodities in trafficking, land, women, and, occasionally, as claims to village authority and positions of prestige. They are also used to establish conformity by threatening anyone considered a ‘traitor’. In such contexts, the generalized image of ‘Albanian criminal prowess and violence’ and adherence to a purportedly violent kanun culture has, in fact, served those who wish to pursue their informal business with as little outside interference as possible. Such recourse to ‘Albanian traditions of violence’ has had real effects on the lives of both Albanians and other ethnicities and is thus more than a mere discursive tool. Using re-invented tradition, KLA recruits swore allegiance to the national cause through besa in the mid-1990s, and ongoing research on death notices and memorial services for former KLA fighters in Kosovo suggests that kanun rhetoric, particularly the concepts of besa (‘oath’, ‘truth’, ‘alliance’) and ndera (‘honour’), is associated with the most radical of Albanian nationalists in post-conflict public discourses.49 The historical kanun suggests that those who ‘break a besa’ and are, therefore, pabese (‘without besa’), that is ‘traitors’, ‘collaborators’ or ‘spies’, may be killed, and, indeed, some Kosovo Albanian communities were intimidated in this way both before and during the war.50 The research findings suggest that Albanian traditions, including those of violence and patriarchalism, are not part of the vision of the future held by most of the inhabitants of Kosovo. The politics of ‘tradition’, however, has become a useful tool for nationalist and radical interest groups negotiating power in post-conflict Kosovo. In 2000 most locals understood this instrumental use of tradition and dismissed it hoping for the establishment of the rule of law. To them these socio-cultural continuities and notions of self-defence were adaptations to an environment of poverty, war and a general lack of security, which suggests that – as in the 1970s – these patriarchal social structures may become redundant once the situation improves. Some Kosovo Albanian respondents saw the enduring stereotypical identification of Albanians with patriarchal traditions as indicative of a continuity within ‘foreign oppression’, since such imagery was seen as underpinning discriminatory practices and acting as a symbolic barrier excluding locals from the times of Miloševiæ.51 As suggested above, in times of crises
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the return to the traditional forms of social order on which such imageries are based has indeed limited life choices, particularly for women, but at the same time it has served as a resource to cope with economic, political and legal insecurities. The ‘home-grown civil capital’ based on social networks and family structures as suggested by Sampson is, thus, ambiguous, complex, and context-dependent. Generalizations that suggest that the Albanians are driven by kanun traditions of violence, however, do seem to be reductionist and illegitimate, and this was clearly demonstrated in the parliamentary elections of November 2001 when the liberal-moderate party ‘Democratic League of Kosovo’ (LDK) of former shadow president Ibrahim Rugova defeated the Democratic Party of Kosovo which had evolved from the KLA.
Conclusion The ethnographies of Balkan intervention within this book have highlighted the structural and symbolical ‘gaps of concern’ that exist between locals and foreigners within the new assemblages of intervention. This concluding chapter has suggested that understanding and respecting the concerns of local actors, whether it be in Pristina, Mostar, Banja Luka or elsewhere, is a prerequisite for any integrative form of development. Although this should seem self-evident, the symbolic boundaries detected and practices described within this book tell more of ongoing processes of alienation and of the ideological consolidation of difference, than of integration and the transfer of power. Social vulnerability within post-war societies in flux has, in response to existing ‘gaps of concern’ as well as to new opportunities, produced local strategies of coping, including cooperative, escapist or subversive strategies. As has been amply illustrated, stereotypical definitions of culture and interethnic conflict, which prevent a comprehensive understanding of local social realities, may actually strengthen nationalist local interest groups and enforce such ‘gaps of concern’. Acting as a self-fulfilling prophecy, such images may justify authoritarian forms of power, blur complex realities and the recognition of urgent problems, prevent integrative approaches to generating trust or a sense of justice in post-war societies, and ideologically reproduce a system of exclusion and its justification. The outcome of intervention in the Balkans seems as yet unpredictable. Bridging the gaps of local and foreign concerns may have an impact on success or failure of interventionist targets such as security, stability, economic growth and democratization. How to do this would be the project of a more conclusive conclusion. Seeking a better understanding of the nature of the gaps of concern embedded within the new assemblages of Balkan intervention can only be a beginning and not – the end.
An inconclusive conclusion 215
Notes 1 C. Geertz, Interpretations of Culture: Selected Essays, New York: Basic, 1973, p. 5. 2 Examples of this moralizing discourse can be found in A. Tariq Ali (ed.), Masters of the Universe? NATO’s Balkan Crusade, London: Verso, 2000, and W.J. Buckley (ed.), Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions, Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2000. 3 K. Gardner and D. Lewis, Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge, London: Pluto, 1996, p. 11 and ibid. citing J. Ferguson, The AntiPolitics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticisation, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 17. 4 Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine. 5 G. Simmel, ‘The stranger’, in G. Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, edited and with an Introduction by D.N. Levine, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, p. 144. 6 M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by A. Hofstadter, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, pp. 145–161 (emphasis in original). 7 On the rationality of violence, see. G. Elwert, ‘Sozialanthropologisch erklärte Gewalt’, in W. Heitmeyer and J. Hagan (eds), Internationales Handbuch der Gewaltforschung, Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002, pp. 330–367. (Forthcoming in English: G. Elwert, ‘Violence in the perspective of social anthropology’, in W. Heitmeyer and J. Hagan (eds), International Handbook on Violence Research, Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003. 8 C. Sorabji, ‘A very modern war: terror and territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, in R.A. Hinde and H.E. Watson (eds), War, a Cruel Necessity? The Bases of Institutionalized Violence, London: Tauris, 1995, pp. 80–95. Cf. Keith Doubt on the notion of ‘sociocide’ or Toni Bringa on the destruction of patterns of neighbourhood, K. Doubt, Sociology after Bosnia and Kosovo, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000; T. Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way. Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. 9 Results of anthropological research conducted in Kosovo in March and April 2000, in cooperation with Astrit Salihu of Pristina University and Natasha Bolger. See G. La Cava, R. Nanetti, T. Nezam, S. Schwandner-Sievers et al., Conflict and Change in Kosovo: Impact on Institutions and Society, Washington, DC: World Bank, December 2000. 10 European Commission, International Management Group, ‘Emergency assessment of damaged housing and local/village infrastructure in Kosovo’, July 1999, available at http://www.img.ba/kosovo/main/housing/housing.pdf (accessed 12 May 2002). 11 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone Press, 1999, particularly p. 399n. 12 La Cava et al., Conflict and Change in Kosovo. 13 L. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, famously suggested the universal principle of social hierarchy in which the donor has always a higher status than the receiver of, for example, bribes or gifts. 14 See, for instance, the numerous examples in The Times and the Daily Mail during November and December 2002. 15 I would like to thank Nicola Mai for drawing my attention to this point. 16 Fieldwork observation during participation as co-chair person of the ‘education’ panel of the German workshop ‘Interethnic co-existence in the Western Balkans’, Pristina, April 2002. 17 My terms; A. Lafontaine, ‘Réfugié ou “local staff ”? Changement de statut et enjeux de pouvoirs au Kosovo d’après-guerre’, Anthropologie et Sociétés –
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Politiques jeux d’espaces, 26:1, 2002, available at http://www.fss.ulaval.ca/ant/ 2002–1.html (accessed 2 December 2002). M. Pandolfi, ‘Myth and new forms of governance in contemporary Albania’, in S. Schwandner-Sievers and B. Fischer (eds), Albanian Identities: Myth and History, London: Hurst, 2002, pp. 203–214. Result of informal discussions and semi-structured interviews conducted during fieldwork in Albania and Pristina in March–April 2000, April 2001 and April 2002. Ombudsperson Institution in Kosovo, ‘Second Annual Report 2001–2002, addressed to Mr Michael Steiner, Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations, 10 July 2002’, available at http://www.ombuds personkosovo.org (accessed 15 November 2002). D. Kostovicova, ‘Enclaves of contention: Serbia’s post-Miloševiæ politicians largely avoid the issue of Kosovo’s future’, Transitions Online, 20 June 2002, available at http://www.tol.cz, article No 4885 (accessed 17 July 2002). Ibid. Personal observations during election observation on behalf of the German Foreign Office for the OSCE in Albania, 1997. US Department of State, ‘Country Reports on Human Rights Practices 2001: Yugoslavia’, Washington, DC: Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, 2002, available at http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2001/eur/8369.htm (accessed 15 October 2002), citing the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). The kanun, a set of customary rules governing village and tribal life according to the principle of self-regulation, was first documented in 1359. Originally only an orally transmitted source of indigenous cultural knowledge it covered all social and interpersonal codes of conduct as well as aspects of social organization, including rules of feuding and reconciliation. It was codified by the Franciscan priest Shtjefen Gjeçov (1874–1929) in the hope that it would become the basis of future Albanian national law. S. Gjeçov, Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit, with an English translation by L. Fox, New York: GjonLekaj, 1989. The first, postmortem, publication was in 1933. The debate was launched by M. Todorova in ‘The Balkans: from discovery to invention’, Slavic Review, 53, 1994, 453–482 and Imagining the Balkans, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. V. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998, is broadly supportive; more critical are K.E. Fleming, ‘Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography’, American Historical Review, 105:4, 2000, 1218–1233; H. Sundhaussen, ‘Europa balcanica: Der Balkan als historischer Raum Europas’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 25, 1999, 626–653; W. Bracewell and A. Drace-Francis, ‘South-Eastern Europe: History, Concepts and Boundaries’, Balkanologie, 3: 2, 1999, 47–66. Deconstructing the notion of ‘ancient hatred’ while exploring economic and socio-political context and change in the Balkans thus became a paradigmatic project for most scholars of the region. For selected examples among many, see J. Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, London: Hurst, 2000; G. Duijzings, Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, London: Hurst, 2000; M. Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Cambridge: Polity, 1999. D. Riches, ‘The phenomenon of violence’, in D. Riches (ed.), The Anthropology of Violence, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Ombudsperson Institution in Kosovo, ‘Second Annual Report’. Ibid. Interviews with the Albanian village council of the mixed Serb–Albanian village, Cernice, near Gjilan/Gnjilane, in 2000.
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39 40
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45 46
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Ombudsperson Institution in Kosovo, ‘Second Annual Report’. Ibid. Ibid. Such implicit alliances are discussed in A. Hammond (ed.), The Balkans and the West, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. United Nations, United Nations Peacekeeping Handbook for Junior Ranks, third draft, New York: United Nations, 1997. A. Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. x, xi. S.M. Weine, ‘Redefining Merhamet after a historical nightmare’, in J.M. Halpern and D.A. Kideckel (eds), Neighbors at War: Anthropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity, Culture, and History, University Park, PA: UP Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000, pp. 401–412. R. Littlewood, ‘Trauma and the Kanun: two responses to loss in Albania and Kosova’, International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 18 February 2002, 86–96. R. Carver, The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania, London: John Murray, 1998. Carver’s book was effectively deconstructed in C. de Waal, ‘Albanians, Kosovars – cultural differences, stereotypes’, unpublished paper to Balkans Intelligence Support Element, US European Command, Joint Analysis Centre, May 2000. E. Durham, High Albania, Boston: Beacon, 1987. Carver, The Accursed Mountains, p. 312. B. Backer, ‘Behind the stone walls’, Culture Populaire Albanaise, 3: 3, 1983, 161–174. J. Reineck, ‘Seizing the past, forging the present: changing visions of self and nation among the Kosova Albanians’, Anthropology of East Europe Review, 11:1–2, 1993, special issue: ‘War among the Yugoslavs’, available at http:// condor.depaul.edu/~rrotenbe/aeer/aeer11_1/reineck.html (accessed 15 August 2002). Ibid. These results are supported by a recent survey of Kosovar migrants in Germany. R. Seifert, Kriegserfahrung, Identität und Geschlecht (= Endbericht des Teilprojekts ‘Friedenssicherung und Vermeidung von Gewalt’ Nr. 2 im Auftrag des Bundesministeriums für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur), Salzburg: Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft, November 2002. S. Schwandner-Sievers, ‘Humiliation and reconciliation in northern Albania: the logics of feuding in symbolic and diachronic perspectives’, in G. Elwert et al. (eds), Dynamics of Violence: Processes of Escalation and De-Escalation in Violent Group Conflicts, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999, pp. 133–152. S. Schwandner-Sievers and A. Prestreshi, “‘Wie ein Hurrikan entstehen die Helden”: zu Märtyrern, Trauer- und Gedenkkultur im Nachkriegskosovo (1999–2001)’, in W. Höpken and H. Sundhaussen (eds), ‘Kriegserinnerung auf dem Balkan: Zum Kulturellen Umgang mit Gewalterfahrungen in Sudosteuropa’, Südosteuropa-Jahrbuch, 33, 2003. Ibid.; for the Besa, see T. Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 99. Gjeçov, Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit, pp. 122, 126, 136, 158; further interpreted in S. Schwandner-Sievers, ‘The enactment of “tradition”: Albanian constructions of identity, violence and power in times of crisis’, in B. Schmidt and I. Schröder (eds), Anthropology of Violence and Conflict, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 97–120. For examples of intimidation, see R. Flottau, ‘Kosovo: Grausamste Säuberungen’, Der Spiegel, 39, 2002, 13–14. Informal talks with Albanian academics, Pristina, April 2002.
Index
Ackermann, Alice 25, 196, 201 Afghanistan (1979) 44 Ahmeti, Ali 112, 115 Ahrens, Geert 107 Ahtisaari, Martti 22 air strikes: criticisms of 22–3; effects of 38; justification for 55, 120; Miloševiæ on 54; USA attitude to 17, 38 Albania: alignment with USSR 14; Chinese support of 14; collapse of pyramid schemes 21; communism installed 12; Corfu Channel case 13; elections (1997) 204; isolationism 14; non-intervention ideology 14–15; PHARE programme 173; SAA 183; Sofia Declaration 174; Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP) 173; under-funding of NGOs 153–4 ‘Albanian question’ 37 Albright, Madeleine 128, 129 Aluminij Mostar 80–1 ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ 12, 33–4, 205 Annan, Kofi 49, 54 Anthropology, Development and the PostModern Challenge (Gardner and Lewis) 196 April Uprising (1876) 9 Arkan’s Tigers 36 Ashkali 91, 100n22 ‘assemblages’ of foreign and local concerns 198–209 Austria 10 Badinter, Robert 17–18 Baker, James 15 Balkanization 2, 205 Balkans: definition 26n-1; images of 2, 11–12, 33, 26n-3, 205; wars (1912–13) 10; see also Regional Cooperation Bauman, Zygmunt 140–1 Belgrade 56, 162 besa 213 Biermann, R. 188 Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) 175, 176
Blair, Tony 54, 96 Blumi, Isa 93–4, 97 Bose, Sumantra 25, 71, 195, 203 Bosnia after Dayton (Bose) 71 Bosnia-Hercegovina: air exclusion zone 19; air strikes 38; currency 40, 70–1; diplomacy during war 16–17; ethnic cleansing 198; ‘good neighbourliness’ 210; IFOR deployed 20; local elections (2000) 84; Muslim strategy 36; political equality 20; political parties 39; pyschosocial programmes in 165; recognition of 3, 17–18; SAA 183; safe areas 141; security 120, 140; self-determination 33; Sofia Declaration 174; Srebrenica massacre 19, 39, 49, 65; Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP) 173; strategy towards during war 39, 63; trauma and dysfunctionalism 161–2; UN in 19; UNPROFOR 18, 44; ‘weekend’ fighters 35; see also Dayton Peace Accords; Mostar Bosniacs 36, 78, 79, 87n2, 91 Bosnian Serbs: blockade against 125; bombed by NATO 19; planes shot down 19; rejection of Vance-Owen Plan 17 Bota Sot 90–1 bottom-up policies see cosmopolitan policies Boutros-Ghali, Boutros 107 Brajkovic, Mijo 80 ‘breadline massacre’ (1992) 123 Brioni Agreement (1991) 16, 65 Brovina, Flora 91 Bulgaria: banking crisis 21; communism installed 12; Eastern Rumelia 9, 10; Europe Agreements 24, 173; massacres in 9; in NATO 189; Sofia Declaration 174; sovereignty 3, 12; trade pacts 173 Bull, Hedley 3 Busek, Erhard 175, 176, 180 Cambodia (1979) 45, 47, 48 Canning, George 8 capacity-building 148–9, 156, 182
Index 219 Carrington, Peter 16 Carver, Robert 210 Cassesse, Antonio 50 Çetta, Anton 212–13 Chandler, David 166 Charney, Jonathan 44 Chernomyrdin, Victor 22 China 14, 110, 118n14 Chomsky, Noam 97 Chossudovsky, Michael 94 Christianity 8–10 civil society development: aims of 137; assessment of 151; costs of 136–7; errors in 144; foundations for 144; local partners 149–50; NGOs’ problems 152–4; projects 148–50; results of 138–9; security and 138–9, 143–5, 155; state of 145 Clausewitz, Carl 36 Clinton administration 17, 49 Cockell, John 92 Cold War 12–15, 13–15, 172–3 Cologne Declaration (1999) 24, 176 colonialism 28n37, 136, 147–8 Cominform 12 Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) 184–5 communism 12, 35 Community Assistance for Reconstruction, Development and Stabilization (CARDS) 24, 182, 186 Conference of Ambassadors 7–8 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) 16, 108, 176 Congress of Berlin (1878) 7, 8 Contact Group 16 ‘convertible mark’ see KM ‘convertible mark’ Cooperation Agreements 174 Copenhagen commitment (1993) 173 corruption 35, 179 cosmopolitan policies 32, 38–9 Council of Europe 4, 165, 179 Country Strategies 182 Crete 7, 9, 10 criminality 35, 36–7, 179, 206–8 Croatia: conflict in 18, 32; Council of Europe membership 4; Diaspora 35; independence 15–16, 17; Mostar and 84; psychosocial programmes in 165; recognition of 3, 17; SAA 182–4, 186; Serbian enclaves 18–19, 141; Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP) 173; trauma and dysfunctionalism in 161–2; UNPROFOR 18; war crimes tribunal 40; ‘wolves’ 36 Croatian Defence Council (HVO) see HVO (Croatian Defence Council) Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) see HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union) CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) 16, 108; see also OSCE
Cyprus 13 Czechoslovakia 44, 47 Dayton Peace Accords (DPA) 19, 174; confederative and consociational structures 85–6; and Croatia 4, 184; ends embargo 125; impact of 38–9, 75; military and police forces 64; Miloševiæ 22, 125–6; possibility of success 39, 65; see also Bosnia del Re, Emmanuela 25, 196, 200, 203, 204 Democratic Opposition of Serbia 130 Denitch, Bogdan 162 Dimitrijevic, Vojin 124 Dinkiæ, Mladjan 122–3 diplomacy: coercive diplomacy 19, 120–1, 131; preventive diplomacy 106–11; war criminals and 38; and Yugoslav wars 16–17 Dragoviæ-Soso, Jasna 25, 195 dysfunctionalism see trauma and dysfunctionalism Eastern Rumelia 9, 10 EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) 4–6, 24, 175 ECMM (European Community Monitoring Mission) 16 economic cooperation 179–80 Egypt 14 electricity: integration 179–80 embedded living 198–200 emotional literacy 160, 165 ethnic cleansing 33, 36, 63, 198–9 EUAM (European Union Administration of Mostar) 69, 70, 73–4 Euro-Atlantic community: 62–5; excommunist countries 66n1; integration 177; Stability Pact Initiative 181–2; see also NATO; European Union Eurocorps 97 Europe Agreements 24, 173, 185, 186 European Commission 23, 161–2 European Community Monitoring Mission see ECMM (European Community Monitoring Mission) European Union (EU): accession to 1, 24, 86, 172, 173, 177, 187–9, 190; ‘bottom-up’ policies 40; civic values 40; conditionality 4–5; energy for democracy programme 129; integration attitudes 181–2; Macedonia 111, 113, 115; mediation by 16, 62; nature of 32–3; ‘potential candidate’status 187, 188; regional approach 39, 174; Royaumont Process 174; security policy 184–5; Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP) 181–2; ‘troika’ dispatched to Slovenia 15–16;
220
Index
‘virtual membership’ of 1–2, 188; see also Euro-Atlantic community Fabrika Duhana Mostar 81 Farer, Tom 50 Financial Commission of Control 4 Fischer, Joschka, 175, 181 ‘foreign models’ 154–7 France 7, 33, 91–2 Frenki’s Boys 36 Frowick, Robert 108, 112 FRY (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) see Yugoslavia FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) see Macedonia (FYROM) Gardner, Katy 196 Geertz, Clifford 194 General Amnesty in Yugoslavia 91 Geneva Conventions 55 Genocide Convention 48 geo-political policies 32, 33–4, 38 Georgievski, Ljubco 112, 113 Germany 9, 12, 16, 17, 33, 34, 35, 47, 81, 178, 199 Gligorov, Kiro 105, 108–9 Gligorov, Vladimir 178 globalization 34–5 Gordon, Thomas 163 Great Britain 7, 8, 9, 12–13, 33 great powers 3, 6, 7, 16 Greater Croatia project 86 Greece: assistance 12–13; civil war (1947–9) 12; cooperation 178; democracy returns 13; dictatorship 13; in EU 13, 172; independence 5, 8; in NATO 172; nonintervention ideology 14–15; Sofia Declaration 174; sovereignty 11 Greece–Turkey war (1897) 4 Guest, Ian 98 Had ic, Miroslav 25, 195 Hague Conferences (1899, 1907) 8, 28n36 Have a Nice Day (Ugrešic) 163–4 HCNM (High Commissioner on National Minorities) 108–9 HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union) 35, 68, 72–4, 76–9, 82–6 Herceg-Bosna 78, 86 Hercegovina-Neretva Canton 72, 77, 79, 84 Higgins, Rosalyn 45 history of intervention 7–15 HNS (Croatian National Congress) 79, 85 Hoffman, Stanley 42–3, 46 Holbrooke, Richard 19, 53, 66n10, 126 Holland 39, 49, 86, 176 Hombach, Bodo 175 Hoxha, Enver 14 Human Rights Watch 90, 93
humanitarian intervention 42–56; aid prolongs war 19; aims and means 55; consent for 43–4; consistency 49–50, 64; criteria 50–5, 64; definition 42–4; domestic government failure 52; inappropriate means 63–4; justification of 46–9; last resort 52–3; legal status 44–6; national interests 48–9; opposition to 43–4; refugees 49; sovereignty 46–8; support for 53–4; UNHCR convoys 18; see also psychosocial intervention Hungary 44, 47, 175, 191n4 HVO (Croatian Defence Council) 66, 77–8, 83–4 ICFY (International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia) 16, 107; ICFY Working Group on Ethnic and National Communities 107, 108, 116 ICISS (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty) 42, 50–2 ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) 51 ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal) see International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia ID cards 147, 201 IFOR (Implementation Force) 20 Ilinden Uprising (1903) 10 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 5, 23–4, 35, 174, 175 India 14, 45 informal economy 36–7 institution building 147–8 ‘international community’ 27n22, 146–8 International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia (ICFY) see ICFY (International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia) International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) 4, 39, 40, 52, 80, 129, 162, 208 International Financial Institutions (IFIs) 4–5, 24, 175 International Law 2–4, 13, 43–4, 105; humanitarian intervention and 44–6 International Police Task Force (IPTF) 69 the ‘internationals’ 93–4, 146–8, 156, 198, 204; local concerns and 198–209 intervention: aims of 38–40, 172; alternative language 6; classical and humanitarian 44; concept of 7; definitions of 6, 24, 42–3, 105; interpretations of 33–4; limits of 7–12, 21; local concerns 198–209; philosophies of 32; post-Cold War 15–25; see also civil society development; humanitarian intervention IPTF (International Police Task Force) see International Police Task Force (IPTF)
Index 221 Iraq 48, 56 Italy 7 Jelavic, Ante 84 Jergoviæ, Miljenko 163 Jews, in Romania 11 JNA (Yugoslav National/People’s Army) 35, 60, 65, 130 Jovanovic, Vladislav 92 just cause 50, 55 Kaldor, Mary 25, 195, 203, 205 kanun 137, 148, 210–14, 216n25 Karamanlis, Constantine, 178 Kay, Sean 96 KFOR (Kosovo Force) 61, 91–2, 97 KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army): composition 36; NATO and 60–1; oaths of allegiance 213; Serbian security forces and 21–2, 127; tactics 5, 36, 37 KM (‘convertible mark’) 70 Koschnick, Hans 74, 85 Kosovo: abandoned properties in 89; conflict 22, 55 60–1, 128, 198; crisis 127–30; currency 40; economy of 89; elections (2001) 95, 214; freedom of movement within 91; justice system in 93, 94; ‘The Kosovo Formula’ 95–6; murder investigations 52; NATO in 49–50, 54; OSCE in 22; parallel states 89, 99n7; police 147, 206; political coalition 39–40; Rambouillet conference on 22, 128; refugees 51; revenge attacks 212–13; security 139–40, 205–8, 206, 211; self government 38; Serbian security forces and 21–2; settlement structures 199; status of 3, 18, 208; strategic interest in 67n16; under-funding of NGOs 153–4; ‘weekend’ fighters 35; see also UNMIK (UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo) Kosovo Albanians: aspirations of 65; attitudes to 34, 202; counselling of 163; expulsion of 61; family solidarity 199; Gastarbeiter 199; interethnic coexistence 205–7; and kanun 137, 148, 210–14; non-violent strategy of 37; patriarchal traditions 211–14; refugees 22, 54; return of 199; security 140; Serbs and 199–200; symbolic partition 201; UNMIK and 90–1 Kosovo Egyptians 91, 100n22 Kosovo Serbs 6, 35, 91, 140 Koštunica, Vojislav 91, 130, 131 Kouchner, Bernard 88, 98 KPC (Kosovo Protection Force) 93, 101n40 Krasner, Stephen 3 language and power relations 202–3 law see International Law Laziæ, Mladen 122
Le Roy, Alain 114, 115 League of Nations 7–8 Levitte, Jean David 92 Lewis, David 196 Liberia 54 Littlewood, Roland 210 local concerns: culture 209–14; embedded living 198–200; ‘gaps of concern’ 200–3; nature of 198–200 Macedonia (FYROM): Amnesty Law 119n24; anti-Western sentiments within 6, 113; borders monitored 110; cease fires 111–13; composition of NLA 36; constitutional reforms 115; disarmament of NLA 115; ethnic rights 108–9; HCNM 108–9; insurgency movement (2001) 111; Kosovan refugee crisis 110, 201; local selfgovernment 114–15; NATO 111–12, 115; Ohrid Agreement 6, 38, 39, 113–14, 116, 119n23; OSCE 18, 108; police redeployment within 115, 119n26; preventive diplomacy 106–11, 116; Operation Amber 115; Operation Essential Harvest 115; recognition of 3, 17, 117n1; stabilization missions 9, 10, 173; third party mediation 107, 111–14; and UN 19; under-funding of NGOs 153–4; universities 109, 117n9; UNPREDEP 20, 107, 109–11; UNPROFOR 18 Macedonian Albanians 38, 40, 107, 112 Macedonian Bulgarians 5 Macedonian Serbs 107–8 Mandic, Dragan 79 Markale massacre (1994) 127, 134n48 Markoviæ, Mihailo 124 Markoviæ, Mira 122 McEwen, Yvonne 165–6 Médecins sans Frontières 6, 51, 88 media 83, 179 mental health 164, 167 mercenaries 36 merhamet 210 Merlin, Dino 83 military intervention 43 Miloševiæ–Holbrooke agreement (1998) 21, 53, 66n10 Miloševiæ, Slobodan: on air strikes 54; challenges to 125–6; Dayton Peace Accords and 125–6; extradition 4; humiliation of 122; image of outside Serbia 33; Kosovo Albanians 67n12; Military–Technical Agreement 22; nationalism 34; overthrow of 38; as peace player 62; reinforces control 127; support for 124–5; war crimes tribunal 129 minority returns 72–3 Mitrovica 90, 92, 101n33, 141–2
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Moldova 3, 175, 179, 181 monitors 16, 18, 108, 110 Montenegro 19, 40, 125–6, 163, 183 Mostar: aid 70; bridge-building 71, 86; culture 83; economy 80–1; education 81–3; elections 73–6; evictions 68–9, 74; Gimnazija 82; hydro-electricity 81; integration 69, 71, 75; interior ministries 79; judicial system 80; vehicle license-plate system 70; media 83; municipal districts 73–4; Muslim coalition 76; partition 68–9, 70; policing 78–9, 85; politics 73–80; population figures 68; power-sharing 74–5; reconstruction 70–1; refugees 68–9, 72–3; riots (2001) 85; ruins of 68; schools 82; Siroki Brijeg faction 77; symbolic partition 83, 203; TV station closed 85; universities 82 Mujahadeen 36 Mürzsteg programme (1903) 10, 17 Muslim Armija BiH 68 Muslim-Croat Federation 20, 69, 85–6 national interests 48–9 nationalism, new 33–7 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation): air strikes 1, 19, 22–3, 54, 60–1, 128; attitude to in Kosovo 203; enlargement of 189–90; goals of 47–8, 64; humanitarian organizations and 96; KLA and 60–1; lack of legal mandate 49–50; naval blockade 19; values of 96; vulnerability of in Kosovo 61; zero-casualty strategy 55; see also Euro- Atlantic community natural disasters 52 Navarino, Battle of (1827) 7, 8, 23 New Atlantic Initiative 94 new nationalism see nationalism, new NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations): advocacy and 149; charter 179; ‘foreign models’ 154–7; guidance from 51; influence of 6; in Kosovo 92; problems of 152–4; under-funding of 153–4 NLA (National Liberation Army Macedonia): Amnesty Law 119n24; civilian support for 36; composition of 36; disarmament of 115; occupies Aracinovo 113; ‘peace agreement with DPA and PDP’ 112 Non-Aligned Movement 14 non-intervention 3, 12–15 Norwegian Refugee Council 92 Nowicki, Antoni Marek 206 Nye, Joseph 49 Office of the High Representative (OHR) 20, 69, 78, 165 Ohrid Framework Agreement (2001) 6, 38, 39, 113–14, 116, 119n23 Ojdaniæ, Dragoljub 129
Operation Amber Fox 115 Operation Essential Harvest 115 Orucevic, Safet 74, 77, 84 OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe): 4; in Bosnia 69, 74, 84; in Croatia 20; in Kosovo 22, 92, 94, 128; in Macedonia 18, 107, 108, 111, 113, 115, 119n26, 119n27; media 93; in Moldova 20; in Serbia 126; see also CSCE (Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe) Ottoman Empire 8, 9 Owen, David 16 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount 7 Paniæ, Milan 124 para-military forces 36 Partnership for Peace 61, 66n1 Pavarotti Music Centre 83 peace 33, 158; threats to 45–6, 51, 205–9 peace-keeping missions 15, 39, 44, 85, 97, 108; see also UNMIK; UNPROFOR; UNPREDEP Peæ massacre 128 PHARE programme 138, 173 Phinnemore, David 25, 195, 197 Pirc, Tatjana 96 Poplasen, Nikola 20 Popovski, Vesselin 25, 195 Presevo valley 37 preventive diplomacy 106–11 Prevlaka Peninsula 20 Pristina 140, 202 Prizren 207 Prodi, Romano 1–2, 178, 188 ‘project life’148–51 psychosocial intervention: defining 158–60; efficacy of 165–7; evaluation of 163–4; therapeutic governance 160–1 Pupavac, Vanessa 25, 196, 200, 202 QUANGOs (Quasi-Autonomous NonGovernmental Organizations) 154 Quick Start Programme 177 Raèak massacre 22, 52, 127–8, 134n49 Racan, Ivica 84 Rambouillet Conference on Kosovo (1999) 22, 128 Rapid Reaction Force 19 recognition 3–4 Reconstruction and Return Task Force (RRTF) 69 Red Cross, International Committee of 51 refugees 49, 51, 69, 72–3, 163, 164 Regional Approach 174, 178–81, 179, 182, 185 Regional Cooperation 178–81, 185
Index 223 Renner Company 81 Renner, M. 96 Republika Srpska (RS) 20, 65, 126; see also Bosnian Serbs rights of intervention 7, 42, 50 Roberts, Adam 43, 49, 50, 55 Robertson, George 112 Roma 91, 207 Romania: communism installed 12; Europe Agreements 24, 173; independence 3, 14; Jews as citizens 11; Most-Favoured Nation status 14; National Salvation Front 15; in NATO 189; non-intervention ideology 14–15; revolution 15; 186; Sofia Declaration 174; sovereignty 3, 12; trade pacts 172–3; under-funding of NGOs 153–4 Royaumont Process 174 Rozic, Marko 74 RRTF see Reconstruction and Return Task Force Russia 7, 10, 12, 15, 44, 47, 54, 62 Russo-Turkish war (1877) 8 safe areas 18, 39, 48, 141 sahovnica 78 Sampson, Steven 194, 196, 201, 202, 203 sanctions 19, 38, 121–5, 122 Santa Maria da Feira European Council Meeting (2000) 182 Sarajevo 19, 72, 123 Sava River Agreement (2002) 179 SBiH (Party of Bosnia and Hercegovina) 76, 77 SDA (Party of Democratic Action) 73–4, 76–7 SDP-BiH (Social Democrat Party) 73–4, 76 security: anthropology of 139–43; assessments of 140–1; CFSP 184–5; civil society and 138–9, 143–5; impact of foreign models 154–7; social policies and see psychosocial intervention Serbia: aid to opposition 129–30; air strikes against 22, 38,120, 128; elections (1992) 124; ‘grey economy’ 122; hyperinflation 122–3; JUL (United Yugoslav Left) 122; local elections (1996) 125–6; Macedonia and 108; mass demonstrations 125–6; Miloševiæ regime 121; October revolution 130, 131; public opinion 127, 135n66; Raèak massacre 127–8; referendum on Kosovo 127; regime change and 131; sanctions against 19, 121–5; strikes (1996) 125; and war crimes tribunal 40 Serbian Radical Party 127 Serbian Socialist Party (SPS) 90 Serbs 12, 36, 38, 39 SFOR see Stabilization Force (SFOR) Siani-Davies, Peter 195, 197, 205
Sierra Leone 54 Simmel, G. 198, 200 Sintra Peace Implementation Council 39 Siroki Brijeg faction 77 Skopje 108 Skoro, Mustafa 74 Slovenia: conflict 16, 32; Europe Agreements 173, 185; independence 15–16, 17, 65; in NATO 189 Socially Owned Enterprises 89–90 Sofia Declaration (1996) 174 Sokalski, Henryk 110 Solana, Javier 96, 112, 113 Somalia 44, 54 Soros Foundation 6, 153 South East Europe University (SEEU) 109, 117n9, 117n10 South East European Cooperation Process (SEECP) 174, 177 Southeast European Cooperative Initiative (SECI) 174, 179 sovereignty 3–4, 11, 14; international commission 42, 50–2; modernization 46–8 SPS (Socialist Party of Serbia) 121, 124 Srebrenica 18, 19, 39, 49, 65 SRSG (Special Representative of the Secretary General) 88 Stabilisation and Association Agreements (SAAs) 24–25, 39, 181–90 Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP) 173, 181–2 Stability Pact Initiative 6, 9, 39, 173–8; EU membership and 181, 188; problems of 180–1; psychosocial intervention and 165; Quick Start Programme 177; regional cooperation 178–81 Stabilization Force (SFOR) 31n76, 69, 85, 97, 141 Steiner, Michael 88, 90–1 Stoel, Max van der 108–9 Stubbs, Paul 138 Study of War (Wright) 159 Summerfield, Derek 165–6 Suncokret 165 symbolic partition 83, 201–2, 203, 204 Szeged Process 175, 191n10 Taiwan 110 Tanzania 45 Talbott, Strobe 22 Tetovo 109 Tetovo University 117n9 therapeutic governance 160–1 Thessaloniki Summit (1997) 174 Thompson, Mark 93 Tito 33–4 Tito–Stalin split (1948) 14 Tomic, Neven 83, 84 top-down policies see geo-political policies
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totalitarianism 33–4 Toynbee, Arnold 33 trade 172–3, 178–9, 180, 182, 185–6 Trajkovski, Boris 113 Transnistria 3, 20, 180 trauma and dysfunctionalism 160, 161–2, 164, 165–6, 210 Truman Doctrine 12–13 Tudjman, Franjo 34, 35 Turkey 13, 174 Turkey–Greece war (1897) 4 Tuzla 36 Ugrešiæ, Dubravka 163, 168, 202 ultima ratio criterion 52–3 UN Charter 44–8 UN Human Rights Committee 54 UN (United Nations): authorizations from 53–4; in Bosnia and Croatia 16 18–19, 45–6; intervention rules 2, 46–7, in Kosovo crisis 64; Resolution 1199 45–6, 51; Resolution 1244 38, 39, 95, 96–8; Resolution 1441 56; Resolution 752 123; use of force 44–5 UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) 159, 165 UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) 51, 69 UNICEF (UN Children’s Fund) 158–9, 163, 165 unilateral intervention 8, 12–15 United Yugoslav Left (JUL) 122 universities 82, 109, 117n9, 202 UNMIK (UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo): approving views 95–6; civil administration 88–90; coordination with OCSE and EU 92; critical views 90–4; extremists and 91; juridical reform 208; Kosovo Albanians and 90–1; Kosovo Serbs and 91; reconstruction strategy 98; Resolution 1244 88–90, 95; self interest 93–4; values 96–8 UNMOP (UN Mission of Observers in Prevlaka) 20 UNOSOM (UN Operation in Somalia) 44 UNPREDEP (UN Preventive Deployment Mission) 20, 107, 109–11 UNPROFOR (UN Protection Force) 18, 44 UNTAES (UN Transitional Administration for Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium) 20
USA: on air strikes 38; criticises UNMIK 92; dominance of 62; fails to help Serbian opposition 126; geo-political approach 32; Greek interventions 12–13; interpretation of wars 33; ‘lift and strike’ policy 17; models of psychosocial intervention 166; ‘new world order’ 62; troops withdrawal 95–5; see also Euro-Atlantic community uti posseditis juris principle 17 Vance-Owen Plan (1993) 16, 17 Vietnam 45, 47, 48 Vratusa-Zunjic, Vera 94 Waever, Ole 2 Walker, William 128 Warsaw Pact 14, 59 Washington Agreement (1994) 69 Washington Post 95–6 ‘weekend’ fighters 35 Weine, Steven 210 Wessely, Simon 166 West, Rebecca 33 WEU (Western European Union) 19 White, Nigel 53–4 World Bank 23, 81, 86, 165, 174, 175, 176, 209 Wright, Quincey 159 Yannis, Alexandros 95 Yugoslavia: coercive policies and 120–1; communism 12, 35; diplomacy 16–17; economy destroyed 37; globalization 34; human rights violations 59; images of 33; informal economy 37; international intervention 15–19; non-intervention ideology 14–15; political mobilisation 36; and recognition 16, 17–18; regional security 61; sanctions against 19; SAA 183; Sofia Declaration 174; sovereignty 38; Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP) 173; ‘structural adjustment’ 34; suspended from OSCE 4; trade pacts 172–3. see also Montenegro; Kosovo; Serbia Zdravo da ste 165 Zenica 36 zero-casualty strategy 55 Zimmerman, Warren 12
