March 4, 2000U.N.'s Kosovo Chief Warns That Mission Is 'Barely Alive'
By STEVEN ERLANGER
PRISTINA, Kosovo, March 2 -- At the end of January, the director of the United Nations government in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, suddenly rushed off to Paris and Brussels. The reason, he explained in an interview here, was insolvency.
"We had 0.00 German marks in our bank account," Mr. Kouchner said, exaggerating only slightly. The entire United Nations mission established to administer Kosovo after the war last year was to run out of money on Feb. 3 -- it requires $325 million this year to pay workers, teachers and doctors, manage utilities and traffic lights, and pay police officers and prosecutors.
The French came up with an emergency transfusion of $3 million, and the Americans helped, and the deadline was extended to Feb. 23, officials say. Two weeks ago, at a Western meeting in Berlin, the bankruptcy date was March 3.
Now, with some $16 million in the bank, it is March 23. The same Western governments that belong to NATO and fought the war to drive the Serbs out of Kosovo are clearly reluctant to finance the day-to-day operations of the Western protectorate they installed to govern until local authority can be re-established.
"This is an absurd, humiliating and self-defeating way to run anything, let alone a project that embodies the prestige of NATO and the West," said a senior United Nations official who works for Mr. Kouchner. "Running Kosovo is hard enough without running around the world with a begging bowl."
Mr. Kouchner himself is livid on the point. "It's like being on a drip, a resuscitation bottle for the whole society," said Mr. Kouchner, a medical doctor who started Doctors Without Borders. "It keeps us barely alive month to month, but only if we reduce the dosage to the minimum for survival, so we don't collapse."
On Monday, Mr. Kouchner and Gen. Klaus Reinhardt, the military commander of the NATO-led peacekeeping forces, will report together on the state of Kosovo to the United Nations Security Council.
It is not expected to be an easy ride. Moscow and Beijing are particularly critical of NATO's management of Kosovo and its inability to prevent continuing ethnic violence and attempts at ethnic purging of the remaining Serb, Gypsy and Muslim Slav populations.
General Reinhardt is annoyed almost as much as Mr. Kouchner over such criticism and the ongoing problems with the mission. The difficulties of the United Nations-led civilian side -- its inability to pay people, find enough international police and prosecutors and jailers and judges -- means an added burden on his troops, who are already tired of playing cop on the beat.
"The problem for Bernard Kouchner is that he doesn't get the money to pay for what he knows he needs and wants for Kosovo," General Reinhardt said. "But the international community -- the same governments that decided to get us here -- doesn't give him what we know he needs, and it has a direct impact on my soldiers."
Officials here explain that governments seem happier to fund projects like post-war reconstruction. But governments do not like to fund other governments. "There's no glory in paying salaries," an official said. "The defense and foreign ministers who backed the war are not the finance and treasury ministers who have to fund the peace or the interior ministers who have to provide the police. They say, 'Not my money. Not my policemen.' "
The European Union in particular is very slow to get its pledged money through the bureaucracy and into United Nations bank accounts, the officials say. The Europeans have promised about $45 million for the budget this year, but it hasn't arrived. They have also promised about $340 million for reconstruction, a European commitment, but that money and the approval process for projects have also been extremely slow, officials say.
The total budget for the United Nations government here, excluding state enterprises like the electrical company and telephone service, which should one day earn money when they start charging citizens again, is about $240 million for this year. Including these state enterprises, the budget is about $325 million. Earnings this year from new customs duties, license fees and taxes that are being progressively introduced are expected to total $100 million.
But there will be an estimated budget gap this year of about $120 million that must be filled, and so far, governments have pledged about $90 million, still $30 million short. But they have delivered only a tiny fraction of what they've pledged, causing Mr. Kouchner to run around the world begging for cash.
Ironically, the sudden ethnic violence that began a month ago in the divided town of Mitrovica has shaken Western governments and allowed Mr. Kouchner to argue that the status quo is a recipe for disaster. It has also allowed him to ask more urgently for the promised international police and for more international prosecutors and judges -- at least 26 -- given the clear intimidation of local legal authorities by accused criminals and their apparent difficulty, in the current climate, of delivering ethnically unbiased decisions.
Mr. Kouchner, stung by criticism that there is no real system of justice or deterrence in Kosovo, plans a new court, to be headed by international judges with local participation, to deal with crimes stemming from ethnic hatred and the war. Local judges and prosecutors will deal with less sensitive, more ordinary crimes.
But even in Mitrovica, one international judge quit because of difficult living and working conditions, while another quit but has been convinced to stay.
The United Nations resolution authorizing the Western presence in Kosovo, No. 1244, comes up for renewal in June, and while Moscow and Beijing are unlikely to veto continuing the mission, they are expected to use the debate to urge closer consultation with Belgrade, which still maintains formal sovereignty over Kosovo.
Even the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, recently called the situation in Kosovo "very worrying," saying: "Bernard Kouchner and his team have done an admirable job. The situation is difficult. I know there has been some criticism. But I believe that, given what we inherited, he has done quite well."
In fact, Washington and London did not want the United Nations, but rather the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, to run Kosovo. United Nations officials here now complain that they had barely 10 days' notice that they would run the province, a compromise worked out at the end of the war in the Security Council with Russia and China, which were negotiating, in effect, for President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.
The Anglo-Saxon dislike of the United Nations is one problem, officials here concede, a dislike somewhat confirmed by Mr. Kouchner's slow start. At the same time, one of his senior aides said, "there was no way to make a fast start without money or personnel, and money covers over a lot of mistakes, but we didn't have that luxury."
Mr. Kouchner has also been criticized for spending too much time negotiating with local politicians to win their cooperation in a form of shared executive. But the aide said: "With one-quarter the authorized staff and one-tenth the necessary money, there was no alternative" to cooperation with the powers on the ground.
Governments that promised officials, money and police officers -- and now promise judges -- were very slow to respond. And until recently, Mr. Kouchner was unable to pay salaries or pensions here -- simply low stipends, not even monthly ones, that barely kept people alive.
Even so, while local judges and lawyers are being paid about 300 German marks (about $165) a month by the United Nations, international agencies like the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and aid agencies are able to pay local translators at least 1,000 marks a month, or $555, more than three times more.
There is also little money for needed garbage pickup, road repair and all the other services that the Serbian state once provided, however inefficiently.
Money is crucial, Mr. Kouchner said, then gave a weary sigh. "But unfortunately we can't buy tolerance."Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
senden