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KOSOVO - Official U.S. Government Documents
For more information regarding the latest policy statements and other materials related to the Kosovo crisis, visit http://www.usia.gov/regional/eur/balkans/kosovo/
***********************************************************Transcript: State Department Special Briefing on Kosovo, July 26
(Effective new justice system, demining are aid priorities)Washington -- The establishment of a new justice system in Kosovo, including effective courts and an effective indigenous police force, as well as the clearing of land mines and unexploded ordnance there, will be key priorities of the international aid program for the war-torn region, according to James Dobbins, special advisor on Kosovo to the President and Secretary of State.
Ambassador Dobbins told reporters at a July 26 State Department briefing that while the United States is prepared to pledge up to $500 million in humanitarian aid to Kosovo, the final amount it provides will be contingent "on a clear assessment of the need and on a confirmation that others will also do their part."
An international conference is scheduled for July 28 in Brussels to organize worldwide aid for Kosovo. Some 50 donor countries are expected to send representatives.
The U.S. contribution will help provide immediate humanitarian aid, such as food, shelter, repair to basic infrastructure, health care, sanitation, trauma counseling, the establishment of an indigenous police force, and the removal of land mines and unexploded ordinance, according to Dobbins.
He said a key priority is the establishment of a court system and an effective police force. He noted that the United Nations intends to deploy 3,100 international civilian police in Kosovo -- the largest operation of its kind in history. The United States will contribute 450 officers. All will have arrest authority and most will carry sidearms.
The goal, Dobbins said, is eventually to replace the international police with a Kosovar police force made up of both Kosovar Albanians and Serbs. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) will establish a police training academy in August near Pristina. The hope is to train about 350 officers in each five to seven week course, after which the officers will begin their duties under the surveillance of United Nations personnel.
Another priority is to clear land mines and unexploded ordinance. Eric Newsom of the State Departments's Political-Military Bureau told the briefing that there is no reliable estimate on the number of land mines that need to be cleared. But there are, he said, an estimated 11,000 unexploded bombs from the NATO air strikes. Both types of explosives have killed at least 20 people and injured another 150 -- mostly children.
"These numbers are disturbing, but they are not nearly as high as they could be, considering the huge number of returnees into Kosovo," Newsom observed. "We believe that is due in large part to an enormous effort that was made for mine awareness in the refugee camps" by UNICEF and other international organizations.
Seventy-five U.S. ordinance experts are now working in Kosovo, Newsom said. Because of the constraints of winter weather, their efforts will probably end in October, to be resumed with the help of U.S. Department of Defense personnel next spring, he said.Following is the State Department transcript:
(begin transcript)
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the SpokesmanJuly 26, 1999
ON-THE-RECORD BRIEFING
BY AMBASSADOR JAMES DOBBINS, SPECIAL ADVISOR TO THE PRESIDENT AND THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR KOSOVO AND DAYTON IMPLEMENTATION, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR POPULATION, REFUGEES AND MIGRATION JULIA TAFT, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR POLITICAL-MILITARY AFFAIRS ERIC NEWSOM, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND LABOR HAROLD KOH, AND PRINCIPAL DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR INTERNATIONAL NARCOTICS AND LAW ENFORCEMENT AFFAIRS WILLIAM BROWNFIELD ON CIVIL IMPLEMENTATION IN KOSOVO
Washington, D.C.
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: This is going to be a fairly busy week for the Balkans and American policy. There are -- in fact, have already begun -- a number of meetings in Europe, beginning today. A meeting of political directors of all of the countries that are going to be participating in the Sarajevo-Balkans Stability Conference on Friday (July 30). Tomorrow there will be two meetings. One will be a meeting at the experts level of the high-level steering group, which is the group set up by the G-7 finance ministers to advise the UN on basic macro-economic policy issues with respect to Kosovo and the Balkans. There will also be a meeting of aid officials from the largest donor states.
Both of these two meetings are intended to prepare for a pledging conference, which will be held on Wednesday in Brussels. This is the first of the pledging conferences. It's focused specifically on Kosovo and on immediate human needs. There will be in excess of 50 donors who will be represented at that conference.
On Thursday, as I think has already been announced, the Secretary of State is going to be visiting Kosovo. And then, of course, on Friday, the President will be visiting Sarajevo for the Balkan Stability Conference.
The White House is going to do the set-up for the Sarajevo and the broader Balkan Stability Conference. We thought we would get together with you today to do the Kosovo related material.
The United States, at the pledging conference on Wednesday, will indicate that it is prepared to provide up to $500 million for immediate human needs. These will include food, shelter, winterization, assistance to refugees not yet back in Kosovo, repair to basic infrastructure, mine clearance and unexploded ordnance clearance, healthcare, sanitation, trauma counseling, human rights and war crimes assistance, and related programs.
There also will be money for the establishment of an indigenous local police force and a pledge for the start-up of basic services. This money is being provided contingent on a clear assessment of the need and on a confirmation that others will also do their part.
The bulk of this money is being provided in order to kick-start and get moving on the civilian implementation of the Security Council resolution and the peacekeeping operation in Kosovo. The United Nations already -- the United Nations and other elements of UNMIK -- that is the UN mission in Kosovo -- already have 700 people on the ground, including 160 police. They've appointed already 37 judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys, and there is a continued flow of civilian personnel going in to fill positions within the UN administration.
It's worth noting, in evaluating the pace at which civilian implementation is establishing itself that all 700 of these people six weeks ago had other jobs doing other things and had to be taken away from other things to be moved to Kosovo. Unlike the military, neither the United Nations nor the United States Government has a ready pool of reserves that is it able to dispatch when these peacekeeping operations arise.
On the military side, thousands -- indeed tens of thousands -- of the troops now in Kosovo knew they were going to Kosovo months before they got there. They'd been training for it. Many of them -- well in excess of 10,000 of them -- had been located immediately on the borders of Kosovo, ready to go in. As I said, they'd been training and preparing for it.
On the civilian side it's a more individual process. Individuals, not units, are assigned; and, as noted, each of them has to be taken away from something else either by the international organization they're working for or the government that they're working for. Indeed, many of them are recruited from private life to go to these positions.
The main elements of civilian implementation fall into a variety of fields that are supported by the US Government. That was the reason why I asked a number of my colleagues to join us here today, because this is a very broad effort involving half a dozen bureaus within the State Department and a number of different agencies. There is the humanitarian assistance, which is led in Kosovo by UNHCR, which forms one of the four pillars of the UN mission in Kosovo -- the others being formed by the UN, the OSCE and the European Union. The UNHCR forms the humanitarian pillar and it is supported on the US side primarily by our bureau here in the State Department for Population and Refugees, headed by Julia Taft, and by USAID.
Another major element of civilian implementation the United States is heavily engaged in is support for the police and the courts. The United Nations intends to deploy 3,100 international civilian police into Kosovo. This will be the largest international civilian police operation in history. Of those 3,100 approximately international police, about 1,000 will be more heavily armed SWAT teams, crowd control teams, and about 1,800 will be individually recruited police officers and then another 200 or so will be border police. The United States has committed to provide a total of 450 of these 3,100 police.
Simultaneously with the deployment of an international police force, we will begin training a Kosovar police force. The training will be done by the OSCE. The United States is taking a lead in this effort. An American has been appointed as the head of the police academy, the first class of which should begin in the month of August. The intention will be, over the next year, to train and deploy 3,000 such recruits.
Another area is mine clearance and unexploded ordnance clearance. This is an area in which the Political-Military Bureau here in the State Department has the lead and is also receiving support and funding from the Department of Defense.
War crimes and human rights related issues are ones in which the United States is supporting both the UNMIK and the ICTY. There are programs included in the pledge that we are making to reverse ethnic cleansing, to being the process of documentation, to create an ombudsman position. We will be providing over $20 million to the ICTY and to war crimes related activities. This includes support that has been received both from the FBI and from the US intelligence community.
The core of the UN's effort is civil administration; it is the creation of indigenous institutions for self-government. The UN has already created a transitional council made up o the leaders of the various ethnic groups and political parties in Kosovo. It will begin a process of voter registration and move toward local and general elections.
The United States will make a pledge also of $4 million for start-up costs of essential services while the Kosovo administration begins to acquire the capability of securing revenues and paying for essential services through its own budget.
The fourth pillar of the UN mission in Kosovo is labeled "reconstruction." This is a bit of a misnomer because it needs to go considerably beyond reconstruction if Kosovo is to be put on sound economic footing. This is an area in which the European Union has the lead and in which we expect the Europeans to provide the bulk of the funding, although we will make contributions and be supportive.
The high-level steering group -- the group that I mentioned earlier -- which is set up by the G-7 treasury ministers is a focal point for the provision of policy advice to the United Nations on issues like what kind of currency should Kosovo use; what kind of banking system should it have; how should it raise taxes and revenues; what should its program of privatization be; how can it become an attractive venue for investment. These policy decisions as much as anything will determine, from an economic standpoint, the success of this operation.
Finally, as I mentioned, the Secretary will be going to Kosovo on Thursday. Her schedule is not yet complete, but I anticipate she will meet with General Jackson, the commander of KFOR. She will meet with Bernard Kouchner, the Secretary General's Special Representative and the head of the UN mission. She will, I am sure, meet with the commander of the US forces and also with political leaders from the Kosovo community.
I'd be glad to answer questions or I'd like to have some of my colleagues address some of the specifics of activities and pledges that the United States will be making in the area of civil administration and immediate human needs.QUESTION: You say your $500 million pledge is contingent on others doing their part. Can you flesh that out a little bit, please?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: Well, this is a standard statement. The assumption is that there will be comparable urgency and priority given to it on the part of other donors and that the assessment that's being done by the World Bank and the European Union, which has not yet been completed, will confirm that contributions on this score are necessary.
The pledging conference on Wednesday will be the first real occasion in order to gauge the degree to which others are contributing comparably.Q: A couple of years ago, the White House published a decision directive, which I think was number 56, which set out the terms and criteria for managing endeavors of this kind -- complex humanitarian intervention -- based partly on your own lessons learned from Haiti. One of the things it specified was that before going into this, everybody would know what it was going to cost and whose money was involved and who was going to pay for it. Would you talk a little bit about how this operation fits into the rules laid down by PDD 56 and who knows where's the notwithstanding money?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: Well, I'd say several things. First, I think we have learned a lot -- some of it from difficult experience, based on earlier peace-keeping efforts: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia. The relatively rapid pace at which the UN is deploying on this occasion, as opposed to, for instance, in Bosnia; the degree to which various elements of the US Government, the international community recognize their respective tasks and are not arguing about who should be doing what; the quick move by the United Nations to appoint judges and prosecutors -- something they would have spent a year arguing whether they had the capacity to do, only a year or two ago; the size of the police force. For instance, we're deploying 1,000 more international police into Kosovo than we did to Bosnia, which is two times bigger in population, had a much more difficult and bloody war and is also geographically much bigger.
So, in many ways, we're learning a lot of cumulative lessons. I think that this is also reflected in the degree of prior planning that we've been doing and that others, including other international organizations, have been doing.
The money that we're pledging actually is money that was provided by the Congress in the supplemental passed in April, which showed a good deal of provision on the part of both the Administration and the Congress to put up adequate funds fairly early to deal even then with the situation that one couldn't be sure in what direction it was going to go. Within, I think, a week of the Security Council resolutions being passed, we had, under the Political-Military Bureau's leadership here, done a very detailed, 50-page implementation plan for civil implementation. It wasn't us -- we're not doing civil implementation -- the United Nations was; but we had a plan that we could go up and brief them in some detail with timelines, with benchmarks and with proposals. And I think, whether as a result of our plan or decisions of their own made on the same -- following similar analysis -- the United Nations has moved very consistently with what our planning documents recommended. I do believe that the fact that we had a fairly detailed political-military plan that we could present and brief to the United Nations and to other key allies in those early days did help channel the process.Q: On the issue of the establishment of a police academy, can you give us an idea of how many nations and which nations, and where will it be established?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: Let me ask Bill Brownfield to answer that. The whole issue of the police and courts and prison systems are handled in this department by the INL bureau -- what does INL stand for, Bill?
DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY BROWNFIELD: International Narcotics and Law Enforcement.
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: And they are the ones who are both overseeing our programs and supporting the UN. And Randy Beers and Bill have both been up at the United Nations virtually weekly as well as to Kosovo -- in the case of Randy, I believe -- in order to oversee our aspects of it.
DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY BROWNFIELD: Drugs and thugs is what we originally were; we have since learned civilian policing since the Haiti and Bosnia adventures. May I point out that this is still a work in progress, but a snapshot of where are on police training right now is as follows. They have identified -- and they in this instance is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe -- OSCE -- which has responsibility for the pillar that includes police training. They have identified a training site in the town of Vucitrn, approximately 20 kilometers, 12, 12-and-a-half miles northwest of Pristina. It is now being tentatively occupied, or at least the first teams have gone in to make the final engineering determinations for whatever infrastructure refurbishments and renovations would be required.
The hope is to begin the first bit of training as early as possible, and, in all likelihood, in the month of August. The first tranche of the training would actually be training the trainers; and that is to say bringing in, at this stage, between 40 and 90 Americans and we would hope another roughly equivalent number of other countries' police trainers, who would be overwhelmingly Western European and Canadian, to train them up in a course that would be approximately two weeks' duration, and then to begin to train, as early thereafter as the physical infrastructure will permit, locally recruited Kosovars to serve as local Kosovar police.
The first training class would probably be somewhere in the vicinity of 150 in number, and then as the additional classes build up, we would hope to be able to train as many as 350 at a time. The objective is to give them a basic -- very basic -- five-week to seven-week training course and then for them to be deployed into the field and monitored and continue to basically see police work in the field before. At the end of this process, we would hope to have 3,000 local, Kosovar police trained and ready to deploy definitively as Kosovar police in a 12 to 24-month time frame.Q: That's in addition to another 3,000 police?
DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY BROWNFIELD: Yes.
Q: Which will include SWAT team members and all that?
DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY BROWNFIELD: If I can clarify, I think you're connecting two things that Jim has said. What Jim was describing initially was the international police force. These are non-Kosovo people, roughly 3,000 to 3,100. I am describing what will eventually be the local Kosovar police, who, as they deploy, obviously, the requirement and the need for the international police will lesson and, in theory, will eventually get to the point where we have very few international police as the local Kosovars take over their own policing.
Q: (Inaudible.)
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: No, I mean, there will be Serbs as well. There are already some applicants who are Serbs; although at this point, the overwhelming number is ethnic Albanian. But we would hope to have a police force that reflects the population as a whole. The two are additive, although, as Bill said, at some point the international police will fall, once you actually have a fully trained Kosovar police force. But for some period you're probably going to have both; that is, 3,000 of one and 3,000 of the other.
Q: Realistically, how many Serbs do you expect eventually to be in the 3,000 local police?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: As I say, I think you'll get a representative sampling of the population; so it depends on how many Serbs ultimately stay. I just don't know. There were something like 15 percent of the population at the end of the conflict, and it's said that as many as half of them have left. But we're anxious that they feel secure and able to come back.
Q: These two different groups of police, as the indigenous police are trained, will work together for some period of time?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: The indigenous police will work under the supervision of the United Nations. They will not be an independent force. They will be under the supervision of the United Nations until there are elections and a fully functioning Kosovar Government is set up a year or 18 months from now, at which point they will gradually -- once they are fully trained and certified -- will revert to the control of locally elected officials.
Q: But there will be, for some time, an integration of the foreign police and the internal?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: One will monitor and supervise the other, if that's what you mean by integration. They won't be a single force; they'll be two different forces, one of which will monitor and supervise the other.
Q: One to the UN and one to the OSCE?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: Sorry?
Q: One group reporting to the UN and one reporting to the OSCE?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: No. As soon as the training is finished they will be turned over to the UN and the UN will supervise the Kosovo police force. The OSCE will do the training.
Q: Another subject -- are you ready for it?
Q: When you went into Bosnia at the international police, did you send SWAT teams and crowd control specialists there, or were they more generalists?
DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY BROWNFIELD: As Jim said earlier on, there was a longer period of time before Bosnia was fully staffed up. It is now and it does include within the IPTF the so-called MSU -- the multi-national specialized unit -- and this is, in essence, the equivalent of their security reaction team under the control of the IPTF commander. I think by and large they are Italian Carabineri, who are paramilitary who have both law enforcement and quasi-military responsibilities in Italy. But this is the concept that they have in Bosnia as well, and eventually the Kosovo operation would look very similar. It's that sort of individual that they're trying to recruit.
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: I could be wrong because I was only following Bosnia but I think we're probably about a year ahead of where we were in Bosnia in terms of the speed at which this is going and the concept.
Q: Can you give us an update on mine clearance -- where that stands?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: Yes. Let me have Eric Newsom, head of our Political-Military Bureau talk about both, and maybe he'll say a word about unexploded ordnance as well as mine clearance; it's technically a different thing.
ASSISTANT SECRETARY NEWSOM: Let me just give you a little status report. First of all, we're still not certain of the severity of the problem. It is clearly going to be severe, but it may not be as bad as we first thought. We do have maps that were turned over to us by the Serbian Army and the places where it laid mines, but we don't have any information provided by the other parties. This is of land mines planted. Then there's the other problem of the so-called UXO -- unexploded ordnance. This is unexploded bombs left over from the NATO bombings. There's not an actual count, but a rough estimate is around 11,000 unexploded munitions; the vast bulk of these being small bomblets from cluster bombs.
There so far have been confirmed reports of approximately 100 land mine incidents and UXO related incidents in Kosovo, with 20 fatalities. Given the probable number of unreported incidents, we would guess it's probably on the order of 150-170 incidents thus far. Of these, 30 percent of the victims have been children under the age of 14. About 58 percent of the casualties have been from land mine explosions, 40 percent from UXO explosions and 2 percent from booby traps.
These numbers are disturbing but they're not nearly as high as they could be considering the huge number of returnees into Kosovo. We believe that is due, in large part, to an enormous effort which was made for mine awareness in the refugee camps both by the United States, working through UNICEF, and by a number of other countries and international organizations made a very large effort to brief the refugees in the camps in Albania and Macedonia before they returned. We believe that has had a real effect in holding down the casualties.
As far as the United States' part in the overall international effort there, we have sent in 75 people. They all arrived last week; they are now engaged in operational demining activities. They're the largest single contribution for demining operations. They have begun work in an area north of Pristina. The principal -- or in fact, the problem they have found in this area is not land mines, but unexploded ordnance. So today they began operations in clearing the UXO. You use basically the same techniques, which is basically to blow up the ordnance in place. So they have begun doing that.
Ultimately, the Department of Defense will take the primary responsibility for UXO clearance. We, the State Department Political-Military Bureau, are in discussions with them right now on exactly how to mesh their UXO responsibilities with our overall responsibilities for land mine clearance. Given the lateness of the season, land mine and UXO clearance really can't go much beyond October. They will probably not be able to mount much of an effort at what remains of the season. Their focus will really be on next spring.
In the meantime, we expect that they will provide us some assistance to our own effort to do UXO clearance on what remains of the season; plus also concentrate on further efforts to educate people on what to do when you come across this unexploded ordnance, which is basically stay away from it and inform somebody.Q: I wanted to ask, on a different subject, the refugees -- specifically the internally displaced persons. If I could ask Ms. Taft, how many did it look like there were up there? What kind of shape were they in when they came out? And is there going to be sufficient food produced indigenously in Kosovo for all those refugees that have come back, or what's the situation?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY TAFT: For the past couple of months, we had thought there were about 350,000 internally displaced persons inside of Kosovo. This was our best estimate based on satellite phones and communication from people who were leaving to go into Albania and Macedonia.
When we got in there, though, it was quite interesting because there weren't large pockets of internally displaced persons. We had thought that there were groups of 100,000 in different places; but they weren't there. What the phenomenon was, was that people would leave from their little villages and go up to the hills and hide and then come back down as soon as it was safe to do so. So we don't have a large displaced population that was malnourished. Although they were suffering from lack of food, it was no famine situation. They are now being taken care of in the assistance programs.
With regard to the amount of food that is available, the World Food Program has organized with the assistance of donors -- particularly the United States -- enough food to feed 80 percent of the population for the next several months. Already the estimates are that the case load will probably go down to about 60 percent because fields are being planted, there are harvests coming in and it looks good. There will still be dependency until next summer of some sort. But the World Food Program has assured us that the pipeline is good.
Now, amongst the pledges that we will be making tomorrow -- and this isn't contingent on any other donations -- but just to let you know. The US is going to be putting in about $100 million, through USDA and Food for Peace, for food that will be going for the assistance programs in Kosovo. So that will cover about 50 percent of all the food requirements.Q: Just one other thing. You say that the displaced people who were in the hills, coming and going to get their food stocks, there are not many of them that are famine-ridden?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY TAFT: No, and they're all now back into their villages. Some of those that were near villages that were totally destroyed have moved to some of the larger cities. But there is not a large internally displaced population there now.
Q: Were the people moving back and forth during the war and you just assumed they were hungry based on accounts? I don't understand at what point you realized they weren't hungry.
ASSISTANT SECRETARY TAFT: No, they were hungry; there was no organized international food assistance inside Kosovo after March 23. We had reports of pockets of people who had not had any food since then. We always knew that there were stocks in some of the major towns, but we were concerned about some of the villages.
When the KLA would report the sightings of large groups of people, that's where we started trying to add up how many were in these pockets. When the ICRC and the UN were able to get in, in May, they found groups of people but not hundreds of thousands of people. So we were able to find out where those were. Some of the air dropped food was targeted toward those places and I guess we just found out that there weren't as many people as we expected there were that were in that situation.
That doesn't mean that everybody was doing fine. It just meant there were not large pockets of people that were in the mountains for two months without any help whatsoever.AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: I think what people have difficulty coming to grips with is how small Kosovo is, and that these people were internally displaced; that is, they were in the hills and they were starving. But they were only starving half an hour to two hours from their home. They simply couldn't enter the village again because, as you've seen in some of the news stories that they went by, they sent their ten-year-old son back to get water and he got murdered, in one of the vignettes that came out of the war. So they were fearful for their lives if they went back to their village or indeed any village.
But when the war stopped and the Serbs left, they got back to their village long before UNHCR got to their village because they were only half an hour away. So I don't know that their suffering was any less, but they weren't any longer displaced by the time anybody from the international community showed up; they were back at home.Q: Since Belgrade has been virtually cut off economically from trade and everything, have you seen an increase in hardship cases there? And are they not going to get some of the humanitarian assistance -- for instance, food and stuff like that -- since they're a city and they're not able to grow food as opposed to some of the folks in the country?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY TAFT: Let me just say the policy that we have with regard to humanitarian assistance is that we are going to be funneling resources through the International Committee for the Red Cross and through UNHCR and UNICEF to reach vulnerable people in Serbia.
One of the problems is the lack of access that any of those agencies have throughout Serbia. So we don't have any good assessments; except along the border where there are active aid programs particularly for Kosovar Serbs and some of the Roma that left to go into Serbia. So as soon as those areas are open to assistance organizations, we will be able to be helpful.
The Belgrade authorities, however, have not allowed any visas to be granted to anyone who is from a NATO country. So that limits quite a lot the humanitarian access.AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: Just to further answer that one, I think that as far as we know, the harvest is proceeding normally. There's no food shortages that we're aware of. They have about 70 percent of their normal power requirements. So I think in terms of the humanitarian emergency in terms of desperate shortages of food, water and medicine, at the moment those conditions don't exist -- except with respect to isolated populations of refugees and others, who are being assisted by the international humanitarian organizations.
Q: The $100 million in food assistance -- is that in addition to the $500 million?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY TAFT: No, no -- that's included.
Q: Kind of a political question -- I recall that part of the Rambouillet idea about the future of Kosovo was that its status would depend essentially on how the Albanians behaved themselves with respect to the Serbs and how Serbs in Serbia would exercise -- what kind of political system was existing in Serbia when the time came to make some final decision about the status of Kosovo. What can you say? It seems that the Kosovar Albanian are making abundantly clear with their actions that they don't want Serbs living in Kosovo with them. Just the massacre of these farmers last Friday was just the latest sign of that. What impact or what effect, if any, will these attitudes have on the inclination of the international community -- including the United States -- to either support or not support some change in Kosovo status in the future?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: Well, I think it's too early to be drawing those kinds of conclusions. You don't turn off ethnic hatreds and violence like a light switch when you suddenly decide to deploy an international peacekeeping force. Massacres of the type that occurred this weekend were occurring every day, indeed, every hour, somewhere in Kosovo for months.
It's deeply regrettable that this one occurred. KFOR, the UN, the United States are all going to do everything to ensure that nothing like this is repeated. But I don't think that it necessarily reflects the attitude or the intentions of the vast bulk of the population. I think it's too early to make that kind of assessment.
Kosovo will, under international protection, develop institutions for democratic self-government. All ethnic minorities will be protected and encouraged to participate in that process. At some point, Serbia will itself undergo a democratic transition. And at some point in the future, an international process, which will involve the representatives both of Belgrade and the elected representatives of the Kosovar people, will have an opportunity to address Kosovo's future status.
I think at this point, we're not prepared to speculate about the outcome of that, beyond what we've said today.Q: Is the local police force going to be armed? Is the OSCE going to arm them; and if so, with what? And given your last comment that you made, how will you be able to ensure that the ethnic Albanians and the Serbs that will be recruited into the local police force will act in a fairly level manner?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: Let me ask Bill to make a statement on the arming. Let me be clear: the police force will be supervised by the UN. The OSCE will train them. The day they leave the training academy they will leave OSCE and be under UN authority. The UN will determine the point at which they will be armed, and it will be a point in the course of their on-the-job training under UN supervision.
Bill, do you want to add on to that?DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY BROWNFIELD: Sure. Not much to add, other than to confirm that the United Nations has actually announced that both the international police force -- the original 3,100 -- will be armed and will have arrest authority, and that the -
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: Which they don't, incidentally, in Bosnia.
DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY BROWNFIELD: In fact, which they have never had before in previous UN peacekeeping operations that had a civilian policing component.
They have also stated clearly enough for us that it is their intention to arm the local Kosovo police once they are trained. Exactly when they will be armed is still, as I said at the start of my earlier comment, this is a work in progress in terms of their precise timelines at which point in their training schedule will they actually be armed. But the objective is to both train them in the use of side arms and then arm them.
Your second question, if I might respond to it -- and this will be very, very simple and succinct -- how will we avoid. That's one of those questions that's impossible to answer. But I will tell you that the concept is community based policing; meaning that the eventual local police who will police individual communities will be recruited from that community, trained and eventually deployed to that community.
If the concept works as we hope it will, it should minimize the risk of tension and blow-ups, if you will, between different ethnic groups, different communities, different groups of people who differ from each other for whatever reason. That's the concept.AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: I'll just add that you're essentially going to have one UN policeman for every Kosovar policeman. So the level of oversight will be fairly heavy to begin with, until one gains confidence that they are behaving professionally.
Q: One more on the police. Will there be any special role for the present or former members of the KLA?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: The KLA will be recruited -- that is, the KLA will be permitted to apply and will be evaluated on an individual basis equally with other candidates.
Given that the KLA is recruited among the age group that you'd normally recruit a police force from and probably has a large number of sort of vigorous individuals who are interested in such a career, I think there's a realistic prospect that some proportion of the 3,000 will, in fact, be former KLA soldiers. But they don't have a privileged position; they have equal and unrestricted access to the recruiting process.
The selection will be made by OSCE and UN officials against an objective set of competitive criteria.Q: Given what President Clinton and various European leaders have said about the relative burden sharing here, if we're in for $500 million, what does that say about what others should be or that you hope others will be in for?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: Let me make a distinction. What we've talked about when we've said that we expect the Europeans to do the lion's share or the bulk of it, we're talking about reconstruction. We're not at reconstruction yet. This is basic humanitarian needs: food, shelter, water, repair of basic infrastructure. When we say that we expect others will do their share, we're talking about the traditional division.
We do believe that as we move beyond that to not just fixing the immediate damage and getting people back into their homes so they can make it through the winter, but when we go beyond that, we will be looking to the Europeans to do the lion's share, which is why the European Union is formally tasked for heading the reconstruction pillar. There will be a pledging conference in the fall -- I believe in October -- which will be focused on reconstruction, with the European Union in the lead.Q: Within the confines of your answer, what are you expecting out of Brussels, in terms of ball park figures?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: I honestly don't know, and that's why I caveated my answer to suggest that we might have to alter the figure that I've given if we get different assessments both of the needs, which we'll be getting from the World Bank assessment and of other donors' preparedness to contribute.
So I'm not going to try to project a figure, because I honestly do not know what it is. This is everybody goes and shows their cards, and I honestly don't know what their cards are at this stage.Q: And will the US -- or are there any expectations that the Friday meeting in Sarajevo will address in monetary terms what might be required for the long-term reconstruction?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: No, the Friday meeting is not a pledging session. I don't envisage people coming forward with specific sums.
The Friday meeting is a policy meeting. They'll be coming forward with policy prescriptions -- trade, investment, other things -- not with specific aid levels.Q: We've had a couple of changes in what we thought was going on during the conflict, both in terms of the internally displaced and in terms of the numbers of mines that might be left behind. Can you go over any other areas where what you found out since is not what you thought it was or that we were told it was during the conflict? And are there any other areas to look for down the road -- whether it's total cost of reconstruction or whether it's refugees outside or refugees who have returned or not returned -- are there other areas that the numbers don't seem to be what you thought they might be?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: Well, the other one that's already, of course, been commented on is the speed of the refugee return, which was much quicker than I think any of the humanitarian organizations had anticipated or prepared for.
I think this goes back to people not really internalizing the size of Kosovo and the fact that people really could get on their tractor and be home in half a day. That proximity and ease of communications is what made that return so much more rapid and comprehensive than we thought.
I think this also goes to the answer about the internally displaced. They were internally displaced, but they weren't days away from their homes; they were just hours, in many cases.Q: Slight follow-up to that. Where do the Serbs stand in terms of helping with the demining?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: What's called the MTA -- the agreement that they signed with KFOR -- provides for future discussions between the Serbs and NATO about the return of a few hundred people to do demining. Those discussions have not been initiated. The Serbs have not, as far as I know, approached NATO on that issue.
Q: On the unexploded bomblets, would you call those malfunction -- is that a function of a malfunctioning munition? Why are there 11,000 --
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: Eric, do you want to take that?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY NEWSOM: There are several hundred of these bomblets in each cluster bomb. Just from kind of the normal, technical glitches, you always estimate about 2 percent will not detonate. So you can extrapolate from that the total number of ordnance that was dropped. That's how we come up with -- I say there was not an actual count; this is an estimate based on the usual failure rate of 2 percent.
Q: Would that cause you in any way to rethink the use of such weapons in a civilian area like that?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY NEWSOM: Well, that's a question for military people in planning military operations.
Q: You wouldn't say it's a human rights question?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY NEWSOM: Well, in this case, decisions were made to use the cluster bombs in pursuit of military objectives. I was not myself involved in the targeting but I imagine that the places that were selected for using these were considered to be strictly military targets where no civilians were in the region. The casualties that are coming from these UXOs now are from people returning to previously vacated areas and the fact that many of these bomblets are still around unexploded.
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: I would note on the human rights aspect of it that the situation which the bombing was designed to address was a situation in which atrocities, massacres, ethnic cleansing, rapes, mass graves and violence approaching genocide was taking place on a daily basis and the bombing was designed to stop it. And it did.
Q: Mr. Newsom again -- sorry. You mentioned earlier that you weren't certain of the severity of the number of land mines. Can you give us a rough estimate how many land mines might be there?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY NEWSOM: I'm sorry, I can't. We never did actually have an estimate. There was information that mines were being laid during the air campaign by all parties. As I said, the Serbian military, as part of the military-technical agreement, provided maps of the areas where they laid mines. But none of the other parties -- the MUPP, any irregular forces of the KLA, all of whom also laid mines -- did not provide any of that information, so we have no estimate.
When I tell you that it appears not to be as severe, there are now -- in addition to the United States -- there are 12 other demining operations going on in the province -- other countries and international organizations. The first findings of all of them is that they are not encountering land mines to the extent that we had feared. But there is no estimate. In fact, the United States, as part of our effort, we are going to fund a land mine survey of the country over the next few months to try to localize as much as possible and mark off the places where mines and UXOs are.Q: So you have no estimate, even based on the maps you were provided?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY NEWSOM: No.
Q: Can you just clarify? You said the US contingent arrived last week. Of the 12 -- when did the mine clearing begin; when did this operation begin?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY NEWSOM: Mine clearing on a very limited scale actually began probably about ten days before we got there. A couple of British NGO groups were in there before we were.
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: Let me clarify that. When KFOR went in, they did mine clearance for their own purposes; in other words, roads they needed to use, buildings they needed to use, areas they needed to traverse or others. If there was a land mine in the middle of the town, they went and did something about it.
What they didn't do was go out and look for mine fields that weren't being traversed either by themselves or by refugees or other significant numbers of people. That's a civilian task which Eric is referring to. But the initial mine clearance was done by the military as they went in.Q: So the assessment is really based on the KFOR experience and the first couple of weeks of civilian mine clearing?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY NEWSOM: Well, again, an assessment for us is a technical term; there is not yet an assessment. These are impressions of the de-miners going in there that they are not encountering the number of mines that they expected to see. What they are finding lots of are UXOs.
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: I suspect that their standard of comparison was probably Bosnia.
ASSISTANT SECRETARY NEWSOM: Bosnia -- where it was a huge problem.
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: In Bosnia, of course, you had a conflict going for more than a year -- a couple of years. So there was time for a lot more mine laying.
Q: I assume you all have asked the KLA where they laid mines?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: I don't believe the KLA laid any mines. The mines were laid, as far as I know -- I could be wrong --
ASSISTANT SECRETARY NEWSOM: Our information is they laid a very small number, very few. They are not sort of like a regular military organization; they did not keep maps. At least my information is we do not have any maps from them.
Q: While I'm not asking you about your estimate or lack of an estimate, with the maps provided by the Serb Army, what are the numbers of mines they laid? Is it a thousand, 10,000?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY NEWSOM: I can't tell you. I can try to find -- if there is any rough estimate. But I believe the maps just basically give areas where mines were emplaced and they're not going to be in a position to tell you exactly where every single mine was emplaced. But if you want to get in contact with my office, I'll see if I can get anything better than that for you.
Q: What about rounding up the guns of the KLA? Some have been buried, I understand; some have been used like in this massacre of the Serbs?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: I don't know that there's any evidence at this point that the KLA was involved in the massacre of the Serbs. It's not an unreasonable hypothesis, but it is a hypothesis and not one that one should automatically leap to. There's lots of people in Kosovo who have guns.
Q: But what about getting the AK-47s and the -- I mean, I understand the massacre was done by AK-47s. What about getting those particular weapons up that have sparked all the hostilities with the Serbians and the Kosovars in the first place?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: The KLA has committed itself to a process of demilitarization which includes giving up weapons of that sort. The process is roughly on schedule; they have been turning over weapons at the rate that was anticipated. There are reports of some caches of weapons. I think there have been one or two of them that have been confirmed and others that are no more than reports at this point, although they may be accurate.
The process is not completed but it is roughly on time. I think that the last stage was one last week, where they were given an additional 48 hours to meet that particular benchmark and then the commander, General Jackson, stated that he was satisfied that they were in substantial compliance with it.
So that's going forward and will, as a result, reduce the availability of weapons in the country. But given the number of weapons that were there to begin with, the porousness of the border, the availability of weapons in neighboring countries -- particularly Albania -- I don't think anybody should fool themselves that this is going to remove the problem. It will substantially ameliorate it.Q: You address the criticism of the UN for a slow deployment directly, but you seem to imply from your remarks that they were going as fast as could be expected. Is this the position of the State Department?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: I don't think it's the position of the State Department; I think it's the position of the US Administration that we would like them to go as fast as possible. We would like them to go faster than they are. But they are going as fast as generally had been anticipated and much faster than has been the case in previous peacekeeping operations, including Bosnia, which is the one that's most analogous to this -- much faster than Bosnia.
Do you have something to add here, Julia?Q: But why is that a different assessment from what the Defense Department, then, has?
AMBASSADOR DOBBINS: I think the Defense Department simply said that they wanted them to go faster; we do too. But --
ASSISTANT SECRETARY TAFT: With all this reference to fastness, I just thought I would share with you a news item that is coming out today. At 3:00 p.m. this afternoon, the first plane load is leaving the United States with the refugees that are from Kosovo that were evacuated here, and they are going to be returning to Skopje. It leaves at JFK this afternoon. There will be another flight tomorrow of about 100 -- a little more than a hundred refugees -- and then that flight will go to Canada to pick about 300 Kosovars that were evacuated to Canada, and they will be returning.
Already we have seen about 13,000 people go back to Kosovo, who were evacuated to Europe and to Turkey. I wanted to stress that in all of the discussion about is there enough food; how many land mines are there; is it safe; is it not safe -- that the overwhelming image that those of us who are close to this have is that the people themselves have determined it's safe and they want to go back and rebuild Kosovo. It's been such a surge -- I don't know how many more will be leaving the United States that were evacuated here -- but the estimates are that about a third of all of those that went to Western countries will be returning home. And, as you know, by and large the majority that were in Macedonia and Albania have already gone back. But the first flight leaves in about 45 minutes.Q: Can you say how many are on that flight? I'm a little confused about --
ASSISTANT SECRETARY TAFT: Yes, 304 are on the flight that leaves at 3:00 p.m. today from New York City -- JFK. And six press.
Q: And tomorrow is 100?
ASSISTANT SECRETARY TAFT: Tomorrow -- let me see if I've got the exact figure. I think we've got about 100 -- oh, I'll have to get -- tomorrow 134 will leave from the US and then the plane will go to Canada and get 340. Then next week we have a 747 and beyond that, I don't know exactly the numbers.
Thank you. Thank you, Jim.
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