U.N. Official Warns of Problems Undercutting Aid to KosovaBy BARBARA CROSSETTE
UNITED NATIONS -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan's leading envoy in the Balkans said Friday that unless significant political and economic reforms are made in the region, much of the reconstruction aid promised to Kosova by world leaders will be wasted.
In an interview here, the envoy, Carl Bildt, said that the inefficient use or diversion of aid is a "major impediment all over the entire region," not only in Bosnia, where there is rising concern about the misuse or waste of assistance.
The underlying problem, Bildt said, is the persistence of old-style socialist or communist political and economic systems with all their built-in faults. Serbia, he said, has been the biggest drag on regional growth. But what Asians call crony capitalism is also found in Croatia and Bosnia, he added.
"There is a need for reconstruction, needless to say, but there is a far greater need for reform," said Bildt, a former prime minister of Sweden. "If we do reconstruction without reform, then we end up with an aid-dependent place. Bosnia is a good example of that."
Bildt said that Europe and the United States need to turn attention to long-term political as well as economic change, especially in Serbia. Success in Kosova, he said, "is very much dependent on what's going to happen to Serbia."
"It's such a big chunk of land in the middle of the Balkans that if it does not reform itself it will be very difficult to do anything substantial with the rest," he said. "Serbia is the core nation of the region."
The United States has ruled out all but emergency assistance to Yugoslavia as long as President Slobodan Milosevic, who has been indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, remains in power. Bildt, who said he believes that Milosevic will eventually stand trial, does not advocate waiting for that moment to begin dealing with the fundamental problems of the country, formerly an important regional trade hub.
"I don't think Milosevic will hang around for much longer," Bildt said. "The country is going so rapidly downhill. You have the economy contracting this year by either 30 or 40 percent. That's a collapse with major social consequences. That has to do to a very large extent with the bombing, but not only."
Yugoslavia, which was in many ways a pioneering socialist economy a few decades ago, has now fallen behind the rest of Eastern and Central Europe, he said, adding that it could take 15 or 20 years for Balkans just to get back to the economic levels of 1989, the year the Berlin wall came down.
"This is the least reformed economy in Europe next to Belarus," Bildt said. "The problem of Serbia is that it can't be discussed just in terms of the personality of Mr. Milosevic. That's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the problems of Serbia."
Bildt said that he welcomes the arrival at the United Nations of Richard Holbrooke, the new chief representative of the United States. The United Nations and the United States will be facing tough decisions on the Balkans in the months and years to come.
"He will make the U.S. a far more active player in the U.N.," Bildt said. "And he brings to the job not only a knowledge of the issues and a lot of personal contacts but a certain amount of political clout. That is good. He is highly respected."
Holbrooke, the architect of the accord that ended the war in Bosnia, will feel some pressures from Washington to speed up developments in Kosova, some diplomats here say. They fear that the United Nations will be blamed if the situation goes awry.
"There is always a tendency to underestimate the challenges ahead," Bildt said, and when things go wrong, a search for culprits in international organizations follows. Bildt, who was involved in ending the war in Bosnia, said he had learned from that experience that withdrawing troops or lowering the level of an international military presence too soon can be a mistake.
"I think it is way too early to discuss troops leaving Kosova," he said. "We are there for the long haul. That was one of the mistakes that were made in Bosnia. There was this belief that you could go in very quickly and do it primarily as a military operation and be out after one year. That was a mistake."
In Kosova, Bildt said, Americans, Europeans and Russians may have to stay for quite a while.August 28, 1999
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