FEATURE - Law and order is Kosovo's Achilles heel09:08 p.m Dec 26, 1999 Eastern
By Andrew RochePRISTINA, Dec 27 (Reuters) - Helicopters hover and clatter over Pristina's rooftops, scanning the shabby alleys with the latest in ``night vision'' technology.
Hundreds of soldiers set up lightning roadblocks and search cars as the world's biggest military machine goes into battle against an elusive army of muggers, car thieves and rapists.
Six months after NATO-led forces occupied Kosovo, the threat to peace is neither the vanquished Serbian military nor the disarmed guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), but a wave of common crime.
Rarely before has NATO taken on such a huge military commitment as its task in Kosovo and rarely has the international community invested so much, in per capita terms, on aid for humanitarian needs and reconstruction. Yet international officials say the effort is being undermined by the lack of simple law and order.
Officers of the more than 40,000-strong KFOR peacekeeping force in the province admit the impressive night-time manoeuvres are largely for show, designed to help dispel a climate of fear after darkness falls. Kosovo's new civilian police force, floundering for lack of men, money and local knowledge, needs all the help it can get.
The province's murder rate has fallen since an orgy of revenge against Serbs and other non-Albanians erupted after the Kosovo war, but robberies, protection rackets and intimidation are rife -- most often, now, committed by Albanians against Albanians and shielded, according to foreign officials, by a Mafia-style wall of silence.SLAMMING INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
U.N. mission chief Bernard Kouchner, who leads the civilian side of the huge international mission in Kosovo, dropped the usual veil of diplomatic language this month to slam governments for their apparent apathy towards policing Kosovo in the aftermath of a war on which they were happy to spend billions.
``I asked for 6,000 police officers. I just received 1,800. This is ridiculous and a scandal,'' he said. ``If all the nations of the world...altogether cannot send me 6,000 police officers, what kind of peacekeeping operation is it?''
The lack of expatriate officers is only one side of the problem. So far the new force has fewer than 200 Kosovans, whose recruitment has been painfully slowed by wrangles among the territory's bitterly divided factions over just who should be allowed to enforce the law over neighbours who a few months ago might have been deadly enemies.
International officials have been adamant that the former KLA guerrillas are too fiercely politicised a group to become the new police. Instead they have been disarmed and remodelled as a ``protection corps'' intended to help only with such tasks as disaster relief and infrastructure reconstruction.
In an apparent confirmation that their fears about the former KLA are well-grounded, U.N. police said last week they had arrested four men believed to be members of the new ``protection corps'' for the murders of five Serbs and Gypsies.
Some have suggested bringing back from retirement hundreds of former police officers who last pounded the beat in Kosovo a decade ago -- before the government of Slobodan Milosevic sacked Kosovan Albanians from state jobs and replaced them with Serbs.
Jonuz Terstena, who was police chief in the 1980s, told a Pristina newspaper he could cut crime by 50 percent if U.N. authorities would recruit 1,000 of his former officers, and promised to send himself to jail if he failed.
But the proposal to take back on officers from the 1980s is said to be opposed by Hashim Thaqi, political chief of the former KLA guerrillas and the most powerful of the Kosovo Albanian leaders. He and other separatist leaders see the 1980s police as unworthy to serve in Kosovo now because they once served Milosevic -- even if they eventually joined the long list of the Yugoslav leader's victims.SERBS FEAR REVENGE
Kosovo's besieged Serbs, for their part, say they want their enclave-like areas policed by fellow Serbs, fearing that any ethnic Albanian will use a uniform to exact revenge for the Serbian authorities' past persecution. An ethnic Albanian policewoman who ventured into the Serb quarter of the divided north Kosovo town of Mitrovica as part of a U.N. police patrol was beaten up by a Serb mob, and the experiment was not repeated.
Officers from as far apart as Northern Ireland and southeast Asia patrol Kosovo's roads in red and white cars dubbed ``Coca-Colas'' by Kosovans. Some of them say they are too ineffectual and small a force to be worth reporting crimes to.
U.N. police sources said last week that some 200 expatriates had been sent home again after misunderstandings about their role, which is supposed to be that of tough street-level police rather than mere observers. The entire 100-strong Nepalese contingent had to return because they had no weapons, while others did not speak enough English for the job.
``It's hard to get national police forces to provide the right people. An army sits around waiting for a war to happen, but police are needed at home,'' one senior U.N. policeman said.
Nuredin Ibishi, commander of the first contingent of 173 Kosovans to join the new force, complained they still had no guns because of the U.N. embargo on supplying arms to Yugoslav territory, and that their expatriate colleagues' wages were up to 20 times higher.
Some Pristina residents express surprise that foreign police spend their days directing traffic in congested Pristina and that after six months, no Kosovans have been employed for such a humdrum task. ``They must be the most expensive traffic cops in the world,'' said one.JUDICIAL SYSTEM PARALYSED
The justice system, meanwhile, has been paralysed for months by the refusal of many Albanian officials to implement the laws of hated Yugoslavia. Kouchner, hoping to break the deadlock, said this month that he would appoint 400 extra judges and prosecutors and that pre-1989 law would henceforth in general apply.
One result of the vacuum in policing and judiciary, according to some international officials, is that there may be an imaginary crime wave as well as a real one. Young women in Pristina dare not walk the streets alone after dark since a wave of supposed kidnappings began to be reported, and many have stories of being stalked by mysterious cars.
``We used to be able to go out at night. In the last month we hear that people are being taken away,'' said female student Valdete Rexhebegay, carrying a candle on a night march against violence through Pristina.
Yet international police and troops say only a handful of kidnapping cases have been reported to them in recent weeks, most of which turned out to be false. Some expatriate officials suggest kidnapping rumours are being deliberately stoked up to draw attention to the lack of police officers.
``It looks as if someone political is saying: you don't want to use us as police? Then see what happens,'' said one.
Distrust between the international and Kosovan sides often runs high, and the cultural and linguistic gap between them means false accusations are easy to make.
Aid workers say the law and order problem is eroding a society which paradoxically, was stronger under Serbian oppression. ``There was a solidarity, a community feeling last winter among the ethnic Albanians,'' said one. ``Now there is fear.''Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited
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