Topic:
Kosovo and OSCE Mission
Authors:
Behlul Beqaj
*An antenna installed in Kosovo with the capacity to broadcast signals
on 2,000 channels throughout the world would indeed be welcome if the
world truly had no knowledge of who is the aggressor and who the
victim there, who massacres and who is being massacred, who enjoys all
the rights and who is deprived of them, who defends his own
sovereignty and who endangers it. The world needs these "verifiers" to
camouflage the truth and replace it with one corresponding to its
own needs.
Just how close the Albanians came to their declared political goals
after a Serb military and police offensive that lasted months may be
inferred from the latest interview of U.S. ambassador Christopher
Hill, who mediates between Belgrade and Pristina. Namely, he said that
"the U.S. and EU are resolutely against Kosovo's independence." The
ambassador went on to say that "to go farther from this agreement to
build these (democratic) institutions on the basis of only one
agreement that we will review in three years and then decide what to
do next," was an "overambitious approach."
The Albanians hoped that after the massacres in Prekaz, Likosane,
Stimlje, Stutica, Gornja Obrinja, Golubovac... the brutal force of the
Serbian regime in Kosovo would finally be stopped by international
armed forces, but reality was quite the opposite. Because of that, the
international power centers decided that cameramen of the CNN, BBC,
NBC, etc, should be joined - instead of by forces to establish or
maintain order - by spy planes in the air and 2,000 witnesses on the
ground, to observe the Kosovo tragedy. In the meantime, according to
official claims, NATO will remain ready to act if Milosevic fails to
fulfill his obligations.
Having in view past experiences, the chances that Milosevic will
fulfill his obligations are equal to the probabilities of NATO
realizing its air strike threats. In other words, the competition will
continue between those who make empty threats and those who make
motions to ostensibly remove them, by withdrawing their military
forces from the woods to install them into the fields, and from the
fields into the ravines, and camouflaging them in the yards of
Albanian homes! If this is to be the scenario of the events to come,
then why is such a fuss being made about it by the media? In this
light concrete measures to resolve the existing problems have
prospectives similar to those of a patient who suffers from a terminal
lung cancer, but continues to smoke despite his doctor's orders.
For the Albanians it is irrelevant whether the sky or ground observers
would be seen as "jeopardizing the sovereignty and integrity of
Yugoslavia," as Milosevic's critics in Belgrade put it, because no one
is truly interested in its own sovereignty and integrity would commit
such a widespread destruction and so many massacres and murders as the
Serbian regime did in Kosovo. The mere fact that the regime is trying
to maintain the "sovereignty" of its state with tanks instead of
arguments testifies that something quite the opposite is in question
here.
Any use of artillery and tanks for "internal" reasons testifies to the
totalitarian nature of that regime and to the unbearable discontent of
the Albanians, deprived of all individual and collective rights. The
Serbian regime has not only an anti-Albanian platform, but an
anti-national platform in general. This is why the methods by which
the Serbian regime attempted to annex Kosovo under the guise of
defending "the sovereignty of Yugoslavia" has jeopardized not only the
sovereignty of Kosovo but of Serbia as well, and OSCE verifiers are
very likely to give legitimacy to such a state of affairs. Therefore,
the verifiers are but a 2,000 channel antenna for the U.N. and OSCE,
who, I suppose, will verify the situation on the ground to the liking
of the creators of the New World Order based in Washington, Brussels,
Rome, Paris, Moscow, London...that is, the creators of these tragic
experiments that are being conducted against nations and states in
general.
Amid such international bias, Kosovo should be seen as a quasi-state
whose perspective would depend on its relations with Serbia and the
international community, while the perspectives of Serbia and
Yugoslavia would depend on their relations with Kosovo and the
international community. Mutual relations in the interim period would
change depending on changes in the international balance of power.
Such a mish-mash would absolutely relativize the issue of sovereignty
and independence which are the true casus belli. In other words, the
objective is not to achieve the independence of Kosovo in the wake of
the interim period, but to push the issue of Kosovo's independence
into oblivion.
This 2,000 channel antenna installed in Kosovo would indeed be welcome
if the world truly had no knowledge of who is the aggressor and who
the victim there, who massacres and who is being massacred, who enjoys
all the rights and who is deprived of them, who defends his own
sovereignty and who endangers it. The world needs these verifiers so
that it can camouflage the truth and replace it with one corresponding
to its needs. Certainly, among the verifiers there will be those who -
because of their sincerity, human dignity, and lack of understanding
of the true motives of the international decision-making centers -
will dare speak the truth, well-known even before their arrival in
Kosovo. Though this "antenna" will transmit some less important
programs, its main task and its chief show will still be to verify the
situation in the field in line with political decisions made in
advance, even before they came to Kosovo and even if their reports are
in full opposition to the situation on the ground. There is no one to
verify the verifiers, except for those who had made the decision to
send them to Kosovo.
We should not be naive and think that the world is not acquainted with
the situation in Kosovo. The world has been "verifying" us for years,
it knows all about the problem and it knows what its interests are,
maybe even better than the Albanians and the Serbs do. Because of
that, the world believes that the Albanians are not ready yet to have
a state of their own, while the Serbs, with their
nationalism-chauvinism and hegemonism, seriously jeopardize everybody
else. The Kosovo Albanians exhibit a strong tendency for creating an
oligarchic state wherein disintegrating forces will prevail over
integrating ones, and threaten both the Albanians from Albania proper
and the states where their compatriots live enslaved. Namely, from the
international community's perspective, the independence of Kosovo
would jeopardize the entire region, where the interests of several
powerful states meet.
The Albanians will continue to be held hostage to foreign interests.
Precisely because of that, the verifiers will come forth with such
testimonies as will be directed from the powerful international
centers. I do not believe that the monitors were sent to Kosovo to
verify the truth, because the Kosovo Liberation Army did not exist at
the time when Milosevic came to power, and transformed the might used
against Albanians into right. The KLA is a direct result of a
repressive anti-Albanian system. It is clear to everyone
that the KLA is a shield against state-sponsored terrorism which -
having failed in its objective to achieve a Kosovo without Albanians -
did as much as it could to damage Kosovo's wealth, and to kill as many
Albanians as it could, and as many as was approved by the
international community.
(The author is a Pristina-based political analyst)
Vojislav Kostunica
In its efforts to achieve an adequate peaceful and democratic
resolution of the problems in Kosovo and ensure FRY's compliance with
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1199, the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe on October 16, signed an agreement with the
FRY federal government. This agreement created a verification mission,
a body rather unusual both from the point of view of the existing
principles of international law and the rules governing the structure
and prerogatives of the OSCE itself.
U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke himself stressed this quite openly at a
press conference in Belgrade on October 13, when he explained that the
mission members were not observers, but verifiers of the FRY's
compliance with Resolution 1199. Concerning the mission's great number
of members and its prerogatives, Holbrooke said that "so far, the OSCE
has never tried anything even closely resembling that." This novelty
in the organization's operation is worthy of attention both from the
point of view of the legal framework of its activity, and in regard to
its potential consequences on the sovereignty and territorial
integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
The 1992 Helsinki document defines the competence of the OSCE, that
is, its prerogatives, in other words, that what represents its legal
and institutional structure. This document does not specify special
titles or types of OSCE missions, but defines what are understood as
OSCE peace operations. These operations "are used, among other things,
to supervise and extend support to maintaining law and order, supply
humanitarian and medical aid and assist refugees."
The specific tasks of the Kosovo verification mission, especially the
reception of weekly police and military reports and monitoring of
regular duties of police and army border patrol units in Kosovo,
clearly exceed the authority the OSCE has in such situations and
transform the verification mission into something it cannot be even
according to its own regulations, and, furthermore, substantially
violate the sovereignty of Yugoslavia.
The verification mission is a mass and complex OSCE mission. In
addition to its diplomatic part, it should also have an adequate
communications and information infrastructure, which could easily be
transformed into a powerful tool of foreign propaganda. Such was the
case with the activities of the civilian and military authorities of
the international community in Republika Srpska (the High
Representative and SFOR), which - in arbitrary, un-democratic, and
even totalitarian manner - regulate relations not only in the sphere
of politics, but also in the realms of media and culture.
The FRY government should vouch for the security of the mission's
members, but it is highly uncertain whether their security could be
preserved when not even the police are safe from the KLA activities.
All this unavoidably leads to a need to have the unarmed verifiers
supplied with armed guardians, most likely dressed in NATO uniforms, a
solution constantly advocated - under the obvious dictates from
Washington and Brussels - by OSCE chairman Bronislaw Gieremek.
Though the Yugoslav government is a signatory of the OSCE mission
agreement, it has no power whatsoever over its makeup. Thus, strongly
biased people can easily become members. It is enough to quote reports
from certain U.S. media alleging that the incumbent U.S.
administration, to avoid the obligation of asking the Congress to
approve the deployment of active military officials in Kosovo, is
ready to send in retired officers from Military Professional Resources
Inc., an organization that in the past had provided advisory and
logistic support to the Croatian Army, especially during the
Operations Flash and Storm, and to the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The element restricting the sovereignty of Yugoslavia stems also from
the OSCE's broad prerogatives in regulating and monitoring future
elections in Kosovo to ensure they are free and fair. Having in mind
the proverbial OSCE manipulations with the election results in
Republika Srpska, it may well be expected that in Kosovo, under
extremely complex conditions, the involvement of this organization in
the electoral process would only have equal effects. Finally, the OSCE
mission's one year term in Kosovo could be extended at the request of
only one side, that is, the OSCE itself, meaning that this
organization is free to decide for how long it will remain in Kosovo.
True, this is only logical having in view the fact that FRY accepted
this agreement under the threat of NATO air strikes.
It is beyond doubt that the authority of the OSCE verification mission
in Kosovo is extremely broad and in opposition to activities of the
organization's peace missions. Such wide prerogatives can easily be
additionally expanded. Such developments are encouraged both verbally
and in practice. Instead of, for instance, calling it a peace mission,
observer mission, or supervisory mission, it is called a verification
mission. The mission should verify all aspects of compliance with U.N.
resolution 1199, exclusively on the part of Yugoslavia, though the
resolution stipulates specific obligations for the Kosovo Albanians as
well (to condemn terrorism and to use peaceful means in pursuing
political goals). Still, it appears as if the name 'verification
mission' would not suffice to the U.S. administration, so it felt a
need to further support it with yet another qualification. An
announcement of the National Security Council of October 19, thus,
speaks of an intrusive verification regime, which includes
verification on the ground and "unlimited NATO control over Kosovo's
air space." Intrusion and verification can hardly have anything in
common, and it is obvious that the creators on the OSCE arrangements
for Kosovo care more about the former than the latter.
This all leads to an insight not only into what the OSCE mission in
Kosovo is, but also into what it is supposed to be. This mission
essentially restricts the state sovereignty of the FRY despite the
provisions of the agreement made with the FRY government asserting the
sovereignty and territorial integrity of the countries in the region.
Time will show whether the OSCE mission should more appropriately be
described as an 'occupation mission.' Under the conditions of an
occupation and an international community's protectorate, it would be
easier to enforce a political solution for Kosovo, unfavorable for
Serbia, from the outside.
Such a political resolution, layed out in a document of the Contact
Group of October 2, and therefore, essentially a U.S. plan, envisages,
in the first stage, that Kosovo should be taken out of Serbia's and
Yugoslavia's legal jurisdiction, and be granted "internal
independence." Basically, such a plan was accepted by the president of
the FRY and the Serbian government in its announcement of October 13.
In other words, the ruling "patriotic" coalition in Belgrade had
capitulated even before the first verifier set foot on Kosovo and
before a single unarmed NATO plane began to fly over Kosovo.
All this corresponds to the order of moves demanded by political
representatives of the Kosovo Albanians, primarily Ibrahim Rugova: an
international community protectorate as an interim solution on the
path towards Kosovo's independence as a permanent solution. Of course,
Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the first Dayton agreement for
Bosnia and the subsequent Dayton agreement for Serbia, could not have
achieved such a negotiating "accomplishment" without his partner and a
negotiating collaborator, Slobodan Milosevic.
In the end, one other thing should also be mentioned. It is widely
held nowadays that nothing is as it used to be, not even state
sovereignty: once absolute, in the contemporary world it has been
highly relativized. According to such positions, deployment of various
OSCE missions in the realms of security and human rights can no longer
be considered interfering in the internal matters of sovereign
countries. This indeed is true, but only if two conditions are met.
First, that more or less the same standards are applied to all
countries concerned, and second, that various peace, supervisory, and
even verification missions do not exceed their prerogatives stipulated
by OSCE documents. Neither of these two conditions has been observed
when the OSCE verification mission in Kosovo is in question.
(The author is president of the Democratic Party of Serbia)
