POLITICS-KOSOVO: Ultimately, UN Role Was Crucial

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 13 1999 (IPS) - It was no small irony that, when the United Nations Security Council authorised an international peacekeeping force for Kosovo this week, Yugoslav officials made the case for a strong UN role in the crisis.

Yugoslavia’s UN ambassador, Vladislav Jovanovic, even told the Council that “it is necessary to deploy a UN peacekeeping mission” and criticised the United nations for not acting more quickly over Kosovo.

Such remarks, diplomats here noted, were a sharp turnaround from 1991, when the former Yugoslavia broke up and Belgrade openly scorned UN involvement in the Balkans, and when UN peacekeepers were held hostage as “human shields” in 1995.

Yugoslavia is not the only party to have had newfound appreciation for the United Nations.

Members of the North Atlantic alliance who had dismissed it as ineffective during the Bosnia and Croatia crises, embraced the world body this week as the one orghanisation that could help end the 11-week NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

The extent to which countries like the United States and its European allies shifted their opinion of the United Nations can be seen in the Security Council resolution which authorised new military and civilian missions in Kosovo.

The resolution restricts the amount of control the Security Council will have on the future Kosovo Force (KFOR), comprised of NATO and Russian soldiers. But it gives the world body wide powers over rebuilding Kosovo, bringing back 800,000 Kosovar refugees and governing the province so it can attain autonomy.

“I think it is…important that the UN has been asked to play its traditional role,” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said this week. “I think that there is a message there for all of us.”

The message, in part, is that recent US efforts to sideline the world body – not just in Kosovo but in conflicts like Iraq and Libya – have run aground, particularly as other countries have expressed their opposition to US unilateralism.

Russian Ambassador Sergei Lavrov made those sentiments clear at the Security Council vote on the Kosovo Force, when he expressed his hope for “a truly multi-polar world order…in which there can be no room for unilateral diktat.”

Even as NATO members praised the UN resolution for providing a legal basis for the deployment of some 50,000 NATO troops in Kosovo, nations like Russia, China and Cuba crowed that bringing the crisis to the UN level limited Washington’s previous dominance of the Kosovo response.

The resolution also fed arguments by both sides over what the NATO strikes had accomplished, with the NATO states defending their “humanitarian” offensive against Belgrade and their critics noting that the crisis ultimately required a diplomatic solution.

Nor is the Kosovo case the only one in which the United States’ in particular, has tried to sideline the United Nations, but ended up relying on UN diplomacy to settle matters.

Similarly, African nations took the dispute among the United States, Britain and Libya into their own hands when they gradually ended their support for the six-year UN embargo against Tripoli.

The faltering sanctions helped push the nations to a compromise on a trial in the Netherlands for two Libyans suspected of involvement in the 1988 bombing of a Pan American flight. UN mediation proved crucial to winning the extradition of the two suspects and the suspension of sanctions this April.

On Friday, the latest result of that compromise was a UN- brokered meeting of US, British and Libyan ambassadors in New York – the first such meeting since Tripoli’s relations with London and Washington chilled in the early 1980s.

However, UN efforts to renew Security Council unity on Iraq have stalled, and the UN weapons inspectors – expelled from Iraq since US and British air attacks last December – are unlikely to be able to resume their disarmament work soon, if ever.

The various crises have had a common thread: the belief by US officials, notably Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, that major international efforts need not involve the United Nations.

Albright – initially a proponent of UN-led multilateralism when she was UN ambassador from 1993 to 1996 – has repeatedly sidelined the United Nations, a move which sometimes has backfired.

Despite the effort to limit the UN role in crises, Washington has had to turn to Annan to mediate with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Libyan Col. Muammar Qadhafi when efforts to isolate those nations generated a backlash from other powers, notably Russia and China.

The Kosovo turnaround see the United Nations – virtually absent from handling the crisis in March – with a huge role as a transitional authority and potential mediator between Belgrade and KFOR.

Despite the White House’s declaration of victory, the Kosovo war’s unintended results – including the expulsions of some 800,000 Kosovar Albanians and the deaths of some 1,200 civilians in NATO raids – have clearly given Washington pause.

“Kosovo has been substantially destroyed as a viable society, as has much of the civilian infrastructure of Serbia,” argued professor Richard Falk in the US weekly magazine ‘The Nation.’

After 11 weeks of such destruction, apparently both Belgrade and Washington have changed their opinion about whether a UN role in the Balkans can be helpful.