17 October 2003 Morning Edition

Kosovo News

· Serbia returns remains of 40 ethnic Albanians to Kosovo (AFP)
· Albanian bodies handed over to UNMIK (Beta)
· Kosovo Gun Amnesty Setback (IWPR)
· Prayer and Politics (WSJ)
· U.N. office reports potential savings of US$37 million through better management (AP)
· Lithuanian troops to stay in Afghanistan and Kosovo until the end of 2004 (AFP)

Regional News

· Early general elections loom over Serbia as government faces (AP)
· Greek president signs accords with Belgrade (AFP)

Other News

· UN adopts plan for Iraq (NYT)

Serbia returns remains of 40 ethnic Albanians to Kosovo

BELGRADE, Oct 16 (AFP) - The remains of 40 ethnic Albanians killed during the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict and exhumed in central Serbia were returned to the province on Thursday, the Beta news agency reported.

Some 800 bodies have been exhumed from mass graves in central Serbia since May 2001 and so far 153 have been identified and returned to Kosovo.

The United Nations has said the remains of some 5,000 victims of the war have been discovered in Kosovo and the rest of Serbia but 3,500 have yet to be identified.

Almost 4,000 people are still listed as missing from the conflict, which saw security forces under then Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic battle separatist ethnic Albanian guerrillas in the southern Serbian province.

Kosovo has been under UN administration since a NATO bombing campaign forced Milosevic to withdraw his troops in June 1999.

Albanian bodies handed over to UNMIK (Beta)

MERDARD -- Thursday - The bodies of forty Albanians, exhumed from a mass grave in the outer Belgrade suburb of Batajnica, were handed over today to UNMIK representatives in Merdare, near the administrative border with Kosovo.

The bodies have been transferred to the Orahovac autopsy centre where UNMIK experts will identify them.

Once the findings are compared with Serbian results, the bodies will be turned over to the families.

About a hundred relatives of missing Kosovars were in Merdare today, observing the handover and carrying protest placards.

The head of the Bureau for Missing and Abducted Persons in Belgrade's Kosovo Coordination Centre, Gvozden Gagic, told media that most of the bodies exhumed in Batajnica were of Albanians from Djakovica.

Three mass graves discovered in Serbia have so far yielded more than nine hundred bodies.

Of these, 153 have so far been handed over to the Kosovo authorities.

Kosovo Gun Amnesty Setback

Highly-publicised campaign fails to persuade Albanians and Serbs to hand over their firearms.

By Artan Mustafa and Jeta Xharra in Pristina and Prekaz (IWPR)

After a family row, 15-year-old Ermira Demaj, daughter of a Kosovo supreme court judge from Pristina, took her father's unlicensed pistol from an unlocked drawer and shot herself in the head.
She died on October 13 after spending several days in a coma. Her father said he kept the firearm for personal protection, as local judges often face threats.
The tragedy came just days after a failed arms amnesty designed to clear Kosovo of an estimated 400,000 illegally-held weapons - and questions are now being raised as to why the high-profile campaign was unable to deliver.
The month-long project, which ended on October 1, resulted in only 155 guns being handed in to the authorities despite a three-month public awareness campaign launched by the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP.
Marie-France Desjardins, programme manager for the UNDP's Illicit Small Arms Control Project, ISAC, described the campaign's results as disappointing.
"We still don't know why we were unable to make a dent on the numbers of illegal weapons still in circulation. We have to think hard about it and discover where we went wrong," she said last week.
A combination of continuing uncertainty over the final status of Kosovo, distrust of the security forces, suspicion of corruption among local officials and growing culture of violence appears to have led to the failure of the amnesty.
Ethnic Albanians are concerned about continuing delays over negotiations on Kosovo's final status, which, they hope, will provide them with full independence from Serbia.
Halim Gecaj, a tour-guide at the Adem Jashari memorial complex in Prekaz, Drenica, once the heartland of Kosovar resistance against the Serbs, told IWPR, "Nobody knows if another war is going to happen or not.
"If they don't give us independence, that might mean that the Serbian forces will be allowed to come back - and most people here don't want to be caught empty-handed when that happens."
Distrust of local law enforcers and NATO troops is thought to have been a factor in the failure of the amnesty.
Gani Xhemajli, a Prekaz farmer, said, "Even if I had weapons, I wouldn't hand them in, because I don't believe that the police or KFOR can keep me safe at any time."
The distrust stems from a widespread view that few murders or other serious crimes ever get solved.
"You need a weapon to protect yourself," Xhemajli said, "as all we hear from the police when there's a murder is that an investigation is ongoing - and in most cases nothing happens."
Some believe that the police are more concerned about their own safety than protecting ordinary citizens.
"The police are armed with pistols while the criminals - even the petty thieves - have AK-47s. So if a citizen is attacked, the cops are far more likely to worry about their own safety rather than carrying out a rescue," said Artan Rexha, a student from Prekaz.
A recent UNDP study noted that while a number of weapons are smuggled from Serbia and Albania, the majority of illegally-held firearms have been in civilian hands since the war.
The Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, which carried out a study in the protectorate in July of this year, has estimated that around 65 per cent of households in Kosovo own a gun.
Alex Anderson, the director of the International Crisis Group in Kosovo, told IWPR that he was not surprised that such a low number of weapons was handed over, as Kosovars are uncertain whether they will have to fight for independence.
"Albanians are appreciative of what's been done since 1999, but they are not so trusting of the international community's intentions [over Kosovo's final status]," he said.
Local reluctance to comply with the amnesty came despite the offer of substantial financial incentives. The UNDP had promised to divide 675,000 US dollars between the three municipalities that collected the highest number of weapons.
The cash, which was donated by the Japanese government, was intended to finance local school projects, health services and general repair work.
But the incentive scheme appears to have been ill-conceived because the public regards local councils with suspicion, "The municipality administration is viewed as corrupt. Many people believe that they would not benefit by handing over weapons, as any money won by the authorities will simply disappear," student Faruk Binaku told IWPR.
Another factor that may have contributed to the failure of the amnesty is the region's culture of violence. "Kosovar Albanian society is witnessing a rise in violence in the home, in schools and in sport, there's a fascination with militarism and army folklore is starting to dominate local culture," said Blerim Latifi, a sociologist with the Gani Bobi centre for humanistic studies, in Pristina.
The protectorate's Serb minority was no more willing to part with its weapons. They were armed by the Serbian ministry of internal affairs throughout the Nineties and received more weaponry from the Yugoslav army when it withdrew from the region in June 1999.
One Serb from the enclave of Gracanica, who did not want to give his name, told IWPR that he and his neighbours had no intention of giving up their firearms. "We believe that none of the security forces operating in Kosovo at the moment are able to fully protect the Serbs, so we have to look out for ourselves," he said.
Artan Mustafa is a freelance journalist in Kosovo and Jeta Xharra is IWPR's project manager in Pristina.

Prayer and Politics
By TUNKU VARADARAJAN (WSJ)
Gracanica, Kosovo
The ceremony was elaborate. First came espresso cups, filled with sweet, viscous coffee. Then glasses of faintly cloudy water. Finally the priest who was serving us -- a bearded giant about 6-foot-4, sheathed dauntingly in a black cassock -- brought us thimbles of plum brandy. He must have seen eyes light up (it was four in the afternoon, well in advance of cocktail hour), for he allowed himself a brief, toothy smile. "Please!" he said to our small group, beckoning us to partake. He then withdrew to a corner, where he stood sentinel, an adamant Serb statue.
The little old man presiding nodded his head hospitably, and once we'd each reached for our liquid of choice, he began to speak his mind. "They killed two of our boys recently," he said, in the clipped sentences of a dignitary accustomed to an interpreter. "Shot them while they were swimming in a river." He shook his head mournfully, and his acolytes murmured their revulsion. "We asked parliament to have a minute's silence in their memory. They refused. They refused!"
The emphasis in the little old man's last words was disconcerting. Until that moment, he, Bishop Artemije -- Serb Orthodox bishop of the Kosovo region of the former Yugoslavia -- had seemed only to whisper. Now he appeared to want to be heard. The boys were Serbs, his parishioners; their killers were Kosovar Albanians, Muslim separatists who are hell-bent, Bishop Artemije believes, on driving the Serbs out of Kosovo, where they now constitute only a small minority in a demographic sea of Albanians -- the same Albanians who dominate Kosovo's parliament, where a technicality, that the rulebook only allows silence for dead legislators, was used to frustrate Bishop Artemije's plaintive request for a formal, public mourning for the murdered Serb boys.
"This is what I spend my time doing," the bishop said ruefully, as if apologizing for the temporal nature of his business. His measured tones were in contrast to the feelings of some of the parishioners present at the meeting, who, it was clear, saw their lives as an irreducible conflict between Christian Serbs and the Albanian Antichrist. The gloom in their hearts was palpable, as if they knew that their days in Kosovo were numbered and that their only option now was to stage an elaborate theater of outrage -- in hopes of getting the outside world to come to their aid. "They will dynamite everything, even our church in Gracanica," one told me. "They" are the Albanians; and the church is one of a score of Serb Orthodox churches, dating from the 13th to the 18th centuries, whose presence imbues Kosovo with near-mystical importance for many Serbs, making Kosovo, as one Serb told me, "like our Judea and Samaria."
Gracanica is five miles from Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, and is the bishop's seat. He lives in the monastery adjacent to the church, a haunting place -- now afflicted also with that contagious Serb gloom -- built in 1321. The Byzantine frescoes inside the church are stunning and, as Edith Durham once described them, "old-world, barbaric, and decorative," with gaunt saints, their cheeks made more sunken still by the ghostly light. The iconography even explains, in a curious aesthetic way, the Serbs' stubborn atavism. Ars longa, vita brevis, Serbia forever.
History is but a flash to the Serbs, for they still kindle themselves with fuel from the 14th century. They were defeated in battle by the Turks in 1389 -- in a place near here, called the Field of the Blackbirds -- and have turned that defeat into an elaborate myth, a kind of Balkan "nunca mas," or "never again," an eerie, vengeful national myth of regret and reprisal. "Losing" Kosovo to the Muslim Albanians today is unthinkable because it evokes the loss of Kosovo to the Muslim Turks 600 years ago. So when prayers are conducted at Gracanica, they are not so much an attempt to transcend political conflict as an extension of existential polemics. Orthodox prayer is politics in Kosovo.
Albanian extremists have only heightened Serb fears by blowing up numerous churches since 1999, when NATO intervened to put a stop to Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of ethnic terror against the Kosovar Albanians. That said, there is now a groundswell in Albanian civil society that offers hope of a way forward. Many nations have their spiritual roots left behind in other territories: the Iranians in Najaf and Karbala; the Turks all over Central Asia; the Greeks in Istanbul. If the Albanians can make promises to protect Serb shrines, and the Serbs can bring themselves to believe those promises, there should be no reason why Bishop Artemije and his flock cannot arrive at a modern way of living with reality.
And then perhaps the year 1389 might cede, at last, to the present.
Mr. Varadarajan is the editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal.

U.N. office reports potential savings of US$37 million through better management

UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ The U.N. office checking on the world body's efficiency and accountability has identified potential savings of US$37 million over the past 12 months and investigated a misappropriation of US$4.2 million in its Kosovo mission.
The Office of Internal Oversight Services said Thursday that US$15 million, part of the US$37 million in savings, has already been recovered, according to a press release.

The office, working with the European Union Anti-fraud Office, has investigated a misappropriation of US$4.2 million by a former senior staff member of the U.N. Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo. The staff member has been successfully prosecuted by national authorities.

The U.N. office issued some 2,700 recommendations on raising accountability for fraud, waste and abuse and on increasing efficiency throughout the U.N. system. It also listed the areas of U.N. work at highest risk for management problems, including safety and security, procurement and peacekeeping.

The oversight office investigated allegations of sexual exploitation of refugees in West Africa, finding that abuse did occur but was not as widespread as was first reported.

Its recommendations have helped the peacekeeping department improve recruitment and procurement procedures and led the U.N. refugee agency to change its project agreements to make them more competitive and glean more financial information.

Lithuanian troops to stay in Afghanistan and Kosovo until the end of 2004

VILNIUS, Oct 16 (AFP) - The Lithuanian parliament decided on Thursday to extend the mandate of the Baltic country's military missions in Afghanistan and Kosovo until the end of 2004.

The parliament approved a proposal from President Rolandas Paksas to extend the participation of 50 Lithuanian troops in the US-led anti-terrorist operation in Afghanistan and the service of four troops in a NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) operating in the capital Kabul.

The parliament also extended the stay of 35 troops in a NATO-led force in Kosovo, the parliament's information office said.

Currently some 250 Lithuanian troops are serving in 13 international missions around the world, including almost 100 in Iraq.

Lithuania is on course to join the European Union on May 2004 and also NATO next year.

Early general elections loom over Serbia as government faces

By JOVANA GEC

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro (AP) _ Serbia's pro-Western government fought for survival Thursday amid signs that it has lost majority support in the Parliament and might be forced to call an early general election.

Deputies in Serbia's 250-member Parliament convened Thursday for a second time this week to discuss a demand by hard-line opposition lawmakers that the coalition Cabinet of Prime Minister Zoran Zivkovic be voted out of office.

After three hours of heated argument, the lawmakers concluded the session without a confidence vote, but government officials admitted that their opponents might have gathered enough support to oust Serbia's first democratic government since World War II.

``It is clear that the government does not have the majority support for its policies at this moment,'' declared Cedomir Jovanovic, one of the government's deputy prime ministers.

``If we don't have a majority here, we will seek majority support in Serbia and get it,'' Jovanovic added. ``We are not afraid of elections.''

It was not immediately clear when the no-confidence vote demanded by the opposition will take place, as the debate _ which will continue next Wednesday _ seems likely to drag on for days. It was also unclear whether the government might win back defectors from its ranks in the meantime.

The fall of the government would lead to early elections and would likely strengthen nationalist and rightist groups in Serbia. Average Serbs are increasingly disillusioned with the slow pace of reforms and allegations of corruption among top officials, and recent polls show that hard-line parties would be likely to make gains if elections were held now.

If the present government is toppled, U.S. and other Western efforts to democratize the Balkans would suffer a setback, observers say. Most of the opposition is staunchly anti-U.S. and accuses the current government of betraying Serbian interests by cooperating with the West.

The threat of a majority vote against the government amounts to the biggest crisis in Serbia since the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in March. That murder was apparently carried out by underground figures resisting a crackdown on lawlessness.

Also facing possible ouster is Natasa Micic, the parliamentary speaker and acting president of the republic, whose replacement is demanded by former President Slobodan Milosevic's Socialists and their allies.

The ruling coalition of democratic parties, which ousted Milosevic in 2000, managed Tuesday to hold off the confidence vote, trying to gain time to consolidate its support in the assembly.

Opposition leaders, including former President Vojislav Kostunica, have accused the government of alleged corruption and incompetence and are seeking its ouster and early general elections.

It was Kostunica's rightist, conservative Democratic Party of Serbia that initiated the no-confidence vote. Kostunica was part of the pro-Western coalition which toppled Milosevic in 2000, but he later turned against his former allies.
Regular parliamentary elections in Serbia are scheduled for next fall. Serbian media have speculated that an early vote could be held in January or February 2004.

Greek president signs accords with Belgrade

BELGRADE, Oct 16 (AFP) - Greek President Costis Stephanopoulos signed accords on transport and energy with the government of Serbia and Montenegro at the end of a visit to Belgrade on Thursday, officials said.

It was the first visit to Belgrade by a Greek president in 23 years.
The accords concern plans for a Belgrade-Athens motorway, Greek aid for powerlines in southern Serbia and hospitals in Montenegro.

Greece has offered aid worth 238 million euros (276.1 million dollars) for the reconstruction of Serbia and Montenegro, the loose federation which replaced Yugoslavia earlier this year.

Stephanopoulos said his meetings with top officals here over the past two days had been "extremely good" and he was confident that the country would eventually join Greece in the European Union.

"The road to the European Union is open to the western Balkans," he was quoted as saying by the Tanjug news agency.
am/smc/cml

UN adopts plan for Iraq

By Felicity Barringer and Kirk Semple/NYT NYT

Security Council vote, 15-0, in victory for U.S.

UNITED NATIONS, New York The Security Council voted unanimously Thursday to adopt a resolution on the future of Iraq, handing the United States a major diplomatic victory in its campaign to gather wider international contributions of troops and money for the rebuilding effort.

At a news conference after the vote, Secretary of State Colin Powell called the action ''a great achievement for the entire Security Council to come together again in this manner.''

Russia, France and Germany, which opposed the war and had been threatening to abstain during the vote, agreed to back the measure, saying they were acting in the interest of Council unity.

But after the vote, they conveyed their disappointment that the resolution did not go further toward meeting their concerns, including a quicker transfer of power from the American-led occupying force to the Iraqis. They also said they would not commit to further military and financial support for Iraq beyond the commitments they had already made.

Pakistan also joined Russia, France and Germany in saying it would not contribute troops to the occupation.

But despite the various misgivings of the Council members, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, said the resolution ''offers a solid base for expanded international engagement'' in Iraq.

The resolution authorizes the creation of a multinational occupying force under the command of the United States; requests international contributions to that force and to the reconstruction; gives the United Nations an expanded but still subordinate role in helping the political transition; and establishes a deadline of Dec. 15 for the Iraqi Governing Council to provide the Security Council with a timetable for drafting a new constitution and holding elections. Finally, the resolution, in effect, endorses a political transition under the control of the American-led occupation authority, which had been a major point of contention between the United States and reluctant Council members.

The vote capped six weeks of diplomatic wrangling, which Negroponte described as a ''very intense experience.'' American officials had been concerned that the resolution might get only the minimum nine votes needed for adoption, with the remaining members abstaining.

''If we had a bare majority, say nine votes in favor and six abstentions, it would not have been a good thing,'' Negroponte told reporters.

On Tuesday evening, as many as six of the 15 countries on the Security Council had indicated that they were likely to abstain. Several abstentions would have clouded what otherwise represented a triumphant moment for the United States and Britain, sponsors of the resolution, along with Spain and Cameroon.

The dynamic shifted overnight, diplomats said on Wednesday, when China agreed to support the measure, and its diplomats began calling their counterparts on the Council seeking to bridge the final impasse, which left the United States, Britain and Spain refusing to include in the resolution any timetable for a transfer of power to the Iraqis, while Russia, France and Germany were insisting on just such a timetable.

The practical impact of the resolution may become apparent as soon as next week at a donors' conference in Madrid at which the United States and Britain hope to receive concrete commitments of troops and money from other countries. Negroponte said several countries had been waiting for the passage of the UN resolution before they would commit any resources to Iraq. The resolution, he said, ''provides the framework for others to make contributions.''

But the resolution papers over the fundamental differences dividing the United States from many other nations on the Security Council, which said the measure should have set more restrictive deadlines for a quicker transfer of responsibilities from the coalition authorities to the Iraqis, and should have given the United Nations a stronger role in the oversight of Iraq during the transitional period. ''We miss the clear signal that the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis will be accelerated,'' Germany's ambassador to the United Nations, Gunter Pleuger, told the Council.

In a joint statement after the vote, the ambassadors of France, Germany and Russia said, ''The conditions are not created for us to envisage any military commitment and no further financial contributions beyond our present engagement.'' Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations, Munir Akram, said his major contention was that the U.S.-led multinational force authorized by the resolution would not have ''a separate and distinct identity'' from the coalition forces.

But the reluctant countries all cited the need for a united front at the Security Council to achieve progress in Iraq.

Pleuger said the members ''share the same goals in Iraq, and that is to contribute to a swift stabilization of the conditions in Iraq, to support the political and economic reconstruction process in Iraq, and to promote the restoration of sovereignty of the Iraqi people through a government democratically elected by them.''

He added: ''This can only succeed when the Security Council appears as unified as possible. We, therefore, did not want to stand in the way of unity of the Security Council.''

The vote is a victory for Powell, who brought the reluctant Security Council together without directly ceding any of the American-led coalition's control over Iraq's immediate political future.

''In crafting this resolution, we never lost sight of the conditions on the ground,'' Negroponte said after the vote. ''Our consistent aim has been to support the Iraqis and those who have joined them in this unprecedented stabilization, reconstruction and recovery effort.''