Corruption

Cutting back the property jungle

Two years and two months ago, the widely respected Pristina city planner Rexhep Luci was gunned down outside his Dardania apartment building.

The day before, Luci had signed a demolition order to remove the foundation of a hotel that was going up without a building permit in Germija park - on public land.

The killers have not been found, but the message was clear: don't mess with the city's real planners.
Despite Bernard Kouchner's naming a regulation after Luci and despite UNMIK's quick move to fence off three other illegal construction properties Luci had planned to regulate, Kosovo's civil servants obeyed the gun with their silence. Illegal construction and a land grab of municipal, socially-owned and Serb-owned property that had begun in the summer of '99 continued unabated.

Recently, however, the under-resourced UNMIK Police, administration and judiciary have begun to crack some of the cadastral corruption. And more could be coming soon.

The former Pristina Municipal Administrator Ivo Sanc often railed publicly about corruption, sometimes to the irritation of his bosses. But a few weeks before he left he alerted police to inconsistencies in the cadastral records in the municipality, socially-owned and municipal property in Pristina's 'Sofia' district was "transferred by the Cadastre to private individuals without adhering to the proper legal procedures required for such a transfer," according to the "Request for an Investigation…" filed by the office of the Pristina District Public Prosector.

Cadastral office chief Shar Pllana and clerk Avdullah Demolli were arrested on 27 September. Demolli was jailed for only 72 hours; Pllana was taken into custody and then released on bail after spending 26 days in jail.

UNMIK brought to Kosovo a principle from earlier missions involving transitional administrations (East Timor, Cambodia) - that land rights should not be affected or changed during a transitional period. Land could be "allocated" for periods of time by the transitional authority, but not privatised. This was formalised by UNMIK regulations 2000/45 and 54.

However, in Pristina, over the past three years, municipal court decisions supporting the privatisation of public land were being enacted as fast as flipping pancakes. Most of these decisions were dated before the arrival of UNMIK, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when previously nationalised land was to be re-instituted. This will be part of the cadastral office's defence.

If that were so, UNMIK officials say, then why were these decisions not implemented until the years 1999-2002?

Investigators suspect that court documents may have been fabricated and backdated to the 1980s. They found Serbian stamps, cyrillic typewriters and bond papers in the cadastral offices. The stamps were freshly used, says a staff member familiar with the case.

But a more significant find during the September police raid of the cadastral offices occurred in two basement rooms which contained large amounts of property records and original cadastre maps. Local officials at the cadastral office had told international officials that the pre-1999 cadastral records had been destroyed or carted away by departing Serbs. The documentation could be the entire cadastral records for Pristina, investigators say. If these include the records for the years 1987 to 1992, as some officials believe, the court decisions of that era which the cadastral office has been implementing since 1999 could be proved fake. Ivo Sanc created a commission to study exactly what those records contain and based on which documents the Municipal Cadastre Office effected more than 3,000 property transactions in the past three years.

In addition, about four months ago, some Kosovo Serb exiles alerted UNMIK that a plot of land they left behind in Pristina had, shortly after the death of the family member who held the deed, appeared on the cadastral records as belonging to an Albanian and then been subdivided and sold off..
Following a private case like this when the owner has died or moved out of Kosovo is extremely difficult, says Prosecutor Anthony Ricci. Yet UNMIK police have pursued this as fraud, related to the investigation of the cadastral office.

Another piece of socially-owned land included in the cadastral investigation had been given to Remi Mustafa, now in jail facing charges of war crimes. But this transaction, which occurred in December 2000, may have been sanctioned by the international administration, rather than local officials, according to those following the case.

Meanwhile, last spring in Suva Reka, Municipal Administrator Manoj Saunik questioned an item on the municipal assembly agenda that would have leased a large plot of socially-owned land to a private company. The municipality had not followed UNMIK rules and regulations on municipal financial procedures: No tender was advertised in newspapers as required; after the municipality claimed to find only one bidder, the matter was not re-tendered; and most surprisingly the municipal officials stated they did not know the area description or boundaries of the land to be leased. Also, there was an outstanding claim with the court from a previous owner on part of the land. The CEO Halil Morina and Assembly President Uke Bytiqi fought UNMIK over the land allocation. This went ahead despite UNMIK's protests, not divulging the fact that the Municipal President was a shareholder in the sole bidding company, Hidroterm, which is owned by another municipal assembly member. This came out when Bytiqi filed a declaration of his assets and income with the OSCE before the latest municipal elections.

As police began to investigate in Suva Reka, a similar pattern to that in Pristina emerged: properties which had been socially-owned were "privatised" for ridiculously low sums to a small coterie of Suva Rekans.

Bytiqi was murdered on 27 October during a victory celebration, the day after his LDK party succeeded once again in winning a majority in the municipal elections. Police have assessed that his murder was related to post-election rage and differences dating to the war, rather than to his business dealings.

However, it was the Suva Reka municipal CEO whose signature was on the improper property transfers, and SRSG Michael Steiner suspended him in August. Police had been investigating the CEO and Bytiqi to see if criminal charges were warranted.

In both cases investigators and UNMIK officials noticed a change from the months following Luci's murder: for the first time, members of the public aided in the search for information. "When people became aware that UNMIK was fighting corruption they responded: people were happy to see that these practices weren't sanctioned," said a former member of the UNMIK administration in Suva Reka.

"Kosovo Albanians are getting over their fear of these organisations and their historical mistrust of government," Ricci said. "The more significant the characters we arrest, the more people come forward.

"We have a number of cases that could be generated with more resources (in the judiciary) and more police resources. The CCIU (Central Criminal Investigation Unit) took the cadastral investigation, but it's not really their thing…We don't have any property lawyers, and even if we did, Western European law is completely different from here…. It's also hard to get an international judge involved as most of us deal normally with murders…"

Ricci imagines the Pristina case will be "long and convoluted….And we can't rule out that it will go beyond the cadastral office."

Susan Manuel