The UN and NATO are failing Kosovo

[Vladimir]

Misha Glenny is director of SEE Change 2004, an organisation promoting regional cooperation in the Balkans. His most recent book is The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999. He writes here for the International Herald Tribune on the latest wave of violence in Kosovo.

In 2002, the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin-based research institute, issued a report that warned of the forthcoming crisis of 2004 in the Balkans. The clock has been ticking determinedly ever since, but evidently not at a volume sufficient for policymakers to hear it above the din generated in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

On Wednesday, ethnic violence between Serbs and Albanians across Kosovo triggered the alarm. It was shrill and clear, signalling a serious failure of international policy in the province and in the wider Western Balkan region.

There is no doubt as to where responsibility lies. For good or ill, the international community took up the reins of government in Kosovo after the war between NATO and Yugoslavia in 1999. There is a Kosovo government headed by a prime minister, Bajram Rexhepi, but its powers are tightly circumscribed. For almost five years, the United Nations and the NATO-led Kosovo Force have exercised decisive authority over Kosovo's administration and security, spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.

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