“The Plan being discussed at Rambouillet is a
formalistic, legal document. Its provisions may be needed,
but it doesn’t contain any ideas on how to make peace among
the citizens who are to live with it when implemented. Their
voice is not heard, their needs are not dealt with in the
Plan. Most of the delegates in Rambouillet are not
representative of the citizens. The “mediators” have no
professional education as mediators. The idea that Kosovo’s
problems can be solved in two weeks is absurd. Rambouillet
militates against all we know about human psychology and
trust-building.
So, once again politics fool media and media fool
world public opinion. And people in Kosovo will have to wait
for peace as long as the vagabonds in Beckett’s drama wait
for Godot…” says Dr. Jan Oberg upon returning from TFF’s
34th mission to ex-Yugoslavia, this time to Skopje, Belgrade
and the troubled Kosovo province.
1. The preparation
When wars are fought thousands of trained soldiers are
mobilised, highly trained experts and sophisticated
technologies activated. When peace is to be created, the
world lets one man – in the case of Kosovo, US ambassador
Christopher Hill with a few assistants – shuttle back and
forth between some of the parties. When Yugoslavia insisted
on Kosovo being an integral part of its territory and the
Albanians insisted that it is their independent state,
ambassador Hill drew a line – not a circle or a ball – and
explained to them, not unlike a father to two quarrelling
children: “The compromise I allow you is ‘self-government.’
He thought that was fair, that this would be in the
interests of the parties. Thus, he and the Contact Group set
up the framework for the future of Kosovo’s 1,5 million or
so inhabitants and the rest of Yugoslavia, around 10 million
people. Nobody ask THEM how they would like the future to
be.
2. The process
Perhaps it is all too complex but there are not only the
Serbian and Yugoslav governments in Belgrade and the
Albanians in Kosovo. Presumably, 15-20% of the people in
Kosovo are NOT Albanians. The Kosovo Serbs have not
been given an opportunity to voice their independent
opinion. Cynically speaking, of course, that doesn’t matter
much because nobody, least of all the ‘conflict managers’ in
Rambouillet, expect them to stay in areas of Kosovo under
‘self-governing’ Albanian majority rule. No Serbs live in
areas now controlled by KLA.
The fatal mistake was to believe that negotiations will
create trust. They won’t. It works the other way: some
trust-building must happen BEFORE people meet at the
negotiation table.
3. The threats
All this – predictably – did not work. The Contact group
then issued ultimatums and put NATO’s prestige at stake:
Come to Rambouillet, sign our document, or face air-strikes.
Air-strikes! ? Everyone knows, tacitly of course, that that
is exactly what KLA would like to see happen, because KLA
does not have the kind of installations – depots, airfields,
ammunition factories, air-defence systems and the like – so
it can’t be bombed. The threat targets the Serb side only –
which has not made them more willing to sign anything.
Last autumn, ambassador Holbrooke forgot to tell the
President Milosevic that NATO would set up an “extraction
force” in neighbouring Macedonia aimed to intervene on
Serbian soil and “extract” the 2000 OSCE “verifiers.”
Yugoslavia sees that as an act of aggression. Incrementally,
the Contact Group and NATO then agreed that any agreement in
Rambouillet would require around 30.000 NATO ground troops
on the territory of the sovereign state of Yugoslavia which
all the Group’s member states recognised as the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, FRY, with Kosovo inside it – just a
few years ago.
The message to Belgrade from the Contact Group and NATO
is: “If you sign, you’ll get NATO ground troops. If you
don’t sign you’ll get air-strikes and NATO ground troops!”
One should hardly expect that this sort of bullying leads to
trust, co-operation and compliance. It is not the first time
the international community threatens someone to sign a
paper and then play it surprised when that party is not in
“full compliance.” In short, NATO has trapped itself: it can
not back down from its demand to deploy ground troops and it
can not deploy them as a peace-keeper but only as an
invasion and occupation force.
4. The Plan
The plan deals with government structure, territorial
status, communes, assemblies, competences, presidential
matters, administration, courts, ombudsman, human rights,
councils, monitoring, police and security, extradition of
war criminals, law enforcement, crowd and traffic control,
police operations, border security, arrest and detention,
elections. In short, it is a fine legal document. But
important dimension are absent.
There is nothing about postwar physical-economic
reconstruction, employment, investments, (better) schools,
hospitals, theatres, or media. There is no mention of local
NGOs and civil society, of socio-psychological healing,
nothing about a truth commission, reconciliation, teaching
the young peace and conflict resolution, or training
professionals and politicians in negotiation. The local
cultures are not mirrored anywhere in the document. The role
of women as peace-makers is forgotten. And the specific
problem of the very high proportion of children and youth
below the age of 20 is not even mentioned. There is nothing
about peace zones, alternative defence, new Balkan
co-operative structures. There is no wider framework, no
awareness of this conflict’s intimate connections with the
region.
5. The delegates
The Serb delegation consist of some lawyers and party
people from Belgrade and virtually unknown representatives
of various small minorities in the region. Conspicuously,
those who do represent the Kosovo Serbs such as Momcilo
Trajkovic, Father Sava, Bishop Artemije and those who have
creative ideas about future co-existence in Kosovo such as
professor Batakovic – were all left in the cold outside
Rambouillet. Belgrade did not ask them to join the
delegation.
The Albanian delegation is headed by KLA, the Kosovo
Liberation Army, which has no legitimate legal status in the
independent republic of Kosova created, as it was, to be a
neutral state with no army and with open borders. The
establishment and activities of KLA was never endorsed by
the Kosovo-Albanian parliament or by President Rugova who,
according to Kosova’s constitution and elections, is the
legitimate leader of the self-proclaimed republic. According
to Serb sources, more of the KLA delegates are indicted for
murder and did not have legal papers upon their departure
for Rambouillet. Two intellectuals on the Albanian team
represent nobody but were allegedly invited by Ambassador
Hill and Foreign Secretary Cook – who did not invite similar
people from the Serb side.
6. The mediators
The mediators are professional diplomats and ministers.
There is no evidence that any of them ever took as much as a
week-end course in conflict analysis, conflict psychology,
creative conflict-resolution, mediation,
conflict-transformation, reconciliation, forgiveness. None
of them has a PhD in peace and conflict studies or related
matters. If Orthodox priests are not allowed in, the
question is whether there is any area expertise,
anthropologists, Balkan experts present in Rambouillet.
Finally – and not the least – it is all a men’s game.
7. The timing
Who could believe that it would be done in one or maximum
two weeks? Only someone who has a) learnt nothing from the
Dayton process in Ohio and the Dayton process on the ground,
b) is unable to see that Kosovo is a complex problem, c)
ignores the depth of people’s problems and suffering for
decades or d) has another agenda – such as seeing NATO
troops on the ground before the Alliance’s 50th anniversary
in April.
8. The “negotiations”
The basics of the Plan is not negotiable. It’s a fait
accompli. An anonymous U.S. State Department official said
before the delegations arrived that only 20% in the margins
could be discussed.
9. The credits
Rambouillet is a stage where the conflicts inside EU and
between EU and the United States are played out. The basis
for the document on the table is the plan developed by US
Ambassador Hill, and the conference is co-chaired by France
and England with a Russian mediator. U.S. Secretary of
State, Madam Albright, was elegantly granted the diplomatic
‘victory’ of bringing the delegation leaders face-to-face
for the first time in a week. If they could not sit at the
same table during the first week in Rambouillet, you may
wonder how they can, together, reach and implement an
agreement.
10. The result
Most likely, the parties will sign the document, one way
or another, with reservations. However, KLA will not accept
being disarmed and Belgrade will not accept ground troops.
No one wants to be first out as the ‘bad guys.’ There may be
secret deals or protocols. They will then also DE-SIGN the
document – i.e. tell the press and their fellow-citizens
that they interpret the difficult parts in their own
particular way, no matter what the others say and do. Both
sides will say that “we did not yield” and “we got what we
wanted – if not right now, later.” Only then begins the
implementation and the compliance games. Soon one or both
sides will not be “in compliance” and the bombs fall. If KLA
refuses to sign, NATO has little leverage. To disarm KLA it
needs to get into Kosovo. This means bombing and
invasion.
11. The morals
All this happens when the international community turns a
blind eye to Turkey’s repeated incursions into a
neighbouring state. In Algeria, 30 times more people have
been killed than in Kosovo with no international
intervention. Tens of thousands have died in Africa with no
bombings. No legal, sovereign government anywhere with
secessionist movements on its territory would accept to be
bombed for adhering to its status as recognised state –
least of all the West.
Director Oberg summarises: “The issue is NOT whether
nasty wars and genocide must be stopped. The issue is how it
can be done. The issue is whether the ‘conflict managers’
agenda is “clean” or they take advantage of conflicts and
human tragedies to cynically promote power politics – and,
thereby, prepare wars in the future (as argued in PressInfo
55). Conflicts can be handled in many and different ways,
the Dayton- and Rambouillet method is certainly not the only
one.
The international community lacks criteria – even a
discussion – about good versus bad conflict-management in
the post-Cold War environment. Most people only blame the
conflicting parties if peace fails, but we must also ask:
Did we, the internationals, contribute to the conflicts in
the first place, historically? Who can serve as
mediators without mixed motives and hidden agendas? Are
the peace plans we impose at all good? What can we learn
from earlier peace processes?
Rambouillet is absurd theatre. Professional peace-makers
and mediators know you cannot make peace that way. The whole
process militates against what is known about human
psychology, trust and co-operation. But the media will
continue to call this type of theatre “peace negotiations”
and thereby free the international community from
co-responsibility for the failure. The poor, suffering
citizens of Kosovo will have to wait for peace as long as
the vagabonds do for Godot in Samuel Beckett’s classical
drama,” Jan Oberg concludes twelve hours before the deadline
at the castle.
© TFF 1999
• You are welcome to re-print, copy, archive, quote
from or re-post this item, but please retain the source.
• TFF’s website has all the relevant links to Iraq,
the Balkans, including media there + peace research, and
non-violence
• Teacher, activist, journalist?? You’ll always find
something interesting at TFF.
• Get your daily global news from the leading media
on TFF’s site, all in one place.
