[ALBSA-Info] Kouchner's dying to hear an Albanian joke

[Kreshnik Bejko]

<Bernie is questioning whether Albanians have a sense
of humor based on the fact that he has never heard an
Albanian joke>


July 17, 2000
Aide Takes Stock of U.N. in Kosovo
By STEVEN ERLANGER


RISTINA, Kosovo -- Bernard Kouchner, the emotional chief of the United 
Nations administration in Kosovo, has made it through a tumultuous year.
Last November, as the province's water and power were almost nonexistent, 
the West was not providing the money or personnel it promised and the cold 
was as profound and bitter as the ethnic hatred, Mr. Kouchner was in a 
depression so deep that his staff thought he might quit.
He spoke darkly then of "how hard it is to change the human soul," of the 
quick fatigue of Western leaders who prosecuted the war with Serbia over 
Kosovo and had no interest in hearing about its problematic aftermath, of 
the impenetrability of the local Serbs and Albanians, with their tribal, 
feudal passions.
"I've never heard an Albanian joke," he said sadly, looking around his 
dreary office, the former seat of Serbian power here. "Do they have a sense 
of humor?"
Now, in a blistering summer, Mr. Kouchner's mood has improved. A French 
physician who founded Doctors Without Borders because he became fed up with 
international bureaucracy, he is now an international bureaucrat, sometimes 
uneasy in his skin. He still goes up and down with the vagaries of this 
broken province, with its ramshackle infrastructure, chaotic traffic and 
lack of real law or justice. And without question, he admits, some of those 
problems can be laid at his door.
"Of course I'm not the perfect model of a bureaucrat and an administrator," 
he said. "But we have succeeded in the main thing": stopping the oppression 
of Kosovo's Albanians by Belgrade, bringing them home and letting them 
restart their lives in freedom.
And yet, he said, "I have not succeeded in human terms" with a traumatized 
population. "They still hate one another deeply."
He paused, and added: "Here I discovered hatred deeper than anywhere in the 
world, more than in Cambodia or Vietnam or Bosnia. Usually someone, a doctor 
or a journalist, will say, 'I know someone on the other side.' But here, no. 
They had no real relationship with the other community."
The hatred, he suggested, can be daunting and has plunged him and his 
colleagues into despair. "Sometimes we got tired and exhausted, and we 
didn't want a reward, not like that, but just a little smile," he said 
wanly. "I'm looking for moments of real happiness, but you know just now I'm 
a bit dry." But he is proud that everyone has persisted nonetheless.
As for himself, he said, "my only real success is to set up this 
administration," persuading Albanian and some Serbian leaders to cooperate 
with foreign officials and begin to share some executive responsibility.
When the head of the local Serbian Orthodox Church, Bishop Kyr Artemije, and 
the leaders of perhaps half of Kosovo's Serbs decided to join as observers, 
"we were very happy then," he said. "We were jumping in the air. We believed 
then that we were reaching the point of no return."
But even those Serbs left the executive council set up by Mr. Kouchner, only 
to return after securing written promises for better security that have 
prompted the Albanian Hashim Thaci, former leader of the separatist Kosovo 
Liberation Army, to suspend his own participation.
Bishop Artemije's chief aide, the Rev. Sava Janjic, said carefully: 
"Kouchner has not been serious in his promises, and the efforts to 
demilitarize the Kosovo Liberation Army are very inefficient. But he is 
sincere, and this written document is important on its own."
A senior Albanian politician said Mr. Kouchner was "the wrong man for the 
job," which he said required more forcefulness and less empathy. "After a 
year, you still can't talk of the rule of law." Still, the politician said, 
"Kouchner's instincts are good -- he knew he had to co-opt the Albanians, 
that the U.N. couldn't run the place alone."
Less successful, most officials and analysts interviewed here said, is Mr. 
Kouchner's sometimes flighty, sometimes secretive management of the clumsy 
international bureaucracy itself in the year since Secretary General Kofi 
Annan sent him here to run the United Nations administration in Kosovo.
Alongside the bureaucrats are the 45,000 troops of the NATO-led Kosovo 
Force, known as KFOR, responsible to their home governments, not to Mr. 
Kouchner or even to the force's commander. And while Mr. Kouchner was able 
to persuade the former commander, Gen. Klaus Reinhardt of Germany, to do 
more to help the civilian side, they were both less successful with 
Washington, Paris, Bonn, Rome and London.
The affliction known here as "Bosnian disease" -- with well-armed troops 
unwilling to take risks that might cause them harm -- has settled into 
Kosovo, say Mr. Kouchner's aides and even some senior officers of the United 
Nations force.
Consequently, some serious problems -- like the division of the northern 
town of Mitrovica into Serbian and Albanian halves that also marks the 
informal partition of Kosovo -- appear likely not to be solved but simply 
"managed," no matter how much they embolden Belgrade or undermine the 
confidence of Kosovo Albanians in the good will of their saviors. It was on 
the bridge dividing Mitrovica -- not in Paris -- that Mr. Kouchner chose to 
spend his New Year's Eve, making a hopeful toast, so far in vain, to 
reconciliation.
Nor will the peacekeeping troops do much to stop organized crime or 
confront, in a serious fashion, organized Albanian efforts to drive the 
remaining Serbs out of Kosovo and prevent the return of those who fled, the 
officials say.
The discovery last month of some 70 tons of arms, hidden away by the former 
Kosovo Liberation Army and not handed over as promised to the peacekeepers, 
took no one here by surprise.
"It was a success," Mr. Kouchner said, "not a surprise."
In fact, senior United Nations and NATO officials say, the existence of the 
arms cache was known and the timing of the discovery was a message to the 
former rebels, who had recently used some of the weapons, to stop their 
organized attacks on Serbs and moderate Albanian politicians.
But few here expect the arrest of former rebel commanders who are widely 
suspected of involvement in corruption or political violence. The reaction 
may be volatile, officials say: troops could be attacked and the shaky 
political cooperation with the Albanians undermined.
Is the United Nations peacekeeping force too timid? Mr. Kouchner paused and 
shrugged. "Of course," he finally said. "But what can we do? Everything in 
the international community works by compromise."
Foreign policemen are also too timid and take too long with investigations 
that never seem to finish, Mr. Kouchner says. But at least now, more than 
3,100 of the 4,800 international police officers he has been promised -- 
even if not the 6,000 he wanted -- are here, and a Kosovo police academy is 
turning out graduates.
One of Mr. Kouchner's biggest regrets is the slow arrival of the police, 
which bred a culture of impunity. More than 500 murders have taken place in 
the year since the United Nations force took complete control of the 
province, and no one has yet been convicted.
There are still only four international judges and prosecutors in a province 
where violence and intimidation mean neither Serbs nor Albanians can 
administer fair justice.
What Mr. Kouchner says depresses him most is the persistence of ethnic 
violence even against the innocent and the caregivers. One of his worst 
moments came last winter, he said, when a Serbian obstetrician who cared for 
women of all ethnic groups was murdered by Albanians in Gnjilane, in the 
sector of Kosovo patrolled by American units of the United Nations force.
"He was a doctor!" Mr. Kouchner exclaimed, still appalled. "It was the 
reverse of everything we did with Doctors Without Borders."
While Mr. Kouchner says he has put himself alongside "the new victims," the 
minority Serbs, he carries with him his visits to the mass graves of slain 
Albanians.
"I'm angry that world opinion has changed so quickly," he said. "They were 
aware before of the beatings and the killings of Albanians, but now they 
say, 'There is ethnic cleansing of the Serbs.' But it is not the same -- 
it's revenge."
He does savor the international military intervention on moral and humane 
grounds. "I don't know if we will succeed in Kosovo," he said. "But already 
we've won. We stopped the oppression of the Albanians of Kosovo."
Mr. Kouchner paused, lost in thought and memory. "It was my dream," he said 
softly. "My grandparents died in Auschwitz," he said, opening a normally 
closed door. "If only the international community was brave enough just to 
bomb the railways there," which took the Nazis' victims to the death camp. 
"But all the opportunities were missed."
That, he said, is why he became involved, early on, in Biafra, the region 
whose secession touched off the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70, in which 
perhaps one million people died. And it is what drives him in Kosovo.
Mr. Kouchner, now 60, holds to the healing power of time. He points to the 
reconciliation now of Germany and Israel, and of France and Germany.
"Working with Klaus Reinhardt is a good memory," he said. "He called me his 
twin brother." They both came of age in the Europe of 1968. "I'm a Frenchman 
and he's a German," and 50 years ago, he said, "no one could imagine this."
"It's much easier to make war than peace," Mr. Kouchner said. "To make peace 
takes generations, a deep movement and a change of the spirit." He smiled, 
looked away. "It's why I sometimes want to believe in God."


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