Kosovo
Missed Opportunities,
Lessons For The Future
Report by
Lesley Abdela
Former Deputy-Director — Democratisation
(Head — NGOs, Civil Society)
OSCE Mission — Kosovo
February 2000
Tel +44 20 7 631 1545
Fax +44 20 7 631 1544
e-mail lesley.abdela@shevolution.com
Lesley Abdela has spent 20 years helping develop democracy building initiatives through skills training, consultancy and grassroots mobilisation/campaigning initiatives. Over the past 8 years she has pioneered democracy-building programmes in 28 countries, working with organisations as diverse as newly-formed NGOs in Moldova, international organisations such as UNDP in Slovenia, the British Council in Tanzania and the Commonwealth Secretariat in the UK.
Most of her work has been in the former Soviet Union, Middle East and Africa.
She is senior partner in two consultancy and training firms, Shevolution, and Eyecatcher Associates, and founded the international NGO Project Parity (she is currently Chief Executive), which specialises in training initiatives to increase the role of women in emerging democracies.
Since the early 1980s Lesley Abdela has been a freelance political journalist publishing features in the Times, Guardian, Independent, etc. and major women’s magazines.
In August 1999 she was seconded by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office to the OSCE Mission in Kosovo for the post of Deputy Director for Democratisation & Governance.
Lesley Abdela is a Board Member of the British Council and a Governor of Nottingham Trent University. She is the author of the management action guides ‘Breaking Through The Glass Ceilings’ and ‘Do It! — Walk The Talk’.
Strengths Of The Current Situation In Kosovo *
The Local Population Work Hard And Are Ingenious At Making Things Work Again - They Are Capable Of Being The Most Powerful Motors For Change In Kosovo *
Kosovo - Problems And Potential Solutions *
Inadequate Resources Allocated For The Key Aims Of the International Intervention *
Words Not Being Matched With Actions By Donor Contributing States *
The Difference Between ‘Growing’ Democracy From The Grassroots And Organising Show-Piece Elections *
The OSCE In Kosovo - Problems and Potential Solutions *
Personnel Deployment System Needs Reforming *
Poor Prioritisation Causing Delays *
Current System Results in Inappropriate Deployment Of Experts *
Paperwork Mountains And ‘Catch 22’ Bureaucratic Nightmares *
Poor Communication Between Member States, OSCE HQ Vienna and the In-Country Mission Office *
Slow Staff Recruitment & Deployment *
Unacceptable Codes of Employment Practice *
Locally Employed Kosovar Staff Hired Only in Low Grade Jobs and Asked to Take a Pay Cut *
Inadequate Logistical Planning *
Previous Warnings About OSCE’s Poor Track Record On Gender In Previous Missions Were Ignored… *
Key Questions For The Future *
Annex 1 — Examples of Practical Proposals Blocked From Above in Democratisation Department *
Informal Needs Assessment Meetings With Political Parties *
Agenda 21 For Local Municipalities *
Outreach To Involve The Population In The Democratisation Process *
Public Meetings Held Around The Province Hosted By Consultative Panels *
User-Friendly Information On Democratisation For The Public *
This report is based on observations and experiences of Lesley Abdela acting as ‘Deputy-Director, Democratisation’ and ‘Head — NGOs, Civil-Society Building’ for the OSCE Mission-Kosovo through the Autumn of 1999. The UN and OSCE in Kosovo were allocated joint responsibility for setting up and running the Civil Administration and building Democracy and Human Rights.
The report is intended to prompt the setting up of a group to examine:
The group would need funding and a secretariat.
It could save billions of pounds if the Kosovo experience is properly analysed and lessons learned. There will be many a further Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone in the years ahead. I would be keen to be involved on a team to help find more appropriate and effective responses by the international community.
Key questions needing further examination touched on in this report are:
The fundamental difference between the traditional abilities of the OSCE and the task that it has been asked to take on in Kosovo may have been at the root of the appalling problems generated there in the post-conflict period.
I arrived in Pristina at the end of August 1999. At that time the Kosovars mostly saw the international community as a liberating force. The international community was busily trying to assemble staff and mobilise. Among the indigenous Kosovar Albanian population there was widespread optimism for the future. People had reopened shops and cafes and were fast rebuilding their homes (when they could get the building materials). To my surprise there did not even appear to be problems of law and order. I felt safer walking around Pristina in the evening than walking around London. There were plenty of local women walking about to shops and cafes in the evenings.
By mid-December it was clear the international community was fast losing credibility and had squandered its honeymoon period, producing few results and acting in a cumbersome, clumsy and bureaucratic manner.
The OSCE and the UN seemed poorly equipped in terms of planning, capacity, infrastructure, and more importantly in capability and culture to deal with such a dynamic situation.
The large international organisations failed to produce virtually anything tangible for the local population in democratisation, justice, law and order, local government administration or even sufficient winterisation supplies.
Hardly any progress had been made in the democratisation process. The crime rate increased dramatically and women were regularly being kidnapped (estimated 5 a week from Pristina). I no longer saw women out after dark because they were now too afraid. I heard reports came from usually reliable sources that lack of sufficient and properly trained international police meant that by the Albanian border girls of 16 were being kidnapped from their beds.
The tension and revenge killings between ethnic groups was escalating. Law and order broke down. Tales of intimidation and shoot-outs between rival criminal gangs had become part of everyday life.
The first Kosovar police cadets were on a pay-scale that was too low. Police pay was around DM298 a month. By contrast, an OSCE driver’s pay was DM1000 a month.
In reality the international community did not manage to pay the police cadets for weeks (possibly months). This naturally created unrest. The International police trainers privately expressed grave concern that producing a police force that was paid too little and paid late would lead to a police service that would survive on bribery and extortion, so evident elsewhere in the world.
The OSCE were supposed to be building a free Media. The local population felt it was such a propaganda station for UNMIK they nicknamed it ‘UNMIK’ TV. Kosovar Albanians said if they wanted some semblance of truth about events in Kosovo they tuned to (Albania’s) Tirana TV rather than UNMIK TV.
The situation among the Kosovar population is fast moving but the design of the UNMIK system and of OSCE itself has encumbered and delayed the activities of the international community, preventing rather than enabling people from producing good results in the tasks they are asked to undertake. The current system has produced a sclerosis. It is a lumbering elephant of a system which leads to the international community continually being wrong-footed by the local population.
The initiative was lost during the initial months after the bombing. Much of this was due to a fundamental failing by the key UNMIK agencies to have the capacity to react suitably to the unique situation of a post-conflict scenario. It requires urgent responses from experienced professionals producing tangible results that the local population want and feel involved in producing. Unless locals feel ‘ownership’ of any outcomes and see results (however minor) they will not trust in the UN for outcomes. They will not ‘wait for UNMIK’, they will find their own means of achieving results through alternative power-brokers. This is not a situation like that faced by established civil-services where directors can gradually learn new remits and ‘sit-out’ short-term problems safe in the knowledge that support will return with long-term results.
If there is no short-term success, it will be very hard to get long-term success.
The local population has felt impeded rather than liberated by UNMIK despite UNMIK’s remit. Part of the problem was/is the Kosovar population and community leaders felt/feel completely excluded from the process of trying to find new solutions. They were neither employed - other than as drivers and interpreters - nor consulted.
A Kosovar delegate at a meeting I attended of sixty NGO leaders said:
"You ‘internationals’ are polluting our air and clogging up our roads with all your white vehicles. You refuse to employ us as professionals in your organisations. There are thousands of you. You all make promises but we neither see action from you ‘internationals’ nor do you provide us with funds to get on with things ourselves."
A frustrated or unhappy populace inevitably turns to alternative power brokers and fixers to achieve what the international organisations have failed to do. It was not hard for militant and criminal elements to increase support for the view that ‘this is our country now, it’s time you foreigners left’.
In December the international police noticed a pattern of increased activity by the UCK to get the Internationals to leave.
The slowness with which the International Community moved with regard to the 29 Municipalities had serious effects which — if not somehow salvaged quickly — could kill any hope of building a democratic system. The UN were supposed to be running the Municipalities — the OSCE were supposed to be training the staff local staff in the Municipalities.
The self-proclaimed interim Government of Hashim Thaci and the UCK operated a swift take-over of political and administrative power in most of the 29 Municipalities. The OSCE Democratisation department and UN creaked so slowly into action that in the void the UCK and LDK have taken over the Municipalities as self appointed mayors. In a number of instances extreme elements in the UCK are using nasty methods of intimidation in the way they run things.
In January 2000 the UN administration appointed a new Transitional Governing Council. A police officer with the international police force in Kosovo commented:
ﾒThe creation of the new joint administration initiatives
between the U.N. and the various political factions here have a number of people very concerned. The TMK is a certified, bona fide gang of thieves, with links to organized crime elements throughout Europe, Asia and North America. They are extremely dangerous people.
The TMK is the KLA/UCK in a two-piece Italian suit, sitting down to dinner with the CIA and Dr. Kouchner. They will be the ultimate winners in this charade that's going on over here.
It would be laughable to turn an entire country over to such a gang of thugs if it wasn't so sad for the common people who have to live here."
The respect for NATO still mostly remains but Kosovars increasingly now see the OSCE and UN as an incompetent occupying force messing up their future. The Kosovars are transferring their support to the UCK to get things done.
Brain Hopkinson of The International Crisis Group (ICG) published a report in October 1999 titled ‘Waiting for UNMIK’:
‘UNMIK’s administrators have arrived late in their assigned Municipality, with little clear guidance about the job facing them and the circumstances they would be working in. Lack of funding and personnel leaves them in a position where they continually have to improvise, while still waiting for guidelines from HQ in Pristina. They are in many cases forced to tell the self-proclaimed Albanian communal authorities, which they cannot formally recognise but must work with in a day to day basis, to wait a little longer. The waiting is then handed down to the population, which remains unserved and unserviced into the fifth month. Impatience can be observed at every level.’
Strengths Of The Current Situation In Kosovo
Size
Kosovo is a province about the size of a British county like Hampshire with a population of less than 2 million people situated within three and a half hours flying time of most of Western Europe. This is not in any way a vast country like Nigeria with over 100 different languages. Given proper organisation, proper commitment, and proper resources it ought logistically to be ‘a winnable constituency’.
There Are Pockets Of Professional And Expert Staff Capable Of A Great Deal
A number of OSCE participating States seconded experienced professionals and experts in their fields: Media, police training, human rights, law and judiciary, democratisation. On arrival in Kosovo a number of these senior and experienced professionals have found themselves stymied by the system. Nonetheless, experts are still in place. Their talents could be liberated to achieve a great deal.
The Local Population Work Hard And Are Ingenious At Making Things Work Again - They Are Capable Of Being The Most Powerful Motors For Change In Kosovo
One big difference between the Kosovar and Bosnian situation is that in Bosnia many of the educated professionals had left for other countries and did not return. However in Kosovo most of the professionals and educated people have returned and are keen to be part of the rebuilding process.
Many Kosovars are self-starters accustomed to organising. For ten years they ran their own alternative schools and alternative society. They even paid a voluntary tax to fund these community activities.
The challenge is how to turn the international organisations into facilitators for these motors for change. The local population increasingly view UNMIK not as ‘compadres’ but impediments (with justification.)
‘Needs Assessment For Democratisation’
The impressive and practical ‘Needs Assessment‘ produced by the Norwegian Foreign Office at the start of the OSCE Mission identified key goals and means for achieving them. It should provide a basis for trying to examine how the actions have differed from the reality, and why.
Kosovo - Problems And Potential Solutions
Many Kosovars have been ‘dissidents’ for the past decade or more. People from the international community dealing with democracy-building failed to understand this culture and therefore failed to empathise with the ‘dissident’ mentality, something they needed to do if they were to harness all the energy and get results. Consequently the international community failed to produce tangible results that affect everyday lives fast enough.
Inadequate Resources Allocated For The Key Aims Of the International Intervention
Democracy and human rights were placed at the centre of justification for the war. For this to be maintained with any honesty, the process of democratisation must be given the utmost importance.
At the moment I do not believe that this is the case.
Overall, it cost an estimated Sterling £15 billion to bomb the region.
Sterling £2 million was allocated initially as the budget for the OSCE Democratisation programme. A sum amounting to approximately £1 per head of the Kosovar population is frankly unrealistic for such a massive task. While certainly accepting that Democratisation is wider than just the department I worked for, the OSCE Democratisation Department was meant to be the key to increasing grass-roots participation and the establishment of democracy in its widest sense, including the development of Civil Society NGOs and democratic political Parties. A budget equal to £1 per person per annum does not send the right signals that democratisation was being taken seriously.
21st Century democracy-building is an accelerating, people-centred process that requires high money in-puts. It cannot be achieved on the cheap. It should not remain the underfunded stepsister of the physical world of building or rebuilding the infrastructure and economy.
To be truly effective, Democracy programmes need to be ‘front-loaded’ so that the process of establishing democracy can literally leap from the starting block.
Solution:
Words Not Being Matched With Actions By Donor Contributing States
Funding was spasmodic and unpredictable. Many countries and international organisations had offered funds and resources. A number of the financial contributors were slow to follow up on their financial commitments. This hampered efforts by the main agencies to get up to speed (due literally to not having the cash for wages, infrastructure investment etc).
The longer the time spent trying to juggle funds, the more of the initial window of opportunity, when much of the local population was filled with hope and determination, was lost.
There was a keen awareness in OSCE that governments often allocate funds to emergencies from a finite pool of resources. Senior personnel were concerned that resources earmarked for Kosovo could just as easily be re-allocated elsewhere instead. When East Timor started to make bigger headlines, agencies became noticeably jumpy, feeling they needed to try to capture the international imagination again or their resources may be diverted to the next Media-sexy emergency.
Perhaps in an effort to counter this, people at the top of the international organisations put a priority on finding large buildings such as the police training school, Political Party service centre, local government training academy etc., ahead of grass-roots, practical but less glamorous development work.
Solution
The Difference Between ‘Growing’ Democracy From The Grassroots And Organising Show-Piece Elections
Kosovo is a small community and local people know who have connections to criminal elements. Decent honest people in the Kosovar community have watched in amazement and horror at some of the Kosovars who have been given power and legitimacy in posts in politics and public life by people at the top of UN and OSCE.
You cannot just drop 'democracy' on top of a society not designed to sustain it. Immediately trying to transfer power to existing networks and power brokers does not engender real democracy. The incumbency advantage can mean that new, fresh players may never again get the same opportunities to enter the political system and challenge the status quo. We have witnessed the results in a number of countries such as in Central and Eastern Europe where the population felt alienated from the system early on when they found power being wielded from a distance without knowing what to do about it or what role they could play in reforming/challenging it.
During the changes in the late 1980s and early ‘90s in Central and Eastern Europe too little was done to make citizens aware of their rights and responsibilities under democratic systems and to inform them of what role they can (and should) play to help their systems develop. This contrasts with post-war Germany where education in democracy and grooming new leaders went on for at least 4 years before even local elections were held.
Democracy can only flourish within an infrastructure trusted by the people to the point it is imbued into the whole of society. This includes an independent judiciary, a democratically accountable police service, independent Media, accountable and transparent political Parties, demonstrable standards of probity in politics and public life, flourishing civil society, and a public who understand and are committed to civil rights and civic responsibilities.
The most serious error made by the international community in the wake of the collapse of Communism was to start by investing large resources in building free-market economies in the former Soviet Union, particularly Russia, without sufficient attention to democracy-building.
It has proved a well-intended effort that led along the path to terrifying corruption.
In an article in the Financial Times in May 1999, Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek wrote that while the post-Kosovo stability pact needs to revive economies of South East Europe, Poland's experience suggests the human dimension must not be ignored. He wrote,
‘The plan's success will stem from its human dimension, in other words from the construction of rule of law and civil society and from respect for minority rights and freedom of the Media and tolerance and pluralism.’
Solutions
The Interim Kosovo Transition Governing Council appointed by Bernard Kouchner had not a single woman among its appointees. Kosovar women's NGO leaders were extremely angry that the international community had ignored them.
After women in the NGOs raised this matter with me I wrote to Kofi Annan on their behalf to raise this issue. As a consequence 3 Kosovar women NGO leaders were invited to meet with Kofi Annan and Dr Kouchner. One woman was subsequently invited to join the Interim Transitional Council.
(Ironically, my fax to Kofi Annan was considered a major breach of protocol by the more senior men in the OSCE which was the main reason for my being asked to leave the OSCE Mission.)
We must not let this happen again. How can we be claiming to help a province develop democracy if our main representatives (UN, OSCE) can calmly say that women are not interested in having a political voice (without asking them) and can appoint no women to the Interim Kosovo Transition Governing Council?
Solution
Erratic Standards Of International Police
The UK and other states have sent some excellent Police trainers to Kosovo, but however good a job they do under difficult circumstances, it is let down by the erratic standards of UN policing and by the fact that there are insufficient numbers of UN police.
Solution:
The OSCE In Kosovo - Problems and Potential Solutions
This question and the problems that need to be addressed may be specific to the OSCE or endemic of other international organisations.
In the on-line Telegraph of 17th November 1999 a UN employee in Kosovo who has served in a number of different UN missions described the situation as follows:
"The whole thing is a joke. Even by the standards of other missions this one is going nowhere. Some people are gifted but they are just smothered by the incompetence of the system."
Another said,
"This system has brought in a whole class of people who just cycle into one mission after another. They only care about keeping their jobs going."
These comments ring true of the OSCE Mission too.
Can an organisation that was originally conceived as a useful talk-shop — an organisation designed for international conferences - change its spots sufficiently to be effective for Democracy-building in post-conflict situations, requiring mobility, flexibility, and results focussed action?
It may be that a complete rethink is needed. Should democratisation be sub-contracted to agencies or NGOs and consultancies that are leaner and more flexible than the OSCE and UN?
Personnel Deployment System Needs Reforming
A number of problems arise from the need to allocate posts by country.
The OSCE system for deploying and handling the international staff needs an overhaul. It defied belief to find that key appointments such as the Director of Democratisation had been given to someone with virtually no experience of democracy building work.
This involves deep discussion on how senior personnel should be selected on merit and relevant experience.
Solution:
Poor Prioritisation Causing Delays
The OSCE Democratisation Department was told that Local Administration training was one of its most important tasks.
For 3 months the only member of staff allocated to Local Administration training was a Norwegian former Member of Parliament and a Mayor. She was instructed by the Director of Democratisation to spend most of her time hunting for a building to serve as a ‘Local Administration Training Academy’. This would have been a more suitable task for the procurement Department. Her abilities were being misused.
By December a building still had not been chosen and OSCE realised they had better scrape together some rudimentary training for people in local Municipalities.
Eventually in December, the OSCE were obliged to start training in other premises, something they should have done in the first place.
Solution
Current System Results in Inappropriate Deployment Of Experts
Instead of enabling professionals in their field to deliver results, the way the system is currently designed actually stymies them. It blocks and prevents them from achieving progress. This was indeed my own experience in the OSCE Democratisation Department.
Some senior OSCE personnel had a total lack of comprehension of the fundamental differences between an immediate fast-moving post-conflict situation and other, more familiar slow moving situations. Kosovo was an emergency situation needing emergency action. The situation could not wait for a slow and gradual response while Mission staff responsible for running a Department - but new to a topic - spent months and months cogitating and learning new remits.
Experts were not empowered to do what they were expert at. They frequently had their hands tied by the bureaucratic hierarchy rather then being supported and enabled to get on with the tasks in hand.
On a number of occasions international staff with great professional expertise in their field (Media development, human rights, police training) spoke of their extreme frustration at working in a system (OSCE) not designed for the task — finding dynamic, workable solutions in an emergency situation.
Example:
Senior Swedish human rights lawyer Marie Von Baltenau had years of experience and her own consultancy back home. She found herself posted out to a junior field post under a 24-year-old Italian line manager ‘boss’. He had little or no human rights experience but had the power to tell her what to do and what not to do! When she left the Mission she said she intended to tell her Foreign Office that she had never experienced such treatment and she described the Mission as being 'management by a crowd of cowboys'.
She said if OSCE were asked to design a pyramid it would end up the wrong way up.
Police Detective Inspectors with 25 years investigating experience were allocated to training traffic police.
All this helped to lower morale even amongst the most committed personnel.
Solution
Paperwork Mountains And ‘Catch 22’ Bureaucratic Nightmares
The paperwork and bureaucratic tangles within OSCE make even the EU look simple and efficient.
Examples:
Solution
Poor Communication Between Member States, OSCE HQ Vienna and the In-Country Mission Office
I was hired to be Deputy-Director of Democratisation. After I arrived they told me this post did not exist. The Head of Mission thought I was an official that had been sent to establish a civil administration college. It was quite clear that there were fundamental failings somewhere in the lines of communication between London, Vienna and Pristina. I now know from other OSCE colleagues that the confusion over my own deployment was repeated in a number of other cases. I suspect that it was in fact communication failures between Vienna and Kosovo because this situation was repeated with other nations.
Senior personnel from OSCE participating States found on arrival in Kosovo that they have been at worst duped, at best misled by OSCE HQ in Vienna as to the posts they would fill and the roles they would play.
Failures of this kind can only serve to make the Head of Mission’s job even harder. On arrival this often led to staff being deployed in different roles from the ones they were hired for. These roles were sometimes quite different from their key expertise. Often they were more junior roles subservient to less knowledgeable ‘line managers’.
Solution
Slow Staff Recruitment & Deployment
In the Democratisation Department we were desperately understaffed for the task. Five months after the NATO bombing ceased, just one third of our proposed province-wide staffing for Democratisation had arrived - 35 out of 95.
In addition the system of staff arriving in no particular pattern each week in dribs and drabs added to our workload. Staff time was taken up each week in the department in welcoming and looking after new recruits, plus it meant we had to keep rearranging the pattern of activities to suit the new staffing pattern and begin the readjustment of personalities on the team all over again every week.
Solution
Unacceptable Codes of Employment Practice
In a number of instances locally employed staff and international staff are not treated properly in terms of accepted EU good conduct. A number of people left because of staff mismanagement and/or frustration with the situation within the OSCE.
The Deputy Head of Mission in Kosovo, Craig Jenness, illustrated the general attitude when he said:
‘You cannot expect EU codes of employment conduct within OSCE. OSCE is not a normal employer, OSCE is the OSCE.’
The OSCE Contracts we were asked to sign in Vienna allow for termination without even a day’s notice if the Mission was evacuated. The impact of these contract terms could well result in a dearth of experienced people even applying in future. It is only because of the greater protection my FCO contract gave me that I was willing to sign this contract in Vienna. Had I seen it before arriving in Vienna I would have had to think long and hard before signing it or going on mission.
Solution
Locally Employed Kosovar Staff Hired Only in Low Grade Jobs and Asked to Take a Pay Cut
A particular feature of Kosovo, in contrast with post-conflict Bosnia, is that many of the educated professional population have returned.
OSCE policy was only to employ Kosovars in lower grades such as drivers, security guards and language assistants. This was a waste of a valuable resource pool which could have enabled the OSCE to perform its work more efficiently. This two-tier approach also began to cause considerable resentment among the educated Kosovar section of the population.
Early on in the Mission, OSCE announced it was cutting the salary of locally employed staff by 30%. This caused bitter resentment. A number of these men and women were the same people who had risked their lives working with the OSCE Verification Mission ahead of the NATO bombing. They and their families were left behind when the international staff were evacuated and they and their families were the first to be targeted by the Serbs.
Solution
Inadequate Logistical Planning
Basic infrastructure logistics had not been adequately considered. Work in the early months was slowed disastrously by a lack of adequate communications such as telephone and e-mail. Communications are still difficult. Yet this is a province in Europe. Telecommunication experts have told me there are a choice of emergency or permanent communication systems that could have been swiftly set up. Until mid-October the OSCE had one e-mail connected computer (which kept crashing) for the use of 700 staff and no telephones in the Democratisation and Media Departments. 25 minutes walk from OSCE HQ in Pristina a Kosovar private enterprise had set up an Internet café with 10 e-mail connected computers permanently on line and cheap SAT phone calls anywhere in the world.
The excuse given by OSCE was that tendering for contracts was taking longer than expected. If this is true this method of deciding who provides telephone networks swiftly should be organised differently in future.
It is not efficient use of resources to go to the trouble of bringing in international experts if they must spend days on everyday tasks such as contacting people to arrange a meeting.
Solution
Previous Warnings About OSCE’s Poor Track Record On Gender In Previous Missions Were Ignored…
Despite clear warnings from reports on previous Missions, once again the needs and potential contribution of women have been largely overlooked. Men in the senior ranks of the OSCE in Kosovo held plenty of discussion about how to achieve representation of ethnic minorities in political and public bodies in the Province did not mention the inclusion of women.
I was severely chastised for working to include women in the democratisation process.
A Human Rights Watch Report on previous OSCE missions summed up the situation for women as follows:
‘Discrimination against women during the reconstruction period is legion...The OSCE region is one of conflict. These conflicts and the complex reconstruction issues they leave behind — have a profound impact on women’s lives. Many women in these conflicts have lost male family members and find themselves heads of households for the first time.
"One Bosnian woman told Human Rights Watch, "Women came last — after everything else came women"’.
With one exception, all senior posts in the OSCE Mission in Kosovo were held by men. It is hardly surprising then that Kosovar women were being entirely ignored in the democratisation process.
Amazingly, the senior men in OSCE justified ignoring women by saying:
This was clearly and utterly unfounded. When I asked local NGOs, there was an overwhelming response from women wanting to be involved in politics.
Solution:
The work-place culture within the OSCE Mission needs updating.
OSCE has an old-fashioned male ultra-hierarchical approach. There is a real underlying pecking order with a heavy emphasis on ‘collegiality’. Collegiality can be a virtue but it can be an excuse for avoiding criticism and ultimately can result in covering-up problems. There seemed to be a belief in the Head of Missions’ office that it was more important not to criticise senior staff (internally) than to air important fundamental departmental problems that needed to be addressed.
There was an OSCE ethos that unless a person is ex OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission or ex some other Balkan OSCE Mission their professional credibility is not respected even though some missions have had disastrous results. Valuable expertise was brought to the Mission by some personnel who had served as KVM and on previous Missions but others were ‘Mission-junkies’ with little understanding of the issues they were dealing with. These people used their ‘previous mission’ status to overlord the professional experts, directly dis-enabling them with the maximum of interference and obstacles.
The OSCE is an organisation that appears to run on fear rather than encouragement. Before they knew I was leaving, a female member of OSCE personnel in Vienna telephoned me to arrange to meet with me to ask for advice and help for her and another female member of staff. She said they were upset about certain things that were happening to them in Vienna. They also mentioned they were concerned at the high number of staff who were leaving the Kosovo Mission early and wanted to know if I had any clues as to the reasons. She said they did not want to go into detail over the phone because they were afraid in case our conversation got back to senior staff.
When other people knew I was leaving they came to me and asked me to speak up for others on the Mission who dared not speak up or who did not have access to opinion leaders.
A number of women on the Mission complained about the outdated attitudes of male colleagues on gender issues.
Solution
Before deploying future post-conflict missions some serious questions need to be discussed about the design and initial objectives of international missions.
Lessons of Kosovo must be learnt for the future. It does not appear the lessons of Bosnia have been learnt by OSCE and UN. Some NGOs and actors such as DfID seemed to have a far better reputation for achieving results for the local population than UNMIK did.
What are the right vehicles and structures for post-conflict efforts?
The answer to this question should evolve AFTER there has been an in-depth analysis of what worked and what did not work and what would help things work better in future.
Should democratisation be sub-contracted to agencies or NGOs and consultancies that are leaner and more flexible than the OSCE and UN?
Is there a need for a rapid deployment team of civilians which later hands over to others?
What worked in Kosovo that didn’t in Bosnia?
Did some agencies/organisations seem to have more success than others?
Annex 1 — Examples of Practical Proposals Blocked From Above in Democratisation Department
Informal Needs Assessment Meetings With Political Parties
It should be kept firmly in mind that Kosovo was an emergency situation needing emergency action.
For 5 solid months the only action on political Party development was to open one set of offices for political Parties.
Other promising activities were blocked or bungled.
I was told the Swiss Government were sending two political scientists to conduct a formal round table needs assessment at which all the Parties would be present together. I was firmly instructed that no Party development activities should be considered until after that took place.
I expressed doubts based on my own wide experience throughout the former Soviet Union that Kosovar political groups would want to admit weaknesses and needs in front of each other. I therefore asked to hold informal ‘needs assessment’ chats with leading members of the political Parties in order to work with them to draw up a shopping list of helpful information, training and other development activities that would assist in building democratic political Parties. This is a procedure I have conducted many times before all over the world. This was adamantly blocked by the Director of the Democratisation Department, a person with no prior experience of democracy-building.
When the Parties saw the proposed programme for the formal round-table they at once declined to attend. After weeks of negotiations the round-table date kept being postponed. It moved from September to mid November and then the event collapsed.
As a result we lost 3 months of potential Party development activities.
Agenda 21 For Local Municipalities
I suggested that the United Nations Agenda 21 approach — a sustainable environment and community based approach to local government (currently being implemented in UK local government) should be used in developing the training for Municipalities. Arne Piel Christensen, OSCE Democratisation Director, had never heard of Agenda 21. I managed to get a handbook on Agenda 2l for him. He never read it, lost it, then said we hadn’t time for such fancy ideas.
Outreach To Involve The Population In The Democratisation Process
On a number of occasions I raised my concerns that we needed to start to build an understanding among the general population of what democracy and citizenship means. I suggested we should involve the local population in discussions and debates around the Province which could be televised too. This could have been developed into a more comprehensive example of democratic debate and enabled Kosovars to play a mainstream role in deciding and developing their future, while visibly showing the role we were playing as facilitators. The idea was dismissed.
Public Meetings Held Around The Province Hosted By Consultative Panels
To help build a culture of participatory democracy I suggested a series of consultative meetings. These might include opinion leaders and specialists on chosen topics. The public audience could put questions and give their views on subjects such as
These consultative processes would include TV and radio discussions, and debates with members of the public putting questions and opinions to a panel, similar to the BBC TV and Radio programmes ‘Question Time’ and ‘Any Questions’.
NGOs and nascent campaign groups could be mobilised and assisted to ensure information about the above topics and other issues such as electoral registration reached the widest possible population - women, ethnic groups and people of all ages.
As with so many suggestions this was vetoed. The Director’s explanation at the time gave the impression he saw grassroots mobilisation as an unnecessary distraction that might look like we were supporting moves for elections. A do-nothing-lest atmosphere hung over the entire Department.
User-Friendly Information On Democratisation For The Public
I suggested we should work with the Kosovars to prepare and distribute user-friendly information starting with the 10 basic questions (in simple user-friendly language) ordinary Kosovars might ask about what democracy would mean to them — their rights etc. This could have started in the form of 4-sided tabloid (a well trodden path in politics). Over 60% of the population are under 25 and I said we could set up a distribution system through a network of young people as a way of starting to involve them in grass-roots democratic politics.
These ideas were also vetoed.
The general Kosovar population frequently request information from members of the International Community on practical matters such as: where do we go to obtain winterisation materials? Where do we go to apply for passports?
One day I saw a distraught woman being turned away by UN Police from the front of their offices. I asked what the fracas was about. The UN police said she was a crazy woman who had come on three consecutive days because her family were nasty to her. I pointed out that if she had returned on three occasions possibly she was desperate for help. They said that even if that were true there was nothing they could do. I suggested they could at least tell her the location for a centre or NGO where she could receive medical assistance, advice or counselling. The UN police said they hadn’t a clue about any services that might be on offer.
I suggested the Democratisation Department could produce a simple leaflet with answers to the 10 questions most asked of the International Community. This would be a basic first step towards a sort of Citizens Advice Bureau system. I suggested that this was part of building citizenship and at the same time would be good PR for OSCE. We could distribute copies to anyone working in the International Community including OSCE, aid workers, Police, K4 NATO troops etc.
This was vetoed.
END