Omar spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it. To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk Land in limbo Until Kosovo achieves independence, upsurges of violence such as the recent attacks against Serbs will only continue, says Anna Di Lellio Anna Di Lellio Monday April 05 2004 The Guardian To describe the violence that erupted in Kosovo last month as ethnic cleansing is wrong and misleading. Yes, Albanian mobs targeted Serb civilians and property, including Orthodox churches. But the label is too easily employed when talking about the Balkans, although it can be said that the violence was all too predictable. What happened was very similar to a race riot, in which a suppressed rage suddenly exploded. The violent mobs were the extreme and cowardly manifestation of a diffuse sense of helplessness among Kosovo Albanians. While there is no justification for the violence, understanding the broader picture is crucial. In 1999 Nato rescued Kosovo from Slobodan Milosevic and delivered it to the UN as a protectorate. Security council resolution 1244 provided the framework for the transition to self-government. At the time, it seemed premature to make any commitment on deadlines and ultimate goals, although Kosovo Albanians thought they had won the war for independence from Serbia. Now they fear a UN-led open-ended transition has taken on a life of its own. This fear is well founded. Residents of a protectorate, Kosovo Albanians have no citizenship or representation abroad. They feel politically homeless despite having a president, a prime minister and a parliament. These self-governing institutions often overlap with the UN, which retains major powers (the police, the judiciary, the security sector and foreign policy among them), lack accountability and produce layers of bureaucracy and resentment, not good governance. Kosovo Albanians have been assigned the impossible task of nation-building even while they are told they have no nation. This contradictory system of rules is now the main obstacle to progress. There is a cautionary tale here for those who would pass a troubled occupation of Iraq into the hands of the UN. Let's take cohabitation with Serbs (multi-ethnicity is a misnomer), the yardstick of the UN's standards for Kosovo. There are Serb members of parliament, Serb ministers and Serb employees of the provisional institutions of self-government. However, Kosovo Serbs have been allowed by the UN to maintain parallel schools, hospitals, and courts - a de facto partition of Kosovo. The Kosovo Serbs are intimidated into separatism by Serb paramilitary groups and police and given financial incentives by Belgrade, which they consider their only legitimate government. For the same reason, those who fled the province after the end of the war are not returning home, no matter how improved living conditions might be. The market economy, or the lack of it, is another problem. Unemployment is measured at over 60%, and growth is barely self-sustaining, though the black economy does well. This is hardly a surprise in the absence of privatisation, stopped months ago in the midst of legal wrangling over Kosovo's sovereignty. Uncertainty about the status of Kosovo is a constant source of anxiety for Albanians. This is especially true when Serbia, still the sovereign state in Kosovo, continues to slide down the path of an unrepentant nationalism. With the eyes of the US, and the world, now turned towards the Gulf, Kosovo Albanians understand that they have become once again hostage to their own powerlessness and feel desperate. Labelling the recent violence "reversed ethnic cleansing" obscures all the above issues and more. It neglects to see that when the streets exploded the Albanian leadership called for an end to it. The former military chief of the KLA, Lieutenant-General, Agim Ã?eku, went on TV to ask that protest be expressed only through institutional channels. Political leaders, from the prime minister to small-town mayors, persuaded angry youths to return home. Civil society groups condemned the violence. The Kosovo Women's Network, an umbrella organisation for women's groups in the country, immediately mobilised to help and collected funds for Serb women. The government has authorised &#euros;5m (£3.3m) to compensate the victims of looting. It is very important that the responsibility of the riots be investigated, from the role played by instigators to the inexplicably inadequate response of more than 6,000 police under the UN leadership and 18,000 Nato troops. However, it is the underlying reasons that need an intelligent political response. To keep a tired UN protectorate on life support for as long as it takes for Kosovo to achieve democratic standards on a par with leading European countries has proved inadequate. A de facto split of the province in two, leaving the north and a few cantons in Albanian territory to Serbia is a clear recipe for more violence and contentious demands for partition elsewhere in the region. Two years ago an independent commission led by the South African judge Richard Goldstone launched the idea of conditional independence as the best option. An independent Kosovo under international monitoring of democratic standards and Nato protection will make citizens out of members of different ethnic groups. It should go some way towards dispelling the fears of both communities, allow development, and solve the question of Albanian irredentism. Without this solution, the Balkans will not know stability and peace. · Anna Di Lellio was the Kosovo temporary media commissioner and political adviser to the UN Kosovo protection corps coordinator from September 2001 to March 2003 Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html