French Health Chief Picked to Bring Order to Kosovo

Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Friday named France’s secretary of state for health, Dr. Bernard Kouchner, as his permanent special representative in Kosovo, making the colorful activist virtual governor of the war-torn province.

The appointment culminated intense competition among European countries for the post after Annan indicated that he would select a diplomat from the continent because the European Union has taken on responsibility for rebuilding the devastated province.

Kouchner said his first task “should be security and health service” for Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s main republic, Serbia.

“I know this will be a very hard job,” Kouchner said, but “reconciliation may come. Sometimes it comes more quickly than you expect.”

Kouchner co-founded the French relief agency Doctors Without Borders and once declared that “mankind’s suffering belongs to all men.”

As Annan’s special representative in the province, he will lead one of the United Nations’ most extensive efforts to restore civil government to a war-torn region.

His mandate will range from police and prisons to postage, from creating a civil service and judiciary to easing tensions between minority Serbs and ethnic Albanians. He will work closely with British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, commander of the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

Asked about his qualifications, Kouchner, 59, who has cared for casualties in such hot spots as Lebanon, Cambodia, Guatemala, Peru and El Salvador, replied that he had 25 years of experience in wartime.

“I am a specialist of the collapse of a society,” he said.

A measure of what the gastroenterologist faces was evident in events within the province and reports received Friday at U.N. headquarters.

In Kosovo, concerns that Yugoslav troops and paramilitary fighters who were to have withdrawn from the province by June 20 may still be present gained credence when U.S., Dutch and French peacekeepers said they had seized Yugoslav operatives in three separate incidents.

Five Yugoslav soldiers, armed with automatic rifles and in uniform, were found Thursday by U.S. peacekeepers who control the southeastern corner of the province. The Yugoslavs claimed to have lost their way and crossed a three-mile buffer zone between the province and another area of Serbia.

Dutch peacekeepers seized six Yugoslav special police officers inside the Serbian enclave of Urosevac. The plainclothes police were traced after the Dutch noted mysterious radio transmissions in the vicinity.

And in the city of Kosovska Mitrovica, French troops arrested an alleged paramilitary leader who they said had remained in Kosovo illegally and was inciting the city’s Serbian residents against NATO.

Yugoslav Forces Laid 425 Minefields

At the United Nations, meanwhile, a report from experts clearing mines in the province said Yugoslav forces had put down at least 425 minefields before withdrawing last month after an 11-week NATO air war.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees also reported Friday that “virtually no funds” were available to ensure the safe return of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians driven from Kosovo by Yugoslav forces during the spring.

Dennis McNamara, UNHCR’s special envoy for Kosovo, said a “dangerous gap” was developing between the emergency phase of the operation in the province and the urgent need to begin rebuilding Kosovo’s civil institutions.

“I find it incredible that after a hugely expensive conflict in Europe, UNHCR has to keep on saying we have no money” to help the refugees and internally displaced people, McNamara said.

In other developments Friday:

* The Clinton administration said Yugoslavia has quadrupled its army strength in Montenegro--to 40,000 troops--apparently in an effort to intimidate and control the democratically elected government of the republic, Serbia’s junior partner in the federation. State Department spokesman James Foley said any attempt by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to undermine the Montenegro government “will be considered provocative and dealt with appropriately” by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

* Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, defended the speed of the alliance’s deployment in Kosovo. In an interview with PBS, Clark said it “normally takes anywhere between 45 and 90 days to deploy forces, and even though we had hoped that Milosevic would give in much sooner, the end still came rather suddenly in terms of the processes. I think some countries are simply having trouble getting their forces ready.” Just under half of the NATO-led peacekeeping force, which eventually should number about 50,000 troops, is now in the province.

* About 5,000 protesters in the northern Yugoslav city of Novi Sad demanded Milosevic’s resignation. It was the second large anti-government protest this week, following a gathering of similar size Tuesday in the city of Cacak.

Outspoken Doctor Has Courted Controversy

Kouchner, who will step down from his French government position, brings a full resume--and a wealth of past controversy--to his new post as Annan’s special representative. Outspoken and charismatic, Kouchner called a news conference while working as a young physician with the Red Cross in Nigeria in 1968, attacking that nation’s genocide against its Ibo population.

He filled a ship with doctors, celebrities and journalists and treated the Vietnamese boat people in the South China Sea in the 1970s. And he headed a secret medical team in Afghanistan during the 1980s, when rebels in that country were battling Russian troops.

Kouchner is an advocate of the view that a “humanitarian right of intervention” transcends state sovereignty.

“People are bleeding. I stop bleeding,” he once told an interviewer. “I just try to do my job as a doctor, without being stopped by political beliefs, boundaries or religious affiliations.”

Judging from the U.N.’s experience in Kosovo so far, Kouchner will need a large tourniquet in the province. To an extent, he will be able to build on a foundation laid down by Sergio Vieira de Mello, who has been serving as Annan’s temporary representative.

De Mello quickly established tight coordination with peacekeepers, formed the rudimentary framework of a judicial system and managed to diffuse a series of potentially volatile crises. On Friday, he brought together ethnic Albanian and Serbian leaders in the province to form a joint crisis task force designed to quickly address security problems when they occur.

Times staff writers Norman Kempster in Washington and John Daniszewski in Pristina, Yugoslavia, and Associated Press contributed to this report.