Same Script, But Hope for a Better Effect in Kosovo

The cease-fire accord has been signed, the defeated troops have withdrawn and the first batch of international soldiers has deployed inside the battered and depopulated province, demining and detonating unexploded ordinance as they go. Blackhawk and Chinook helicopters hover overhead, dropping supplies, while Humvees and other armored, all-terrain vehicles rumble over broken roads, asserting and extending a security presence. Soon an army of unarmed nongovernmental organizations and private voluntary organizations will begin the arduous task of dealing with the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of refugees to their burnt-out villages and homes.

Kosovo in the long, hot Balkan summer of 1999?

Try post-Gulf War Iraqi Kurdistan in June 1991.

As the international community, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at its core, gears up to begin the massive task of rebuilding postwar Kosovo, it would do well to keep the Kurdistan experience in mind. The Kurdistan mission is as good as it gets when it comes to reversing a tidal wave of human misery, the only recent international effort to repatriate hundreds of thousands of refugees that actually worked--and then only kind of.

There are huge differences between the two situations, the first and foremost being that while the flight of the Iraqi Kurds was the result of the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, the flight of the Kosovo Albanians was the cause of the NATO campaign against Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade.

But the similarities are there for all with eyes to see. In both instances, the “K” people (Kurds and Kosovars) were involved in rebellions aimed at achieving self-determination and/or independence from recognized, if thuggish, states determined to maintain their territorial integrity. The rebellions were sanctioned and even tacitly supported by the international alliances trying to bring down Hussein and Milosevic. When the revolts faltered and then failed, the civilian population was left exposed to the wrath of the targeted regimes. It was time to go over the mountains.

The response of the international media to both crisis was also similar. By and large obliged to maintain a safe distance from the “hot” wars in progress, the vast majority of journalists tried to make up for their absence on the battlefield by focusing, to the point of overkill, on the human misery spilling over the frontiers of the war zone, creating the image, respectively, of the “cuddly Kurd” and the “abandoned Albanian” in direct contrast to how the refugees were perceived in their new host countries. Due to internal, demographic dynamics, the Iraqi Kurds in Turkey and the Kosovar Albanians in Macedonia were not a welcome addition, and the image of both host countries suffered as armies of international relief volunteers complained, in print and on camera, about the foot-dragging attitude of the authorities in Ankara and Skopje. The reception afforded both groups in Iran and Albania, respectively, was only slightly better.

Then came the time of return, and if the Kurdistan experience is any guide to what awaits Kosovo in the coming weeks and months, it will not be pretty.

First will come the political squabbling about who was where, when and did what for the cause. In the case of Kurdistan, the tensions between the two traditional leaders, Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, over control of the “gray market” trade in fuel oil across the frontier to Turkey eventually boiled over into a short and nasty civil war, with the former calling on Iran for aid and the latter throwing in his lot with the old devil Hussein. The result was the pullout of almost all Western aid personnel in the region. Even before that event, the international aid workers were skittish to the point of cowardice. Will the Kosovo Liberation Army split along go-slow, go-fast attitudes toward Kosovo independence and KLA disarmament, or will it fragment between self-styled Greater Albania hard-liners and quasi “collaborators” like the prewar, pacifist leader Ibrahim Rugova, creating a massive exodus of foreign aid workers back to Macedonia? Only time will tell.

One thing that is almost a certainty will be the smuggling and black-marketeering in international relief aid back across the frontiers with the erstwhile refugee host states. Refugee-style tents from Kurdistan became almost fashionable camping equipment in Turkey during the summers of 1991 and 1992; even more shocking was the trade in precisely the sort of heavy construction equipment needed to rebuild shattered Kurdistan. Caterpillar tractors, road graters and other equipment was pillaged from the huge Bakhme hydroelectric dam in eastern Kurdistan and sold for a song in Iran by the same leaders begging the West for ever more aid.

The local economy will also experience “distortions.” Small fortunes will be made by refugees who, speaking English and owning functioning automobiles, hire themselves out to the NGOs, as well as by farmers and small landlords whose fields and orchards have been destroyed by tent cities housing tens of thousands of homeless and thus require compensation. Any family with a house with a roof and walls left standing will make out pretty good, too, as those will be the domiciles favored to rent by the same army of international aid people hiring the translators and drivers.

The relief professionals will enjoy the experience, too. In addition to their standard salaries, working in a hardship zone has its distinct perks, such as inflated per diems and housing allowances that actually increase the fewer people share a given space, replete with maid service. As the old saw has it about many 19th-century Christian missionaries: “They came to do good and they did well.”

Still, compared with the aftermath of a dozen other, mainly ethnic conflicts that have rocked the world over the past decade and spawned huge refugee outflows--the post-Soviet wars between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Georgia and Abkhazia and South Ossetia, North Ossetia and Ingushetia, Moldova and its Trans-Dniester district; the post-Yugoslavia wars over Bosnia and the Krajina area of Croatia; the Central African wars in and around Rwanda and Burundi and Congo, not to mention the almost forgotten carnage in southern Sudan and the on-again-off-again desert conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia; and the human residue of the civil-war disaster that was and is Afghanistan--the Kurdistan operation is still regarded as a “success” and the operative paradigm for the “phase two” mission now begun in Kosovo. The people are going home, and no matter how shattered and blasted and ruined those homes may be, that is certainly a better option than remaining in refugee camps.