Bias of U.N. Chief in Kosovo Is With Victims

For all its intended solemnity, the scene in the district courthouse here had an inescapable aura of naughty schoolchildren being forced to stand up and pledge to behave.

Bernard Kouchner--a Frenchman and mercy mission veteran who as special representative of the United Nations is empowered with all executive, legislative and judicial authority in war-shattered Kosovo--was swearing in seven handpicked judges and two prosecutors. Some were ethnic Albanians and some were Serbs.

These were Kouchner’s men and women, but he still had a point to make--and he seemed to feel it could bear some repetition. On the great chessboard that is today’s Kosovo, Kouchner, 59, was making one of his moves.

Handsome, media-savvy and often described with such phrases as “a Boy Scout who never grew up,” Kouchner first delivered a little lecture about impartiality. Then came the oath, read by Kouchner a phrase at a time--and translated into Albanian and Serbian a phrase at a time. Then the men and women pledged allegiance to four international agreements on human rights.

Finally, Kouchner was satisfied. He had beaten the drum of ethnic tolerance long enough for one session.

“OK, in the name of the United Nations here in Kosovo, I congratulate each of you for your appointment, and I wish you success in your office,” he said.

Everything he said in the courthouse was scrupulously impartial, with no tilt either to the ethnic Albanian or the Serbian side in this embittered and hate-filled province, which technically remains a part of Serbia despite the United Nations’ formal placement of all governmental power into Kouchner’s hands.

Kouchner’s real bias, as shown by his career-long focus on international humanitarian aid, is toward the victims, whoever they may be, of natural and man-made disasters. The victims in Kosovo are not just on one side of the ethnic divide, and Kouchner aims to help them all.

“We are just a few, but we represent the rest of the world,” said Kouchner, whose mission is expected to eventually number an international staff of more than 1,000. “This is very difficult, but we’ll win, we’ll succeed, all of us, for human beings, not against the Serbs. Against the [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic regime, yes. Against the Serbs, no way.”

By stressing the importance of ethnic tolerance, which he personally and the international community in general see as the central principle on which a democratic Kosovo must be built, Kouchner is acting both by his deepest instincts and in pursuit of one of his job’s key goals.

Yet Kouchner is also a man who has seen enough suffering, and enough hatred, that he is under no illusions that his lecturing, prodding and sermonizing on behalf of ethnic harmony will have instant results.

“This is very difficult to ask [of] the victims--tolerance for the criminals,” he said in an interview. “How to make a circle square? It is impossible, but even if it is impossible, this is my duty to try. You can’t, so close to the war and the suffering, convince the people of the necessity to be tolerant. . . . This is always the same fight, to [bring out] the best from the people.

“But it will come, it will come. It does always come.”

When Kouchner speaks this way, he is not simply philosophizing, but drawing on his decades of dramatic personal experience as a humanitarian activist, during which he often prodded his own and other governments to act in the face of suffering.

Kouchner’s introduction to humanitarian work came in war-torn, starving Biafra in 1968, where he served as a young doctor with the International Committee of the Red Cross. He co-founded the aid group Doctors Without Borders in 1971. After a split with the group over whether to get involved in rescuing Vietnamese refugees from the South China Sea--action he strongly favored--he founded Doctors of the World in 1979. That group’s hospital ships were credited with rescuing about 15,000 Vietnamese refugees from 1979 to 1987.

As chief of France’s unique government agency for international humanitarian activities, Humanitarian Action of France, Kouchner spearheaded his country’s relief efforts in Sudan, Liberia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Somalia.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said during a recent visit to Kosovo that Kouchner’s abilities and background make him “the right man at the right time in the right place.” Kouchner’s work here, Holbrooke added, is “possibly the most important international job any European [has] been assigned since perhaps the end of WWII.”

Judging Kouchner as an administrator, Holbrooke’s assessment that he is the perfect man for the job remains unproved. But Kouchner seems to believe that his most critical task is to be a voice of moral authority who can jawbone Kosovo’s violence-torn society--which suffers deep political splits among ethnic Albanians as well as its fierce ethnic divisions--into gradually accepting the norms of democratic life.

Some critics have accused the United Nations of getting off to a slow start here, but that assessment depends largely on what an observer believes was possible. Kouchner himself, never given to self-doubt, vehemently rejects the criticism, especially as it applies to the international community’s failure to prevent the flight of most Serbs. The U.N. mission, he notes, has been here only a matter of weeks, after “months of massacres, years of oppression, centuries of history.”

“How could you say that this is slow?” he asked. “How can you change the mentality of the people in so short a time? It’s impossible. It’s not only impossible, this is childish to believe that it could have been done.”

Kouchner and the entire U.N. mission benefit from the enormous goodwill of most ethnic Albanians, who remain thankful for what NATO--with its 11-week air war against Milosevic--and the United Nations have done. When Kouchner drove through the countryside on a recent day, children smiled and waved at the U.N. convoy all along its route.

Many Serbs, too, caught in a sea of ethnic Albanian hostility, see the international presence here as the only thing that is allowing them to remain in Kosovo at all.

On that recent day, Kouchner made a journey that initially seemed to have all the trappings of a pilgrimage to a holy place: the village of Donje Prekaze, where on March 5, 1998, Serbian forces slaughtered 21 members of one family, headed by a well-known ethnic Albanian fighter, along with 31 other people. That massacre triggered an upsurge of armed insurrection within Kosovo and caught the outraged attention of the world.

Treated like a head of state or a conquering hero, Kouchner was first met by an armed commander of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army. He walked past a welcoming lineup of about 1,000 young men and women, and kissed a little girl who survived the massacre.

He then entered the home of Rifat Jashari--the massacred family’s only adult survivor, who happened to be in Germany during the attack--and spoke words that would enrage many Serbs, who blame the Jasharis and fighters like them for igniting the flames of war. Immediately after the killings, Serbian police had claimed that women and children among the victims were killed in a “cross-fire” between police and guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

“I know how much this family was heroic and how dearly it paid for its patriotism,” Kouchner told Jashari. “On behalf of the United Nations, I wanted to come here and salute you and tell you of my support and admiration for your family. . . . If there were a Nobel Prize for freedom, then your family should receive it.”

Jashari responded with a few words of welcome. Then Kouchner continued, still making verbal moves in the grand game of chess that is his mission here.

“I want to ask you, since you have suffered so much, to be tolerant,” Kouchner said, in words that suddenly cast his earlier praise in a different political light: His pilgrimage here was in part, at least, to seek some degree of forgiveness for the Serbs.

Jashari gave only a noncommittal response, but Kouchner had made his point.

Later, Kouchner said of the slow steps toward rapprochement: “Please don’t believe that confidence and goodwill may come in some days or weeks. This is not true. There’s a fantastic density of hatred here. But the answer is not police, the answer is not soldiers. The answer is development, peace, democracy.”