U.N.’s Departing Kosovo Official Makes Peace Plea

In an emotional farewell speech Friday, the top U.N. administrator in Kosovo begged the leaders of the province’s various ethnic groups to bring an end to violence.

“My final message to you is simple: Stop the killings, my dear friends. Stop the violence,” Bernard Kouchner said, addressing the officials seated in a sports hall in Pristina, Kosovo’s provincial capital.

“There were already too many victims on this land. There was too much suffering in the last months and years,” he added.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan later issued a statement thanking Kouchner for his service to the United Nations and the people of Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic.

Kouchner has served as the top U.N. official in Kosovo since the United Nations and NATO took control of the province in June 1999 after the alliance’s 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. That campaign was launched to stop a crackdown by President Slobodan Milosevic against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo.

Since the international peacekeepers’ arrival, the province has been the scene of countless attacks on Serbs and other minorities.

Kouchner, a former French health minister and a founder of the aid group Doctors Without Borders, is being replaced Monday by Hans Haekkerup, a former Danish defense minister.

In Copenhagen, Haekkerup said that he supports local parliamentary elections in Kosovo but that he needs clarification on their legal status before setting a date.

Parliamentary elections in Kosovo are widely expected to be held in the spring.