New Kosovo Administrator Tells Parties to Make Up

Kosovo’s new U.N. administrator, Michael Steiner, warned feuding local politicians Friday that the time has come for them to stop bickering and strike a deal on forming a new government.

A new Kosovo parliament elected in November to provide a measure of self-rule in the separatist province remains paralyzed by a three-way standoff among moderate ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, former ethnic Albanian guerrillas and Serbian representatives.

Rugova’s Democratic League of Kosovo placed first in the elections. But it failed to win the majority of seats needed to govern alone and has refused rival parties’ demands for a power-sharing deal.

Steiner, a veteran German diplomat and Balkan specialist with a reputation for combining brilliance and arrogance, announced Friday at his first formal news conference that he will primarily be “in the listening mode” for his first few weeks here. He then promptly criticized parliament’s failure to get moving.

“I don’t want to overdramatize the fact that time has elapsed between the elections and the nomination of the government,” Steiner said. “But I think it’s now becoming high time that the parties get their act together.”

Citing his pledge to listen first, Steiner declined to propose how the deadlock should be broken.

Steiner, 52, arrived in Kosovo on Thursday, replacing a Danish predecessor, Hans Haekkerup, who left in December after a year in office.

Although administered by the United Nations, the predominantly ethnic Albanian region technically remains a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic. Most ethnic Albanians in Kosovo see self-government as an important step toward independence, and there is widespread public frustration with the politicians’ failure to move forward.

Under U.N.-established rules, the 120-seat parliament must first elect a president by majority vote. The president will then nominate a prime minister, who will head a government with broad powers.

But in three rounds of voting in December and January, Rugova, the leading candidate for president, won just 51 votes in his strongest showing, well short of the 61 needed to win the post.

With 22 seats in parliament, the Serbian party, the Return Coalition, could give the presidency to Rugova. But so far it has declined to do so, and accepting Serbian support to win the post would carry long-term political risks for Rugova.

Steiner noted Friday that the job of the first head of the U.N. mission, Bernard Kouchner, had been to deal with a humanitarian crisis and to set up an international administration after peacekeepers entered the province in June 1999 in the wake of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 11-week air campaign. Haekkerup in turn had overseen administrative changes and the holding of elections, Steiner said.

The main task now, Steiner said, is to turn over much of his own power to the new local government--once it is set up. He also stressed the need for economic growth, more jobs and better security for Kosovo’s besieged Serbian population, which despite the large international peacekeeping presence here still cannot move freely outside ethnic enclaves for fear of attacks by ethnic Albanians.

A student radical in his youth, Steiner first won prominence in 1989 when, as a junior diplomat in Czechoslovakia, he was filmed by television crews as he helped people over the West German Embassy wall into the compound so they could flee the Soviet bloc.

In 1991 Steiner headed a German humanitarian aid office in Zagreb, the Croatian capital. He was Germany’s key negotiator on Yugoslav issues in 1994 and 1995 and served as the deputy head of the international administration in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1996 and 1997.

Steiner resigned as German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s foreign policy advisor in November after coming under fire in the nation’s media for allegedly insulting German soldiers while on a plane at Moscow’s airport. Steiner said during the controversy that his comments had been misunderstood.

Steiner is scheduled to meet with Kosovo’s political leaders over the weekend.