Potential problems in Kosovo

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War crimes indictment could push teetering Kosovo to edge

Simon Tisdall
Wednesday January 5, 2005
The Guardian

The possibly imminent indictment for war crimes of Kosovo's prime minister, Ramush Haradinaj, threatens to provoke a new crisis in the breakaway Serbian province that was invaded by British and other forces in 1999 and remains under uneasy UN and Nato control.

Mr Haradinaj, who took office last month, is a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The Serbian government accuses him of complicity in atrocities committed in the Decani region of western Kosovo in 1998-99. Belgrade has issued an arrest warrant and is refusing to deal with Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority leadership while he remains in power.

The chief prosecutor of the international criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, also has her eye on Mr Haradinaj. He was interviewed by war crimes investigators late last year. He has dismissed all the accusations as Serb lies. Now Ms Del Ponte's tribunal is about to make a decision. Its final list of indictments, possibly issued under seal, is expected this weekend.

If Mr Haradinaj is suddenly charged and carted off to The Hague the reaction in Kosovo could be explosive. If action against him is shelved because of his prominent position, analysts say that already grudging Serbian cooperation with the tribunal may be seriously jeopardised.

The situation in Kosovo five years after the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic's troops were sent packing remains deeply problematic without such complications. A decision is due this year on its final status: as a part of Serbia, as now, or as an independent state, as most ethnic Albanians want.

But as the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, noted last month, security problems and the political stalemate between Albanians and what remains of the ethnic Serb minority (an estimated 200,000 have fled since 1999) continue to obstruct economic development, democratic institution-building, and power sharing. In short, the province is as divided as ever.

Mr Annan warned that "sustained action" by the international community was essential if a recurrence of last March's violence was to be prevented. Then, 19 people died, nearly 1,000 were injured and hundreds of homes and cultural sites were burned by Albanian extremists intent on driving out the Serb, Roma and Ashkali communities.

This renewed bout of "ethnic cleansing", the reverse of that suffered on a larger scale by the Albanian population in 1999 and which led to the international intervention, occurred under the noses of nearly 20,000 Nato peacekeepers and the UN.

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