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Photo: Scott Heidler/Mercy Corps
By KRISTIN GRIFFITH AND RUTH ALLEN
Until the spring of 1999, many Americans had never heard of Kosovo, a Connecticut-sized province of Serbia. In March of that year, NATO airstrikes ended Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of ethnic cleaning against the region's ethnic Albanians. The fighting stopped, and the peacekeepers and aid workers arrived as the ethnic minority Serbs fled in fear of retribution from the returning majority Albanians. Soon Kosovo drifted back out of the collective consciousness -- another half-solved problem.
This spring, Kosovo will be back in the news, looking for the second half of its solution. This week, UN special envoy for Kosovo Martti Ahtisaari presented his plan for the "final status" of Kosovo and in the next few months, the United Nations Security Council will approve a way forward: the region will either receive conditional independence or remain part of Serbia with some degree of autonomy.
Settling Kosovo's political and legal status is the critical next step in bringing long-term peace and stability to the region, but let's be clear about this: a status decision is necessary but not sufficient in guaranteeing a decent future for Kosovars.
Independent or not, Kosovo is poor and divided. More than half of Kosovars live on less than $1.60 a day. With a per capita gross domestic product of less than $1,300, Kosovo ranks below places such as Afghanistan and Rwanda in wealth per person. Given this level of poverty, it's not surprising that tension between the region's majority Kosovar Albanians and minority Kosovar Serbians persists. One in 3 Kosovar Serbs feel the Albanians aren't trying hard enough to integrate them; more than 1 in 4 Kosovar Albanians don't think the Serbs want to integrate at all.
Luckily, the international community has learned some lessons about what works and what doesn't in Kosovo, and these lessons need to be applied if the region is to have any hope of peace and prosperity.
First, in order to create lasting stability, all ethnic groups must feel they have some control over their future. Years of distrust, tension, and conflict have left both ethnic majority and minority residents unable or unwilling to participate in governance activities.
In implementing Kosovo's final status decision, the international community and local authorities need to prioritize investments that strengthen ' vertical linkages' -- the connecting points between the government and its citizens. Without a role in public decision making, citizens lack confidence in their government, and in turn government is less responsive to the people.
Kosovo has lots of tough public decisions to make in the near future, and those decisions are only going to hold if people see their government officials as legitimate representatives of their interests. That trust is earned, not granted, and the international community needs to help politicians understand that.
Along those lines, as the final status agreement is implemented, donor agencies and policy makers must take a hands-on role in strengthening the capacity of government, administration, social service, and security structures at both central and local levels. The international bureaucracy that runs Kosovo now soon will be downsized and local institutions will become increasingly responsible for assuming control over government and associated functions.
Second, it is paramount that relations among the various ethnic groups improve. Normal civic interaction between Kosovar Serb and Albanian communities has largely stopped, with both populations increasingly seeking support and protection within their own ranks. The result is disintegration of 'horizontal linkages' -- those which connect people of different backgrounds.
The international community cannot continue to step in every time there is an ethnically sensitive problem to resolve. In 14 years on the ground in Kosovo, Mercy Corps, a global humanitarian agency, has learned that it is most successful in re establishing or developing new linkages among ethnic groups when community-driven approaches are used to identify and pursue common interests -- developing a shared market, getting a damaged factory back online, expanding a medical facility -- and using the good will generated to catalyze larger change within society.
As one Mercy Corps project participant from a multi ethnic neighborhood said, "Community involvement with both communities is the best way. Through this project, Serbian villagers feel like they are a part of Kosovo society and feel less isolated." While co-existence alone cannot be assumed to result in reintegration or reconciliation, collaboration toward a shared goal can often be an excellent first step.
Finally, Kosovo needs to remain a funding priority for the international community. Despite its many needs, Mercy Corps is seeing drastic cuts in assistance to Kosovo, with donor aid falling by 70 percent between 2000 and 2003 alone -- a trend which continues today.
It would be a grave mistake to assume that the final status decision marks the end of the international community's obligations to Kosovo. The options are clear: invest time, energy and resources in Kosovo now to address underlying issues, or call it good enough, and plan on dealing with another failed state several years from now.
Kristin Griffith is Kosovo mission director for Mercy Corps, a global humanitarian agency. Ruth Allen is a senior program officer in Mercy Corps' in Cambridge.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in The Boston Globe
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