Atop a hill in the early winter mud, in a dilapidated, dung-colored building that was once a film studio, there works an unlikely general. He is supposed to be the most powerful man in this strange, decomposed place.
But Gen. Klaus Reinhardt, commander of NATO troops here, is not only the first German officer to command such a mission, but also a historian. And that, he hints ironically, makes him less a prophet than a realist in Kosovo.
“I don’t believe that people learn from history,” the general told me recently in the studio where NATO headquarters (called KFOR) are stationed. “It seems that people have to experience everything for themselves.”
Then, talking more directly about the unusual mission and mandate that he and NATO have been given, he moved on to his everyday matters. “I know,” he continued, “how many Albanians have suffered: their houses burned, their families killed, the many young Albanians still suffering in Serb prisons with no one knowing where they are. It is a permanent sorrow.
“We have to rebuild tolerance here, but we can’t rebuild it through military force. Whoever thinks all this can be changed in a short period doesn’t know human nature. . . . Our mission will take time. We won’t be out in a matter of months or even years.”
The day before, talking with another German officer, Gen. Klaus Olshausen, who coordinates with the Serbs on the northern border and with former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters, made the unique mission even clearer.
“KFOR is not here to create the final settlement,” he told me, “but to create a situation that will hopefully be stable enough to find a final settlement.”
And right there, you begin to understand what these able officials face. They have behind them the greatest military machine the world has known. They could bomb Serbia or Kosovo off the map, if that were called for. But their “power” is extremely limited and ever compromised by the limits the world community has, in many ways self-righteously, placed upon them.
They are to provide the military backing for the United Nations’ attempt to create a civil society out of this physical, moral and institutional chaos; to make two peoples “reconcile” with each other when one has just attempted to wipe the other off the face of the Earth; to investigate and arrest local war criminals when there is no judicial system and no recognized law; to reconstitute factories when no one even knows who owns them; and to create an “autonomous” space on the globe of Kosovo, while the international community persists in the fiction that it still does, and can, belong to the Serbia that tried to destroy it.”
Gen. Reinhardt, who has had considerable experience in these kinds of confused missions–in Somalia and in Bosnia, for instance–is known for being impatient, rightly so, with the unending excuses of both sides. Unlike too many former European NATO generals and UN representatives in the Bosnian war, many of whom were amorally co-opted by the Serbs, he is outspoken with everyone, but particularly with the Serbs.
In Mitrovica, for instance, the city where the two ethnic groups still are divided and where Belgrade is effectively setting up a partition of Kosovo, Reinhardt tried recently to negotiate each side’s claim to a closed battery factory. “All right, I told them, we’ll do it on a 50-50 basis. The Serbs agreed to that and we sent guards to protect them. The plant opened, but none of the Serbs showed up; they really wanted only a Serb factory.”
He has been particularly successful, given this situation, on at least two counts. First, the demobilization of former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters seems to be working, and many of them are now in the process of applying to work with a new civilian Kosovo Protection Corps just formed under a particularly effective former KLA general, Agim Ceku. Second, under Reinhardt’s popular spokesman, Col. Henning Philipp, KFOR has tried, with effectiveness, to get through to the Belgrade press by offering them honest information.
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So far, the Germans can be rightfully proud of this, their first out-of-theater NATO mission.But the question here is not one of capability but the degree to which NATO has agreed to put its power behind such a murky mission. Can even NATO’s best be expected to succeed with such a strange and imprecise mission?