The first thing everybody tells you about the new Danish chief of the entire UN mission here is, “Well, he’s surely no Bernard Kouchner.” It is usually said not critically, but descriptively.
In fact, Hans Haekkerup himself doesn’t disagree. “Basically, I will continue the same line as Kouchner,” he told me in one of his very first interviews in his office in one of the half-destroyed buildings of the former Kosovo government. Then, with an ironic smile, he added, “but, of course, we’re very different personalities.”
When I interviewed Kouchner a year ago last fall in this same office, I found a man full of charm and energy and inspiration. Having long ago become famous as the 1971 founder of Doctors Without Borders, the premier humanitarian group in the world, this curly-haired Frenchman constantly bounced up and stalked around the room, intent on the reinstitutionalization of NATO-occupied Kosovo.
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“We’re trying to build a transitional country out of a non-country,” he said at one point. Then he looked momentarily overwhelmed as he added, “I’ve been sent to do an impossible task.”
New UN chief Haekkerup seems very different. A respected former defense minister of Denmark, he is no-nonsense straight, tall and grave. His first passions are not, like Kouchner’s, creating a “civil society” here at any cost or holding elections as soon as possible, if only to get the UN and NATO and all the other alphabet-soup organizations out of here.
Rather, he is first determined to get the correct legal basis for the future Kosovo laid down.
“All want elections as soon as possible,” he said, “but we want to have the legal framework in place before we do it. . . . As soon as that is in place, I’ll call elections. The idea is to define the powers of the various elected bodies before the election.
“What are the powers of the self-government, of the parliament, for instance? The legal framework will define the powers and create the framework, which we are now discussing with the leaders of the parties and of the local councils. Then we will hand over power.”
This year? I asked him. “I’ll do it as soon as possible,” he answered.
But UN mission chief Haekkerup is also not exactly what many people think. He has already been quite definite in his position vis-a-vis the Serbs, who waged such destructive war against this province. “Serbia has no role in creating the legal framework,” he told reporters early on. “In the end, I will be the one to make the final decision UN mission, in truth, has been fortunate–in those years when many European and UN officials were pretentiously “neutral” or even, as some still are, supportive of the Serbs–in having these two unusual and moral men in this top position.
But Kosovo remains a bleak, hate-filled, outwardly hopeless place, still in its own mind (and in substantial reality) at war with Belgrade. Almost everyone is unemployed. Revenge attacks by Albanians against the remaining Serbs are everyday occurrences. The elections last October were hopeful (moderate Albanian Kosovars generally won), but Kosovo still is characterized by a scene at the Pristina airport. Visas are not required, as one entering American doctor remarked wryly, “because you’re `nowhere.’ “
In short, Kosovo remains officially part of the Serbia it abhors. And the recent democratic elections there have awakened new fears in the Albanian Kosovars’ hearts that the outside world will try to thwart their overwhelming desire for independence in order to placate the new regime in Belgrade. Elections should be underway here as soon and as realistically as possible. These people need to rule themselves and decide their status, and we all need it just as urgently.
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