Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
As Kosovo recovers from Serbian-inflicted devastation, rival political factions jockey for position.
Jul 2, 1999 | In the midst of critical shortages of livable housing, water, electricity, food, medical care, telephone lines and passable roads, one problem Kosovo does not have is a shortage of people vying for power. Kosovo, a recently Serbian-held province that has no official legal status of statehood, has not one, but two prime ministers formerly in exile, a president now living in exile and dozens of people with titles like "foreign minister" and "defense minister" printed on their business cards.
The thirst for power of Kosovo's would-be rulers does not appear to have been slaked by the staggering destruction unleashed against the province and its people by Serbian forces over the past three months.
As thousands of foreign troops and international officials arrive in Kosovo to patrol, police, demine, excavate, rebuild and administer the province, a dilemma is unfolding in the back rooms of the United Nations mission in Kosovo, or UNMIK, as it is locally known. Just who legitimately represents the 1.8 million Kosovo Albanians on whose behalf NATO intervened and some 45,000 foreign troops were deployed? Normally the legitimacy of political leaders is determined by elections, of course, but no one, not even the organizations that run elections for a living, seems to have the stomach to even think about elections in Kosovo for at least a year, while the bodies are still being counted and the rubble is being cleared.
For the NATO-led Kosovo peacekeeping force, KFOR, there was no question that the man they needed to deal with is the one who controls the guys with the guns: Hashim Thaci, the 30-year-old political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who has declared himself prime minister of a Kosovo provisional government that would rule until elections are held, probably next year.
But Thaci, whose nom de guerre as a top KLA rebel was Snake, is not the only one running around claiming he's the prime minister of Kosovo. The other Kosovar prime minister, who recently returned to Kosovo after eight years in exile in Germany, is Bujar Bukoshi. And while Thaci controls the guys with the guns, Bukoshi, 51 years old and a physician by training, controls the Dardania bank account in Albania into which has been deposited the hundreds of millions of dollars donated by the Kosovo Albanian diaspora, who by tradition give 3 percent of their income to the homeland.
"We have something to offer," Bukoshi said in an interview Sunday in his office above a sports shop in the Kosovo capital of Pristina, referring to his government, which helped fund parallel health and education systems for Kosovo Albanians during the past eight years of Serbian repression. "We capped the front for 10 years under hard repression. We succeeded to survive all those years because we organized democratic institutions."
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