According to Benita Ferrero-Waldner, chairperson-in-office at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Kosovo elections on 28 October 2000 gave the people of Kosovo 'an historic opportunity to show the international community that they are committed to a democratic future' (1).
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Under the United Nation's (UN) administrative mandate over the Yugoslav province, the OSCE is responsible for organising elections and building democratic institutions - and, it would appear, for testing Kosovans' commitment to the democratic process. But it is the international administrators who seem to have most to learn about democracy.
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The lack of international support for democracy in Kosovo was brought home to me during my week-long stint as a Council of Europe observer of the elections. At the two-day training session in Skopje the monitors received little background information on the political process. We were told that voters in Kosovo could not be expected to understand much about democratic politics, while the political parties were described as amateurish, lacking training, leadership and programmes. Victor Ruffy, head of the Council of Europe Mission, stressed the importance of the elections for restoring a sense of civic dignity and community pride to the people. He didn't mention the importance of democratic accountability.
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Any monitors who had done some background research of their own would have realised that the elections were more important for the credibility of the international community than for the democratic rights of the people of Kosovo. After the elections, the UN administrators will still be running the municipalities in much the same way as before - the only difference being that more of the Kosovo representatives on the largely consultative local councils will be elected rather than appointed directly by UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo) (2).
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The UN administrators will still have the power to select representatives to give a greater political, ethnic and gender 'balance' to the newly elected councils. The job of the councils remains as it was prior to the elections - to enact UNMIK administrative regulations decided at a provincial level and formally to agree to policy proposed by the UN-appointed municipal administrator, who has the right to attend and convene meetings of the council and all its committees. The administrator also has responsibility for all municipal property and must approve all appointments of staff as well as the budget and any financial decisions.
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 | | Administrators let people vote without identification - then marked their ballots as invalid |
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Any councils that disagree with the UN administrators' edicts have no right of appeal and can be overruled by their municipal administrator, who can suspend any legislation disagreed with. Alternatively, the councils can be held to be in breach of UN regulations and the elected representatives dismissed for failing to carry out their duties.
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For the OSCE and the Council of Europe, the lack of political differentiation between the parties, which all focused on the demand for independence and little else, was a sign of the lack of democratic maturity of both the parties and voters. That the international community runs Kosovo affairs, controls the purse strings and has the final say on policy over all important questions would suggest that the real barrier to the development of political parties is the lack of opportunity to take genuine responsibility for policymaking. And the fact that local elections were held before elections at the broader provincial level means that the political parties are often fragmented and based on regional allegiances more than policy agreements.
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But rather than seeing the lack of fully developed party programmes and organisations as a result of so few opportunities for self-government, the international administration uses it as an argument for further international regulation. As one member of the European Community Monitoring Mission team told me, the internationals had learned from Bosnia that it is better to start with a full protectorate and gradually introduce some political freedoms, rather than (as in Bosnia) increase the powers of the international community in response to problems. In fact, this response is even less likely to work.
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The system of UN and OSCE regulation in Kosovo mitigates against the development of traditional democratic contestation because the role of elected representatives involves little input into policymaking. Whichever party people vote for, the policies implemented at local and provincial levels will be decided by international appointees. This perversion of democratic competition is reflected in the development of the political parties and their programmes. The programmes were largely written by the OSCE, which organised international funding for the smaller parties and helped establish a network of 'civil society' non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The OSCE even ruled on the names and leaders of some of the smaller parties. The OSCE and UNMIK published a political party guide in which the OSCE priorities are repeated by rote, from concerns over the environment, health, education and social services to the economic policy for encouraging small and medium enterprises and promises to accept the election results.
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Although the people of Kosovo have major problems of poverty, water and electricity supply, unemployment, and a lack of health, education, social services and transport and communications infrastructure, there is little evidence that they do not understand democracy. Yet more international resources are going into providing Kosovo with civil-society NGOs than in meeting basic health needs or literacy.
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Only the most idealistic OSCE administrator could argue that women in Kosovo will be more empowered by the international imposition of at least one-third women candidates on all political parties than by employment and literacy skills. But this reversal of reality is par for the course for Kosovo's international bureaucracy, for whom the lack of basic infrastructure is a damning indictment of Kosovan 'culture' rather than a reflection of Kosovo's historic underdevelopment in former Federal Yugoslavia and the destruction caused by civil conflict and NATO bombing.
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While the communally organised systems of service provision and 'parallel society' organisations have been undermined by international rule, the international bureaucracy has been slow to put anything in its place. The rubbish piled high in the streets of every town is seen as a sign of Kosovan stupidity rather than a problem of inefficient international bureaucracy. Cars without numberplates are automatically seen as symptoms of Mafia rule rather than the failure of the international administrators to establish a system of vehicle registration. The more inefficient international regulation is, the more Kosovans appear to be incapable of governing themselves. The 28 October elections fitted the same pattern. OSCE procedures were so disorganised that voters with the correct identification papers spent three to five hours standing in queues, while OSCE staff explained (wrongly) that the queues and delays were only natural because they had never voted before.
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There was no detected fraud or cheating as far as we were aware, but the international monitors saw this as little more than a test-run for democracy, ensuring that it met the technical conditions of a 'free and fair' election. In terms of content, nobody had much time for the democratic choices of the people of Kosovo, with 58 percent support for Ibrahim Rugova's LDK party. Even before the elections we had been instructed that votes for the former UCK/KLA parties signified hardline nationalism, while votes for the moderate LDK signified a backward-looking conservatism. Because the internationals had little respect for the democratic choices expressed by the electorate, the focus turned to the technical aspects of the election process.
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Teaching the people of Kosovo about democracy didn't end with voters queuing for hours to be ink-checked and identified. The OSCE officials sometimes played along with them and pretended that by giving the local chairperson of the polling station the chance to count some ballots they were teaching democracy. In fact, OSCE organisers treated the elections surprisingly lightly. Some election supervisors arrived in Kosovo the day before the election and many were not familiar with the rules. The polling stations were disorganised, with 12 or 15 in one building with one narrow entrance and little indication of which room was which. The UN and OSCE organisers had ruled that no Albanian flags could be displayed outside election buildings, as Kosovo is formally part of Yugoslavia - but the day before the elections this rule was dropped, and in some polling stations Albanian and US flags were displayed side by side.
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The OSCE and UNMIK didn't want anything to spoil the big day, so were willing to drop the usual regulation regime. They even let people vote without identification - although, unbeknown to the voters, they then marked their ballots as invalid. Election day went off without incident except for the OSCE's disorganisation - and the voters (excepting the disenfranchised Serbs and other minorities) were made to feel that the elections were a major step on the way to independence.
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This was the biggest con of all. Every Kosovo party - even the Green Party - stood with independence as their main platform. But the OSCE pretended that the people were voting for toothless municipal councils. To enhance this fiction the OSCE produced an election publication, Voters Voices: Community Concerns, which alleged that voters were more concerned with municipal issues than with Kosovo's future status (3). Everybody gained from the pretence: the voters felt this was the start of their political independence and the OSCE could sell the elections as 'the best-ever post-conflict first elections'. If the electorate knew that these elections were just the first of many for talking shops under international regulation they might have been less willing to put up with the long queues and ink-checks.
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The fact that the new Kosovan and Yugoslav leaderships are increasingly dependent on outside support has led US and UN officials to be much more open about rewriting UN Resolution 1244, which promised to respect Yugoslav integrity and grant substantial autonomy to Kosovo. Bernard Kouchner, the UN-appointed governor of the province, wants to start talks on independence with Belgrade a month after these elections, and an 'independent' UN report has called for 'conditional independence' (4).
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Negotiating Kosovo's future status before the establishment of a provincial assembly means that Kouchner intends to enter talks as the representative of the people of Kosovo, a desire which has been strongly condemned by the leaders of the Kosovo parties. While many commentators fear that granting Kosovo 'independence' risks conflict between Kosovo factions and with Belgrade, they ignore the reality of US and international domination over the region. Kouchner wants to settle the future status of Kosovo - not to quit the province and leave the people to determine their own future, but to overcome current uncertainties over the limits of international control.
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'Independence' for Kosovo will not mark political autonomy - it will institute another UN protectorate along the lines of the 'independent' state of Bosnia, which has been managed under international administration since the Dayton Accords of 1995. Far from heralding the 'birth of democracy', the October elections were about legitimising the UN administration. As in Bosnia, Kosovo's international administrators organised elections 'free and fair' enough to legitimise elected consultation bodies but not democratic enough to justify political autonomy. The people of Kosovo will be facing democratic 'tests' set by their international rulers for the indefinite future.
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David Chandler is senior lecturer in international relations at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. He is the author of:
- Constructing Global Civil Society: Morality and Power in International Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
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- From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention (Pluto Press, 2002)
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- Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton (Pluto Press, 2000)
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And he is the editor of:
- Protecting the Bosnian Peace: Lessons from a Decade of Nation Building (Routledge, 2004)
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- Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
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(1) 'Statement of the chairperson-in-office on the eve of the first municipal elections in Kosovo', OSCE press release, 27 October 2000. See here
(2) UNMIK Regulation number 2000/45 'On self-government of municipalities in Kosovo', 11 August 2000, Sections 47-48. Available here
(3) Voters Voices: Community Concerns, OSCE, September 2000, Pristina, Kosovo
(4) The Kosovo Report, by the Independent Commission on Kosovo, Oxford (October 2000)
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