Tough job for EULEX

After slow start, Albanians and Serbs skeptical about EU’s Kosovo mission

Foreign reporters stand in front of graffiti reading EULEX, in the Kosovar capital of Pristina, yesterday. The UN Security Council last week gave a green light to the planned EU mission.

By Fatos Bytyci - Reuters

PRISTINA – An EU mission begins a long-delayed deployment in Kosovo today, but Western police, customs and court officials may be hard pressed to win the confidence of both Albanians and minority Serbs.

In February, European Union member states decided to send a mission, dubbed EULEX, to oversee the institutions in Kosovo, taking over from the United Nations mission running the province since 1999.

“EULEX is not getting the ideal start,” said Peter Palmer, Balkans director of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. “A new reality has been established. And it’s not what was envisaged in the past, and certainly not what the EU was hoping for.”

The EU hopes its new mission will help build government institutions in the poorest corner of the Balkans, a region still recovering from the wars of the 1990s when Yugoslavia collapsed. Deployment has been delayed amid opposition from Serbia and Kosovo Serbs who see it as a symbol of Kosovo’s independence.

The 27-nation block won Serbia’s consent by amending the deployment plan to enable police, judiciary and customs officers in Serb-held areas to work under the umbrella of the United Nations while their Albanian counterparts will work with EULEX. The move was heavily opposed by Pristina’s leadership, which said the plan would lead to a de facto partition of Kosovo, which proclaimed independence from Serbia in February, nine years after NATO bombing drove Serb forces out.

“Through slow deployment EULEX is losing its legitimacy,” says Veton Surroi, chairman of Foreign Policy Club of Kosovo.

A gray building in the center of Pristina, used by the UN administration now, is the EULEX compound. Hundreds of EU police officers are being trained there. On the outer wall a graffito reads “EULEX, made in Serbia.” It was written during a demonstration of several thousand ethnic Albanians who protested against EULEX in Pristina last week.

“I have no doubt that EULEX will support Kosovo independence,” said Shkelzen Maliqi, a columnist for the Express daily. “But the amended plan for its deployment caused fear among Kosovo Albanians that the international community has abandoned principles of the (Martti) Ahttisaari plan.”

Ahtisaari, who mediated Serb-Albanian talks on Kosovo as the EU’s envoy in 2007, drafted a plan advocating EU-supervised independence with broad autonomy for Kosovo’s Serb minority, but Serbia and Russia rejected it.

Like many of the ethnic Albanians, the roughly 120,000 ethnic Serbs who live in Kosovo say they are very cautious about embracing the EULEX mission.

“I don’t think that there will be violent outbreaks,” said Kosovo Serb leader Marko Jaksic. “However EULEX is not going to be welcomed in Serb-held areas and I think that Serbs will simply boycott the mission.”

The EULEX mission is expected to be operational fully by the end of winter. Serbian officials said that the deployment in Serb-held areas is going to be slower.

“The EULEX mission needs national support in Kosovo otherwise it will end up in failure,” said Pieter Feith, the International Civilian Representative who oversees the implementation of the plan that Kosovo declared independence.