My Town is My Castle by Delfin Pllana, 26 August 2008
Hope vies with unease as Kosovo embarks on a sweeping local-autonomy plan.
PRISTINA Entering Gracanica, a half-hour’s drive from the Kosovan capital, the sense of crossing a boundary is palpable. Minarets give way to the walled Orthodox monastery on the main street, guarded by a pair of burly Swedish KFOR soldiers. All the signs are in Serbian and billboards urge voters to support local branches of Serbian parties.
These new houses were built in a field outside Gracanica with money from the Serbian government. TOL photo.The separation runs deep. For years the central authorities in Pristina have had no say over the provision of public services, administration, schools or health care here, as in other Kosovo cities and towns where Serbs make up the majority.
This improvised twin-track system of governance evokes memories of the parallel structures set up by the Kosovo Albanians under the rule of Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic. Now the principle of devolved local authority is enshrined in the new country’s constitution, and the government is hurrying to implement its mechanisms of decentralized local government. The constitution, approved in June, draws heavily on the “supervised independence” plan drawn up by UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari and accepted “with aching hearts” by the Kosovo Albanians but rejected by Belgrade and Kosovo’s Serbs.
“I won’t be happy if Novo Brdo becomes more mono-ethnic than it is now but I’ll keep living here – this is my place, my home. I have Serb neighbors and the others [Serbs] are also welcome if they want to come back, but only the good ones,” says Hasan Llapashtica, recalling tough times in 1999 when Serb paramilitaries forced him and his family to leave the multiethnic municipality in eastern Kosovo, which is foreseen by the Ahtisaari plan to expand and include nearby villages inhabited predominantly by Serbs. A Serb neighbor who wouldn’t give his name doubted the plan will ever be implemented in Serb municipalities since it hasn’t been recognized by Belgrade. Although he hadn’t read the plan he was certain it was not meant to bring any good for the Serbs in Kosovo.
DECENTRALIZATION AND ITS OPPONENTS
The establishment of new, mostly Serb-majority municipalities was one of the main elements in the 2007 negotiations on Kosovo’s status between Pristina and Belgrade under Ahtisaari’s guidance. Affirmative rights for Serbs in Kosovo and more self-rule for municipalities (most including a number of towns or villages in a compact area) was central to the process of “decentralization” aimed at addressing local problems and devolving responsibilities to lower levels of authority while at the same time responding to Serb demands.
The number of municipalities will rise to 38 from the present 30. Five new and one expanded Serb-majority municipalities are being formed, along with three already established pilot municipalities, one of which has a Turkish majority.
All municipalities will hold elections, tentatively set for the autumn of 2009.
In the context of the tense relations between the majority Albanians and other communities in Kosovo, decentralization became a synonym for minority protection as the UN and other international actors sought means to bring Serbs back into provincial affairs. Serb politicians began boycotting the Kosovo parliament in 2005. Most Albanian politicians supported the decentralization process, viewing it as an opportunity to hasten the way towards opening of talks they hoped would bring full independence. For the Serb community, propped up by a system of parallel, Belgrade-funded jobs, health care and education, there was little enthusiasm for bringing their day-to-day concerns under the umbrella of a process offered by the international community and supported by the Albanian-dominated Kosovo institutions.
Paradoxically, the greatest opposition to the decentralization scheme has come from the Serbs, who seemingly stand to benefit the most from it, although some Serbs have welcomed the plan, among them the prominent politician Rada Trajkovic. However, some Albanians as well are incensed over giving greater autonomy to local communities.
“We will concentrate all of our efforts not to make decentralization happen,” says Albin Kurti, leader of Vetevendosje (Self-determination), a self-described non-political movement. Even as public support for Vetevendosje has slipped, its activists remain vocally opposed to what they call the “rule of UNMIK” and the Ahtisaari plan and constitution. A soft-spoken, intense man who has been jailed by Serbian and by Kosovan courts, Kurti, 33, argues that decentralization will lead to formal separation of the northern part of Kosovo and creation of a largely Serb buffer zone in eastern Kosovo.“This way, links between ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and in the Presevo valley in southern Serbia, populated predominantly by Albanians, will be cut,” Kurti says.
Kurti insists that creation of new Serb municipalities will further divide Kosovo into separate, mono-ethnic units and, rather than the goal of calming tensions, will merely add more potential points of conflict between Albanians and Serbs.
All of the Ahtisaari plan’s provisions for local self-governance, setting municipal boundaries, and local governance finances have been adopted as the law of the land, whether in the constitution or other legislation.
Once decentralization is fully implemented, all municipalities will have primary responsibility for local economic planning and development, public services, education, basic health care, housing and other services. In addition, Serb-majority municipalities are responsible for protection of churches and other cultural monuments and have a say in appointing local police chiefs.
The plan in effect preserves some of the parallel Serbian structures. Serbian-language schools are permitted to use curriculums and textbooks imported from Serbia, and the university in the northern, Serb-majority part of the city of Mitrovica will be given autonomous status. In Kurti’s view, the efforts of the Pristina government should have centered on economic development and easing social problems for all communities. He casts much of the blame for Kosovo’s lack of confidence on the “incompetent rule” of the UN and other international agencies since 1999.“UNMIK made puppets out of local politicians in their efforts to create fragile stability, thus justifying its continuous presence in Kosovo,” he says.
Officials responsible for seeing that decentralization succeeds are well aware of the task ahead.
“The Albanians criticize [the Ahtisaari plan] while Serbs refuse to cooperate,” Local Governance Minister Sadri Ferati told the Epoka e Re newspaper in May.
“This is the obstacle and the main challenge we aim to overcome to implement the plan. We have no alternative,” he said.
Burim Ramadani, an external adviser to the Ministry of Local Governance, where responsibility for implementation of the decentralization process lies, is optimistic that the process is on the right track.
Raising his voice over the roar of an electricity generator in a downtown café, Ramadani explains that an interministerial working group has been established and assigned to lay the groundwork for new legislation, transfer of competences and resources to local governments and coordination of donor funding. Teams responsible for preparing municipal governments for the change are expected to be named in the next few weeks.
Ramadani adds that a public information campaign is about to begin aiming to “demystify” the decentralization process and explain its benefits. Citizens need to understand that their local governments will soon take on the authority and responsibility to provide many services previously implemented from the capital, he says.
Even now that Kosovo’s independence has been recognized by most European countries, the government does not have all the levers of decentralization in its hand. The process is supervised by the International Civilian Office, the less-powerful successor to UNMIK, the UN agency that had run Kosovo since 1999. Headed by Pieter Feith, who simultaneously serves as European Union special representative in Kosovo, the ICO will have final say over the implementation of local self-governance and other civilian aspects of the Ahtisaari plan.
The band Dogruyol played Turkish music in the EU’s “roadshow” when the traveling promotional campaign reached Prizren in June.
In sharp contrast to the UN’s sweeping pre-independence mandate in Kosovo, the ICO and EU mission is much more modest, press adviser Verena Ringler says. Feith’s office will be looking for “technical cooperation” between the new municipalities and Pristina, she stresses.
Like the new government in Pristina, the ICO/EU mission knows how crucial it is to have public opinion on their side. In the spring a “roadshow” toured the country promoting the EU’s new role in Kosovo with skits, music and talent contests.
Raphael Naegeli, head of the ICO’s community affairs unit, says that his office is very optimistic that the process will be carried out successfully even though there is still lot of work to be done on the ground. “In the end,” he says, “it is about very local things that lead to local problem solving.”
