September 1999
Emerging out of a PeaceGame held in Amman, Jordan, this op-ed was written for in-house use at UNESCO. The ideas remain valid–and not just for Kosovo. Note, too, that the advice for Kosovo was never taken: Kosovo today is a wreck—a corrupt and nearly dysfunctional country “managed” by a thoroughly dysfunctional UN bureaucracy with the collusion of a number of money-making NGOs.
In Kosovo we are about to find out first hand that establishing peace is more complicated than warmaking. Beyond the immediate problem of establishing a security force in Kosovo and enabling the refugees to return home are even more daunting challenges.
In April, during the early days of the NATO air attacks on Yugoslavia, a group of distinguished Jordanians and others from the region gathered in Amman for a two day “PeaceGame”. Rather than the strategy of bombing, the upside down wargame explored the strategies of practical regional peacebuilding using Kosovo as a case study.
Now the international community can put those ideas into practice. The bombs have stopped, it is time to think about the long term strategy for peace and development in the Balkans. In the midst of the daily excitement about military peacekeepers taking up their stations in Kosovo and refugees returning home to burned out villages we need to move to questions about how this international effort can help shape a more peaceful future for the troubled Balkans. Will the contributions of Jordan and others around the world add up to peace?
Ahead is the task not to “rebuild”-the past has been destroyed by the killing and burning and bombing-but to assist the damaged peoples of Kosovo and their neighbors as they construct new lives and new communities. This help is going to be very costly and go on for years. The large force of military peacekeepers will be very expensive to keep in the field. The European Union and the World Bank are already talking about investing several billion dollars a year for years and years in “peacebuilding.” Even if the Europeans do pay most of the bills as the White House is saying, billions of U.S. taxpayers dollars and thousands of their sons and daughters are going to be going to Kosovo for years to come. Will all that money and all those people help change anything? Certainly we all hope so, but practical strategy will be more useful than hope.
The NATO bombing campaign has shown the perils of launching a great enterprise without forethought. Too much will be at stake to undertake the peacebuilding campaign willy nilly. We need to get this one right. Thinking beyond today’s urgencies we need to devise a few basic guidelines and to assemble the machinery that will help us assess progress. Some are saying that Bosnia is a model. But in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Guatemala, and Haiti and many others well-meaning officials have poured in money and well-intentioned organizations have gone to work on the ground to assist the afflicted, but never with a sense of whether the whole enterprise was adding up. Too often it has not.
Here are a few of the many things—ideas generated in the Jordan PeaceGame by savvy Middle Easterners—that we might be mulling if we are going to be practical about this newest peacebuilding challenge:
Consider all the ethno-religious groups, not just the Albanian Kosovars. Any future peace in the Balkans ultimately must rest on the willingness of different stripes of people to live together. The quick fix of carving out protected areas for ethnic Albanians will merely ratify Milosevic’s scheme for ethnic cleansing. In Kosovo, the Albanians, Serbs, and other groups need something better than a NATO-enforced apartheid, something that will allow the gradual reconnection of peoples whom Milosevic has deliberately set at each other’s throats.
Help the Kosovars-and the Serbs-help themselves. Misled by TV pictures of helpless refugees, we tend to underrate the capabilities of Kosovars to manage their own affairs. A nascent democracy was stirring as Kosovars struggled to regain control of their lives after Milosevic took away their autonomy ten years ago. Just as the Marshall plan relied on European initiative, our resettlement and reconstruction plans should at every turn foster the local exercise of democratic self-reliance. The last thing we want to do is create another pool of resentful people permanently dependent on outside aid.
Pay special attention to education. Pro-Serb policies destroyed Kosovo’s education system years ago. Hundreds of thousands of young people need to be back in functioning classrooms as quickly as possible. It will be in the schoolhouses and playgrounds that the seeds of war or peace are planted. We need to see kids carrying schoolbooks, not guns. Adults will be hungry for education too, many so they can find paying work in new careers. And we must not forget the Serb school children who have been force-fed a diet of separatist hate.
Recognize the psychic trauma. Rebuilding is more than restoring burned-out houses and restarting agriculture. After years of propaganda demonizing “turks”, the hooded Serb “cleansing” and killing squads stripped the departing Kosovars of their identity papers. Imagine the trauma of suddenly, with home and family treasures in flames, losing even the ability to identify yourself as you stumble into the degrading anonymity of “refugee” in a camp more slum than refuge. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission may be a useful example; Rwanda’s failure to do more than arbitrarily imprison huge numbers of alleged genocidaires is not.
Include high technology. Among the exhausted people pouring over the border in caravans of tractor-drawn were a high proportion of townspeople and educated professionals. Kosovo desperately needs those middle class elites back in Pristina, not emigrating permanently to Toronto or Bonn or Los Angeles as many of the most talented Bosnians have chosen to do out of fear there was no hope at home. Information systems, computers, and the Internet will be central to offering them a future where they are part of Europe and the global economy. Internet-based “distance learning”, for example, can help restart education while schools are rebuilt. On-line communities may help sustain a local sense of place and family until a new, normal life is possible; high tech surveillance systems may help neighborhoods to become more resistant to future cleansing threats.
Just as important as a broad strategic framework will be a capacity for monitoring progress and problems. This is something the international community has never mastered. Helping a people rebuild their society is far more complicated than bombing it into submission. Helping rebuild the economy, resettle refugees, develop police and justice systems, and jump-start the schools are each complex, messy tasks. Seeing the whole picture so as to judge overall progress and adjust priorities has confounded us in other crises. If we do not figure out how to do that in Kosovo there will be no end to our very expensive commitment of troops. The military exit strategy runs straight through the door of peacebuilding in the civil society.
The future of the UN also runs through Kosovo. Fenced out of the war making, the UN Secretary General, the Security Council, and the various UN agencies must take a leading role in the peacebuilding. Nothing would meet the criticisms of the UN skeptics more effectively than a successful effort to devise an overall peacebuilding strategy and to foster a coherent assessment process.
Getting it right in Kosovo is terribly important to all of us. The bleak arts of ethnic cleansing and aerial bombing are running way ahead of our collective peacebuilding skills. A dreadful world of many more Kosovos lies directly ahead unless we can develop now the critical craft of strategic thinking about how to help a damaged people build a genuinely civil society out of the rubble of their lives. Nothing will be a greater deterrent to future tragedies in the Balkans and elsewhere than a thoughtful, cost-effective attack on the challenge of peacebuilding in Kosovo.
A former U.S. Navy battleship captain and military strategist, Larry Seaquist works on practical conflict prevention strategies. A senior advisor to the Director-General of UNESCO, he created “PeaceGames” to encourage local conflict prevention.