Kosovo Offers Police Officers as Peacekeepers, and Is Refused
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: October 6, 2003
RISTINA, Kosovo, Oct. 5 At a time when the Bush administration is having little success persuading its major allies to send troops and police officers to postwar Iraq, offers of help are coming from some very unusual and very small places.
On Sunday, Ibrahim Rugova, the president of the semiautonomous province of Kosovo, said he was eager to send several hundred police officers to help anywhere they were needed.
"I don't have soldiers; however, I have offered police officers to Iraq, to Afghanistan" or other places, Mr. Rugova told Richard C. Holbrooke, a former American ambassador to the United Nations and former assistant secretary of state, and journalists traveling with him. "We have very good police forces."
Mr. Rugova's announcement follows the news that the United States has recently accepted an unusual offer by Serbia and Montenegro to send up to 1,000 combat troops and police officers to Afghanistan to work with American forces.
Kosovo has been administered by the United Nations and protected by NATO troops since 1999, when NATO waged war against the Serbs after Serbia's wave of atrocities against the largely ethnic Albanian population there. When it came to winning points with the Bush administration, Mr. Rugova was not to be outdone by the Serbs.
Mr. Rugova said he made the offer to the State Department during a visit to Washington in February. He followed up with a letter to President Bush before the United States went to war against Iraq in March, saying, "As your country prepares for possible action in Iraq, you have our full political support." He also wrote, "We would be pleased and honored to provide tangible assistance in the form of any practicable sphere that you require." He said he never got an answer.
Reached on Sunday, a State Department official said the administration had said thank you very much, but no thanks. Mr. Rugova received a reply from the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, Elizabeth Jones, that said the best thing he could do to contribute to the campaign against terrorism was to build a stable democratic Kosovo, this official said.
Mr. Rugova's gesture is rooted more in symbolism than in reality. Enforcing law and order, which includes the police, is a power reserved by the United Nations administration in Kosovo.
But Mr. Rugova, who favors Kosovo's independence from Serbia and Montenegro, is big on symbols. As is his habit with important visitors, he gave Mr. Holbrooke a large mineral rock flecked with gold.
He proudly showed the visitors the three large flags hanging in his home: the flag of Albania, the flag of the United Nations and in the middle, the flag of Dardania, or Land of Pears, the ancient name for Kosovo. "That," he said, "is the flag of the president of Kosovo."
Nexhat Daci, the speaker of Kosovo's legislative assembly, repeated the offer last week in Washington during a visit with lawmakers including Senators Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Democrat, and Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican of Iowa.
"When we were first starting our police force, we didn't understand why they had to go to school until they learned lessons in respecting the human rights of the citizens and how to avoid taking revenge," Mr. Daci said in an interview. "We could teach the Iraqi police the lessons we learned."
Kosovo's fledgling police force has been trained here in a European and North American training operation under American control.
While most of the force of 5,600 locally recruited police officers is ethnic Albanian, 16 percent is non-Albanian, including Serbs. A potential peacekeeping force would be multiethnic, which in the view of politicians here, would prove that Albanians and Serbs can live and work in peace.
There is so much willingness to please Washington that Gen. Agim Ceku, the commander of Kosovo's emergency disaster relief corps, has also offered his forces in the American-led campaign against terrorism. Although the force of 3,000 is seen by ethnic Albanians as a fledgling army, fewer than 100 bear arms. "We run refugee camps, deliver humanitarian aid, do search and rescue missions, guard key sites," General Ceku said in an interview. As Muslims, he added, his forces would have credibility in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pėrgjigju Duke Cituar
Krijoni Kontakt