In mid-March 1999, a 70-year-old man named Memhet (name has been changed) sat anxiously in his home, determined to wait out the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) bombing campaign of the Serbian Army in his homeland of Kosovo. Having defied orders from Serbian authorities to leave, he had placed himself in a precarious situation.

When the Serbian military arrived at his home, they did not give him a second chance to leave. They shot him four times at close range with an assault rifle, poured fuel on his dead body, and ignited it. They then fired rounds from a tank into his home and set the remainder of his property on fire. Weeks later, when the conflict was over, Memhet’s family found his charred remains lying about 15 feet from his front porch.

During the conflict, acts like this one occurred in communities throughout Kosovo. Roughly 15,000 Albanians lost their lives at the hands of a nationalistic Serbian government gone amok. Replacing and rebuilding that government became the responsibility of the international community on the day it decided to intervene. Thus, Kosovo has become yet another place on an ever-growing list of places to be governed and administered by the international community.

The challenges of governing and administering a war-torn province like Kosovo are innumerable. Wounds of the war have left deep scars on all citizens, whether Serbian or Albanian. People of different ethnicities who once were neighbors can no longer live near each other. And with the vacuum of power left by the Serbs and temporarily assumed by the international community, even ordinary Albanians are having great difficulty in living with each other as they divide along political-party lines.

The history, hatred, mistrust, and potential for violence that exist in Kosovo have set the stage for a unique realm of local public administration, one that is being duplicated more frequently as regional events are calling for international intervention.

The Meeting of Peacekeeping and Local Government
To understand how municipal governments operate inside Kosovo, it is important to understand two basic considerations, namely, that:

1. The nature of the interim administration in Kosovo (the government established by the international community) is temporary and transitional. It is not meant to be an end-state, merely the means to an end.
2. Reaching and maintaining an absolute end to hostilities is vital to providing a safe and secure environment in which the Kosovo interim administration can gradually devolve control back to local officials.

Each organization—be it the UN, NATO, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), OSCE, or the World Health Organization (WHO)—has a specific role to play within the realm of each municipality. Unlike a traditional municipal government, where all efforts are organized on a local level and administered by one manager, most local efforts in Kosovo are organized on a provincial level, in Pristina (Kosovo’s capital city).

Because no single, unifying local authority exists for all of the various entities, it is difficult to compel individuals to cooperate with each other locally. Thus, local government, when diluted with international goodwill, is a bit of a three-ring circus. Everyone does different things inside his/her own ring, without any real coordination.

Thus, the challenges of governing a locality in Kosovo do not all lie within the scope of “traditional” local government. They are far from it. The challenges are shared by the UN, foreign militaries, NGOs, international political organizations, and local citizens. This is the framework in which local governments must be administered within the international effort.

Lay of the Land and Roles of the Players
Kosovo is a province inside Serbia proper. The republics of Serbia and Montenegro are all that constitute the former republic of Yugoslavia. Boundaries for local governments inside Kosovo have been set up according to the municipalities that existed before the international intervention in Serbia. Municipalities have a similar jurisdiction to that of an American county.

Each municipality has a United Nations–appointed civil administrator at its head. A UN civil administrator can be most closely compared to a traditional city manager within a council-manager context. Each UN civil administrator, a veteran UN employee with extensive international experience, also has a small staff of UN employees and local citizens who help manage the municipality.

In addition to the administrative staff, every municipality has its own police force. The United Nations Mission in Kosovo-Police (UNMIK-P) is composed of international police officers, as well as local officers, charged with law enforcement responsibilities. Each local government also has at its head an UNMIK-P commander, similar to a local police chief. Typically, the UN civil administrator and the UNMIK-P commander have a relationship like that of a traditional city manager and police chief.

The UN civil administration is concerned primarily with the day-to-day issues of local administration, but with the important difference that the environment in which the government is situated is much different from that of the United States. Automatic weapons, grenades, rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns, anti-tank mines, and anti-personnel mines have proliferated in the cities and the countryside. In such an environment, UNMIK-P officials, armed only with handguns, stand little chance against a disgruntled citizen with a chip on his shoulder. An additional force is required to administer civil order.

Kosovo’s environment necessitates the presence of an international military force given the charge of being peacekeepers. The relationship that they share with the UN forms the heart of Kosovo’s local administration system. What makes this relationship interesting is the fact that foreign militaries in Kosovo, also known as Kosovo Force (KFOR), are not designed to fit within the framework of a local or province-wide civil administration. KFOR is intended as a separate military force with the primary role of enforcing the peace and a secondary task of augmenting the local or province-wide civil administration.

Keeping the peace/augmenting the work of local officials is a particularly interesting aspect of the UN-KFOR relationship. As each foreign military force that composes KFOR is separated into multinational brigades (MNBs) (e.g., MNB-East consists of Americans, Greeks, Poles, Russians, United Arab Emirate citizens, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Jordanians), each participating foreign nation has a specific responsibility within its MNB.

The MNB commander (an American Brigadier General) determines where each nation’s military personnel will be located. For example, Ukrainian soldiers are stationed in the Serbian town of Strpce. The Serbians’ long history with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries, including the Ukraine, has created a natural fit for the Ukrainians in Strpce. This point matters because Introducing foreign peacekeepers into a sovereign nation can easily perpetuate the fighting they were sent to stop.

Great care is taken to build relationships of trust and to maintain local control. This aspect of local civil administration must constantly be handled delicately.

Close coordination between local UN and KFOR officials is absolutely necessary, but unfortunately it is not always a reality. This coordination is facilitated through weekly security meetings and frequent contact. During the security meetings, issues are discussed between KFOR and the UN that, in an ordinary community, would be dealt with strictly through the civil administration.

One instance of this kind of coordination involved the town of Kacanik’s stray-dog population. Large dogs roamed the countryside like herds of deer. When food was in short supply and when small children were left unattended, these dog packs would seize their opportunity. With the widespread proliferation of weapons, it would not have been practical for locals to take the initiative and go out on the hunt by themselves; they might be spotted and fired upon by KFOR. Consequently, U.S. soldiers, coordinating with the UN civil administration, devised a plan by which the Americans would accompany the local hunting club to seek out and destroy the strays safely.

Other UN-KFOR–coordinated efforts have helped to rebuild schools, bridges, and roads. UN-KFOR coordination also has distributed large amounts of clothing and food to needy families. Overall, the arrangement between KFOR and the UN has been unique from a civil administration perspective.

Generally speaking, “official” communication between KFOR and the UN seemed to take place more on the higher levels than at the local one. Often, on the local level, KFOR and contact with the UN only was as close or as distant as one or the other entity in the municipality wished it to be. One side or the other usually got its way, not because it actually had the authority but because it had the stronger will.

A separate UN organization, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), filled a giant need of the civil administration but worked completely independently from the UN civil administrator. Its charge was to furnish assistance and provisions to the massive flow of refugees coming both into Kosovo (primarily Albanians from the Presevo Valley and Macedonia) and out of it (mostly Serbians going to Serbia).

The refugee problem always has been an issue because towns could literally grow overnight, with family and friends from neighboring areas fleeing the hostilities. The sudden population influxes and movements therefore would exert a tremendous strain on both the interim administration and the fragile balance of peace.

To augment UNHCR’s efforts, a tremendous number of NGOs have rendered assistance and provisions. These organizations have ranged from CARE and Doctors Without Borders to the American Jewish World Service and the Latter-Day Saints Charities.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) played a pivotal role in the facilitation of elections and the education of elected officials. OSCE facilitated this function in order to maintain the integrity of the democratic process by allowing the UN to focus on its role of government administration. OSCE’s task was significant largely because it introduced democracy to a formerly communist province. Educating the population about a new concept like democracy was daunting.

For example, when the first democratic elections of municipal councils were held, many Albanians and Serbians, as a form of protest, simply did not vote. They felt that, by not voting, they were making a strong statement regarding their political stance; this mindset had unfortunately carried over from the old Yugoslavian system, in which not voting meant that you were essentially not “validating” the vote. Only after the first democratic election was over and the vote was carried into effect did many locals realize the error of their old ideology.

In addition to the organizations already described, other government-sponsored agencies and NGOs provide support. They range from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Challenges to the Local Administration
Even though several organizations share the same challenges, it doesn’t make dealing with these problems any easier. In fact, it often makes the job more difficult. Barriers between culture and language often are as formidable as those presented by egos, pride, and hatred. When Polish troops were stationed at a town that was dominated by Albanians, locals felt a strong reluctance to cooperate with the troops. Albanians didn’t mind that Poland is a NATO member; instead, they focused on the fact that the Poles are Slavic, as are the Serbians. To an Albanian, a Polish soldier is nearly as bad as a Serbian soldier.

As if these challenges weren’t enough, the actual responsibilities of the government are overwhelming. Local governments have absolutely no tax base; there are no building or zoning codes or enforcement efforts; many basic systems of infrastructure, such as roads, sewers, and power lines, are severely dilapidated; basic services like water, sewer, power, trash collection, and fire fighting are almost nonexistent; unemployment is well over 50 percent; illegal activities and the revenues they generate form the bases of the local and national economies; and land mines and unexploded ordinance litter the province.

Implementing some of these basic services is difficult because of the ebbs and flows of international relief funds. For instance, right after NATO’s ground forces entered the province, international donors flooded the region with relief funds earmarked for a wide assortment of projects. Some major roads were rebuilt, and many citizens received funds to repair or rebuild their homes.

As time passed, and as events in Kosovo became more of a memory to these donors, funds for major projects that still needed to be addressed began to dwindle. Competition for this aid became intense, and community initiatives (roads, fire-truck purchases, job skills training) often were funded because of the political savvy of a UN civil administrator or NGO representative, rather than in response to the actual needs of one community or another.

Even though the democratic world always has worked in a similar fashion, the outcome in Kosovo often has been extremely different. This is because the perception, whether realistic or delusory, of funds’ going from a major Serbian project to a rather minor Albanian project can cause hostilities to erupt overnight. Relief funds, in the absence of tax revenues, have a major impact on the progress of peace in the region.

Of course, the greatest challenge of all is embodied in this question: When will Kosovo become independent? Or, for the Kosovo interim administration: When will we cease to exist? The weight of this uncertainty is felt every day by every organization in Kosovo. Although it seems that the UN and KFOR will be around for a long time, the way in which they administer and carry out their policies, both locally and province-wide, will hinge directly on the answer to this question.

The New Reality
Kosovo was one of the first places in the world to be completely administered, both locally and centrally, by the international community. Unfortunately, not only is this level of involvement now being equaled in other parts of the world, like East Timor, but also it is “morphing” into new types and levels of involvement, as seen in Afghanistan and Sierra Leone. As the international community is drawn into these areas on a larger scale, more frequently we will find that it is our friends, colleagues, and neighbors who are serving there, instead of strangers from strange lands.

The reality is that a new kind of local government has been born. It is not a neat, encapsulated form of traditional government to which many people have grown accustomed.  No nice, organized flow chart outlines where one director’s role starts and another one’s task ends. Gone is the idea that neighbors of different ethnicities could want a single community that would benefit them both. The reality is peacekeeping, or “nation building.” It is a case of starting all over again with nothing but the means to enforce a fragile peace.

Given this new reality in Kosovo’s government and the challenges it presents, new lessons must be learned. Perhaps the greatest lesson for outsiders is not to learn how to improve this government or to streamline it but simply to understand its nature and the magnitude of the work that will be needed to make it succeed. 

Robert Parsons, Ph.D., is chair and professor, Romney Institute of Public Management, Marriott School, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (robert_parsons@ byu.edu). Cody Strong, Sierra Vista, Arizona, is an M.P.A. graduate of the Romney Institute of Public Management, Marriott School (wecamp@earthlink.net).