A Council of Europe draft report alleging Kosovo's prime minister is a Mafia-style boss lays out a truth diplomats privately acknowledge: the West in Kosovo has favored stability over justice. The crime and corruption given succor by such an approach over the past decade has deterred foreign investment and left Kosovo among the most destitute regions in Europe. “The international organizations ... in Kosovo favored a pragmatic political approach, taking the view that they needed to promote short-term stability at any price, thereby sacrificing some important principles of justice,” Dick Marty, rapporteur for the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly committee on legal affairs, wrote in his draft report. Diplomats say recent history in a country that remains an international protectorate shows a Faustian bargain for a new state in an unstable region wracked by ethnic wars in the 1990s. “You have to deal with those who wield the power,” said a veteran EU diplomat with long experience in Kosovo. The strategy is “stability first, and then we look at all the other elements of creating a society”. After communist federal Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 1990s, the West only gradually intervened to stop the fighting. By the time they brokered a peace treaty in Bosnia exactly 15 years ago this week, 100,000 had died. During the 1998-99 Kosovo war, the international community took a more interventionist role which included a NATO bombing of Serbia. A decade of United Nations administration followed. Kosovo has received four billion euros in international aid since the war. That, plus proceeds from privatizations, along with drug trafficking and other scourges, created huge opportunities for crime and corruption in a country of two million, most of whom are ethnic Albanians, without an effective rule of law. “There's a lot of thugs around, a lot of criminal activity,” said William Walker, a former US diplomat who headed the Organization for Security and Cooperation mission in Kosovo in the late 1990s. “I fault the international community as much as the Albanians. They feel that the PDK represents stability,” he said of Prime Minister Hashim Thaci's party, which came first in Sunday's first post-independence election with a third of the vote. Marty's report said Thaci served as a mafia-like crime boss during the war, leading a group that committed assassinations, beatings, trafficking in organs and drugs and other crimes. This summer, Kosovo's European Union police and justice mission (EULEX) arrested the central bank governor on charges of money laundering, tax evasion and accepting bribes.
