Real Diplomacy and Peacekeeping: cable

Saturday, November 3, 2018

Kosovo 2007: UNMIK HQ Gets the North wrong

From my 2007 journal:

October 23: Today was a difficult day. Went down to Pristina early to meet the DPKO Assistant Secretary General and brief him on the way up for meeting in Mitrovica. I think the briefing -- which I used to broach the perceptions of reality from up here and how they differ from UNHQ Pristina -- and the meetings -- in which he could see and feel the intractable situation we face -- went well. But I have been blindsided before by a polite hearing that hid an already established agenda. Yesterday I saw a "code cable" to New York that was blatantly misleading about Serb "parallel institutions. I had the ASG meet with my whole senior staff so he could hear from them. He encouraged me to put our views down on paper through a cable to NY. I already keep a number of NY people on my email list. He is inviting me to help correct the picture before a Nov 6 meeting to be chaired by the Secretary General. All and all, I'd say we are reaching some internal "cleansing of the spears."

November 5: ... Had an inconclusive meeting with the SRSG this afternoon. He is clueless but not absolutely stupid. He understands that I cannot be run down or over but still doesn't know what to do with me and still doesn't understand the depth of the lake of shit all around us and what we need to do to keep from having it flood the little Potemkin village we live in.

I drafted two code cables per the ASG's suggestion, the first follows below the second will be in the next post. Both were sent.

Friday, October 26, 2018

Fears of a Kosovo Partition (July 2006)

By mid-2006, Western concern over the unstable Kosovo situation had come to take the form of UNMIK Pristina worrying over a possible move by the northern Kosovo Serbs to implement a "hard" partition of the north to preempt an expected unilateral move by the Kosovo Albanians south of the Ibar to declare independence from Serbia. (In the event, the northern K-Serbs never did seek partition -- though they hoped, and still hope, that Belgrade would thus save them -- while the K-Albanians did take the first move by declaring independence in February 2008.) UNMIK's HQ stood in the middle of the K-Albanian capital of Kosovo -- Pristina -- and was under the direct influence of the Western countries (and especially the US and UK) which fully supported the K-Albanian position. (At the US Office's July 4th celebration that year, the head of the office publicly called the northerners that UNMIK Mitrovica worked with "troublemakers.) Under those influences -- channeled by the Office of Political Affairs (OPA) -- the UNMIK leadership grew quite paranoid about a northern partition. OPA prepared a strategy paper outlining how UNMIK might work to prevent it. OPA drafted a Code Cable in July to be sent to New York to cover the paper. I don't remember UNMIK Mitrovica being given the chance to be involved in the preparation. However, the PDSRSG was not unaware of the realities of the north so the OPA paper had to recognize that UNMIK had little to work with beyond continued diplomacy and peacekeeping. In the event, in late July, he and I had the opportunity in Vienna to brief senior Western officials and Martti Ahtisaari (the UNSG's Special Envoy for Kosovo negotiations, UNOSEK) on the north. It became clear that the Western dictum against partition was little more than words. The draft code cable follows. (I'm not sure it was sent.) The full draft strategy paper is too long to provide here.

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