Shacked Up With the U.N., Kosovo Is Ready to Bolt

The United Nations could argue that it lacks the funds to pay judges. But then why does it pay an employee from Sierra Leone more than $11,000 per month to teach Kosovars how to run their railroads? The Kosovar railroad workers, who survive on just over $200 per month, were more than a little offended to learn that Sierra Leone's last trains stopped running in 1975. Their teacher was an expert on harbors.

U.N. top brass knows full well that Kosovars are losing patience. Last year Inga-Britt Ahlenius, U.N. undersecretary general for internal oversight services, warned if the administration continued to ignore corruption, the whole mission could be jeopardized. "[T]he reluctance by senior Mission management to address fraud and corruption will have a devastating impact on public perception inside and outside of Kosovo," she wrote.

"Revolution," Albin Kurti tells me at a café in Pristina last year, emptying his cappuccino in one gulp. "We are going to make a revolution!" When he says this for the third time, people turn our way.

A student protester and translator for ethnic Albanian guerrilla fighters during the Milosevic regime, Kurti today leads Kosovo's movement for independence. At age 32, he looks more like an aging grad student from Berkeley than a revolutionary. But Kurti is the idol of the young, which says something in a place where half the population has yet to turn 25. Already he has enough followers to plaster the country with the word "Vetëvendosje" -- self-determination.

On Saturday, all the candidates running for parliament will be Albanian because the Serbs have boycotted the campaign. All the candidates support independence. On that issue, the "international community" is split. The U.S. government generally backs the idea; Europe, worried about another Balkans conflagration, is mixed; Pro-Serb Russia is against it. The United Nations is supposed to deal with the issue soon. Kosovo's Albanians have vowed to declare independence if no agreement is reached by a Dec. 10 U.N. deadline.

Kurti assures me the revolution will be peaceful. A hundred thousand people will surround the U.N. headquarters, the police station and the court. They will stay as long as it takes -- for a week, maybe for a month.

But don't be surprised if the scenario plays out violently. After our interview, Kurti was charged with orchestrating a pro-independence riot. At that protest in February, two ethnic Albanians were killed when Romanian police officers fired rubber bullets at point-blank range. Last week, a court in Kosovo extended Kurti's house arrest until Jan. 11.

Critics say that Kurti vaingloriously fancies himself Kosovo's founding father. He wants to see his statue in the town square and his name in schoolbooks, they claim -- to be the man who by action, shrewdness or violence won freedom for a humiliated people. "We do not want the U.N. mission in Kosovo, but the Kosovo mission at the U.N.!" he cries.

An adventurer? Certainly. But the wrath he rides did not invent itself.

maciej.zaremba@dn.se

Maciej Zaremba is a staff writer for the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. His complete reportage on Kosovo can be read at www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=2502&a=664639.