Men with a mission - no women
by Lesley Abdela
Published in The Guardian Newspaper (UK) http://www.theguardian.co.uk
2/3/00
Last August I was asked by the foreign office to leave at short notice for Kosovo. Six days later, after a
brief induction course in Vienna, I arrived in Pristina as deputy director for democracy at the
Organisation for Security & Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
In the first bloom of peace after the Nato bombardment, I was really pleased to be in at the reconstruction
of Kosovo. Ethnic Albanian Kosovans smiled when they recognised my UN/OSCE identification tag. They still
saw the international community as a liberating force. People sat at pavement tables in cafes in the
warm sunshine, looking forward to a brighter future.
But while Kosovans were able to leap from exile into rebuilding homes and shops, the UN from the start
became ominously mired in bureaucratic tangles. Although a local cafe quickly opened with internet
access on 10 computers, round the corner at the OSCE HQ we managed to get one computer to cope for email
access for 700 staff, and virtually no phones. As the international community failed to produce tangible
results, the Kosovan population began to feel impeded rather than liberated.
A Kosovan NGO leader summed up the mood: "You 'internationals' are polluting our air and clogging up our
roads with all your white vehicles," she said. "You refuse to employ us as professionals in your organisations.
There are thousands of you. You all make promises but we neither see action nor do you provide us with funds
to get on with things ourselves."
Albanian Kosovans are energetic and self-starters. For a decade under Serb hegemony they organised their
own alternative society beneath Belgrade's ethnic and religious apartheid system. They ran more than 500
schools and paid a voluntary 3% tax. The educated and professionals, by contrast with Bosnia, returned to Kosovo.
Within days of my arrival I noted that with one exception, all senior posts in the OSCE mission and the UN mission in
Kosovo (Unmik) were held by men. Unmik and the OSCE were deeply imbued with a "dolly-bird" culture, a sure
sign of corporate early-onset sclerosis and entrenched behaviour. Exclusion of women from the democratisation
process was highlighted by the fact that Dr Bernard Kouchner, special representative of the UN secretary
general in Kosovo, had appointed not one woman to the Kosovan transitional governing council, even though
the UN global platform for action states that at least one third of all decision-making positions in
politics and public life should be filled by women.
Deeply ignorant of the majority gender, the OSCE regularly discussed what percentage of Serbs and ethnic
groups should be represented on judicial, political and public bodies, but not the role of women. When I
pointed out this discrepancy I was told women in leadership posts would be "alien to local culture and tradition"
and, in any case, "no women in Kosovo are interested in participation in politics or public life."
Women comprise more than 50% of Kosovans, not least because so many of their men were murdered. They not only
took the brunt of the ethnic cleansing, many served with the Kosovan liberation army.
Luleta Pula, leader of a social democratic party, told me that in 1990 she had headed a 60,000 strong women's
wing of the LDK political party. From the Russian revolution to decolonisation days, from Togo to the
India of the Raj, women have been instrumental in the fight to defend freedoms and rights.
Kosovan women's NGOs were especially angry at being entirely ignored in the democratisation process. I was
told by a leader of Motat Qiriazi, an umbrella of four rural women's networks, "The international
community has marginalised us women in a way we never had been before. We have never felt so pushed aside
as we feel now."
Prompted by the frustrations of the Kosovan women, a UN colleague and I faxed UN secretary general Kofi
Annan to ask him to intervene. As a direct consequence, three Kosovan women NGO leaders were invited to
meet with Kofi Annan and Bernard Kouchner. Unmik agreed to hold regular consultations with women NGO leaders.
One woman was subsequently invited to join the interim transitional council.
But there was also, to me, an unexpected result. Just as I was getting into my stride in helping to build civil
society - yes, including women's campaign groups - the fax to Kofi Annan was to be used by the OSCE head
of mission to rid his boys of my turbulent presence. I was "uncollegiate" (yes, women do indeed do things
differently) and "too zealous" in advancing the needs and roles of Kosovan women.
The fax was considered a "major breach of protocol" by senior males. It had embarrassed the hierarchs of the
OSCE in Kosovo. It was given as a main reason for my being told to leave the mission a few weeks later.
By mid-December UNMIK had squandered the honeymoon period. A sinister atmosphere of incipient thuggery and
danger was developing fast. Today Serbs and Roma have either been terrorised into fleeing the province or
hide, frightened, in their homes. The crime rate has increased dramatically, night by night. Law and order
have broken down. Tales of intimidation and shoot-outs between rival criminal gangs are part of everyday life.
Barely nine months after Milosevic capitulated, the Kosovo to which I was sent out with such high hopes,
has become a scene of the utmost horror. And as for the position of women: they are now regularly kidnapped -
an estimated five women a week in Pristina alone. And by November women no longer went out after dark. They
were too afraid.
Kosovo was and is hardly a little matter of a far-away people of no interest to Britain. The first shot
was a missile fired from a British submarine. Tony Blair put much of his leadership credibility behind
the bombing, to the extent the new German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder only half-jokingly dubbed him "the
young god of war".
Kosovo was an unusually complex situation not typical of most post-conflict situations, in that Nato had
acted outside the customary UN collectivist approach, primarily to avoid a Russian veto. This may well
have hampered planning efforts by Unmik. It was bogged down in a nightmare of bureaucratic entanglement,
miscasting of characters and the wrong design of organisation taking on the job. But from that
point on they dug their own (and many a Kosovan's) grave.
lesley.abdela@shevolution.com
© Lesley Abdela 2000
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