Ukrainian Canadian, member of mission for OSCE, reflects on crisis in Kosovo

by Andrij Kudla Wynnyckyj
Toronto Press Bureau

TORONTO - Now that the conflict over Kosovo has entered yet another phase, it is hardly surprising to learn that a local solution brokered in part by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was within reach two weeks before NATO's bombing campaign began on March 24.

Such is the portrait of the situation provided by Myroslaw Tracz, a Ukrainian Canadian who was there as a verifier for the OSCE.

Mr. Tracz is an elections officer from Winnipeg, a veteran of two tours of duty as an international observer for the United Nations and the OSCE in Bosnia, as well as stints in Armenia, Cambodia, and Kazakstan.

Mr. Tracz arrived in Kosovo on February 7 as part of the OSCE's Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), an effort made possible by a truce agreement signed in October 1998 by the government of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) and OSCE Chairman Bronislaw Geremek of Poland, and in support of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1199, also passed at that time, which mandated a ceasefire in the region.

According to the OSCE's official website, the mandate of the mission was to promote dialogue between Serb/Yugoslavian authorities and representatives of various communities; collect information on instances of violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms and promote solutions to such problems; to assist in the organization and supervise elections in Kosovo and ensure their openness and fairness; and to assist in the establishment of local Kosovar institutions and a police force.

Mr. Tracz said he met Ukrainians from Ukraine everywhere he went, including Ihor Soloviov, an artillery captain from Odesa, and Volodymyr Nestor, an air force major from Kyiv.

"People had various functions, but camaraderie was established based on common well, a common place of origin - people tended to gravitate to their own people," the OSCE verifier recalled, "Of course, we were also all stuck in a volatile, tense situation together."

Mr. Tracz described his tour of duty, based for the most part in Pec and Jakovice in southwestern Kosovo. Every day at 8 a.m. an international group drawn from such diverse countries as Canada, Denmark, Georgia, Germany, Kazakstan, Moldova, Romania, Russia and Ukraine would be briefed by an OSCE intelligence officer, then set out in orange-painted armored personnel vehicles, wearing orange-colored helmets and flak jackets.

"Usually teams of three people, including a translator, would go out and go into a region, investigate allegations of killings and human rights violations, monitor troop movements, inspect gun emplacements, talk to members of the Yugoslav army and police, talk to villagers and townspeople," Mr. Tracz said.

For the Winnipeg-based activist, there was no doubt as to his focus: preparation for elections, based on a new assessment of the number of voting-age Kosovars. "We did not accept the figures that were quoted by either side; we were going to conduct a review, since the last census had been conducted in 1991," Mr. Tracz said.

"Nobody really new how much things had been affected by internal migration since then, or how many people had left Yugoslavia outright as refugees. We conducted an informal verification, handing out questionnaires about how many adults there were in a particular area, and what was their ethnic origin," the verifier explained.

"In Pec, there were five of us in our democratization section, and I hired two translators, one Serb one Albanian, in order not to be perceived as favoring one over the other," Mr. Tracz said.

"The region is more diverse than you'd expect from media coverage," Mr. Tracz said. "It's not simply split along Albanian Muslim-Serbian Orthodox lines, there are Catholic Albanians as well as Turks, Romani (Gypsies) and a mountain people known as the Goran."

Quickly, as a calming presence amidst armed tension, the mission took on another shape. "As long as we of the KVM were there, we represented hope." For example, mission members provided an escort for electrical workers (normally too frightened of the fighting to go out into the field) to restore power lines, and assisted in the safe conveyance of a body for proper ritual burial.

One team commander seized an opportunity to broker a compromise between the Serb police and local villagers near Pec to re-establish a multi-denominational school.

New order in Kosovo was in reach

Working six-day weeks, the OSCE officials gained the confidence of the local population and began drawing up a framework for an entirely new government structure and to redefine their own role in the region.

"Working region by region, we built a consensus for a new legislature with 280 seats, 140 were to be directly elected, 140 were to be based upon ethnic groups," the verifier said.

Of a 2,000-member contingent, the vast majority were either active military personnel from various OSCE countries or retired officers, with Mr. Tracz in the civilian minority. And yet, by mid-March, they had agreed that circumstances were appropriate for a shift toward a majority civilian operation, and a renaming of the contingent as the "Kosovo Implementation Mission," geared to providing the province with a functional governing body.

"In a matter of days, the transformation of the KVM would have occurred, the structure of the organization would have been altered and nature of personnel participating would have dramatically shifted away from the military toward civilian elements," said Mr. Tracz.

"I argued for no troops whatsoever," he related, "When I met with people on the Serb side, they said: 'you need NATO to make this work, don't you?' and I answered 'No, we don't need NATO, we need laws and respect for laws.' "

"In Pristina, regulations for running elections were being put in place, a training academy for local police officers would have been established," Mr. Tracz said.

"In Pec, we had just made a commitment to rent a new location which was away from the OSCE headquarters for Kosovar officials of various ethnic and political backgrounds to meet and thrash out concerns," added the verifier.

"The new plan, the blueprint was in place," Mr. Tracz said.

The various sides were waiting for the outcome of negotiations taking place in Rambouillet, France. As Mr. Tracz related, "Both Serbs and Albanians asked 'When will they sign?' not 'What will they sign?' "

"Whoever screwed up, it was screwed up somewhere in Rambouillet," Mr. Tracz said, "not at the local level, it was not a situation that was getting out of control on the ground, not at all."

Signs of breakdown

And yet, even as the OSCE mission neared success, Mr. Tracz said that signs FRY authorities in Belgrade were preparing to scuttle it were evident.

He concedes that even as the OSCE conducted population surveys and tried to compile electoral lists based on local birth records and school registrations with the assistance of local Serbian officials, representatives of the FRY Ministry of Internal Affairs were gathering up documents from the local Albanian population and refusing to release them.

"They were collecting documents in key villages, and then officials at local administration buildings told the villagers and OSCE personnel that 'the records are no longer available at the local level for security reasons'," Mr. Tracz said. "We couldn't tell if they were being destroyed on the spot or moved away."

The verifier also recalled that FRY Army armored vehicles and heavy weapons were being moved out from central depots into the field. "The area around Jakovice is mountainous like around Sarajevo, and the Serbs were moving out to establish a cordon just like they had in Bosnia," Mr. Tracz said.

The verifier said the OSCE failed because it left the theater of action, and yet was fatalistic about the outcome. "Of course, we couldn't have stayed, because the situation was becoming very dangerous. The Serbian police could have taken us hostage," he said.

"It was they who let us go. We were essentially under the 'protection' of the Ministry of Interior and the police," he added.

Destruction for the sake of destruction

Preparing to leave for duty as an observer of elections in Armenia in late April, Mr. Tracz was baffled by the turn of events and the ruthlessness of the deportation operations.

"This is worse than my childhood memories. In World War II, when my parents and I left Ukraine, there was a slow movement of people behind retreating armies, or people left before major battles. Here, the Serb police arrived and gave people 10 minutes to move out. Just leave your life behind, leave."

"It seems [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic learned nothing from the Bosnian conflict. There, too, there was destruction for the sake of destruction. One town, a population of 28,000, was mostly Serbian before it was torched during the war, and yet now there are maybe 40 people living there," Mr. Tracz said.

"It's unfathomable what Milosevic intended to do with burnt out [Kosovar Albanian] houses. I don't see any Serbs moving in there. After their troops burnt these houses, who is going to live there? It's not even a moral question, but a matter of what can you do, physically, to make the region liveable," he added.

Mr. Tracz was evacuated from the beleaguered province on March 14, but said he has every intention of returning to Kosovo and resuming his work.

"I still have a valid visa and a work card," the activist said. "I'm one of the few guys who managed to get them [the documents] out of the country, before [Serb authorities] took them away from people."

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, June 20, 1999, No. 25, Vol. LXVII

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