BRUSSELS - A year to the day since the start of Nato's 78-day air war to liberate Kosovo, Europe's leaders face a stark warning that the Western allies may be failing to secure its future.
A starkly written paper by Europe's most senior foreign policy officials argues that the West is having "considerable difficulties" in Kosovo, that ethnic violence is "at high levels" and that the United Nations Administration is dogged by "insufficient personnel and resources."
The document, from Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy high representative and Chris Patten, the European Commissioner for external relations, presented to the heads of Government at yesterday's Lisbon summit, makes sobering reading. It concedes that the plethora of decision-making bodies involved with the Balkans means duplication, delay and "ad hoc" procedures. "The time has come," says the joint paper, "to take a fresh look at the situation and to develop a coherent strategy."
This unprecedented exercise in soul-searching is designed as a wake-up call for the continent's leaders as the Balkans slips down their list of priorities.
Money is going into Kosovo - this year the EU expects to spend 360 million euros - and the international community can claim credit for averting a winter crisis, returning around 1 million refugees to their homes and reopening most hospitals and schools. So what is going wrong?
Ten minutes north of Pristina, past the crumpled wreck of a petrol storage depot bombed by Nato last year, lies a symbol of the new battle for Kosovo.
Coated in dust, Kosovo A is a coal-fired power plant built in the 1960s with Russian technology which, when in service, belches 1000 tonnes of ash into the atmosphere each day.
Most of the time it does not work and the immediate problem is not the planned renovation of Kosovo A. When, earlier this month, a technical fault stopped generation, this was just one of the plant's problems: Kosovo A had just two days worth of coal left.
Western officials planned to recoup costs of power generation from consumers, but of the bills sent out in January - for the first time since the war - just 3 per cent were actually paid.
The lack of a real economy is a familiar theme in Kosovo which, well before the 78-day bombing campaign began, was being reduced to near-collapse by Belgrade.
"From the economic point of view," says Joly Dixon, the UN's deputy special representative in Kosovo, "we thought that we were coming into a society damaged by a relatively short war. What we found was an economy weakened over 10 years and with no administrative structure."
Before last year's war there was little productive industry. Even those with jobs as power workers cannot rely on regular pay. The big international presence has become the primary source of income. As well as those who have found work with the EU or UN, many Kosovars have moved out of their homes to rent them to foreigners at high prices.
Meanwhile, lawlessness provides a fertile breeding ground for ethnic violence and a mafia-backed black market. A new chain of petrol stations, Kosovo Petrol, is springing up through the province and no one seems quite sure who owns it.
While the new idea is to ring Yugoslavia with progressive, market-oriented states, the Solana-Patten paper calls for a streamlining of the West's Balkans initiatives and a limit on international meetings, and it argues that technical problems which have stopped Kosovo and Montenegro being eligible for international funding - because they are not independent countries - must be overcome. All this may be a race against time, as the support of Kosovar Albanians appears to be evaporating, something which could make Kosovo ungovernable and alienate western donors.
- INDEPENDENT
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