MEMBERS OF the Defence Forces have been serving in Kosovo for 10 years. They are part of a currently 12,600 strong United Nations mandated force, Kfor, that is led and co-ordinated by Nato, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and involves no less than 32 countries. Commensurate with our size, Ireland plays a relatively modest role in Kfor. Out of the total Kfor complement, a mere 239 are Irish Defence Forces personnel. But the measure of Ireland’s contribution is not the size of the force that has been sent. It is, rather, the fact that we participate at all and secondly the effectiveness of that contribution.
Irish participation in Kfor is fully in accordance with national policy which demands a UN mandate, Government decision and Oireachtas ratification – the so-called triple lock mechanism. There is no doubt also but that members of the Defence Forces who have served in Kosovo have done so with distinction, across all ranks. They have brought to bear, on an ethnically-fractured society, traditional soldiering peacekeeping skills as well as other skills for which Irish peacekeepers are justly renowned – the capacity to win the confidence of worried communities prone to extreme reactions in the face of slights and threats, both real and imagined.
Kfor was deployed after the March 1999 aerial bombing campaign by Nato. That campaign, fully justified by events then taking place, halted the murderous ethnic cleansing activities of Serbian forces, operating under the political patronage of Slobodan Milosevic. Tens of thousands of people were fleeing their homes in terror in a nightmarish reprise of earlier horrors in Bosnia. Kosovo, with a population of just under two million people, is about 88 per cent ethnic Albanian and seven per cent Serbian, the latter heavily concentrated in the northern part of the country where efforts were afoot to remove Albanian people.
Kfor’s job in the wake of the Nato bombing was relatively simple: keep the sides apart, calm ethnic tensions, create conditions in which people would return to their homes confident of their safety and try to promote relations as normal as possible between the two communities. In this, Kfor has been a marked success. Kosovo is at peace, on edge and nervous perhaps but at peace nonetheless. As Dan McLaughlin reported in yesterday’s edition, Kosovo’s Serbs and Albanians both trust Kfor more than they trust Kosovan police or government.
The roots of communal hatred are extremely deep in the Balkans and the really difficult, and necessarily long- term, task in newly independent Kosovo is creating structures and institutions of governance that command cross-community support and adhere to basic European rule of law and human rights norms. This is the task of EULEX, the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, in which Ireland is also participating. EULEX is monitoring, mentoring and advising Kosovan authorities on policing, the judiciary, customs and prison services.
A fully secure and lasting peace in Kosovo will be a long time coming. But the EU is trying to do the right thing and it is right that Ireland plays its part.