Consolidating democracy in Kosovo

By Alex Anderson

Date: 24/03/05

Two weeks after Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj resigned and turned himself in to a war crimes tribunal in The Hague to face an indictment, Kosovo's parliament on Wednesday (23 March) voted in the successor he designated.

The choice of Bajram Kosumi was made against insistent contrary advice from representatives of the EU, but in the circumstances, it was the right choice for Kosovo.

Kosumi's nomination marks the continuation of the two-party coalition that put Haradinaj into the prime minister's chair last December, against the expressed preference of Kosovo's main international sponsors - the EU and the United States - for a broad multi-party coalition to maintain stability and unity as Kosovo approaches talks on its future political status, expected later this year.

As such, Wednesday's vote carries some risks of Kosovo Albanian political fragmentation, but it also marks a determined step forward in the territory's democratisation and capacity for self-governance.

Haradinaj's hundred days of government turned out to be a pleasant surprise. After two and a half years of uncohesive, broad coalition - in which ministries allocated between rival parties operated as separate islands of power and patronage and a figurehead prime minister wielded no real authority - here suddenly was a functional government, working full-tilt at the UN's decentralisation and "standards" agenda to accommodate Kosovo's beleaguered Serb minority and develop governance capacity.

Under Haradinaj's energetic, bullying leadership, ministers from his own small party, the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo (AAK) and president Ibrahim Rugova's large party, Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), were pulling together as a team.

Kosumi is a 45-year-old specialist in Albanian culture and literature, a political prisoner in the 1980s who has migrated through senior roles in various Kosovo Albanian political parties since the mid-1990s. He lacks Haradinaj's dynamism and militant background and some observers have questioned whether he has the mettle and authority for the job. But many also thought Haradinaj would be a disaster when he started in December; in the event, he set a new standard for dynamic, responsive government and challenged his own society to transform and modernise itself.

Kosumi has pledged to push ahead with the "standards", leading a team that will be held accountable if its performance fails the UN assessment this summer, which will determine whether a process to settle Kosovo's future status begins this autumn.

Previously, the lack of a single address for accountability gave all parties an alibi for failure.

After Haradinaj's departure, President Rugova resisted pressure to dissolve his party's alliance with the AAK back into a broad coalition and cede leadership of the government to the opposition party, the Kosovo Democratic Party (PDK), the main political successor of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The pressure was coming in particular from EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who flew to Pristina last week. Rugova showed some rare moments of animation: "For the first elections, we listened to the international community, which requested a wide coalition. They require the same again. So why do we hold elections then?"

With Kosovo so dependent on its decisions, the international community has become too accustomed to stage-managing the business of government formation here. While its brokerage of a broad coalition was essential after the 2001 elections, which produced a stalemate of no workable parliamentary majority, its role on this occasion was less necessary. It appeared neglectful of Kosovo's internal political dynamics and risked retarding Kosovo's democratisation. It ran close to overturning the results of the October 2004 elections: blocking a democratically mandated coalition that was performing well. The UN mission chief, Søren Jessen-Petersen, appears to have orientated better in the situation, noting that in democracy "there are winners and losers" and helping to convince Solana and others last week that levering the loser of the election into the prime minister's chair would be counter-productive.

But for democracy to take root, the political system has to give opportunities and space to the opposition. Solana played a useful role in compelling Rugova to meet with the opposition before announcing his nomination of Kosumi.

From now on, Kosovo's parliament must convene more often and the opposition must be able to initiate debates. Unable since its formation to garner more than 30% of the vote and with voting patterns remaining largely pre-modern - dependent on patronage and clan loyalty - the PDK's leaders are anxious that the LDK-AAK coalition could lock it out of power in the long term.

The international community could compensate by allocating significant democratisation assistance to the opposition, helping the PDK reform and develop toward its preferred self-image as the party of "the modern and progressive part of society".

With Kosovo requiring a shared political platform for its forthcoming status talks, Rugova should take his role to "represent the unity of the people and guarantee democratic functioning" more seriously. He should make his office in the government building his regular place of work, meet with all parties, disband his parallel security structure and accept the Kosovo police's protection. If Kosovo is to mature towards statehood, its two main political forces, the LDK and PDK, must outgrow their zero-sum rivalry.

• Alex Anderson is the Kosovo project director for the International Crisis Group. www.crisisgroup.org

Two weeks after Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj resigned and turned himself in to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague to face an indictment, Kosovo's Parliament on 23 March 2005 voted in the successor he had designated. The author of this article, who is the Kosovo project director for the International Crisis Group, says that although the choice of Bajram Kosumi was made against insistent contrary advice from representatives of the EU, in the circumstances, it was the right choice for Kosovo.