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Wednesday, October 25, 2000
Performance in Kosovo should earn Dienstbier a UN pink slip By Michael Luhan What other appropriate response can there be to Dienstbier's public proposal -- made under the auspices of Kofi Annan -- that the international community should provide Slobodan Milosevic guaranteed immunity from prosecution for war crimes in return for stepping down as the Yugoslav president? The proposal was not only breathtakingly cynical, cowardly and stunningly stupid, but it surely must be considered as blatant insubordination as well. Less than 72 hours later, Milosevic was forced from office in the appropriate way, by people power, and with no shady deal to save his wretched skin. Dienstbier's statement was immediately rebuked as out of the question by both Carla del Ponte, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and by Annan himself. The reason is obvious: If acted upon, such an offer would nullify the juridical basis for every other case before the Tribunal, and Dienstbier knows that full well. He made the suggestion after consultations with the new Yugoslav President-elect, Vojislav Kostunica, who has refused to recognize the authority of the Tribunal and vowed not to send Milosevic to The Hague. That is a point of view to which Kostunica is entitled, but as a senior UN representative charged with upholding international standards of human rights, Dienstbier does not enjoy the same freedom of dissent. He has betrayed his office and should be sacked. The amnesty proposal was but the latest folly in Dienstbier's dubious showboating career in the Balkans. Less than two weeks into the bombing of Yugoslavia in March 1999, when NATO warplanes had yet killed barely a single civilian, Dienstbier denounced the action from a podium he shared with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov at the annual UN human rights assembly in Geneva. This, at a time when the forces of Milosevic were already well into their own terror campaign of mass rape, murder and forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of Albanian Kosovars -- about which the special rapporteur had precious little to say from the same podium. As I am writing this article from Kosovo, I have been told of other aspects of Dienst-bier's slovenly work that help explain his see-no-evil attitude toward the Belgrade regime. According to two staff members of the UN human rights office here, Dienstbier never once visited the site of any alleged massacre during his numerous visits to Kosovo in 1998-99, nor did he ever express a desire to do so. When 46 members of the Jashari clan were murdered by Serbian special police in March 1998, an incident which touched off the war, Dienstbier dismissed the victims as a "mafia family" who had defied the law and died for that reason -- even though most of the murdered were women and children. Oddly, he is not on record as having ever described the Milosevic family in similar terms. 'Strange principles' During a five-day visit to Kosovo in July 1999 -- his first following the NATO bombing and mass destruction by Serbian forces -- Dienstbier made a daylong circuit of the province, but never asked to take a walk around in any of the towns he visited in order to speak with local residents or inspect the damages. In Peja (Pec), which suffered the worst destruction of any city in Kosovo, and frightful atrocities in its surrounding villages, Dienstbier made only a 30-minute visit to an abandoned police detention center. He then adjourned to a restaurant where he chatted about beer and other frivolities, according to his UN translator and driver. Virtut Gastafari, a staff writer for the leading newspaper in Kosovo, Koha ditore, wrote about an exclusive interview he had with Dienstbier in March 1998. What struck him most about Dienstbier was that virtually every comment he made was couched in terms of his own experience. Conditions were worse in Czech communist prisons, he assured Gastafari, and independence for Kosovo was a bad idea, just as Dienstbier regretted the breakup of Czechoslovakia. Czechs and Slovaks waited 40 years to be free of tyranny without violence, he reasoned, so why shouldn't Kosovars? Gastafari's summary impression was this: "I don't think he was bad; he just struck me as a rather stupid man with strange principles." And now that the odious Milosevic is out, Dienstbier should join him, and for just as long. A once-distinguished Czech dissident, he has completely and irrevocably lost his way. -- The writer worked with the United Nations in Yugoslavia from 1993-95 and has worked in Kosovo since July 1999 for the People in Need Foundation.
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