This paper has been written from a practitioner’s perspective. The author spent 6 months embedded with the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) command team, spending hours in their company during its de-activation. Whether visiting KPC headquarters across the country; sitting in meetings at the highest echelons of Government; or accompanying the Commander and Deputy Commander to the Kosovo Force (KFOR) HQ in Pristina, the author had unprecedented access and exposure at the heart of the organisation. As the 19th UK Liaison Officer to fill the appointment, the post had contributed to a long and trusted relationship between the UK and the KPC – in many circles the KPC was considered a ‘British Baby’ as it was conceived and established under the leadership of the UK’s General Sir Mike Jackson (General Jackson was the first Commander Kosovo Force), a folk hero to the KPC.
Working to the Commander of Kosovo Force (COMKFOR) in Pristina, the liaison officer post existed to provide the eyes and ears for the NATO-led mission in Kosovo and to provide the essential linkage between the two organisations at the highest level. Provisionally formed on 20 September 1999, the KPC had been fulfilling its civil emergency mission for close to a decade. Providing de-mining expertise, disaster relief, urban search and rescue and more routine community construction projects, the KPC had served its country well. Organised into six Protection Zones (PZ) across the country, its HQ was in an old driving school in Pristina. Its personnel had been recruited from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) which had transformed and downsized into the KPC. The KPC was only a transitional arrangement. Designed to absorb many of the KLA membership, it was always going to be replaced with a more appropriate structure. During its existence, some members of the KPC had been convicted of involvement in serious crime, which had an inevitable effect on its reputation. However, the KPC survived and as time passed, its membership enjoyed deep respect from the population. The position in society of senior KPC members in particular, and the Protection Zone they served in, was inextricably connected to family and clanbased influence and power. The KPC also played a significant role, although mostly understated, during some of the most tense and difficult periods of Kosovo’s recent history. The uprising and bitter ethnic clashes in March 2004 saw the KPC deploy in many of the worst areas in order to reduce tensions amongst Kosovo Albanians; tensions that had threatened to destroy communities. Considered by the Kosovo Albanians to be national heroes, the KPC was generally a feted organisation that managed to recruit, albeit in small numbers, across the ethnic divide. A combination of international initiatives, stemming from the Ahtisaari Plan* sealed the KPC’s fate.
[* In November 2005, the Secretary-General appointed Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari as his Special Envoy for the future status process for Kosovo. According to the terms of reference, this process should have culminated in a political settlement that determined the future status of Kosovo.]
This paper is written assuming some prior knowledge from the reader of the Kosovo situation. It describes the last few months of the KPC before deactivation in January 2009, as an organisation going through a transition. Looking at the stakeholders, the risks and how those risks developed, the paper will attempt to bring to life the issues that faced Kosovo at this time. The raison d’être for this paper is to provide the reader with the opportunity to critically assess the relationship between the international community and the KPC, the issues that dominated this period and to identify lessons for future transitional activities. Of course Kosovo was a unique situation; its status was unrecognised by the very organisations charged with leading it through this difficult period of change. It is impossible to write about Kosovo without touching on the degree of complexity, at many levels, that was present. And some stakeholders will attract criticism. The paper did not set out to do this; the paper set out to raise some difficult issues and, where appropriate, explain why a situation occurred and how it could have been avoided or dealt with better. It is not the criticism that should remain with the reader; it is the fact that the situation existed in the first place.
