The EU is about to land in Kosovo. But will it take off?

Mark Tran visits Europe's newest capital city as Serbia goes to the polls to find Kosovo's biggest problem may be that there are too many cooks

?SPAN style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'">         Mark Tran in Pristina

?SPAN style="FONT: 7pt 'Times New Roman'">         http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/09/kosovo.serbia1

Albanians pass a banner which reads "Free Kosovo" in Tirana. Photograph: Hektor Pustina/AP

As we sip beer at an internet cafe, Albin Kurti, the leader of Kosovo's self-determination movement, slips me a document that purportedly shows Serbia's spending plans for Kosovo, put together even though the former Serbian province has broken away from Belgrade.

The document lists projects such as sewage works, nursery schools, road building and the restoration of some of the world's finest orthodox monasteries. Kurti tells me Belgrade - hardly in the best financial shape - plans to spend €800m (?st1:chmetcnv w:st="on" UnitName="m" SourceValue="630" HasSpace="False" Negative="False" NumberType="1" TCSC="0">630m) on projects in Kosovo this year.

"To the extent that we are moving away from Serbia, Serbia is entering Kosovo," he said, only half in jest.

Serbia's meddling in Kosovo, which unilaterally declared independence on February 17, will take a new twist on Sunday when Serbia holds parliamentary elections that are expected to strengthen ultra-nationalist, pro-Russian parties at the expense of politicians that favour closer ties with the EU. While attention is focused on Serbia, Belgrade ?with what can only be described as chutzpah - has decided to hold parliamentary and municipal elections in Kosovo as well.

The UN mission in Kosovo (Unmik), in charge of the province since 1999, gave the green light to parliamentary elections to honour the "dual citizenship" of Kosovan Serbs but drew the line at local elections, declaring them illegal. However, Unmik and the Kosovan government decided not to force the issue and are allowing the illegitimate municipal ballots to go ahead.

"It's like telling someone they can't build a wall, but allowing them to build a house," says Kurti.

Kurti wants the authorities to confiscate all Serb election documents, stop Serb politicians from coming to Kosovo to campaign and ban public buildings from being used as voting places. In the past few days, he has been hurriedly trying to organise protests today that could attract hundreds of people to Pristina's streets. When I ask him how much public support his self-determination movement has, he cites a figure of 16%.

Shpend Ahmeti, an economist, tells me many Kosovans support Kurti's stance that their government should be more assertive towards the alphabet soup of international organisations in the country - Unmik; the election monitoring body, OSCE; and Kfor, the Nato force that will soon include 600 British troops. The presence of these "internationals" is most evident from the white 4x4s with black logos that navigate Kosovo's pot-holed roads.

In theory, when the new constitution kicks in on June 15 a new batch of EU organisations will take over from Unmik and play second fiddle to Kosovo's government. The EU's International Civilian Office (ICO) has already arrived. Housed in a glass building protected by a tall blast wall of blue concrete blocks, the ICO overlooks Pristina's battered town centre.

Headed by an EU special representative, Pieter Feith, the ICO's main job is to ensure the protection of Kosovo's Serbs - 120,000 out of the total population of 2 million - and other minorities. The EU will also have a rule of law mission, Eulex, to "monitor, mentor and advise Kosovo's institutions". But instead of making way for the ICO and Eulex, Unmik is showing no sign of packing its bags.

In fact, the respective roles of the UN and the EU are taxing the best diplomatic and legal brains in New York and Brussels. One diplomat in Pristina said Kosovo had leapt up the list of priorities of the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, from "28th to third, behind climate change and Darfur", because of the ongoing international legal mess.

Unmik was set up by UN security resolution 1244 after the Kosovo war. Under the blueprint for Kosovo's supervised independence devised by the Finnish diplomat Maarti Ahtisaari, Unmik's authority would expire once Kosovo's constitution took effect and supervision was assumed by the EU. But Russia, Serbia's ally, had other ideas and blocked a new UN resolution that would have given the Ahtisaari plan an international stamp of approval.

In the absence of a new resolution, the UN is likely to stay in a reduced capacity to work alongside the EU; but the question is how, and who does what. So the embattled Kosovan government will have to deal with even more layers of bureaucracy. UN officials shake their heads in weary resignation when asked about the future shape of Unmik. They simply don't know, and will have to wait and see. But the body language already points to a turf war, with one UN diplomat openly wondering what the ICO will actually do.

Belgrade and Kosovan Serbs are having a field day over this deadlock. In the divided town of Mitrovica in the north, local Serbs are refusing to work with the EU, putting the bloc's deployment plans on hold.

What the UN and EU are desperate to avoid is the nightmare of an international presence split along Kosovo's ethnic and regional lines, with the UN in the north and the EU in the south.

As for the Kosovans, the surfeit of international organisations in their tiny, landlocked country has provided some benefits: there is no shortage of business for Pristina's plentiful bars and cafes.

In contrast, local men can sit nursing a coffee for hours because there is little work; the unofficial unemployment rate is 40%, although a parallel economy flourishes. Many male and female security guards have been hired and there is an extraordinary number of taxis for such a small place, many of them forming a long queue outside the Grand hotel, once an important hub for the Serbian police.

But Kosovans also resent having so many highly paid international civil servants with too much time on their hands in their midst. That is why many people sympathise with Kurti, although they wonder about his penchant for public demonstrations. He was thrown in jail in February 2007 after organising protests in which two demonstrators were killed by Romanian UN guards, though he was later cleared of any responsibility.

As Kosovo awaits the arrival of the EU, which sees Kosovo as an important test of its new foreign policy, Kurti jokes: "The EU is about to land and Unmik is not taking off."

He argues that there has been a top-down approach to Kosovo's independence that has not worked. Real power lies in the hands of international organisations, rendering the governing class compliant and docile. Kosovans admit, however, that their politicians and civil servants currently lack the experience to run the country effectively.

Kurti favoured a referendum that would have lent legitimacy to the fledgling state and to its army ?important for as long as Serbia does not recognise Kosovo. He also strongly opposes the Ahtisaari plan for matching territory to ethnic communities, which will produce municipalities where Serbs form the majority. "Yes to minority rights, but no to territorial rights," says Kurti, who believes the "dysfunctional" Ahtisaari plan will deepen ethnic divides by herding Serbs into cantons or ghettos.

One diplomat ventured that the Serb minority issue will resolve itself in the long term. Serbia will only support the Kosovan Serbs for so long, the argument goes: they will either leave or throw in their lot with the Albanian majority as economic development picks up. The EU and the US will keep pumping in money since they do not want to see a failed state here.

"Belgrade knows it will never get Kosovo back," the diplomat said. "On the other hand, no Serb politician can take the responsibility of giving it up as that would be political suicide. It's all about internal politics in Belgrade and it boils down to a racist and nationalist attitude that says Serbs can't be under the rule of others."