Mitrovica, Kosovo
CONTROVERSY OVER the role of French peacekeepers in Kosovo has taken a dramatic turn. For weeks, Paris issued angry denials that pro-Serb prejudice had infected its military. But at the end of March, a top French police commander who had been called home from Kosovo was briefly imprisoned for allegedly leaking documents which reveal just that: a French bias in favor of the Serbs and against the international administrator in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner.
That Kouchner himself is French adds spice to the story. But the most shocking part of the tale is the strong evidence of serious human rights violations by French members of KFOR, the NATO force operating in Kosovo under U.N. mandate, in dealing with Kosovar Albanians.
The scandal originated in the divided northern Kosovo city of Mitrovica, in the French area of occupation. The town has been split between Serbs occupying the neighborhoods north of the river Ibar and Albanians on the south bank.
In February, Mitrovica, which had been seething with resentment and minor violence since the end of the NATO intervention a year ago, erupted. Bombings, of a bus carrying Serbs and a Serb cafe, led to an assault on Albanian dwellings by thousands of Serbs.
The carnage was disturbing enough, but then came the accusations. French soldiers in Mitrovica were charged with refusing to help American and other police rescue Albanian victims. Later, it was claimed the French had destroyed evidence before one street battle could be investigated by international police.
To other victims of the Balkan wars, none of this was news. The Bosnian Muslims, especially, will never forget what they consider clear French complicity in such incidents as the assassination of a Bosnian Muslim leader, Hakija Turajlic, by a Serb officer while Turajlic was supposedly under French protection; the refusal to provide air cover to stop the 1995 massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica; and the killing of Bosnian Muslims at the Sarajevo airport while it was under French control.
Also in late March, Bosnians were shaken by publication in the United States of former New York Times reporter Chuck Sudetic’s Atlantic Monthly expose showing that the French had failed to arrest indicted war criminals, whose whereabouts they knew, in the French zone of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
But the events in Mitrovica have been most damaging to French prestige, especially the Americans’ claim that they were left to fend for themselves against a Serb mob, while French troops fled the scene. Soon, French units were removed from duty at the Ibar River bridge and replaced by British troops.
In mid-March, another chapter was opened when Amnesty International issued a report alleging serious human rights abuses by the French in Mitrovica. The report received almost no global media publicity. It described how, on the morning of February 13, two French soldiers were hit by gunfire, one in the stomach and one in the arm, in Mitrovica, whereupon French KFOR troops started firing at “snipers.” A 37-year-old Albanian, Avni Hajredini, was fatally shot, and 49 Mitrovica Albanians were arrested in their homes.
Almost immediately, representatives of the United Nations administration in Kosovo announced that “a sniper” had been killed. A French KFOR spokesman said Hajredini had been shot by French troops while sniping at them from a balcony; furthermore, Hajredini was “probably” responsible for the wounding of one of the French soldiers. Later statements to the press called him one of two “captured snipers.”
Unfortunately, however, Amnesty’s investigation found otherwise. A video turned up showing Hajredini only seconds before he was shot, standing on the payment blocks away from where the French soldiers had been wounded, and not on a balcony. Further, he was not “captured” by French KFOR, as they had claimed, but was taken from the scene by Albanians after he was shot.
On February 17, KFOR retracted the claim that Hajredini had been a sniper and even denied knowing whether Albanians or Serbs had shot at the French soldiers. The next day, KFOR further suggested that Hajredini had not been shot by the French.
By that time Hajredini’s body had been released to his family and buried, without an autopsy. As if this performance by KFOR weren’t enough, Amnesty had still more evidence against the French. The 49 Albanians arrested on February 13 said they had been verbally threatened by those who arrested them, and then conducted to a filthy, ice-cold KFOR gymnasium where they were kept incommunicado for up to five days. On the first day they were ordered to remain sitting in chairs and forbidden to stand, turn around, or talk. Requests to go to the toilet were met with physical abuse.
After the first night, the KFOR soldiers wore masks, according to Amnesty. Some of the detainees were not allowed to wash for the full five days, and their families were not notified of their whereabouts. Nor were they permitted legal counsel.
One French KFOR official responded to Amnesty’s inquiries by saying the prisoners were “no angels — these people shot my soldiers.” Other KFOR and U.N. representatives explained the conditions of imprisonment by citing “exceptional circumstances” or a lack of resources, even though the problems in Mitrovica had gone on for almost a year.
The bottom line was that the 49 Albanians had been arrested on the basis of an ethnic criterion alone. Amnesty quoted an international police officer saying that “from a police point of view there was no probable cause” for any of the 49 to be held. The picture that emerged was one of justice worthy of a third world dictatorship, not a leading European power.
The French defense ministry responded to Amnesty’s report with silence, while U.N. representatives in Kosovo announced they had “accepted” the report and would look into its findings. The U.N. also promised to appoint an ombudsman to handle such issues. Both Paris and the U.N. in Pristina clearly preferred to let the matter die down, and it did, temporarily. But in Paris at the end of February, the conservative weekly Le Point and the radical Le Canard enchaine published secret documents showing that general Louis Le Miere, French commander in Kosovo, had criticized Bernard Kouchner as “anti-Serb.”
Matters came to a head in the streets of Paris on the night of March 20, when a French police colonel, Jean-Michel Mechain, 46, challenged a group of men he said had been following him. A fistfight broke out, metropolitan police were called, and it emerged the gang tailing the colonel were agents of DPSD, the national military police. Two of the latter were arrested.
It was soon revealed that Col. Mechain had been ordered home from Kosovo and was under investigation in the publication of the anti-Kouchner memos. On March 27 Mechain appeared before a Paris magistrate on a charge of “leaking confidential defense documents.” Facing a possible seven-year prison sentence and a fine of $ 104,000, he was incarcerated in La Sante prison, known for its bad conditions, but was ordered released after only two days. Le Monde on March 30 said the case demonstrated that judges could easily abuse their powers; and it condemned the “questionable habits” for which French military intelligence services have been known in the past.
Mechain is a career officer in the national police, or gendarmerie, a body separate from the army, although both report to the ministry of defense. He has had a brilliant record and is in line for promotion to general. But while serving as a legal adviser to Kouchner, he reportedly was sickened by the human rights violations committed by French forces in Kosovo and outraged by the bureaucratic maneuvering employed by Le Miere and others to undermine Kouchner’s mission.
On the day Mechain was released, Kouchner testified before the foreign affairs and defense committees of the French National Assembly. He sharply denied being anti-Serb. Earlier, French defense minister Alain Richard had suavely portrayed the “pretended opposition” between the French military and Bernard Kouchner as merely “a normal debate in a situation of crisis.” If such discussion is “caricatured as polemic,” he said, “that can only mean the democracies don’t have enough self-control for the demanding task of reestablishing peace.”
Unfortunately, Richard’s conclusion is correct. Among those who report to him, only colonel Mechain seems to have a clear understanding of his duty, and he has suffered for it. Without a thorough housecleaning in the French zone of Kosovo, the Western powers, including the United States, have no answer for those Kosovar Albanians — or, for that matter, their Serb neighbors — who claim that U.N. peacekeeping in Kosovo is a fiction.
Stephen Schwartz is an American journalist reporting from the Balkans.
