Shortly thereafter she was dismissed, after 29 years at the railway. The company needed slimming. But why her? "Look here," Zogjani shows a diploma for "particularly deserving worker". But she was the only woman in her department. And in the other departments it was the same. Inexperienced men could stay while well-merited women were sacked. That's how 19 women at UNMIK Railways realized that they were being discriminated. Watch out SIDA, here comes the receipt for the assistance work: They join forces and demand to have their dismissals tried in court.
They are turned down. They find out that if they had been discriminated by a private company the court could examine their complaint. But, alas, the railway is part of the UN: It's UNMIK Railways. And the UN, informs the court, enjoys legal immunity in Kosovo. So you cannot question the decision. It is irrevocable.
Xhezide Zogjani did not believe her ears, she says. She had just been taught by the UN that she should not accept to be discriminated. Also that "in the determination of his civil rights and obligations (...), everyone is entitled to a fair (...) hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal..." Now she learnt that the principles that UN teaches are valid for everybody - except the UN itself! Could this really be true?
Yes, it is true. It's unbelievable, devastating for the UN mission in Kosovo, but perfectly true. There are only two places in Europe where citizens cannot claim their rights either locally or in court in Strasbourg: Belarus is the first, the UN state Kosovo is the second.
Before we try to understand how it came to be this way, let's first try to experience how it feels.
There are 17,000 soldiers in the Kosovo Forces (KFOR). They are run by NATO which in turn operates under the UN umbrella. So it happens one day that the soldiers catch sight of a suspicious car. Maybe there is cocaine hidden inside or is it stolen? They bring it in for investigation. No, it turns out to be clean. But when the owner, lets call him Paloka, shows up to get his car at KFOR it is gone. Yes, it seems it has been stolen, comment the soldiers who might be from Azerbaijan. "Bad luck, friend." Compensation? No, there is no use in complaining at the UN, they are not responsible for the military. And forget NATO, they do not answer for the national units. So where shall Paloka turn to claim his right? To the Department of Defence in Azerbaijan. Unless the responsible officer that night was from Turkey. Then it's Ankara. Good luck!
KFOR is made up of units from 36 countries, among them Rumania, Morocco and Mongolia. I leave the rest to the reader's fantasy.
I have not spoken to Mr. Paloka, so we can just imagine how he felt. But I have met the customs official Bedri Shabani. It is heart-piercing to listen to this huge man telling his tale with the intonation of a child who has lost its faith.
Bedri Shabani did exactly what the UN wants Kosovans to do. He broke the Albanian pattern. When he discovered that several of his bosses within the Customs Service had been bribed by smugglers, he collected evidence and went to the UN police. "I had five kilos of documents." Time passed, nothing happened. Then he turned to the press. This was brave, close to stupid, because in Kosovo you can get shot for less. But look - a breakthrough! The head of Customs is arrested! But released shortly thereafter - by order of a UN judge. The Albanian prosecutor protested, saying he had been run over, and accused the UN of sabotaging justice. But people in the streets shrugged their shoulders. They had recognized the Albanian pattern.
By coincidence it so happened that Kosovo's governor at the time, the German diplomat Michael Steiner, was intimate with a daughter of one of the Customs bosses, himself the best friend of the arrested. No harm in love you may think (they married later). But to whom shall Bedri Shabani complain now, when his governor made himself challengeable? He writes to Kofi Annan. He shows me the letter. It's like in the fairy tales. The confiding subject carries his complaint about the governor to the Emperor and in simple words asks him to do justice.
So far it wasn't a catastrophe perhaps. We cannot know who had done wrong. It is not until this moment that the inconceivable happens. Shabani is sacked from Customs. It was an unforgivable breach of duty, the UN claims, to write to Kofi Annan. Not at all, retorts the court in Pristina where Shabani appealed. Kofi Annan exerts supreme power over Kosovo and you can complain to him, Shabani used his freedom of expression. The dismissal is void.
Encouraging, isn't it? First Shabani, father of six who risks his life, and then these Albanian lawyers who have studied their human rights. You are almost led to believe that the UN had started to make progress.
I would rather not have had to summarize UNMIK's reaction to the verdict. The most adequate is: Take your human rights and shove them up your ass! We do as we wish here.
Too crude? Well, put it this way then: Three years have passed since the court declared the dismissal of Shabani illegal. But he is still out of work. The head of UNMIK Customs refuses to obey the court that the UN has appointed and that passes verdicts based on UN legislation. And there is nobody who can force him.
I am telling this story in such detail because it is typical. There are thousands of Zogjanis and Shabanis in Kosovo to whom the UN represents lawlessness and lost illusions. If you want to understand how it could go this far you should look up a white house with a Swedish sign-board on the roof. "Was ist das?" you ask your driver. "Das ist Hilfe!" he shines up. (What is that? It means help!)
As a Swede your heart warms up. "Ombudsperson" it says. ("Ombudsman" was too male for the UN, they stick to zero tolerance when it comes to sign-boards.) The "Ombudsman", which we shall insist on calling him, copied from the Swedish institution Solicitor-General, is the only institution in Kosovo where citizens can file their complaints against the authorities. Through the years thousands have done so. All of them got answers and some were proven right. But the most humiliated victims the Ombudsman could not help.
Marek Antoni Nowicki, an international lawyer with roots in the Polish human rights movement, claims to understand the bitterness towards the UN after working five years as Ombudsman in Kosovo. "It shows clearly in my reports." In these reports we can read that in Kosovo the UN itself is behind most crimes against human rights. But against the UN itself there is no justice to be had.
"From a legal point of view Kosovo is the black hole of Europe", says Nowicki. "Or like a novel by Kafka. The UN arrives to defend human rights - and at the same time deprives people of all legal means to claim these rights".
The deprivation took place on the 18th of August 2000. That day the UN Governor accorded legal immunity (also retroactive) to the mission. All UN institutions in Kosovo, including their employees, and their soldiers, all in all maybe 60,000 persons, were placed above the law. They could not be sued, prosecuted, arrested or even interrogated by a local legal body - or by any other body for that matter (except soldiers who could be prosecuted by their respective governments). Only in cases where UN staff committed a serious crime could the immunity be lifted - by Kofi Annan alone.
Nowicki says that the decision was illegal, illogic and fateful. Illegal because it was violating the European Convention on Human Rights. "There is no right to a fair hearing" - article 6- if those in power are above the law." Illogic because the aim of the immunity was to protect UN-people from intoxicated policemen in Afghanistan or Islamic courts in Sudan. But in Kosovo? There the UN represents the one and only power. They manage the police, they write the laws and they appoint judges. "What actually happened in Kosovo was that the supreme power made itself immune to itself. It no longer had to follow its own laws".
I ask Nowicki if the UN maybe thought all UN-workers were angels. The immunity not only rendered the Kosovans impotent, it also got in the way of UNMIK's attempts to shape up their own staff. "I do not think they thought much at all," answers Nowicki.
Consequently I ask Hans Corell how he thought. In those days he was UN's chief of justice in New York, he approved the immunity. Was it really wise to make UN Customs and all other institutions immune to the UN justice?
Hans Corell sounds amazed. "What are you saying! Of course not." Such an interpretation, says Corell, is abusing the immunity. It is not even meant to protect a policeman driving drunk as driving drunk is not part of the mission. So what does he have to say about the director (my previous article) who ran away unpunished from his telephone bill? "That was not at all the way the immunity was supposed to be applied!"
No, evidently not. But that is the way it was applied, clearly demonstrated in the reports from the Ombudsman. The power put itself beyond reach of justice. It should be an urgent task for UN lawyers to find out how this twisted interpretation came about.
In the seventies some social experiments in USA and Italy (Milgram, Zimbardo) were carried out to see what happens to people when they are granted unrestricted power over others. Some had to be interrupted - it got too horrid. You could say that Kosovo is such an experiment, unconscientiously irresponsible but full-scale. What effect it had on the Kosovans can be deduced from the number of burnt out UN cars. But what does it tell us about us, about our democracies?
That they are very brittle, I'm afraid. That perhaps they are less built on the conviction in every man's heart and much more on the behaviour of the flock, the institutions and the fear of sanctions. When immunity lifted the risk of sanctions, when pressure from the flock was weakened, far away in the Balkans, it took only a few months for reliable democrats from Copenhagen and Paris to throw away their principles, one after the other: Habeas corpus, (no one shall be imprisoned without verdict), the independence of the judges, equality before the law.
The Kosovans were not particularly law-abiding in 1999, but they did not get any nicer by being treated like Hottentots during seven years. Show me a Swede that would accept to abide by laws only available in French. Look at the level of colonial arrogance: In Kosovo, where one in five does not know how to read, where there are power cuts all the time, the UN make some of their laws available only in English. Or only on the internet. If a court protests it's of little avail, because in UN land, judges are subordinated to the governor, who removes them if he wants to and ignores verdicts when it suits him.
A famous gangster is arrested. But he is popular, regarded as a freedom hero by some. Unpleasant, there could be protests... So UNMIK orders the prosecutor to release the culprit. It would not have been possible in Hungary, but in Kosovo it is possible. Or the other way around: A court (with international UN prosecutors) decides to release an arrested person for lack of evidence. But the governor wants him behind bars, (maybe a wish from the CIA?). So he orders the prison wards to disregard the court order. It would not have been possible in India, but under the UN umbrella it is possible. It is called "executive orders" to keep people locked up without trial and without the right to appeal.
In November 2005 Alvaro Gil-Robles from the Commission for Human Rights of the European Council sounded the alarm bells in Le Monde. Could it possibly be the case that there is a Guantanamo in Europe? Si senor, there is. Its name is Bondsteel, an American military base on the border to Macedonia, where prisoners in orange coloured overalls just like in Cuba are kept for an indefinite period, without trial, lawyer or verdict. Because the UN Governor believes they might be terrorists. The Ombudsperson Nowicki, like Amnesty and others, moved heaven and earth in protest against these encroachments. But where could they complain? Above George Bush there is at least the Supreme Court. Above the UN Governor there is nothing.
"Is this what you mean by all people having equal value?" Fatmir in Pristina asks. On the photo you can see men leaving a building. "Those are judges" Fatmir explains, "they just convicted a mafia boss. Very unusual in Kosovo and a health hazard. Look! The one to the left is a Briton, surrounded by his bodyguards. They follow him to the car which is bullet proof. They will keep watch over him even when he sleeps. The Briton earns thirty times more than the two to the right, local judges. They take the biggest risks, they have their families here. But they are left without protection."
What can I say but gnash my teeth? Of all the mistakes made by the UN the most unforgivable is that the few people standing up to fight corruption and mafia have been totally let down. "UN betrayed many of the brightest, most idealistic people in Kosovo in favour of the most thuggish" write two former UN workers, Whit Mason and Ian King. "The use of arbitrary detentions by the executive and the rejection of lawful court orders set a precedent that the UN may come to deeply regret because such moves undermine the democratic objective of developing an independent and strong judiciary", writes the Canadian judge David Marshall, who was a Kosovo observer on behalf of OSCE.
How come so little of all of this has been written about during seven long years? A possible answer could be that it has taken me almost six months to collect reliable information for these articles.
How do you go about finding out what the "Claims Office" in Pristina actually deals with? They say it is a place where Kosovans can lodge their complaints if a UN car crashes into theirs. How many complain? How are they received? You report to a guard at the UN headquarters outside town. The place is crowded with five young people dressed in blue UNMIK t-shirts. Maybe they used to study medicine or economy, now they are guards for the UN at triple the salary of a university professor. No, Im not allowed inside. So I call the boss of this claims office. She directs me to her boss, but that person is not allowed to talk to the press either. He directs me to the UNMIK press office.
It is about five kilometres away. It says that the office is manned seven days a week, but nobody opens a Tuesday afternoon at three oclock. I call the five different numbers posted on the door, no answer. I walk to an internet café, wait for the power to come back and send an email to a certain Gyorgy Kakuk, on top of the list. After two days, still no answer. I bang the door again and - lo and behold - a human being! Hi, Im Jeff Bieley", says the American while waiving to a bowing native to put his lunch tray on the table.
No, UN has not received a letter from Dagens Nyheter. "Did you write to Mr Kakuk? Ha, ha, he quit ages ago. What are you saying, is he put as person in charge?"
No, Mr Bieley cannot put me in contact with the Claims Office. I am allowed to put some questions to him and the answers will be channelled through him. It will take a week, maximum. And questions for clarification? Three days, no more. "How long are you staying in Kosovo?"
Out of the 6,000 UN officers (international and locals) there are only three who are allowed to talk to the press, explains Jeff Bieley. All the others go through him. OK, I say, here are my questions. "No, you have to send your questions by email". In Kosovo, where half the population enjoys only three hours of power per day? Mr. Bieley shrugs his shoulders indicating that the meeting is over.
I sent my questions to bieley@un.org on the 24th of October last year. Im still waiting for a reply.
It could be that the UN lawyers did not understand what they did when they subdued Kosovo courts and muzzled their own people. But others understood better. After seven years of experimenting, Kosovo is the European centre for women and drugs trafficking.
So think of that when you see this Balkan people on TV, throwing stones, burning UN cars and carrying on. New York will inform you that they were offered the best of Western democracy, but they were not clever enough to receive it.
Its not true. They were offered scrapings. Why this happened I will try to understand in the final article.