PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Aug 16 (AFP) - The president of Medecins
Sans Frontieres, the Nobel Prize winning medical humanitarian
agency, launched a stinging attack at the "failure" of the
international community to protect Kosovo's minorities, on a visit
here Wednesday.
James Orbinski, head of the international council of Medecins
Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors without borders), was in Kosovo to
defend the decision by the agency's Belgian wing to stop its work in
minority enclaves of the province.
"The most important problem suffered by people in the enclaves
is a legitimate fear for their safety," he said. "The solution is
not to give diazepam for fear, the solution is pro-active
security."
But Kosovo's UN administration defended its record of working to
protect minorities, which it described as its most important task in
a province where ethnic hatred is still entrenched one year after a
civil war.
"It is unsatisfactory that we have minority enclaves at all.
This is not a tolerant society, we've got some hard work to do but
it's the most important part of our mission," UN spokeswoman Susan
Manuel said.
"The situation is precarious and not going to change quickly,
but it is receiving our greatest efforts."
MSF announced on Monday last week that it was withdrawing its
staff from the northern part of the divided town of Kosovska
Mitrovica, where ethnic Albanians are a minority in a Serbian area,
and from the municipalities of Srbica and Vucitrn, where Serbs live
in enclaves surrounded by Albanians.
The minority communities have suffered intimidation and violence
at the hands of members of the surrounding population, forcing many
to leave their homes and leaving hundreds of others dead or
injured.
"It was a difficult decision," Orbinski said. "The people in the
enclaves face an increasingly fearful and increasingly hopeless
situation."
MSF was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1999. Its tough
criticism of the UN mission in Kosovo will be particularly
embarrassing for its chief, Bernard Kouchner, who was one of the
movement's founders.
Orbinski described the efforts of the KFOR peacekeeping force
and the Kosovo's UN civilian police service as "ineffective".
"KFOR took the reponsibility to protect all the people of
Kosovo, they should carry out that responsibility," Orbinski said.
"Humanitarian work can not be a palliative for a failing
security policy," he added.
Manuel said that most KFOR troops were tasked with protecting
minorities and that UN police had made "hundreds of arrests" despite
being undermanned -- while a force of 4,800 international officers
was planned, only 3,200 have been deployed.
When it was realised, she said, that local ethnic Albanian
judges could not be trusted to oversee the cases of people accused
of attacking Serbs, international judges were brought in and had
begun work.
Leila Wolteche, a psychologist, said that MSF had had to stop
using mobile clinics to provide medical care in the enclaves because
people to were too afraid to come out of their homes.
MSF doctors began making home visits in June, but stopped even
this after it became clear that the security situation was
deteriorating and that the even these visits could attract unwelcome
attention for their patients.
"There's a family we've been visiting in northern Mitrovica.
When you enter the building there's an awful intimidating
atmosphere. We have a system of code when we knock on the door, so
they know its someone coming to help, not come to threaten them,"
she said.
Since KFOR entered Kosovo in June last year to bring to an end a
bitter civil war between Belgrade's security forces and separatists
from the province's majority ethnic Albanian population, more than
200,000 non-Albanians, mainly Serbs, have fled Kosovo.
Around 100,000 remain, mainly in Mitrovica and the north where
they are the majority group and in a scattered enclaves around the
rest of the province.