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Monday, October 23 12:58 AM SGT

Kouchner's UN Kosovo mission under fire as poll approaches

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Oct 22 (AFP) -

Bernard Kouchner's UN mission in Kosovo on Sunday entered the last week before
the province's
first post-war election, defending itself after a series of high profile reports
criticised its rights record.

A damning report on election preparations from the US-based group Human Rights
Watch was
released Friday, following a broadside Wednesday by Kosovo's OSCE legal monitors
and an earlier
rebuke from Medecins Sans Frontieres over protection for minorities.

Taken together, the reports from three prominent groups add up to an attack on
Kouchner's
progress on the three main planks of his mission -- the establishment of
representative government,
protection for minorities and the rule of law.

But each report has been strongly contested by the mission, which has predicted
that the October 28
municipal poll will mark a successful first stage of the transfer of authority
to elected bodies.

The Human Rights Watch report said: "Basic requirements for a free and fair vote
in Kosovo include
adequate protection for ethnic minorities, freedom of movement, a free media and
an environment
free of political violence that can ensure freedom of assembly, association, and
expression. These
conditions are lacking in Kosovo today."

But the report was dismissed as "unsubstantiated" by Roland Bless, a spokesman
for the the
Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) which is organising
the poll on behalf
of the UN mission.

"We appreciate the need for outside scrutiny and welcome it, but the conclusions
of this report are
not supported by the facts," he said, "We would reject the idea that we are not
ready to hold free
and fair elections."

The report catalogues a number of attacks including four murders and a bomb
attack it said were
politically motivated, but Bless denied that the list amounted to proof of
widespread intimidation or a
brake on free speech.

"There has been violence, and there is some intimidation, but we have seen no
proof that the murders
were directly linked to the campaigns," he said, adding: "In recent weeks the
campaign has been
extremely peaceful."

The report also that that the decision by Kosovo's Serb minority to boycott the
poll was
"predictable" given the violence they have suffered since the end of Kosovo's
1998-1999 war
between ethnic Albanian separatists and Yugoslav forces.

But Bless said minorities had been strongly urged to register to vote and
security measures had been
taken to try and ensure they were free to do so.

In August, Medecins Sans Frontieres, the Nobel Prize-winning medical
humanitarian organisation
which Kouchner helped found, denounced what it described as the UN mission's
continuing failure
to end violence against members of the Serb and Roma minorities.

They withdrew their medical teams from Kosovo's minority areas refusing "to
remain silent in face of
the lack of effective action from the international community."

On Wednesday an OSCE monitoring team that carried out a six-month review of his
administration's
justice system concluded it failed to live up to international standards,
accused it of anti-Serb bias
and reported a series of rights abuses and illegal detentions.

"In certain circumstances, the authorities in Kosovo are not complying with the
applicable law,
including international human rights laws," a summary of the report noted.

The head of the UN mission's justice department, Sylvie Pantz, promised to set
up a working group
to look at the report's recommendations, but said it was "unrealistic" and
ignored the reality of life in
Kosovo.