After three Serbs, one of them a four-year-old child, were murdered in a village near the eastern Kosovo town of Gjilan/Gnjilane in May 2000, the recently-established United Nations mission in Kosovo intervened in the work of the country’s judiciary for the first time.
An executive order signed by the UN secretary-general’s special representative for Kosovo prolonged the detention of the murder suspect, who was held in custody for more than two years before being released because of a lack of evidence.
From that point on, and for the next eight years, the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, better known locally as UNMIK, loomed large over events in the country which had just broken away from Belgrade’s rule.
The UN deployed its Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, after the NATO air strikes which ended Belgrade’s control over Kosovo. It was established on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which was passed in June 1999.
UNMIK, a civilian mission, was in charge of the provisional administration of Kosovo with a mandate to “ensure conditions for a peaceful and normal life for all [its] inhabitants”. Opinions vary, however, about how successful it was in achieving these goals.
Almost 20 years after the mission was deployed and a decade after it handed over most of its functions following Kosovo’s declaration of independence and the deployment of the EU’s rule-of-law mission EULEX, UNMIK’s day-to-day responsibilities are now relatively minor.
Now its future is again up for debate after the outgoing US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, asked in October for it to be withdrawn from Kosovo, arguing that its work was complete.
Haley cited “repeated statements by the majority of Security Council members that UNMIK has long fulfilled its mandate”.
Her call was welcomed in Pristina, which sees UNMIK as a relic of the time when internationals had the final say on everything in Kosovo, but it angered officials in Belgrade, who argued that this would leave Kosovo Serbs unprotected. Russia, which holds a UN Security Council veto, backed its Serbian allies.
Blerim Reka, a professor of international law, argued that UNMIK’s mission was complete the day Kosovo declared independence on February 17, 2008, but a lack of unanimity among Security Council members meant it remained on the ground, despite its lack of powers.
“Paradoxically, the UN keeps in force a resolution [1244] which still artificially recognises the ‘sovereignty’ of Serbia over Kosovo, while another UN body, the International Court of Justice, has contested this resolution with its opinion from 2010,” Reka told BIRN.
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