Memoirs of a Very Special Envoy

Review: Dan z krve (Blood Levy), by Jiri Dienstbier. by Frantisek Sistek 11 February 2003 Prague, Lidove noviny, 2002. 359 pages.


Reader, be warned. The title of Jiri Dienstbier's new book--an allusion to the Ottoman levy and conversion of Christian boys who were then trained to become soldiers or imperial administrators--has absolutely nothing to do with its content. Book shoppers may be lured by the cover's sensational blurb--"The sultans are gone, but the blood levy is being enforced in the Balkans to this day"--but the title, motivated most likely by marketing strategy, unnecessarily places the book among those works that represent the Balkans through historicist cliches of ancient hatreds, fratricidal wars, bloodletting, and Dracula.

Jiri Dienstbier--former journalist, then dissident and first Czechoslovak foreign minister after the Velvet Revolution--served as the UN special envoy for human rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and federal Yugoslavia from 1998 until 2001. His mandate coincided with a tumultuous period: the culmination of the Kosovo crisis, NATO's bombardment of Yugoslavia, the creation of a UN protectorate in Kosovo, changes of autocratic regimes in Zagreb and Belgrade, and the escalation of ethnic violence in Macedonia. During his tenure, the always outspoken Dienstbier was prone to uttering remarks and opinions that generated controversy and heated debate in the Balkans and in the West as well as in his homeland.

"Among the Kosovo victims there is a whole clan whose members were all murdered, from grandfather to little kids. It was done by the Serbian army, but everybody is happy, because this was a criminal clan, a local mafia."

With these words in a 1998 interview with a Polish journalist, Dienstbier fueled one of the first scandals of his UN days. In Blood Levy, this very special envoy sums up his Balkan experience and views about the Yugoslav crisis.

PEACE FIRST, THEN RECONSTRUCTION

Dienstbier’s main preoccupation was the problem of Kosovo, and in his book Kosovo and Serbia receive the most attention. Dienstbier makes clear that he had no sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic and the repressive measures his regime used in the province during the 1990s. However, he was clearly more concerned with ethnic Albanian armed struggle and extremism as it intensified at the time of his appointment as special envoy in 1998. His negative views on the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and its actions recur throughout the book and he cites many sources that point to the corruption and criminal character of some KLA leaders. It seems that his contempt for the KLA was also rooted in a refusal to accept violence as a legitimate means of political struggle. This nonviolent conviction emerged from Dienstbier’s own experience as a political opponent of the Czechoslovak communist regime during the 1970s and 1980s. Dienstbier mentioned the parallel himself in a conversation with Ibrahim Rugova in 1998.

"In the struggle against communism," Dienstbier told the pacifist Kosovar leader, "our opposition did not allow a single window to be broken. It never came to our minds to use violent methods. … It was not possible to defeat the Soviet army, and irresponsibility [of an individual resorting to violent methods] could have cost thousands of people their lives."

Dienstbier believed the Yugoslav regime actually welcomed the KLA's violent actions as a good excuse for the use of force. There is certainly ample evidence to back his critique of the excesses and crimes committed by some KLA members, and Dienstbier’s adherence to the tradition of nonviolent political struggle is admirable. The trouble was that most of Kosovo's Albanians and their political leaders used the methods of peaceful resistance recommended by Dienstbier for years without success and without gaining the attention of the outside world before some of them finally took up arms.

Although Dienstbier favored the establishment of an international presence in Kosovo, he strongly opposed the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia. The military campaign did not even start out with a clearly defined goal, he claims, until "finally, it was Milosevic himself who provided the operation with some legitimacy: When his forces started massive ethnic cleansing, the return of the expulsed population became the operation's goal."

The bombing of Yugoslavia was "militarily unsuccessful, morally unacceptable, and politically as well as economically wrong in its strategic conception," he states. Unfortunately, Dienstbier does not address the question of whether there was a realistic chance of Belgrade accepting a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the crisis. Recalling the endless diplomatic missions, negotiations, and broken promises of the months preceding the NATO campaign (not to mention the international community's frustrating dealings with Belgrade during the Bosnian war), this does not seem likely.

Dienstbier is very critical of the role Western powers and international organizations have played in the Balkans. The failure of the international community to establish safe conditions for Kosovo's non-Albanian inhabitants meets with his strongest disapproval. He accuses the international forces of focusing primarily on the security and well-being of their own staffs rather than trying to stop criminals and extremists from establishing real control of the province.

Dienstbier's criticism of the UN, NATO, and European Union efforts to stabilize and rebuild Kosovo after 1999 is sometimes too harsh. Nevertheless, he makes a forceful and important case that progress in the reconstruction of the infrastructure and formal development of local institutions is secondary and all talk of a democratic and multi-ethnic Kosovo meaningless as long as its foreign protectors cannot ensure personal security for all its citizens.

A GADFLY AND WORSE

The author makes no attempt to gloss over the memorable and zany moments of his career in the Balkans, many of them the result of his typically frank and unrestrained remarks. In 2000, Dienstbier repeatedly lambasted the great powers for their tolerance of Albanian extremism and for the dismal state of minority protection in Kosovo. By June, Bernard Kouchner, the first UN administrator of the Kosovo protectorate, finally lost patience. He accused Dienstbier of "trying to tell the truth to the rest of the world" after having spent just two days in the province (Dienstbier says he actually spent five days there) and publicly asked the envoy to "shut up."

The renowned Albanian writer Ismail Kadare claimed Dienstbier was biased toward the Serbs because he had relatives in Belgrade. The Czech diplomat chose not to answer, even though, as he notes, it would have been easy to retort that Kadare showed a pro-Albanian bias due to his being himself an Albanian.

Some of the charges raised by Zagreb and Belgrade officials were both bizarre and grotesque. A Croatian diplomat at the UN in New York accused Dienstbier, shortly before the death of authoritarian Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, of attempting to sell a Croatian basketball player to America. Dienstbier says he grasped the implication of this absurd charge--"if I traded in basketball players, I must also be trading in human rights." Yugoslav Information Minister Ivan Markovic, notorious for his venomous propaganda, went even further and claimed that Dienstbier stood behind the kidnapping of former Serbian President Ivan Stambolic, who disappeared a few weeks before the fall of Milosevic.

Some passages in the book suggest that Dienstbier takes all such accusations as well as more rational criticism of his actions lightly. In fact, criticism from all sides only strengthens his conviction that he is right. "I was satisfied," the author commented after verbal attacks by both Kadare and the Yugoslav government. "Both sides confirmed that I could not be manipulated by either one of them." Dienstbier best summed up his stand in his defiant response to Bernard Kouchner: "I never shut up. I did not shut up when I went to prison, I did not shut up as a journalist, and will not shut up as a special envoy either."

The bulk of Dienstbier's book is made up of summaries of his conversations with politicians, intellectuals, and nongovernmental activists he met during his trips to the region along with frequent quotes from the press and official documents. Analytical passages and attempts at generalization are less numerous and scattered. The diverse opinions of many dozens of informants and conversation partners unfortunately sometimes clutter the text, especially as Dienstbier presents them in a repeated scheme--"In town A, I met politician B who told me one thing, activist C claimed another, I said such and such, and the newspaper wrote this and that."

In addition, there are a great number of historical, geographic, and other mistakes and stereotypes scattered throughout the text. One of the most glaring is the claim that the Kosovo problem is not simply an ethnic one, as "there are 100,000 Albanians in Belgrade and no one does them any harm." In fact, the Albanians living in Belgrade (many already half-assimilated speakers of Serbian) numbered fewer than 5,000 before the Kosovo war and their number has further decreased since then. The "100,000 Albanians in Belgrade" argument was widely used by Milosevic--not exactly the best source for ethnic figures in the Balkans. While the author claims that Czechs have a much better understanding of Balkan problems than do Western Europeans, let alone Americans, the many mistakes as well as a high proportion of misspelled names of people, including some whom Dienstbier met personally, suggest that the notion of a special Czech understanding of the South Slavs might be, at least in his case, somewhat shaky.

The solutions Dienstbier offers for the Balkans are quite general: "eradication … of the political and military base of Albanian extremism," respect for borders, integration of the region into Euro-Atlantic structures. Dienstbier certainly is not the most notable or best-informed of the hundreds, or rather thousands, of foreign diplomats, peacemakers, and observers who have attempted to understand and halt the crises and wars of the western Balkans in the past decade. The same can be said of his book, which reveals little new information or original analysis. There is, however, one trait that sets Dienstbier apart from most other foreign participants in the post-Yugoslav crises and that might at times also delight the reader of his book. Dienstbier simply says what he thinks and why he thinks it is this way and not the other way around. He rarely pauses to look at other sides of the story and cares little about the possible consequences and controversies his views might generate. Many of his opinions can be challenged, but his undiplomatic directness, a rarity in the labyrinth of neutrality, consensus, and fence-sitting otherwise known as international involvement in the Balkans, deserves our sympathy.