The 50-page Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR) report “State of Constriction?” scrutinizes governance in Kosovo through the lens of freedom of expression. Two years on from independence, it examines the quality of the statehood being consolidated, offering a health check of two major spheres: the public realm and economy.

The report analyses the ways of Kosovo’s political parties, constraints upon media and reporting, adverse pressures upon performance of public service, the quality of the municipal elections of late 2009, and the impacts of the continuing dependency upon international oversight. Its survey of the young state’s economic management and prospects focuses on the pressures produced by patronage practices and the huge unemployment rate, severe problems with public procurement, restraints upon market competition and barriers to the private sector growth that is needed to reduce the unemployment overhang and secure social stability.

The report poses questions about how far Kosovo’s citizens at large, and not only in the bellwether profession of journalism, feel free to exercise their conscience and judgment – whether in the state or private sector, whether bureaucrat or businesswoman. It puts professionalism in Kosovo under the spotlight, for it is Kosovo’s professionals who will ultimately determine the state’s character. Is it to be one of enablement or constriction?

Download in PDF

The report was launched on 24 May in Prishtina at a conference entitled: “Two Years on: Governance under the Spotlight” which was televised live by the national channel Kohavision (KTV). The report’s writer Alex Anderson and YIHR co-researcher Besa Luci presented its main findings. Robert Hårdh, Executive Director of Civil Rights Defenders, the Swedish organization that supported the project, praised YIHR for daring to speak out about the threats and pressures faced by watchdogs and whistleblowers: “This report definitely must lead to consequences in Kosovo society.”

Alex Anderson said that “Kosovo’s public sphere is made to seem a forbidding place, the property of the powerful, where individuals without strong backing should tread carefully.”

Besa Luci presented findings that “servility, conformism and silence” were the qualities gaining hold in Kosovo’s public service – where arbitrary control was gaining ground, helped by lack of consistent, impartial procedures, and disrespect for the official watchdog institutions. Even the decentralization mandated by the Ahtisaari plan, intended to secure more accountable local government, resulted in civil servants owing their jobs to mayors, consequently becoming less secure, less autonomous in their decision-making and less free with information.

Luci spoke of a deteriorating relationship between the government on one hand and civil society and media on the other, with the former employing threats and intimidation. To soften critical voices, journalists have been either offered positions in institutions or enterprises, their sources were intimidated, or threats and warnings have come directly from officials, political advisors and senior government members themselves.

Anderson pinpointed the role in this of Kosovo’s political parties, which function “like private businesses” and “function to channel power and patronage over state resources to party leaderships that are difficult to hold accountable or dislodge. They overwhelm public and state institutions. Such institutions must be liberated and reclaimed for the public interest.”

Anderson criticised the government for graft and restricting economic growth: “State power is used to prey upon sources of wealth. The political elite’s commitment to promoting full-blown market competition is half-hearted. It does not want to loosen its grip upon the levers of patronage available in a more rigged economy, and appears confident that present methods can return it to power in future elections. Rather than achieve a greater opening to the outside world for its citizenry, Kosovo’s political class seems too well adapted to the new state’s condition of semi-isolation, and to making a living from appropriation of a share of that captive citizenry’s limited wealth.”

He described tensions between the mandate of EU police (EULEX) for prosecution of the high government officials behind corruption and “the fact that much of the international political investment made in Kosovo is to ensure stability, and to hold things in place. For, meaningful change or reform suggests upheaval.” He said that failure to act would be mistaken, since Kosovo’s “present form of stability is of a brittle, stifling and constrictive variety.”

Other speakers sharing the platform included the International Crisis Group’s Project Director for the Western Balkans Marko Prelec, who said that the “excellent and timely” YIHR report portrayed a situation reminiscent of negative phenomena he observed firsthand during Croatia’s years of state formation in the early 1990s: enrichment of people in and close to government, pressures exerted on law enforcement institutions, politicization of these bodies and the media – especially TV, informal control exercised by the powerful over every sector of governance, and intimidation of civil society. He saw cause for optimism in that Croatia and other countries in the region have been through this and come out the other end, and saw reason to hope that Kosovo will take less than Croatia’s 15-20 years to turn itself around.

Prelec said that this forthright YIHR report and the support it has attracted from other Kosovo NGOs help demonstrate that, despite government attacks, Kosovo civil society and media are actually in stronger shape than in some other countries of the region, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina. For, crushing independent voices in Kosovo would require the government to descend into Chechnya-like levels of repression, which would impose costs in terms of international isolation that it is unwilling to pay.

He concluded that it will be key for the future of Kosovo to overcome the American–European split the YIHR report has described in relation to prosecution of senior government members over corruption allegations: “I think we have some signs that it has indeed been overcome because since the EULEX investigations have been made public it has foreclosed the option of sweeping it under the carpet, and they now must and shall be pursued fully to their logical conclusion. And the government will have to make its peace with this in one way or another. The international community will have to support these prosecutions.”

Haki Abazi, regional representative of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, said the YIHR report made for grim reading yet stood out among the many papers published on Kosovo over the last decade, for its daring, professionalism and wide range of sources.

Abazi said that Kosovo had not demonstrated great capacity to govern itself in its first two years; its citizens were still locked into the constraints that characterized their 15-year wait for resolution of Kosovo’s political status, and were not being offered any vision for a different future. He concurred with the YIHR report’s finding that government people have attempted to occupy all public space, to leave none for citizens. He wondered how much longer the country’s citizenry could remain tolerant towards the kind of corruption and criminality in government that: “has turned Kosovo into a zone of tenders issued for the sake of certain interest groups rather than tenders designed to further Kosovo’s development.”

He concluded that: “Kosovo needs a new initiative, a new approach, a new outlook. Kosovo’s citizens must again become the centre of attention for the politicians of the state of Kosovo.”

Shpend Ahmeti, director of the GAP Institute, a Kosovo economic think tank, said it was “rare that we see such powerful reports, supported by documents, quotations and sources... that show us where we really are.” He described the report as a wake-up call, for Kosovo society to stop accepting bad things as normal, for the country to look itself in the mirror, recognize how bad its internal situation is and work on its improvement. He hoped that the government would do this rather than label the report a deception and those who worked on it spies and traitors. He spoke of the pressures exerted upon common citizens to preserve Kosovo’s good image while at the same time the country’s leaders have themselves behaved so corruptly as to be raided and searched by European Union (EULEX) police.

Ahmeti spoke of the dangers inherent in the current level of state control over the economy. In other former Communist countries economic transitions arose after a multiplicity of economic actors made such control impossible and drove further reform. He explained that the opposite has happened in Kosovo. “I guarantee you won’t need more than two hands to count the powerful companies in Kosovo. In these conditions it’s difficult to understand where business ends and politics begin. Does politics control business or vice versa?” He saw no foreign investment success stories and said the rapid expansion in government spending of the last two years has served to boost “state control over which of Kosovo’s companies survives.”

He wondered how Kosovo will in fact achieve the economic transition arguably necessary for a political transition. “Democratic development in such states where there is great poverty, where the state is in control, is almost impossible … Where will the pressure to change this situation come from? ... We have reached a status quo or an equilibrium from which it is very difficult to escape.” He looked to EULEX for action that could prompt positive change, while expressing fear that it may not follow up on the moves it has made so far.

Ylli Hoxha, director of the Foreign Policy Club, a Kosovo think tank and debate forum, said that the YIHR report “is a very important contribution to the struggle of this country’s citizenry to put the place on the road to the rule of law and state functionality, from which it is veering further away day by day.” He described how Kosovo citizens have demonstrated their support for the efforts of EULEX’s chief prosecutor, and responses from opponents of the rule of law that included circulation of fake notices of his death.

Hoxha said that those driving corruption need institutions to be dysfunctional. Kosovo’s abject judiciary has made embezzlement a low risk activity. “Punishment is a foreign term for us; it doesn’t exist in our justice system.” The present government has made resource allocation discretionary by placing its people at the helm of the boards, management and procurement offices of public institutions and companies. It has massively expanded to 40% the most corruption-vulnerable portion of the budget, capital spending. EULEX’s confirmation that it is investigating 6 ministers for corruption shows what has happened.

He said that “the international community in Kosovo has been blackmailed by Kosovo politics, by those in corruption,” who make it understood that: “going to war on corruption would create political instability.” However, Hoxha also stressed the risks of mutual blackmail: ambassadors of the major Western countries have grown used to micro-managing Kosovo, yet place the interests of their companies before those of Kosovo’s citizens, one for example “applaud[ing] a corrupted minister” for giving a certain contract. With large projects and privatizations on the horizon, “It is too great a luxury for Kosovo’s citizens to afford for compromised people to be managing the vital interests of the state, who could leave us with heavy economic consequences for decades to come.”

During subsequent questions and answers, Haki Abazi commented that stability should not be elevated above all else in policy towards Kosovo: it is self-defeating since transient stability becomes itself “a threat to [real] stability if a status quo that renders Kosovars poor and without dignity is allowed to continue.” Shpend Ahmeti said that in contrast to Croatia in the 1990s, Kosovo’s greater poverty and youthful demographics can make it “impossible to control all of this society in the manner currently foreseen by this political class.”

Referring to the YIHR report’s citation of analysts who see a risk of social turbulence if the situation does not change, Ahmeti added: “Transition is going to happen in Kosovo in one way or another. It’s up to politicians, Kosovo society, civil society and businesses whether it happens in a peaceful or a violent way.”

Alex Anderson responded to a question from the floor about the government by explaining that Deputy Prime Minister and government spokesman Hajredin Kuci had been invited to participate in the conference, yet was prevented from doing so by other commitments. Nevertheless, he was consulted in advance on all the YIHR report’s most contentious findings, and his responses were recorded in the text.

Over the following few days Anderson gave interviews explaining the report and its findings to Koha TV’s Interaktiv program (24 May) and Klan Kosova TV’s “Ora e Pasdites” [Afternoon Hour] (27 May).

You can browse through the report here: