Archive

In the immediate aftermath of Zimbabwe's 24-25 June 2000 Parliamentary elections, many Zimbabweans optimistically expected that their country would begin to return to normal-leaving behind the six months of violence, intimidation, farm invasions, racist political rhetoric, and erosion of the rule of law.

Since the International Crisis Group’s (ICG’s) last paper addressing the Serbian political scene, the situation on the ground inside Serbia has changed dramatically

The deteriorating relationship between Montenegro and Belgrade has raised the question of whether the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with its two constituent republics of Serbia and Montenegro, in fact continues to exist.

There has been since the fall of Soeharto’s New Order in May 1998 a drastic decline in the political influence of the military.

The Macedonian electorate will drag itself wearily to the polls on 10 September 2000. This year's local elections follow the 1999 presidential election, 1998 parliamentary elections, and 1996 local elections.

Over its first 15 months the international mission in Kosovo has a number of accomplishments to its credit.

Burundi has been involved in a civil war since the assassination of the first-ever democratically elected President and FRODEBU leader Melchior Ndadaye, in October 1993. For the last 26 months, the government of Major Pierre Buyoya, which took power in a coup four years ago, has been engaged in negotiations with FRODEBU together with the other political parties.

Local elections in Albania on 1 October 2000 will mark the first test of popular support for the ruling Socialist-led coalition since it came to power following the violent uprising in 1997.

The regime in Serbia has recovered its footing after the 1999 war with NATO and remains as hard-line as ever. Learning and gaining experience over the years has enabled the regime to “improve” its performance and become more efficient.

Almost a decade after the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements, Cambodia is at peace and the government is at last secure enough to contemplate the trials of some Khmer Rouge leaders.

Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan each face the prospect of civil unrest and large-scale violence. This is not a certain outcome and may be avoided if the governments make substantial changes in domestic policy, but the risks are high and mounting.

Ten years after independence, Macedonia’s two largest ethnic groups continue to lead very separate and distinct lives.  The uneasy co-existence between ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians has only just withstood the violent breakup of Yugoslavia and the continuing instability in Kosovo.

Several thousand people have died and hundreds of thousands have become refugees in the last eighteen months as the result of inter-communal fighting in Indonesia’s Maluku islands. The conflict continues at a high level of intensity despite the declaration of a state of emergency in June 2000.

After two years of negotiations, the Burundian peace process has reached a critical stage. In his capacity as Mediator, Nelson Mandela, during his latest visit to Bujumbura from 12 to 14 June renewed his support for rebel demands that President Pierre Buyoya's government should free all political prisoners regardless of their crimes and restore the rights of political parties.

Zimbabwe's 24-25 June 2000 parliamentary election resulted in President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU (PF) party retaining power. However, the nine month old opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), made an impressive showing, winning 57 of the 120 contested seats.

In the fall of 2000, for the first time in their history, the people of Kosovo are being promised the opportunity to participate in democratic, internationally supervised local elections.

This report is the product of seven months of field research conducted by teams of local and international personnel in Kosovo and Albania in 1999, as part of the International Crisis Group’s Humanitarian Law Documentation Project.The Project was conceived in the spring of 1999, as violence and destruction in Kosovo forced hundreds of thousands of men, women and children from their homes, many seeking shelter in neighbouring Albania and The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (hereafter referred to as Macedonia).

The present briefing previews detailed research findings contained in a forthcoming report on the Burundi peace process by the International Crisis Group. The full report is scheduled for publication at the end of June. 

Nearly a year after NATO defeated Serbia in the war over Kosovo, the international community appears uncertain about how to remove Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from power.

Indonesia has undergone an extraordinary transition during the last two years from a society long ruled by a military-backed authoritarian leader to one in which an elected government was installed through an open and largely democratic process.

Mitrovica has become the linchpin of Kosovo’s future united status.  The stakes are high.  If the international community cannot re-establish Mitrovica as a single city, efforts to preserve a united Kosovo will also fail.

The recent crackdown by the Belgrade regime on Serbia’s independent media and political activists suggests that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is more vulnerable than it would appear.

The return of refugees to areas where they are an ethnic minority is crucial if Bosnia is to be re-established as a successful multiethnic society and the effects of wartime ethnic cleansing are to be reversed.

Local elections are to be held in Podgorica and Herceg-Novi, two of Montenegro's 21 municipalities, on 11 June 2000.

In August 1999, only a month after the signing of the Lusaka ceasefire agreement, a new dynamic of conflict emerged within the anti-Kabila alliance and further complicated Africa’s seven-nation war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The international community can draw a degree of comfort from the results of Bosnia’s 8 April 2000 municipal elections.

Reunification of Mostar is key to the reintegration of separatist Herzegovinian Bosnian Croats into Bosnia.

Involved in a civil war since the assassination in 1993 of Melchior Ndadaye, the first elected president, Burundi is now at a crossroads. Since 1998 the government of Major Pierre Buyoya (who returned to power in July 1996) has been engaged in a negotiation process with FRODEBU, winner of the 1993 elections, as well as with most of the Burundian political groups.

The assertion of the primacy of Serbian rights over all other peoples by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has driven nearly every nationality of the former Yugoslavia toward the Republic’s exits.

Montenegro has been a crisis-in-waiting for two years now, with Belgrade opposing efforts by a reform-minded government under President Milo Djukanović to distance itself ever further from its federal partner Serbia.

The end of the war over Kosovo brought the transformation of the guerrilla army that started it. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA – or UÇK in the Albanian acronym) has been formally demilitarised, but in various manifestations it remains a powerful and active element in almost every area of Kosovo life.

During the spring of 1999, more than 450,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees flooded into Albania, many of them forcibly deported by Serb forces in Kosovo.

Thousands of people try to find their way daily through an immensely complicated labyrinth established by the three separate and very often conflicting legal systems in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).

With the immense challenges facing the international community in its effort to secure and rebuild Kosovo, one critical outstanding matter that has received very little attention is the ongoing detention in Serbian prisons of several thousand Kosovo Albanians. 

To date, little attention has been paid to the role public administration plays in enforcing or violating the human rights and civil liberties of Bosnia and Herzegovina's citizens.

After an unprecedented, multilateral military intervention in Kosovo succeeded in expelling Serb forces and enabling the return home of more than a million displaced persons, the international community embarked on the ambitious, long-term project of securing, rebuilding, and establishing the rule of law in Kosovo, while setting the territory on the path to self-governance.

As 1999 nears a close two questions about Yugoslav Strong-man Slobodan Milosevic stand out: How did he stay in power after the NATO action, beginning on 24 March 1999, and will he opt for bloodshed in Montenegro, at least before the end of January 2000?

There has been a considerable Burundian refugee population, almost entirely Hutu, in countries neighbouring Burundi, and especially Tanzania, since the 1972 mass slaughter of Hutus when 300,000 are reported to have fled. 

The enterprise known as Trepca is a sprawling conglomerate of some 40 mines and factories, located mostly in Kosovo but also in other locations in Serbia and Montenegro.

The agreement signed on 20 September between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and KFOR commanders transformed the KLA into a 5,000-strong, nominally multiethnic civilian force - the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC).

In anticipation of the fourth anniversary on 21 November 1999 of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, this report presents a detailed analysis of the agreement and the future of the Bosnian peace process.

More than four months have passed since the start of the deployment of the United Nations in Kosovo.

On 31 October and 14 November 1999, Macedonian citizens will go to the polls to elect a successor to 82-year-old President Kiro Gligorov, who is stepping down after two terms in office.

The past two years has been a highly turbulent period for Indonesia.

This paper offers a brief guide to the leading indigenous organisations and personalities in Kosovo/Kosova.

After a year of failed attempts by Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Organisation for African Unity (OAU), South Africa and other regional powerbrokers, the six countries involved in Africa’s seven-nation war in the Democratic Republic of Congo signed the Agreement for a Cease-fire in the DRC in Lusaka on 10 July 1999.

Just under a year ago a nervous Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic warned the world that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was preparing to trigger a new Balkan war by launching a campaign of violence against the tiny republic of Montenegro.

The NATO intervention in Serbia and the indictment of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia have created openings within Serbian society and exposed cleavages within the regime that should be rapidly exploited to hasten Milosevic’s departure and bring about genuine political change.

During June and July 1999 international military and civilian organisations entered a territory from which every form of administration and authority had become suddenly absent.

The 1999 action plan of the Reconstruction and Return Task Force (RRTF) represents the most determined effort yet to implement a policy of mass minority return in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

ICG, with the support of the European Commission, has established a project to promote justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  With the assistance of 8 partner organisations based all over BiH, ICG will monitor individual cases and general trends to highlight and promote the development of a judicial system in BiH up to the standards of a modern, European judiciary.

Repercussions from Kosovo continue to shake Republika Srpska (RS), and may prove a catalyst for further transformation and reform.

On 28 June 1989, Slobodan Milosevic stood on the site of the ancient Serb battleground of Kosovo Polje and delivered the speech that was to propel him to prominence and the leadership of Yugoslavia.

The ICG Balkans Report N°66, “Kosovo: Let’s Learn from Bosnia”, of 17 May 1999 looked at how experience in Bosnia could be useful in Kosovo, and also at the extent to which the Rambouillet agreement of 23 February 1999 resembled the Dayton agreement of 21 November 1995.

The magnitude and complexity of the unfolding refugee crisis in the Balkans is hard to overstate.  One and a half million people have been forced to flee their homes in Kosovo since the start of this year. 

What seems to be turning into a continental war first broke out on the territory of the Democratic Republic of Congo on 2 August 1998. So far, it has involved a dozen African countries, either directly as combatants in the fighting, or indirectly as mediators in various peace initiatives.

A continental war has begun in Africa.  It reaches almost without interruption from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.  Whereas some of the conflicts along this path started decades ago, a new phase involving more than a dozen states has now begun.

Since NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began on 24 March 1999, Macedonia has been in an extremely vulnerable frontline position, facing an unmanageable influx of refugees from Kosovo, the prospect of economic collapse and volatile domestic interethnic relations.

After almost three and a half years working in Bosnia to implement the Dayton Peace Agreement, the international community will soon face the prospect of establishing a presence in Kosovo.

The limits of the West's resolve to enforce a solution to the crisis in the Balkans were freshly exposed last week at a press briefing by U.S. President Bill Clinton.

On 23 January 1999, the countries of the Great Lakes region suspended sanctions against Burundi.

The donor countries hoped the governments of Bosnia and Herzegovina would use the promised $ 5.1 Billion post-war reconstruction aid to undertake the structural changes necessary to transition from communism to capitalism.

NATO’s strategy in the war with Yugoslavia over Kosovo isn’t working. As the Alliance’s bombing campaign enters its fourth week, it is Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic who is still winning the political game.

Since the suspension of sanctions against Burundi on 23 January 1999, Burundian diplomacy has been directed towards a single objective: the resumption of international co-operation, which was suspended a few weeks before the coup d’état led by Major Buyoya in 1996.

Five years after the beginning of the genocide, it is now time to review the progress made in administering justice to those implicated in its planning and implementation.

The early part of 1999 has been turbulent for Republika Srpska. Political life has been unsettled by three separate and hardly-related crises: the decision of the High Representative to remove from office the RS President Nikola Poplasen; the decision of International Arbitrator Roberts Owen to give the municipality of Brcko neither to RS nor to the Federation but to both as a condominium; and the NATO air-strikes on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY).

The new Macedonian government marked its first hundred days in office in early March.

With just over two years to run before the end of his term as Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic remains entrenched in power in Belgrade.

The Kosovo peace talks, held at Rambouillet (France) under the auspices of the six-nation Contact Group, have been suspended until 15 March 1999 after a provisional agreement was reached on granting substantial autonomy for Kosovo.

While last spring saw conflict erupt in Kosovo's central Drenica region when Serbian security forces attacked and killed residents of the villages of Prekaz and Likoshan, this spring brings the possibility of peace.

Electoral reform is on the agenda this year in Bosnia and Herzegovina. For too long the country has been ruled by leaders who draw support from only one of the three main ethnic groups.

The Arbitral Tribunal on Brcko meets this month, and may or may not this time make its final decision, after postponements in 1997 and 1998.

The international community collectively heaved a sigh of relief when Cambodia’s rival factions moved back from the brink of disaster and agreed to form a fresh coalition government in November 1998 after weeks of violent protests and political deadlock.

The recent parliamentary elections and the change of government in Macedonia in many respects are a landmark in the country’s development.

Premier Pandeli Majko’s new coalition government is slowly consolidating its hold over the administration, though the overall power of the government remains weak after the country was rocked in September by the worst political violence since the uprising of March 1997.

In the past few weeks the Belgrade authorities have sacked a number of key public officials. The two most prominent were security chief Stanisic and head of the army general staff Perisic. The firings triggered much speculation in the international media about the stability of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s regime.

Three years after the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia), the country has many of the trappings usually associated with statehood such as a common flag, currency, vehicle licence plate and passport.

The Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) has dominated Croatian political life since multi-party elections in April 1990 brought an end to communist rule.

On 2 August 1998, barely 14 months after the end of the war initiated by the anti-Mobutu coalition, the emergence of a new armed movement announced the beginning of a further "war of liberation" in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this time against the regime of Laurent Désiré Kabila.

The Sandzak is an area within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia that borders Serbia and Montenegro.

To promote a resolution of the Kosovo crisis, the international community should propose arrangements granting the people of Kosovo the status of intermediate sovereignty.

In outline form, the elements of the various agreements suggested by ICG, based on our presence in the region and extensive consultations around it over the last few months, are as follows: As winter approaches in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia), conditions for refugee returns to that country become increasingly difficult. In neighbouring Croatia, by contrast, the weather is generally milder so that, given political will, refugees should be able to return to their homes throughout the winter months.

Macedonians go to the polls on 18 October 1998 in the first of two rounds of voting to elect 120 members of the country's parliament.

Cambodia’s electoral process re-lit the candle of democracy that had first flickered into flame with the restoration of peace in 1991, after more than two decades of strife.

Despite considerable progress since the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) in November 1995 in consolidating the peace and rebuilding normal life in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia), international efforts do not appear to be achieving the goal of establishing Bosnia as a stable, functioning state, able at some point to run its own affairs without the need for continued international help.

Sarajevo’s Bosniac authorities were given the opportunity to demonstrate their much-vaunted commitment to multi-ethnicity when, on 3 February 1998, representatives of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia), the Federation of Bosnia Herzegovina (Federation), Sarajevo Canton and the international community adopted the Sarajevo Declaration.

The stakes in Bosnia’s forthcoming elections, the fifth internationally-supervised poll since the end of the war, could not be higher, for Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia) and also for the international community.

During the past six months, Serbia's southern, predominantly Albanian province of Kosovo has emerged from international obscurity to become the world's most reported conflict zone.

Croat extremists put Drvar into the spotlight in April 1998 with murders and riots against returning Serbs and the international community.

On 2 August 1998, barely 14 months after the fall of the late Zairian President Mobutu, a new armed movement in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo announced the beginning of another “war of liberation”, this time against the regime of Laurent Désiré Kabila. 

The reintegration of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia) has been consistently obstructed by the main Bosnian Croat party, the Croat Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina (HDZBiH).

On 2 August 1998, barely 14 months after the fall of the late Zairian President Mobutu, a new armed movement in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo announced the beginning of another “war of liberation”, this time against the regime of Laurent Désiré Kabila.

As the one former Yugoslav republic which has managed to keep itself out of the wars of Yugoslav dissolution, Macedonia has often appeared to outsiders as a beacon of hope in the Balkans.

For the first time, most of the parties involved in the conflict in Burundi were present during the first round of negotiations that took place in Arusha from 15 to 21 June 1998.

Relations between Albanians from Albania proper and their ethnic kin over the border in Kosovo are complex.

On 1 July 1997 Konjic became the first municipality in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia) to be officially recognised as an Open City by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Cambodia is set to take to the polls in barely six weeks time, with some fearing the elections will cement in place a de facto dictatorship and others seeing them as the last chance to ensure that the country’s fledgling democratic process remains on track.

Croat-controlled Jajce and Bosniac-controlled Travnik are both municipalities to which displaced persons who do not belong to the majority ethnic group have been returning in substantial numbers.

When on 15 May 1998 Slobodan Milosevic met with Ibrahim Rugova it was the first time that the Yugoslav president had met with an Albanian leader from Kosovo in close to a decade.

Kosovo, an impoverished region at the southern tip of Serbia, is drawing ineluctably closer to war with each passing day.

International organisations working to help displaced Bosnians return to their pre-war homes – arguably the most important element of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) – have declared 1998 the “year of minority returns”.

Burundi has spent the most part of the past five years embroiled in a vicious civil war that has so far claimed more than 200,000 lives and triggered massive movements of refugees and displaced persons and which continues to add to instability throughout the Great Lakes region.

Since 28 February when Serbian special police launched a brutal offensive against alleged ethnic Albanian (Kosovar) separatists in Kosovo, events in that ethnically-divided province of rump Yugoslavia have featured prominently on the front pages of newspapers and in television and radio news broadcasts throughout the world.

The fate of the Brcko area, whether it should be in the Federation or Republika Srpska, was considered too contentious to be resolved in the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) and was left to binding arbitration.

To many who followed the Bosnian war from abroad, Sarajevo symbolised Bosnia and Herzegovina’s rich tradition of multi-culturalism and multi-ethnicity.

In Bosnia’s local elections on 13 and 14 September 1997, parties representing displaced Serbs from Croat-held Drvar, Bosansko Grahovo and Glamoc won either a majority or a plurality of council seats in these three municipalities in Canton 10 of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This report studies the background to the latest crisis affecting the Southeast Asian nation of Cambodia. It examines current conditions in the country, assesses the key issues requiring redress and offers a number of specific recommendations for international policy-makers aimed at shoring up political stability

Achieving the ambitious goals of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (DPA) -- forging a unified state out of the shaky Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and resistant and unstable Republika Srpska -- is a complex and difficult undertaking which has not been made easier by the quest for a so-called “exit strategy”. 

Prospects for lasting peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina have improved in recent months as a result of a clear shift in approach towards implementation of the peace plan on the part of the international community.

Images that usually first come to mind in relation to the Balkans are of ‘ancient inter-ethnic hatreds’, irrational bloodletting among neighbours, and unpredictable eruptions of senseless violence.

On the night of 2-3 May 1997, some 25 houses were set ablaze in the Croat-controlled municipality of Drvar, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Federation).

Apart from stopping the fighting, silencing the guns and separating forces, the single clearest promise of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) was that Bosnian refugees and internally displaced persons would be able to return home.

Given the critical role that the media played in the destruction of both Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the on-going role they play in fanning the flames of ethnic hatred, the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina has devoted much time, energy and money to this field.

With the ongoing reconstruction efforts in Bosnia and Herzegovina and plans for the imminent privatisation of a number of industrial enterprises, the question has arisen as to whether the Bosnia and Herzegovina central government or the sub-state entities – Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina – properly succeed to the immovable assets of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia located on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This memorandum seeks to answer this question.

The violent events in Mostar on 10 February – and the failure of the International Police Task Force (IPTF) and the Stabilisation Force (SFOR) to either anticipate or control them – constitute a mortal threat to the peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina and to the continued existence of the Bosniac-Croat Federation.

The Dayton Peace Agreement postponed a decision on the fate of the Brcko area, one of the peace talks’ most contentious and potentially explosive issues, until arbitration could take place. A decision is expected by 15 February.

Arrest of Suspects Indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal

On 13 August the International Crisis Group monitoring the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) issued a report calling for the postponement of the elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina on the grounds that the minimum conditions for a free and fair poll did not exist.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) has been monitoring the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) in Bosnia and Herzegovina since early March 1996.