As KFOR consolidates its control over Kosovo, the first stage of this major operation reveals how difficult and long term will be the commitment necessary to complete the mandate laid down by the United Nations Security Council. Serb military forces are withdrawing more or less as planned, leaving devastated and burned towns and villages and the most shocking and horrendous evidence of murder and torture behind them. They are accompanied by thousands of Serb civilians, fearful of retaliation and unconvinced of getting protection from the new UN-mandated military or civilian authorities. Most moving is the mass return of the refugees from neighbouring countries, despite the dangers of mines, booby traps and snipers.
The United Nations mandate is much more than the fig leaf implied by some NATO responses to the end of the fighting. It was a central element in the political agreement involving the Group of Seven industrial countries, Russia, the main NATO powers and the European Union. It provided the Yugoslav government with a means of agreeing to withdraw in favour of the UN not NATO, and allowed Russia to play its useful and valuable role in defining the peace agreement. It lays down the essential legal framework within which both the military and civilian administrations in Kosovo are to be set up and held accountable.
For these reasons, the subsequent talks about what precise role Russia's armed forces are to play in KFOR are more important than may appear from the scramble to get troops first into Pristina and its airport. Negotiations in Helsinki between high level US and Russian representatives have made welcome progress towards defining a functional rather than a territorial set of responsibilities for Russian troops in KFOR and an appropriate command structure. Agreement on this will have to respect the Russian desire not to be subject to NATO command, without affecting the efficiency of the overall operation. There are sufficient precedents for co-operation in Bosnia to draw on in order to reach an agreement along these lines.
It will also be essential to install a properly functioning regime of justice and civil administration under UN auspices with the utmost urgency. Many horrifying war crimes have been committed in Kosovo with the latest reports indicating that at least 10,000 civilians have been murdered. An important start has been made by the War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in laying down indictments on Mr Slobodan Milosevic and four of his senior colleagues. But responsibility for the atrocities, massacres and ethnic cleansing, now being revealed in graphic reports, clearly extended right down the operational command structure to paramilitary and police forces working alongside Serb residents of Kosovo pressed willingly or unwillingly into these actions.
A durable and sustainable agreement will depend crucially on installing a credible judicial process to deal effectively with these cases as well as putting military and security forces in place. It is a daunting task, but indispensable if Kosovo is to have a peaceful future, with an assurance that Kosovar Serbs, innocent of such crimes, can stay in their homes.