Interim administration Kosovo

Kosovo...

When the word first surfaced in Western media it came along with images of refugees, para military commandos and destroyed buildings. Even 8 years after the war and the NATO bombings - while searching the internet for some nice pictures that I could use for the invitation of my goodbye party (see picture) - I only found torn apart corpses, military maps and destroyed cultural heritage (just google Kosovo and search for pictures). The image of Kosovo on the web was fully determined by the 1999 war: frontline journalism, Serb and Albanian propaganda and NGO reports. It looked as a place were you should definitely NOT go to.

But I did. I left Amsterdam on May 26th 2007. For 3 years. I had been seconded by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Mission in Kosovo. The Finish ex president Martti Ahtisaari had just presented his plan for a final status settlement to the United Nations Security Council. In his plan he proposed to grant Kosovo independence under strong international supervision. Essential to his plan were the paragraphs on decentralisation and protection of the religious cultural heritage. It was going to be my task to monitor the implementation of these paragraphs. A difficult job in an extremely politized environment.

Okay, I was probably going to work hard. But I was definitely going to recreate hard too! In this blog you will find an irregular update on both. I hope you will like it. And that it will contribute to improving the image of this region...