Creating Kosovo by Elton Skendaj

After reading Katherine Bolkovac’s The Whistleblower I had very low expectations of anything to do with the Balkans. According to Elton Skendaj, a professor of political science, things do indeed look pretty bleak. The judicial system is slow and corrupt, richer litigants can bribe judges, so who would bother to take a case to court? The author quotes many of the lawyers, both local and international, who were tasked with codifying the laws of the new state. One of them has an interesting story; the lawyers who know English will start with just one law, copied from the USA or UK, but the non-Anglophones will copy laws from different countries, all based on clashing principals. It appears that the European organizations that are supposed to be helping Kosovo are trying to do too much at once.

One thing that the author cites as “efficient” is the customs service, which seems to a decent job of monitoring imports. But where do the import duties go? From the very beginning of the book, Skendaj discusses how the country’s money, plus the funding from Europe, get lost or stolen. The customs officials, though they are thorough, make their living on bribes. Why would anyone pay hundreds in duties when they can pay a bribe of ten? It doesn’t allow for revenue to pay for police, courts, schools, etc.

Creating Kosovo doesn’t focus much on the ethnic strife which Kosovo is famous for. In the decade since the fall of Milosevic, the worst thing about Kosovo is probably the lack of resources. Food isn’t being grown, infrastructure is bad, the police are unreliable, and I can’t imagine schools are any better. There is an advantage to knowing English (isn’t that the case everywhere?) but those with education will probably leave. That creates a brain drain, leaving the country with a limited talent pool. All you have left is cheap labor.

Perhaps the best way to explain the Kosovo problem is to compare it to Detroit. Whatever investment Kosovo had under Yugoslavia disappeared, just like Detroit lost her industry in the space of a few years. With the jobs gone, people leave, and the ones left behind are left to suffer. The same way Detroit “had the rug pulled out from under her,” Kosovo had the same problem.  Kosovo today has almost no foreign investment, no companies from the USA, Korea, or China looking to set up shop. There isn’t much to gain from being there.