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In Kosovo, UN Braces To Take Reins of Rule

Officials Face Rivalry Among Ethnic Albanians

Senior UN officials admit that they are now in a period of testing and challenging the rebel army and its political and military leaders. But they are eager not to act like an imperial power or to drive the rebels into opposition.

To that end, Bernard Kouchner of France, the chief UN administrator in Kosovo, in effect the province's ''czar,'' says he wants to draw the rebels and others into the exercise of power. He will offer to provide them a share of executive responsibility through a new Transitional Council that will meet next week.

To the same end, Mr. Kouchner said he intended to organize supervised elections for a provisional Parliament as early as April, much earlier than some in the international bureaucracy would prefer.

''We're not in southern Sudan,'' Mr. Kouchner said. ''We don't have to teach people here how to vote.''

''If they campaigned and voted underground under Slobodan Milosevic, they can certainly campaign openly,'' he added, referring to the Yugoslav president who directed a campaign against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

But no one has convincing answers about how to give quick security and confidence to the 20,000 to 25,000 Serbs remaining in Kosovo - other than to concentrate them in protected enclaves - let alone how to entice the 160,000 or so Serbs who have fled to return.

While the United Nations has been very slow to get started, the organization and the international peacekeepers have concentrated in the last week on actions intended to symbolize the exercise of real authority.

The peacekeepers have raided the headquarters of the rebel army's shadowy ''ministry of public order,'' seizing weapons, cash and unauthorized police identity cards and temporarily arresting its ''minister,'' Rexhep Selimi, as well as the guerrillas' chief of staff, Agim Ceku, for carrying guns illegally or without the required documents.

Some rebel-appointed provisional mayors have been dismissed by UN-appointed mayors, and the United Nations has put a few hundred international police officers, mostly borrowed from Bosnia, onto the streets of Pristina, with more permanent police forces to follow.

As important, the UN administrators have begun to pay city workers, including judges, nearly all of whom have not received any salary since February or March. This week, in a display that should have an impact among ordinary ethnic Albanians, the United Nations intends to pull up to Pristina Hospital with a truck full of money and cashiers, protected by peacekeeping troops, and start paying doctors, nurses and other medical staff members.

''Our mission is to get some stable measures of self-government here to deliver services, in a preferably democratic and prayerfully multiethnic way,'' a senior UN official said. ''People need to see their government working.''

It was inevitable that many Serbs would flee Kosovo after such a bitter, personal and nasty conflict, which really began early in 1998. But officials admit that the peacekeeping force's main concern was to protect its soldiers and returning Albanians from the Serbs, and that little thought was given to protecting innocent Serbs or Gypsies from revenge attacks.

''To really protect Kosovo as a multiethnic state - in other words, to provide security for the Serbs who wanted to stay - would have meant rapid ghettoization behind protected lines,'' a senior official said. ''No one was prepared to do that.''

But with an apparently organized campaign by the Kosovo Liberation Army to drive Serbs out of Kosovo, a pattern of protected enclaves, as in Orahovac, Kosovska Mitrovica and Gracanica, has become the peacekeeping force's only answer. But the troops appear to have a new determination, as evidenced by the stiff French response to ethnic Albanian demonstrations, organized over the weekend by local rebel leaders, against Serbs in Kosovska Mitrovica, north of Pristina.

The struggle to tame and co-opt the rebels, who moved quickly to seize municipal buildings and set up provisional authorities, however weak, is intensifying. While Mr. Kouchner does not recognize the so-called provisional government led by a rebel political leader, Hashim Thaci, he needs Mr. Thaci's support, or at least his forbearance.

But international officials are disturbed by the guerrillas' attempts to drive out the remaining Serbs; to attack and harass peacekeeping troops, especially the Russians, who are perceived as allies of the Serbs; to seize property, businesses and impose taxes and to intimidate other Albanian politicians, especially those belonging to the Democratic League of Kosovo, the party of Ibrahim Rugova, the pacifist whom Mr. Thaci is trying to supplant as leader apparent.

While Mr. Thaci is quick to say the right words in public when pressed, numerous senior UN officials maintain that the words are too often hollow. And many of them resent the prominence given to Mr. Thaci by the Clinton administration, especially Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her close aide and spokesman, James Rubin, who has taken on Mr. Thaci as a sort of project.

They also resent the U.S. decision to write a loose paragraph into a demilitarization agreement with Mr. Thaci that promises the creation in Kosovo, sometime, of some form of ''national guard.''

''That would be a really, really long way away,'' one official said. ''The KLA has got to transform itself or atomize.''

But Mr. Thaci does not control the entire rebel army, the same officials acknowledge, and certainly not its chief of staff, Agim Ceku, who is trying to preserve its status as a military entity despite insistence that the rebels completely demilitarize by Sept. 19.

At the heart of the issue, of course, is the basic problem of Kosovo's future - the rebels as well as Mr. Rugova are committed to independence, while the United Nations and the West are committed to keeping Kosovo at least formally under Yugoslav sovereignty as a province of Serbia, but with ''the highest possible degree of autonomy.''

As late as 12 days ago, officials said, Mr. Thaci thought seriously of ignoring Mr. Kouchner and the United Nations, or working around them. But Western leaders - including Mrs. Albright and the British prime minister, Tony Blair, - ''made it very clear to Thaci that he had to deal with Kouchner and the United Nations,'' one official said.