“Everything Is Politicized”
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2010 “Everyth ing is politicized” Competing governments in Strpce/Shtërpcë, Kosovo Abstract: The aim of the research is to gain insight into the practices of parallelism and the influence of framing on this governance system. I obtained this information by taking one municipality, Strpce/Shtërpcë, as a case study. While living there for three months, I analyzed the everyday reality of life for citizens and the local governments. Strpce/Sthërpcë, a municipality in Kosovo of which the population consists of a Serbian majority, has two parallel sets of government related institutions. The governments compete and both claim to be the only legitimate ruler in the municipality. Both base their legitimacy on the claim that the territory is indivisible. Peaceful development in parallelism in Strpce/Shtërpcë will only be achieved when the framing of the situation changes. Significant herein is the inclusion of the youth. By looking into the practices of Strcpe/Shtërpcë I found signs of the dynamics of framing and possibly the weakening of the ‘indivisibility frame’. However regarding subjects that have to do with culture, history or language the indivisibility frame is still strong. Merel Heijke University of Wageningen 1-11-2010 “Everything is politicized” Competing Governments in Strpce/Shtërpcë, Kosovo Merel Heijke MSc ‘International Development Studies’ University of Wageningen 1 November 2010 2 Colofon © 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form of by any means, without the prior consent of the authors. This thesis is produced by Merel Heijke, student of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, as part of her MSc-programme. Author: Merel Heijke Supervised by Gemma van der Haar at the chair-group: Disaster Studies at the University of Wageningen. 3 Preface Kosovo…, what to expect? I was crazy to go there was the comment of my family and friends. “It will be very cold in winter, do you have your thermo underwear with you? And isn’t it dangerous there?”, was the standard reaction I received. But the country and Kosovo’s people turned out to be very hospitable towards me. The municipality I ended up staying for three months was a bit further off from the ‘normal’ destination, but it was in the centre of the attention. About the first message I received about the municipality Strpce/Shtërpcë was that it was a ‘model municipality’. It should be a model for the whole nation because of its fast reconstruction and the cooperation between Serbs and Albanians. I wanted to see this model municipality and see for myself how it functioned. Why did they obtain this status within Kosovo? My aim was to see what the role of the local government was in the reconstruction of the area. Not much information about the functioning of the municipal governments in Kosovo could be found. My aim was to understand the local practices and add useful information to scientific literature that could help in forming new states, or in reconstructing local areas in post-conflict times. Strpce/Shtërpcë turned out to be special in its governance system, as it dealt with two sets of competing government institutions. This was an extra interesting factor in my research. Despite the competing parallel governments, or perhaps thanks to this complicated situation, the municipality was still believed to have all it takes to be a model municipality. All the more reason to ask myself the question how does this parallelism function? I enjoyed to get acquainted with the people of Strpce/Shtërpcë and Kosovo, with the culture, the history and the governance. I enjoyed working my way through the puzzle that the governance of Strpce/Shtërpcë is. I wrote the situation down as clearly as I could. I hope you enjoy reading it. 4 Acknowledgement Before I start elaborating on the subject of my thesis I want to thank a few people that have provided me with the necessary information or pulled me through the process of writing the thesis. First of all I could not have done this research without the interviewees of course. I will not call them by name, but say a general thanks to the civilians, employees and politicians of both local governments in Strpce/Shtërpcë, and officials of international organization as ICO, EU, OSCE, USAID, and VNG international that were willing to share their point of view. What is more, special thanks to my translators, Blerim Feizaj and Radovan Banasevic, who I came to trust and rely upon. Of great support and crucial in the organization of the research was Milos Milovanovic of NGO Fractal. I appreciated the discussions between us. I want to thank NGO Fractal in general, as they have provided me with a place to stay, have welcomed me, and suggested elements in society that could be interesting for this research. I also want to thank Igor Savic of NGO Future without Fear for providing me with a place to work and the employees that have become my friends and support in living in Strpce/Shtërpcë: Suzana Staletovic and Milena Ljubic-Dejanovic. Furthermore, very important for the success of the research has been Gemma van der Haar, lecturer at the University of Wageningen. She has made this research possible in cooperation with Cristine van Empel, from Clingendael institute and coordinator of the Dutch ‘Peace, Security and Development Network’, and Dion van den Berg from NGO IKV Pax Christi. Their expertise and knowledge of reconstruction and peace building has helped me in understanding the situation in Kosovo. Above all, Gemma’s comments helped me structure, restructure and refine the writing. Her way of teaching encouraged me to finish the thesis. Lastly, a big thanks to my family for their support and interest also when I was feeling down and a special thanks to my father who helped me in clarifying a structure in my work and state clear conclusions. 5 Table of Content Abbreviation ............................................................................................................................................ 8 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 9 1.1 Research approach: starting at the core of everyday life ........................................................... 11 1.2 Outline thesis ............................................................................................................................... 16 2. Theoretical framework ...................................................................................................................... 18 2.1 Parallelism ................................................................................................................................... 18 2.2 Indivisibility keeping parallelism alive ......................................................................................... 24 2.3 Framing ........................................................................................................................................ 27 2.4 Conclusion: What can theory about framing tell us about the functioning of parallelism? ....... 30 3. Methods ............................................................................................................................................ 31 3.1 Literature ..................................................................................................................................... 31 3.2 Case and method selection ......................................................................................................... 32 3.3 Interviews and interviewees ....................................................................................................... 33 3.4 Observations................................................................................................................................ 36 3.5 The influence of the researcher .................................................................................................. 38 3.6 Data-analysis and validity ............................................................................................................ 39 3.7 Conclusions: what does the reflection on my research approach tell us?.................................. 39 4. The status issue of Kosovo and the development of political structures and administration ......... 40 4.1 Kosovo’s status issue ................................................................................................................... 40 4.2 Reconstruction and international interference........................................................................... 44 4.3 Government organization structures .......................................................................................... 46 4.4 Conclusion: What can history and institutional development tell us about the strength of the indivisibility frame and parallelism? .................................................................................................. 51 5. From war to parallelism and independent elections ........................................................................ 53 5.1 The municipality of Strpce/Shtërpcë and its people ................................................................... 53 5.2 Parallelism ................................................................................................................................... 58 5.3 Conclusion: How are ethnic division and parallelism framed together? .................................... 66 6. November/December 2009: A