The flaw here is that the U.N. administrators in Kosovo at present lack the budgetary and political support from the Security Council to keep a policy of uncertainty sustainable for very long. Bernard Kouchner, Annan's special representative on Kosovo, will deliver that message, in more specific terms, when he briefs the Council on Friday in New York. His efforts to establish a functioning local administration to include the territory's major political groups seem to have been frustrated by excessive caution at U.N. headquarters as much as by conditions on the ground. Annan will soon announce a date for local elections in 2000, probably at mid-year. Those would bring Kosovo uncomfortably close to what seems to me to be inevitable independence.
Creative ambiguity can be one of diplomacy's most effective tools.
But it can quickly turn into destructive ambiguity if it just puts off the hard decisions. The United Nations must show that limbo leads where the Kosovars want to go and is not intended to be an endless tunnel to sidetrack them.