Building peace piece-by-piece in Tetovo

OSCE monitors are performing a delicate task in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, helping the Skopje Government to redeploy the police into previously strife-torn communities.

The day begins

Every morning at 9.00, a fleet of armoured vehicles sweeps out of the OSCE compound in Tetovo and heads off along the region's fertile plains or up into some still-snowbound mountain villages.

Inside sit the rather curiously named "confidence-building monitors", 30 internationals from 10 different countries, whose job is to ensure that the peace deal - the Ohrid Framework Agreement - that brought an end to last year's inter-ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, is implemented on the ground.

Movers and shakers

The confidence-builders are the OSCE's movers and shakers in the field. They monitor the redeployment of the ethnically mixed police forces into the former Albanian rebel held territories; facilitate meetings to bring together ethnically divided communities; and constantly assess the security situation as well as the mood of the local people in order to pre-empt problems and to resolve difficulties long before they develop into the cause of another fire-fight.

Confidence-building monitors are the fingertips of the OSCE Spillover Monitor Mission to Skopje - feeling the pulse and delicately applying first aid to what's broken.

Assisting police redeployment

The primary task of the monitors - the bulk of the OSCE internationals in the country - has been to create favourable conditions for the return of an ethnically-mixed police force into the areas formerly held by the ethnic Albanian armed group - the self-proclaimed National Liberation Army (NLA).

The return of the police is an essential part of the peace process, as it means not only a return to law and order but also a confirmation of the territorial integrity of the state.

But police redeployment - even though this is softly-softly community policing accompanied at every step by OSCE internationally recruited police advisers - has been anything but easy.

It has been the job of the confidence-building monitors to persuade the sceptics and despite a slow start, they have had success. In the Tetovo region, by the start of March, police had been re-deployed in 60 per cent of the villages, and it is anticipated they will return to the remainder in the very near future.

Building a long-lasting peace

But monitors do much more than just facilitate the return of the police. Their job is to create the conditions for a long-lasting peace in the area and it requires an imaginative and proactive approach. It means being a diplomat, negotiator, patient listener and social worker all rolled into one.

"In the course of one working day I may start the morning in a smoky room, convincing die-hard sceptics to talk to their neighbours; pass the afternoon shovelling snow off a mountain road to allow displaced people to return to a village; follow that up with a meeting with a mayor to discuss freedom of movement; and then end the day in the same smoky room, reiterating the same arguments to the same sceptics I met in the morning," says Daniel Renton, an OSCE Confidence-building monitor.

"Confidence-building requires a combination of saint-like patience, an actor's determination and - not least - a cast iron stomach to handle industrial quantities of coffee."

Putting yourself out of job - a good thing

Sometimes the diligent and painstaking efforts are thrown off track by sudden and unpredictable events.

At the end of 2001, Daniel's efforts to restore confidence in the Dzepciste municipality, a particularly sensitive area that had provided many members of the former NLA, were severely setback when three Macedonian special police were killed in an ambush and seven Albanians were arrested on a variety of firearm and terrorist charges. There followed an armed stand-off for several weeks in the snowy Dzepciste fields between the Macedonian security forces and local Albanians.

"It's taken a lot of talking and still more coffee to deal with the repercussions of those events, and it teaches us that our efforts to build a long-lasting peace can be reversed with dizzying speed in a matter of minutes," he says.

"But thankfully such incidents are now very rare. As we approach the spring, I can confidently say that in the Tetovo area, the local population increasingly believes the peace is here to stay. We may soon be out of a job and perversely, that can only be a good thing."