After UN Security Council Resolution 1244 had practically suspended Yugoslav sovereignty over Kosovo, the distribution of governmental power in Kosovo was a highly complex matter. There were several competitors in the ring. All hopes were vested in Bernard Kouchner's United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) to rapidly assume full governmental responsibility, but for reasons similar to those hampering previous civilian missions, the UN was unable to deliver in the short term. There was no UN administrator ready to walk into the municipal building in Orahovac and take up office there, the way that civil affairs Major Joppolo had positioned himself behind the desk of the Fascist mayor of the Sicilian town Adano in the wake of the Allied invasion in 1943. In the administrative void that emerged all over Kosovo, two competing Albanian factions claimed to represent their Kosovar majority, while most Serbs refused to cooperate with the international community and created their own structures. The UÇK, clearly the most muscular Albanian player, threatened NATO's proclaimed plans for a multi-ethnic and democratic Kosovo as it was rapidly assuming administrative control over most of the province. In this murky arena of competing and overlapping claimants to power, KFOR was clearly the strongest player with tens of thousands of heavily armed soldiers on the ground. Haphazardly and grudgingly, KFOR progressed from the public security vacuum into the wider civil administrative vacuum, since more than community policing was needed to keep the UÇK from becoming ‘Kosovo's next masters’ as New York Times journalist Chris Hedges had predicted in the magazine Foreign Affairs two months prior to the international intervention on the ground. Early warnings such as these apparently had little impact on the preparedness of either KFOR or the United Nations for the task ahead.

Local Administration

Alexandros Yannis, who arrived in Pristina as Kouchner's political advisor in July, called the UN's potential for keeping the peace and building stability in Kosovo rather dim that summer. Never had a power vacuum emerged as suddenly as after the Serbs’ withdrawal from Kosovo and, for a task as massive as the assumption of full governmental responsibility over a territory by the deployment of an international administration of colonial proportions, the UN had neither the capacity nor the experience.