Kosovo: Drawing lessons from a disaster, 1999

01/11/1999

The earthquakes in Turkey and Taiwan, as well as the crisis in East Timor, should not prevent us from assessing how the latest Balkan crisis was handled. Two questions arise: the weakness of the international aid community's warning system, which was not prepared for the departure or early return of Kosovars, and the changes taking place in the humanitarian landscape. Indeed, new actors, including the military and the business sector (which sometimes act in symbiosis), are filling the "gaps" that traditional aid providers have left both during the emergency and reconstruction periods. This raises ethical questions and creates new practical problems in the already complex institutional millefeuille in the field.