Policing divided societies: Kosovo and Northern Ireland
by Mihane HOXHA and Allan LEONARD
29 November 2024
Would further exchanges between the police services of Kosovo and Northern Ireland be beneficial, or have recent challenges proved too great?
Olga Stefanović is from the Serbian community, from the village of Lešak in the Leposavić municipality (in northern Kosovo). She joined the Kosovo Police in 2003, and said that a professional visit to Northern Ireland in 2013 left her with “only positive impressions”:
“It was the first time I saw so much and learned. I felt that Belfast shared similarities with Mitrovica, but also saw how with great determination people had managed to address so many challenges and were genuinely committed to continuing that progress.”
The relationship between policing, community, and dealing with the past
Joanne Murphy, a professor of inclusive leadership at the University of Birmingham, has written a chapter, “Policing and Peace in Northern Ireland: Change, Conflict and Community Confidence”, in a book about Northern Ireland’s conflict and peace.
As she explained, communities in Northern Ireland have come to rely on the presence and input of the police into complex community problems:
“The most challenging difficulty externally is the euphemistically termed ‘dealing with the past’. There is an organisational legacy to conflict, just as there is a political one. The PSNI has still to grasp this nettle fully — both in terms of its own role and the role of others.”
Reforming policing post-Good Friday Agreement
Being a highly political and dividing issue in Northern Ireland, policing has proven to be one of the most difficult tasks on the road of peacebuilding its divided society.
After the establishment of the state of Northern Ireland in 1922, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was formed by the Unionist government, not only for maintaining law and order inside the new state, but also for defending cross-border attacks from southern Ireland. Employing a vast majority of Protestants/Unionists, the police service was regarded by many Catholics/Nationalists as the armed wing of unionism, and was often accused of sectarianism and brutality. In addition to wider anti-Catholic discrimination (e.g. in housing and employment), having a Unionist police service helped the government ensure that Northern Ireland was going to stay part of the United Kingdom, and repress Nationalist threats to unity with the Crown.
A new beginning
In 1998, the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland was established (as a result of the Good Friday Agreement). In 1999, it published the report, A New Beginning: Policing in Northern Ireland (better known as the Patten Report). The report was an attempt to generate a police service that was acceptable to the whole community, and an attempt to make policing non-political.
The implementation of the report’s recommendations has made the now-named Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) arguably one of the most accountable police services in Europe.
Symbolically, the PSNI’s badge and symbols are free from association with either the UK or Ireland states, and no flags fly from its buildings (except the PSNI flag).
The focus of policing in Northern Ireland is a human rights-based approach, integrating with the European Convention on Human Rights.
A new Northern Ireland Policing Board was established, to hold the Chief Constable and police accountable for their actions.
Composition of police services
To redress the unbalanced composition of the police service, a quota system was used until 2011, guaranteeing that 50 per cent of new recruits would be Catholic.
As of September 2024, Catholics make up 33% of PSNI’s 6,355 police officers (Protestants: 65.7%; ethnic minorities: 0.7%). Fewer non-officer police staff (2,387) are from a Catholic background (18.9%) (Protestants: 78.8%; ethnic minorities: 0.8%). In comparison, of 8,642 Kosovo police officers, 15% are from non-majority (non-Albanian) communities.
Also, in Northern Ireland male outnumber female police officers 2:1 (68%:32%), while there are more female than male police staff (57%:42%). In contrast, in Kosovo there are substantially more male than female police officers (86%:14%).
Kosovo Police Lieutenant Reshat Hyseni claimed a lack of gender discrimination within the service:
“During my 22-year career, I have worked with teams that included both male and female colleagues, and our duties were always carried out professionally, without any prejudices or favouritism based on gender.”
Likewise, KP Inspectorate Chief, Kushtrim Hodaj, said that there has never been an incident regarding an officer’s ethnicity:
“In our databases, there are no cases where officers from any community have reported feeling discriminated against due to their ethnicity or religion… Regarding promotions and leadership positions, we have not received any complaints, nor are there cases where someone was promoted or not because of their ethnicity.”
But Hodaj made a distinction with the situation in northern Kosovo, particularly since 2022:
“The resignation of (600) Serbian police officers has disrupted the ethnic representation balance within the Kosovo Police.”
He added that is not easy to recruit their replacements.
Evolution of community-oriented policing in Kosovo
Merita Kadriu-Berisha is originally from Medveda/Serbia and joined the Kosovo Police in 2013. Now working as a patrol officer in Pristina, she explained how their service includes “a ‘communication passport’, which contains contact details so that residents of the neighbourhood can reach us 24/7”.
Besiana Sejdijaj from Peja, a 21-year-old member of the Egyptian community, joined Kosovo Police in 2023. Although not from the area, Sejdijaj was aware of the contentious situation in the northern part of Kosovo. She specifically applied to serve there, and was assigned to the Zubin Potok police station. For Sejdijaj, the Serbian language is a challenge:
“When citizens understand Albanian, I speak with them because some Serbian citizens understand Albanian, but if they don’t then my Serbian colleagues help me.”
After the end of the conflict in 1999, the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) created the Kosovo Police Service, whose police officers were trained by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The training focus was more on a law-and-order than “community-oriented policing” (COP) model, with the latter involving the community in the process of policing. COP is thought of as being particularly useful in societies emerging from deep conflict.
One of the earliest forums to promote COP in Kosovo was Municipal Community and Safety Councils (MCSCs) — consultative bodies for safety that bring together representatives from the municipal offices, police, media, ethnic and religious communities, and civil society organisations (CSOs).
Another COP forum is the Local Police and Security Councils (LPSCs), which were created by OSCE after the 2004 riots in Kosovo, when violence between ethnic Albanians and Serbians in the northern city of Mitrovica spread throughout Kosovo. LPSCs are based on a grass-roots approach of creating consultative bodies, for local communities to have a voice in the policing of their community.
Community-oriented policing progressed in some Kosovo municipalities. This includes those that received financial support from international NGOs, such as Saferworld, which helped develop MCSC action plans in Ferizaj/Urosevac and Hani Elezit, both in southeast Kosovo.
There are no MCSCs in the north of Kosovo. Nevertheless, this hasn’t dissuaded others from trying to implement community-oriented policing in this contested space.
Learning from Kosovo-Northern Ireland police exchanges
In April 2009, the Forum for Cities in Transition was established — an international network of cities engaged in conflict transformation, based on the premise that one divided society is the best place to assist another. Mitrovica and Derry/Londonderry were two of the founding cities of the forum, with the former hosting the inaugural annual summit in May 2010. An outcome was a collaboration between the PSNI and Kosovo Police (KP). A delegation of 10 KP officers — five each from the Albanian and Serbian communities — visited Northern Ireland in April 2011. The PSNI showed the KP officers how the transformed police service works in practice, logistically and culturally.
There was an emphasis on the leadership role that the police has with the communities that they serve. As Chris Yates, a PSNI senior superintendent at the time, explained:
“It goes back to the issue of legitimacy. Sinn Fein [an Irish nationalist/republican party] supported the devolution of policing [to the Northern Ireland Executive]… because they wanted it to be treated along the same lines as housing and health — to mainstream policing.”
Yates explained how the PSNI “got on with it”, driving an agenda of change and developing an integrated police service.
This was followed by a delegation from Northern Ireland — including two PSNI police officers, a former mayor of Derry/Londonderry, and representatives from the business and community sectors — visiting Mitovica in March 2012. The exchange further developed the relationship between the PSNI and KP as well as between Derry/Londonderry and Mitrovica.
There have been other Kosovo Police study visits to Northern Ireland, including one in September 2013, when 11 senior officers met at several locations with PSNI officers, in order to discuss the strategic planning necessary for delivering sustainable community-oriented policing.
Participant KP Major Olga Stefanović described the learning experience as very important and influential in how she carries out her work:
“There are so many good practices we can adopt from Northern Ireland.”
The OSCE, which supported this visit, explained how the KP participants highly valued the discussions on how the PSNI developed the delivery of “Policing and Community Safety Partnerships”, in the context of emerging from a sustained period of societal conflict.
Following this visit, the OSCE continued its support through a workshop, in which the KP participants briefed senior management — including two KP deputy general directors — on their observations and recommendations for potential best practice procedures and protocols in community-oriented policing for potential implementation by KP.
Challenges and opportunities
Both the PSNI and KP face significant internal and external challenges.
In recent years, the PSNI has been under intense scrutiny for its actions on several controversial events.
One example was an apparent double standard in the period of social restrictions (lockdown) during the Covid epidemic, when PSNI officers arrested protestors at an anti-racism rallies, while the PSNI did not charge anyone over a much larger breach during a public funeral service for former senior IRA member, Bobby Storey, which included dozens of people in a funeral procession on a public road as well as the now first minster of Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill, attending the burial. This and other controversies have been addressed in the structures of accountability, such as the Policing Board and the Department of Justice (part of the Northern Ireland Executive).
The PSNI is also caught up in the broader discussion of dealing with the past and the debate on investigating and seeking prosecution for unresolved murders during the Troubles conflict, versus any kind of amnesty agreed by political representatives. (More details on this topic are published in a separate article at Shared Future News.)
In Kosovo, there has been a collapse of the legitimacy of policing by the Serbian community in the northern region, if not law-and-order then certainly of community-oriented policing. This is because of deteriorating wider relations between Kosovo and Serbia, with the latter withdrawing support for Kosovo state institutions in the northern region, which it particularly contests. A number of Serbian community members resigned from Kosovo Police in an act of protest in November 2022. (Similarly, this is a concern if Irish nationalists and the political parties were ever to withdraw their support of the PSNI.)
A mutual lesson is that if you do not have the “buy-in” from relevant communities, then community-oriented policing will not happen. It is likewise vital to have the organisational structures in place and bedded down so that they can endure inevitable challenges.
There remains a desire by police officers for more shared learning projects. We spoke with several Kosovo Police officers who have not had the opportunity to participate in study visits. They spoke about the importance and need for continuous training, whether in Kosovo or abroad, for their professional development.
No one should underestimate the difficulty in creating and developing community-oriented policing, especially in a society in the process of conflict transformation. The human rights and community-based approach of policing is a new process in both Kosovo and Northern Ireland, and further exchanges can provide mutual support. Indeed, this could be thought of as a process underway in both places, where “with great determination and genuine commitment” — in the words of Major Stefanović — progress for a more trusted and responsive police service in each place can be achieved.
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This article is part of a series co-authored by Kosovo and Northern Ireland participants in a peace journalism project, Reporting on a Troubled Past, initiated and organised by the Association of Journalists of Kosovo in partnership with Shared Future News, with funding from the British Embassy Pristina and the National Union of Journalists Belfast & District Branch. The facts presented and views expressed are those of the authors and editorially independent of any funder.