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PRISTINA, Nov 16 -- A row has erupted between international and local officials over one of the most glittering prizes in Kosovo's reconstruction process -- a multi-million dollar deal to build a mobile phone network.
The battle involves two of Europe's telcommunications heavyweights, Alcatel of France and Siemens of Germany.
It also highlights some of the most central issues, such as disputed ownership of state property, faced by officials trying to rebuild the war-scarred territory's economy.
In a nutshell, Kosovo's United Nations-led administration favours a bid from Alcatel to provide equipment and supply the network. A commission set up by the U.N. decided at the weekend the French firm should be awarded the contract.
But the local public post and telcommunications company, PTK, has chosen an offer from Siemens and says officials from the U.N. mission, known as UNMIK, have no right to interfere.
``As I understand it, they have the right to supervise -- and they're doing that -- but not to stop us and to give us solutions,'' Agron Dida, PTK's general manager, told Reuters.
``The owner of this company is the people of Kosovo, not UNMIK,'' he said.
Unsurprisingly, the U.N. takes a different view. It backs the decision in favour of Alcatel made by the Joint Civil Commission on Postal and Telecommunications Services (JCC).
``PTK is not a private company but a public company. And so the JCC has the rights of an owner that would be the rights of a shareholder in a private company,'' said Pascal Copin, UNMIK's director of post and telecommunications.
The pressure is on both sides to find a way out of the impasse soon. Hampered by antiquated equipment, years of underfunding and NATO bombing earlier this year, Kosovo's telecommunications system is in urgent need of renovation.
In many places, only local telephone calls are possible via the landline network....if people have a working phone line at all. A Serbian mobile network, Mobtel, operates erratically and only in the capital Pristina.
UNMIK says a contract with Alcatel will be ready in about two weeks and it will be signed.
It is banking on the PTK not daring to delay a process which should rapidly improve the quality of life for many people here and bring in substantial revenue for its own coffers.
``I'm sure that the PTK management wishes for the good of the Kosovars and the good of Kosovo and I'm sure that the PTK management will sign the contract with Alcatel,'' Copin said.
Technically and financially, both bids were generally acceptable, officials familiar with the process say. In each case, the PTK would borrow around 35 million deutschemarks to set up and run the network and repay from revenue generated.
Dida says the PTK's objections to the Alcatel bid stem primarily from a plan to use a main switch, which routes all calls in the network, and billing system in Monaco.
But Copin says this would only be a temporary measure to get the system up and running more quickly. After a couple of months, billing and switching would be done in Kosovo, he says.
He says UNMIK favours the Alcatel bid as it offers more ingenious solutions for getting round technical and bureaucratic obstacles to set up a comprehensive network more rapidly.
Whatever the final outcome of this row, the issue of who runs Kosovo's state-owned businesses is already one of the most thorny issues here and is likely to rear its head frequently.
UNMIK runs Kosovo, legally still part of Yugoslavia, under a U.N. Security Council resolution. U.N. officials say this gives them the right to control state assets in Kosovo.
Often, however, members of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority -- booted out of state jobs under a decade of Serb repression -- feel they should be back at their desks and in charge.
Equally, Serbian and Yugoslav state official protest that the assets still belong to them and say the U.N. is stepping beyond its mandate by creating separate Kosovo entities such as PTK.