The United States is urging Kosovo to join regional liquefied natural gas (LNG) initiatives, arguing that energy security is essential for economic development and attracting foreign investment. In an interview with KosovaPress, Micah Savidge, Economic Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Pristina, said Kosovo risks missing important investment opportunities if it cannot guarantee a stable energy supply.

Savidge discussed the role of American LNG, the potential of lignite gasification, renewable energy investments, and regional gas infrastructure projects, emphasizing that Kosovo’s future energy security should be based on a diversified energy mix rather than reliance on a single technology or resource.

KosovaPress: Could you explain why the United States is so interested in selling LNG to Kosovo?

Micah Savidge: Thank you for the question, and welcome to the Embassy.

In February this year, during the Transatlantic Gas Security Summit held in Washington, D.C., twelve Eastern European countries signed a joint declaration aimed at strengthening natural gas supply security across Europe. The objective was to diversify gas sources and supply routes as part of the European Union’s gradual effort to reduce dependence on Russian natural gas.

Infrastructure designed to distribute LNG from the United States is being planned to cover all Western Balkan countries—with the exception of Kosovo. When we speak with American businesses, which we do frequently here at the Embassy, they express strong interest in expanding into Kosovo because of its young population, widespread English proficiency, educational standards, and skilled workforce. However, they consistently ask about reliable energy supply.

Without dependable electricity, Kosovo risks losing potential American investment. That is why Kosovo, as perhaps the most pro-American country in Europe, is being invited to join this regional U.S.-backed initiative, enabling us to work together on strategic investments and strengthen our partnership for the long term.

KosovaPress: Why can’t Kosovo simply rely on its own lignite reserves for energy production?

Micah Savidge: For decades, Kosovo has benefited from its domestic lignite resources, and they remain an important component of the country’s energy system. American companies such as General Electric have been involved in coal-fired power plants that are currently operating.

However, true energy security is not achieved by relying on a single source of energy. A more diversified energy mix provides resilience, improves system reliability, and gives Kosovo more options as regional and global energy markets continue to evolve.

The question is not simply “coal or gas.” The real issue is how Kosovo can build sufficient and reliable energy capacity for the future. Economic growth, industrial development, and increased investment all require stable and competitive electricity supplies. Additional generation capacity could also reduce Kosovo’s exposure to expensive electricity imports, particularly during periods of high regional demand, especially in winter.

That is why we advocate access to LNG and regional gas infrastructure—not because they would replace Kosovo’s existing resources, but because they would add another tool to the country’s energy portfolio, improve system flexibility, and reduce dependence on a single source, namely coal.

Countries with diversified electricity systems are generally better positioned to withstand price shocks, supply disruptions, and changing market conditions. We would like to see Kosovo achieve that same level of resilience.

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KosovaPress: What is coal gasification, and could Kosovo make use of it?

Micah Savidge: There has been significant media coverage, so let me clarify that the potential coal gasification project and the potential LNG pipeline project are separate initiatives. We support both.

Coal gasification is a process that converts coal—including lignite, which Kosovo has in abundance—into synthetic gas, or syngas. This gas can be used to generate electricity, support industrial production, manufacture chemicals and synthetic fuels, and create other valuable byproducts.

Because Kosovo possesses such significant lignite resources, the United States supports exploring innovative technologies that could help Kosovo make better use of its domestic energy assets.

The United States has already engaged with American companies to better understand what may be technically and commercially feasible. We welcome further discussions on this issue.

That said, Kosovo’s long-term energy security will require a combination of different energy sources, including additional generation capacity and access to multiple forms of energy. No single technology or energy source can provide the entire solution.

KosovaPress: What about renewable energy? Can Kosovo generate more of it?

Micah Savidge: Absolutely. Kosovo can produce more renewable energy, and we strongly support expanding renewable generation capacity.

We hope these capacities continue to grow in order to meet future energy demand, strengthen energy security, and support Kosovo’s economic development. Renewable energy is undoubtedly a key component of Kosovo’s strategy for building a diversified energy portfolio.

We have also supported American companies operating in the renewable energy sector, and they are making new investments in Kosovo.

One particularly important example is the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Compact program, which includes a $202 million battery energy storage project. The United States is providing the $202 million, while the Government of Kosovo has contributed an additional $34 million.

This battery storage project will improve grid reliability, reduce energy costs, and enable Kosovo to integrate more renewable energy sources into the system.

I recently spoke with colleagues at MCC, and they confirmed that the program is proceeding according to plan. Engineering and preparatory work have been completed, including permits and land transfers. Procurement for construction of the battery system is ongoing.

Additionally, a new entity—the Energy Storage Corporation—has been established to manage the battery system in the future.

KosovaPress: If Kosovo agrees to import LNG, would it be competitive in terms of price? Who would finance it?

Micah Savidge: We believe that access to LNG, supported by a long-term supply agreement with an American supplier, has the potential to provide Kosovo with more predictable energy costs and support competitive domestic electricity generation in the future.

Kosovo’s current dependence on imported electricity exposes consumers and businesses to volatility in regional energy markets, especially during periods of high demand and limited supply.

According to customs data, Kosovo spent approximately €735 million on electricity imports over the past four years, including €259 million in 2025 alone.

Without additional generation capacity, Kosovo will likely continue to depend on electricity imports to meet future demand.

This raises an important strategic question: how should Kosovo best strengthen its long-term energy security? Is it better to secure predictable energy supplies for domestic electricity production, where costs can be forecast more easily, or to remain dependent on imported electricity purchased at market prices beyond Kosovo’s control and vulnerable to external fluctuations?

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KosovaPress: What is the regional context? Are all of Kosovo’s neighbors connected to American LNG projects?

Micah Savidge: Not yet, but there are plans to connect all of Kosovo’s neighbors—and much of Europe—to pipeline networks supplied by American LNG.

Since this infrastructure will be built over the coming years and supply contracts will be finalized during that process, the sooner Kosovo joins regional integration efforts, the better the terms it may be able to secure.

If Kosovo waits too long, opportunities may be lost.

One example is the pipeline connecting Alexandroupolis in Greece with Skopje in North Macedonia, which is currently nearing completion. By the end of May, half of its planned ultimate capacity had already been reserved by Serbia through a separate connection.

Had Kosovo acted earlier, it might have secured a larger share of future supply capacity.

KosovaPress: What is your view of the recent proposal to connect Kosovo to the gas terminal in Vlora?

Micah Savidge: As far as I know, that project has not yet been fully finalized, so it is difficult to discuss specifics.

Nevertheless, we welcome Kosovo’s willingness to invest in regional natural gas infrastructure. We see it as a positive sign that Kosovo may eventually decide to build domestic natural gas infrastructure.

The energy decisions Kosovo makes today will shape its future for decades. Ensuring a stable energy supply is essential for Kosovo’s development path and for the speed with which it can reach European Union living standards.

For this reason, we strongly encourage Kosovo to consider further investment in natural gas, including the possibility of building a gas-fired power plant. If constructed with sufficient capacity, such a plant could meet Kosovo’s domestic energy needs and potentially create opportunities for electricity exports to neighboring countries.

Like many energy experts, I believe the future will be increasingly energy-intensive. As more technologies and processes become electrified, demand for energy will continue to grow.

Kosovo must prepare itself for that future.

As the Chargé d’Affaires recently wrote in her editorial: energy security is national security.

The United States stands ready to begin a structured dialogue on securing Kosovo’s energy future through a diversified energy mix that includes coal, coal gasification, LNG, and renewable energy sources.

• Original link: https://kosovapress.com/ekskluzive-kosova-ti-bashkohet-projektit-rajonal-te-lng-sa-seshte-vone-mbeshtesim-edhe-gazifikimin-e-qymyrit-zyrtari-amerikan

• Translated with ChatGPT

Last November, I found myself in an intimate conference room at the opulent Oxfordshire estate of Ditchley Park, which served as a secret retreat for Winston Churchill during World War II, attending a small gathering devoted to one question: how to create economic incentives for progress in the Kosovo–Serbia dialogue. Around the table sat top European envoys for the Western Balkans, British diplomats, business leaders, and regional experts. During one of the discussions, a speaker made a remark that was at once obvious and startling (to me, at least) - a simple fact that I had somehow never paused to ponder before.

“Kosovo,” he said matter-of-factly, “is the only country in all of Europe that does not border a member state of the European Union.”

It was a blatant fact, a truism really, yet hearing it stated so plainly made me return to it several times over following months.

Like when I was waiting at the Evzoni border crossing between North Macedonia and Greece. The queue of cars was not particularly long, yet it still took time before we managed to cross. The EU’s new Entry/Exit System (EES) requires non-EU travellers to provide fingerprints and undergo a facial scan when entering the EU. Drivers, families, children, everyone had to step out of their vehicles and go through the procedure.

As I waited, I found myself thinking about the shock many Kosovars will experience when they realize they will have to undergo a similar process every time they travel to neighboring Albania or Montenegro once those countries fully enter European Union, sometimes during the dusk of this decade. Millions of border crossings, multiplied by many additional minutes spent waiting, will translate into billions of minutes lost as Kosovars head to their favorite vacay spots on the beaches of Drymades or Dolcinium.

Businesses, especially small exporting ones focused on the region, will be hit even harder. Other European countries outside the EU, from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Ukraine, have shared borders with member states and have accumulated years of experience navigating the practical realities that come with it: phytosanitary inspections, customs procedures, regulatory checks, transport bottlenecks, and countless administrative frictions that accompany trade across an EU frontier.

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We have largely been spared of these realities, surrounded entirely by non-EU neighbours, living our blessed lives in a kind of geopolitical waiting room. Yet as the European map around us continues to (rapidly?) change, that anomaly is becoming less a curiosity and more a strategic vulnerability.

Kosovo’s ruling regime of the past 5-6 years has been talking the talk of the European integrations, but little walk was walked.

Anyone who makes a living in Brussels - whether as a diplomat, eurocrat, journalist or correspondent - will tell you the same thing: Kosovo’s file is gathering dust in the enlargement departments.

Other countries from the region have moved forward. Montenegro and Albania have made remarkable progress, while Moldova’s journey is gathering pace. Others have regressed, such as autocratic Serbia and Georgia, or remain trapped by circumstances largely beyond their control - looking at you North Macedonia - held hostage for years by the whims of complicated EU neighbors. Bosnia continues to endure paralysis.

Kosovo, however, occupies a category of its own. We have neither progressed nor regressed. We are not stuck because of some external obstacle. We have simply stopped participating in the EU integration race altogether.

We are still not a formal candidate for EU membership. Half a decade has been squandered by the ruling regime on unnecessary spats with allies and partners, while little effort has been invested in the kind of sustained diplomatic work that could have improved Kosovo’s standing in European capitals. There has been shockingly scant interest in tackling the larger strategic questions: deepening cooperation with key allies, coordinating with allies and delivering on big ticket items in dialogue with Serbia, or creating the political conditions for additional recognitions from EU non-recognizers such as Greece, Romania, Spain, Slovakia or Cyprus.

Some readers less versed on the European integration tactics and tantrums may think maybe Kosovo has instead focused on building a more stable, strategic relations with the USA. We are after all, “the most pro-American nation in the world”.

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Alas, we have fumbled the ball in this game too, proving largely unable to navigate the new realities in Washington DC, and now face a rapidly shrinking footprint in a key alliance where we have traditionally been at our strongest.

Kosovo’s strategic dialogue with the US has been effectively suspended by the Biden administration. The Kurti government also cancelled the coal-based power plant project awarded to a US company, later resulting in more than 20 million Euro in compensations paid to the firm. Kurti then cancelled the gas pipeline project that was supposed to be built with US federal grants from Millennium Challenge Corporation.

Kurti’s foreign ministry has significantly (and intentionally) reduced Kosovo’s diplomatic and lobbying presence in the American capital. Where Kosovo once engaged high-level figures such as Susie Wiles, Ambassador Frank Wisner or Senator Bob Dole, and maintained access to influential networks that shaped Washington’s policy ecosystem, for much of this decade it has effectively shut down formal lobbying efforts and is operating through an embassy that has been severely understaffed for ever since Kurti came to power in 2021.

As the Kosovo’s current Ambassador Ilir Dugolli warned in a leaked email to bosses in Prishtina:

“It is hard to find another Embassy where reliance is concentrated in a single diplomat, without local staff, combined with treatment by the host state that is far more brutal than can be perceived in the capital…”

Kosovo seems to be the only country to have been unable to further its interest in Washington nowadays.

• In April, Albania, the United States, and Greece signed a 20-year energy agreement valued at 6 billion dollars, which focuses on supplying American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Albania and developing regional energy infrastructure.

• Only last month, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, also signed a multi-billion dollar deal, which came on top of a 1.5 billion dollar deal connecting US, Croatian and Bosnian energy interests.

• Serbia is moving ahead with 2.6 billion dollar deal for a massive hydropower project of over 2000MW, together with US company Bechtel. This agreement is result of a Strategic Energy Agreement signed between Serbia and US last year and US Embassy in Serbia has just published the procurement for this project.

• North Macedonia and the US Government are proceeding with regular meetings of their Strategic dialogue, hoping to conclude agreements in energy, military support, etc.

  

Agon Maliqi, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC noted last week that “the central US focus today [in Western Balkans] seems to be on energy and economic infrastructure projects”.

James Carafano, a senior executive at The Heritage Foundation and a Balkans connoisseur in the Republican circles, with whom I shared a panel at an AmCham event in May, also commented on how Kosovo is missing the window of opportunity:

“Kosovo is probably one of the most pro-American countries in all of Europe. But, if I'm honest, I think Kosovo has left a lot of untapped opportunities. We have an American government that wants to work with this region, that wants to create partnerships, that wants people to go to the US and bring concrete agreements to the table. And, frankly, I don't think we're seeing that”.

A recent Policy Paper from American Chamber of Commerce in Kosovo warned of risks for Kosovo’s lack of engagement in the American energy connectivity projects in the Wastern Balkans:

“As Europe moves decisively to replace Russian gas and neighboring countries increasingly integrate into LNG-backed regional energy corridors, this gap risks leaving Kosovo structurally exposed to security-of-supply challenges, cost volatility, and regional strategic marginalization.”

All these worries of Kosovo’s lack of attention to the regional energy connectivity, prompted Anu Prattipati, Chargé d’affaires at the US Embassy in Pristina to publish an unprecedented editorial just days before the national elections in Kosovo, concluding:

“The window for Kosovo joining these projects is closing. Delaying this decision risks American LNG supplies being committed elsewhere and could leave Kosovo as the only Western Balkans country without access to American LNG. History cannot stand in the way of decisions that will benefit Kosovo’s people today and into the future.”

Where does this take us? Nowhere it seems. Kosovo has just held its third national election in a year. While opposition parties have raised alarms about the implosion of Kosovo’s foreign affairs and energy policy, Kurti remains acting prime minister and - at this point - there is little sign of urgency to restore institutional stability or relaunch a coherent strategy that could realistically restart Kosovo’s path toward EU integration and a forward-looking strategic relationship with the United States.

Kosovo is heading toward its third national election in less than a year. For most of this period, the atmosphere on the partisan pitch as well as the voters’ stands projected democratic fatigue. Two pairs of elections in 2025 felt more like a football match dragged into extra time with exhausted players showing tired movement on the field with little creative dribbling. Voters were watching from the stands, grumpy, with folded arms, an opposition too weary to press forward. The political slogans came and went like rehearsed chants in a disinterested stadium. Both the players on the pitch and public on the stands seemed to understand that another whistle would soon blow anyway and the winner seemed predetermined. VV won both scrappy matches not because it had a good history of playing, but because the opposition was unable to unlock a way to beat the main playmaker, the perennial acting Prime Minister Kurti.

This time around, the competition feels different. If previously we watched a slow, tactical stalemate, we’re now witnessing something closer to a derby on the verge of explosion, every tackle harder, every statement sharper, every social media post delivered to inflame opponents. These Kosovo’s elections now resemble a match that has abandoned any rules midway through the second half: players shouting over one another, swearing and kicking, and the observers left unsure whether they are witnessing strategy, improvisation, or pure panic.

Rhetoric has escalated and there are two main reasons for it.

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Firstly, Albin Kurti seems to have been genuinely stunned that he wasn’t able to hold on to power even after winning 51% of the vote in the December 28 elections. His decision to backstab President Vjosa Osmani, his former staunch ally turned frenemy turned chief antagonist, was a gamble that cut ridiculously short his third mandate in a year. He must be seeing the current slipping poll numbers, worried that he can’t count on the enormous diaspora that spent their Christmas holidays all too happily in Kosovo, bringing tens of thousands of guaranteed votes. According to UBO Consulting exit polls, around 5% of voters in February 2025 declared themselves to be from the diaspora. In December 2025, that number jumped to 15%. We’re safe to assume over 70% of those votes went to VV.

Kurti switched to a mode he knows best: a highly polarizing campaign, engaging in every dirty trick from the book of political dark arts: peddling conspiracies, framing critics as enemies of the state, amplifying old regional divisions, and unleashing an outright filthy onslaught of online harassment, smears, AI-generated fake news and deep fakes from an army of trolls.

Secondly, former President Osmani is confirming the old lines of William Congreve: “Heav'n has no rage, like love to hatred turn'd, / Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd". She has (re)joined her old party LDK and is campaigning aggressively (if somewhat hypocritically) against Kurti. On interviews she had no qualms putting out the dirty laundry from her co-habitating days with Kurti. List is long: Kosovo government has sent confidential Notes Verbales to countries hosting Osmani, saying “she doesn’t represent Kosovo”; Kurti has also told her “it’s a mistake to be sitting in a same table with Donald Trump”; Kurti has accused her for organizing military parade for Independence Day.”

Osmani is adamant that it’s personally Kurti who gave orders for, what she called, “the worst smear campaign in Kosovo’s history”, which also includes sexual innuendos by social media accounts close to the ruling party.

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But the rhetoric and online mudslinging soon escalated into a kerfuffle and then into something altogether far more serious last week, following an incident in the PDK heartland of Drenica. According to reports, one of Kurti’s deputy ministers visited a bar in the town of Skenderaj and began insulting the town’s mayor Sami Lushtaku, a founding member of the KLA (known for his short temper), accusing him publicly of being a Serbian spy. A physical altercation followed, and the VV official was hospitalized with minor injuries.

What happened next was both strange and sinister: at around 1 a.m., dozens of armed and masked special police officers descended on Skenderaj, prompting local residents to take to the streets. PDK MPs from the constituency reacted furiously, accusing Kurti of employing Milosevic-style tactics with the intention of inflaming tensions. Usually calm head of PDK Bedri Hamza, was very clear in his warning to Kurti:

“Last night we witnessed deeply troubling scenes, as the Kosovo Police, acting on government orders, deployed special units to Drenica with the apparent aim of exerting pressure and demonstrating force. I call on the acting prime minister to stop the propaganda, stop spreading hatred, and above all, immediately halt the provocations and the misuse of state institutions for his partisan political scenarios.”

Agon Maliqi, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council in Washington DC gave an acute observation:

“PDK, LDK, and VV have only truly been national contenders for power at moments when they managed to extend their reach across all of Kosovo. Albin Kurti’s political objective is to confine PDK to the status of a regional Drenica-based party, limiting both its broader appeal and its national potential. By consistently redirecting attention toward Lushtaku and Drenica during election periods, Kurti effectively kills two birds with one stone.

First, he unsettles racist urban constituencies with the specter of Drenica returning to power, presenting himself as the sole savior capable of preventing such a scenario — partly out of fear that these votes could otherwise drift toward LDK. Second, through this strategy, and by understanding the Drenica mentality and the emotional reaction provoked by the deployment of special police units, he actually strengthens the dominance of that region’s branches within the party itself.”

On the other hand, Flaka Surroi, the chief editor of “Koha Ditore” also expressed alarm over hate-speech - and lack of focus on what matters - the inflation of 7.5%:

"…When there is so much hatred and so many insults spreading — especially through social media — it does not take much for a spark to ignite somewhere. And that leads nowhere. Amid all the commotion, it cannot conceal a fact that should concern us far more than Sami Lushtaku: prices in April, compared to the same period last year, increased by 7.5%. That is alarming. This is a matter of survival. The rest is theatre.”

Kosovo still prides itself on a surprisingly resilient democratic tradition for a “newborn” state: fiercely independent media, an outspoken civil society, competitive elections, and voters unafraid to challenge those in power. That is precisely why Kurti’s increasingly reckless political shenanigans matter. The real danger is not one ugly campaign, but the normalization of intimidation, conspiracies, online harassment, and permanent political division as tools of governance. Kosovo’s democracy has endured because no leader has managed to place himself above the state and this election may test that principle more than any before it.

Limbo is an interesting word. Limbo, the Caribbean dance, asks a simple question: how low can you go without falling? In Kosovo, the political leaders have been dancing limbo for quite some time. We spent years bending under ever-shifting conditions: lowering the bar, lowering the expectations of integration with Euro-Atlantic family, lowering the standards of governance.

In theology, limbo asks a very different question than the dance: it’s not “how low can you go,” but rather: what happens to those who exist on the threshold of salvation, neither fully condemned nor fully redeemed? So if limbo, the dance, is about physical balance under threshold of pain, theological limbo is about existential suspension, existing in a space of just waiting, uncertainty, and unresolved belonging, like the unbaptized souls who carried no personal sin. Not punishment, not reward, but an in-between that quietly asks: is it possible to exist indefinitely on the edge of grace? It is a condition that aptly describes Kosovo - a state that, since its “newborn” days, has hovered at the threshold of full inclusion in multilateral institutions such as the European Union, NATO, and the United Nations, never fully outside possibility of membership, but never quite inside.

And then we have the related, derivative concept of political limbo, where the key, blunt and uncomfortable question is how long can a state (or its people) be kept in a state of political, economic and diplomatic suspension without resolution?

Kosovo organized national elections in February 2025. Acting PM Kurti got the plurality of the votes, but not a governing majority. Opposition had a theoretical governing majority but couldn’t agree on actually realizing this parliamentary potential and got stuck in a quicksand of parliamentary procedures and incessant bickering over quintessentially unimportant issue of parliamentary speakership. Acting PM, aided by his then-ally President Osmani, managed to drag the process to December 2025, when Kosovo organized the second, snap, national elections.

This time around there was a clear governing majority. Kurti won 51%, more than enough to control the parliament and the government. It was widely expected (or at least I expected so) that Kurti would reach agreement to extend Osmani’s mandate or allow for another figure to become a President of mostly symbolic power (similar to Greek or Italian presidents). But Kurti backstabbed Osmani in the most spectacular fashion and then refused to contemplate to allow opposition keep the presidency (which was the only way to ensure 2/3 of parliamentary votes). Deadlines have passed and Kosovo is now facing its third parliamentary elections in 16 months, scheduled for June 7th.

In the meantime, we remain in the political limbo. While EU Commission now declares that Montenegro is on track to conclude its EU enlargement process in 2028 and Albania also marching forward in opening and closing of accession chapters, Kosovo has nothing to show in its EU and NATO integration process. Those few non-recognizing countries in EU and NATO are no closer to recognizing Kosovo’s independence. The suspended strategic dialogue with the US Government (under Biden) is still suspended under Trump.

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Croatia few days ago signed a deal with the United States on Wednesday to boost the expansion of gas pipelines and energy infrastructure throughout the Balkans. Zagreb has also struck a deal with Bosnia to build the long-discussed Southern Interconnection gas pipeline. The deal, reached on the sidelines of the Three Seas Initiative summit in Dubrovnik, is being framed by officials as a breakthrough that could loosen region’s dependence on Russian gas.

At the same time, Albania, the United States, and Greece signed a 20-year energy agreement valued at 6 billion dollars, which focuses on supplying American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Albania and developing regional energy infrastructure.

North Macedonia too, signed a deal with the US, paving the way for energy to become key for the bilateral strategic partnership as part of the strategic dialogue with the United States. Turkey and Bulgaria are also negotiating deals left and right to create a new energy landscape in the Balkans, independent from the Russian energy resources.

James Carafano, a leading foreign policy expert from Heritage Foundation, commented today on this state of affairs between the US and Kosovo: “Kosovo is probably one of the most pro-American countries in all of Europe. But, if I’m honest, I think Kosovo has left many opportunities untapped. We have an American government that wants to work with this region, that wants to build partnerships, that is looking for people to go to the U.S. and bring concrete agreements to the table. And, frankly, I don’t think we’re seeing that.”

Kosovo’s economy is already in limbo. Inflation is among the highest in Europe, reaching nearly 7% in March. The flagship Mediterranean Games project, scheduled for 2030, is facing delays in the construction of key sports and transport infrastructure due to political limbo. Meanwhile, mortgage and interest rates have climbed to nearly 10%, levels not seen since the early days of the banking system, exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis and access to capital for private companies.

Is there a way out of the limbo? In theology, limbo is not a prison with an escape route, it is a state resolved only by God’s mercy, not something navigable like a system. Exasperated Kosovar voters may hope for divine intervention, but more practical paths may exist. The opposition is better positioned to achieve a stronger result in June. Kurti is expected to win again, but the only path forward will likely require re-learning the lessons of Kosovo’s democratic tradition, where political cohabitation was once embraced. A presidency held by VV alongside a united opposition forming a government may be one possible scenario. An opposition president and a VV-led coalition government may be another.

Ultimately, what breaks political limbo is rarely a sudden rupture, but a slow epiphany - when rival actors recognize that permanence of crisis is an illusion, and that governance requires compromise rather than conquest.

There’s a bit more than a week left for Kosovo’s Kuvend to elect a new president. Failure to do so will trigger third national elections in a year, but one doesn’t sense any urgency in Kosovo to avoid this mind-numbing (and expensive) scenario. The Parliament already failed to elect the president back in March, which enabled the now-former President Osmani to disband the parliament and pave the road to elections in April/May. Alas, the Constitutional Court told Madame President “not so fast” and cancelled her decree, which bought four more weeks of reprieve for the Government majority to try and assemble the 2/3 majority needed to elect a President. One would have thought that the Government would do its utmost, with the greatest urgency and deepest engagement with the opposition, to identify a woman or a man fit to become President of the Republic, but Kurti doesn’t seem bothered in the slightest.

The opposition seems to be somewhat shocked that they get another attempt at casting the electoral die, while the Prime Minister is busy traveling across Europe, after spending much of his second mandate as a pariah, unwanted in EU capitals due to his perceived intransigence in the dialogue with Serbia. Kurti 3 decided to play nice and agreed to a relatively minor compromise in the dialogue with Serbia with regard to the execution of the Law on Foreigners, which gave him a bit of a diplomatic windfall: a bilateral meeting with Macron in Paris and with Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper in London. He even got to hobnob with global leftist leaders and billionaires at the conference of Global Progressive Mobilization in Barcelona, where he was in a cheerful mood to dispense ideological advice to the global Left: “Geopolitics is seen as belonging to the right. But in my view, this should change. Geopolitics should also belong to us on the left - to analyze, to think through, and to put forward our own positions. Geopolitics is far too important to be left to the right.”

Kurti didn’t show such enthusiasm for the mobilization of votes for the election of the President at home, where he continues with the old tactical habit of avoiding media, staying silent and waiting for the clock to run out. He had one or two meetings with LDK’s leader Lumir Abdixhiku, with whom he seems to show a faint interest in reaching an agreement on the presidency. He also sent apparently one or two WhatsApp messages to the leader of PDK, Bedri Hamza, and continued to completely ignore AAK. From this staggering lack of urgency, one can only deduce that Kurti’s focus is on finding an excuse for why the President was not elected, rather than finding an electable President.

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New campaign, old tricks

On the other hand, the Government seems to be in a great deal of rush to use the remaining week or two of Parliament to ram through its agenda. The Government tried to (unsuccessfully) push for approving the controversial Law on the Bureau of Confiscations, which was already deemed unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court of Kosovo. The Venice Commission, too, had raised serious concerns regarding the “compatibility of the provisions of this draft law with the minimum standards of human rights and the rule of law.”

A spate of other bills and decisions is being processed too, including the election of two judges to the Constitutional Court, which may change the balance in Kosovo’s primary and most credible legal vehicle for institutional checks and balances. A new attempt is also made by the VV to fully control the public broadcaster RTK and the Independent Commission of Media, which led the experts of European Centre for Press and Media Freedom to declare that the attempts of the government will “result that we will no longer have media pluralism in Kosovo, which is one of the foundations of the free society.”

The lack of focus on governance is taking a significant economic toll. Inflation in Kosovo was already among the highest in Europe before the war in Iran and has reached 6.7% on an annual basis in the month of March. The IMF has lowered its projections for economic growth due to inflation, a decline in exports, and weakening private sector demand. Energy prices have risen even further in April, hitting all layers of society and the economy hard. The Government has refused to lower VAT on oil imports, but the word on the street is that the Government is planning a massive “inflation package” of circa €200 million. It is hard not to view this move through the prism of electoral needs to pump money into key voting demographics. Kurti has already spent €67 million in February to dispense the “13th salary” to all public sector employees.

An interesting side note here: the Kosovar Anti-Corruption Agency published its annual income declarations for all public officials, and the one self-declared by Albin Kurti raised a few eyebrows and inspired countless memes. The 51-year-old Prime Minister of Kosovo declared that he has never taken out any mortgage, does not own a car, does not own any property, has zero declared assets, and currently has a total of €16.41 in all of his bank accounts. The Robespierre of Kosovo thus stayed true to his image of a “poor mouse,” but the public reaction to a not-so-young leader having no more than sixteen euros to his name generated more ridicule than respect. As one economics analyst quipped: “No serious country should have a prime minister with only 16 euros at his disposal. In any case, this is not normal. So either we are dealing with a big and dangerous gambler who has gone “all in”, or with a person who has not managed to save even 100 euros for basic family security in emergency situations.”

Opposition: same old, same old…

One would expect that the fact that Prime Minister Kurti, who won 51% of the vote in December, shows a stunning lack of ability to actually govern and to lead negotiations in the election of the President would reinvigorate the Kosovar opposition. Here is a man who cannot make even the most modest of compromises in sharing power and is willing to risk new elections and turmoil because he cannot stand being overshadowed by his former bestie Vjosa Osmani, and is willing to block Kosovo in his attempts to control all levers of power.

But opposition seems slow as ever to capitalize: LDK is hoping it can be invited into a power-sharing agreement by the government, though Kurti’s laissez-faire attitude doesn’t really seem promising for such a scenario. PDK is gearing towards elections, hoping that those will be held in June with a far lower turn-out, which may (or may not) give the party a more significant share of MPs from its stable pool of voters. Osmani on the other hand is continuing to air her grievances on the media and is in a pre-election mode of her own, visiting Kosovar towns for a “post-presidential tour”.

In Kosovo, tragedy and farce have learned to share the same stage. For now, the curtain has not fallen. But the audience, increasingly familiar with the script, may soon stop believing in improvisation.

A group of eminent journalists and publishers from Kosovo have addressed the institutions of the European Union and the Government of the United States with a letter, in which they raise serious concerns about the way proceedings are being conducted at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague, particularly in the case against Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi, and Jakup Krasniqi.

In the letter, among other things, it is stated that these concerns are not political, but are based on reporting from independent media.

Participating journalists:

1. Blendi Fevziu (Klan TV, Albania)

2. Adriatik Kelmendi (Klan Kosova, Kosovo)

3. Afërdita Saraqini – Kelmendi (RTV 21, Kosovo)

4. Lirim Mehmetaj (VOX Kosova, Kosovo)

5. Berat Buzhala (Nacionale, Kosovo)

6. Ermal Panduri (RTV Dukagjini, Kosovo)

7. Sidorela Gjoni (Top Channel, Albania)

8. Leonard Kerquki (T7 & Gazeta Express, Kosovo)

9. Alban Dudushi (RTSH, Albania)

10. Kushtrim Sadiku (Kanal 10, Kosovo)

FULL STATEMENT: JUSTICE CANNOT BE SELECTIVE

Addressed to the institutions of the European Union and the Government of the United States

We, a group of journalists from Kosovo and the region, raise serious concerns about the way proceedings are being conducted at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague, particularly in the case against Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi, and Jakup Krasniqi.

These concerns are not political. They are based on reporting from independent media, reactions from civil society, institutional assessments, and the positions of legal experts.

The EU and the United States not only supported the creation of this court — they guaranteed that it would represent the highest standards of justice. For this very reason, any deviation from these standards is a direct test of their credibility.

Today, that test is being seriously called into question.

– Judicial interventions beyond the role of a neutral arbiter
– Detention exceeding five years without a final decision
– Delays in proceedings beyond any standard of “reasonable time”
– Lack of transparency through closed hearings
– Admission of evidence without sufficient verification
– Decisions that deviate from fundamental European principles such as lex mitior

These are not procedural details. These are issues that affect the very essence of justice.

In this context, we ask for clear answers:

– Who bears responsibility for such prolonged detention?
– How is the impartiality of the trial guaranteed?
– Why is transparency the exception rather than the rule?
– What happens if violations of international standards are established?
– And above all: is this court functioning as a mechanism of justice — or as an instrument with double standards?

Kosovo amended its Constitution under international pressure, with the belief that justice would be fair, transparent, and equal.

Today, that belief is wavering.

These questions do not harm justice.
Silence does.

If a court built in the name of European values loses public trust, it risks transforming from a symbol of justice into a symbol of selectivity.

And that is a cost no one can afford.

Find below the opinion piece published by Ambassador Daan Everts, one of the most experienced European diplomats engaged in the former Yugoslav crisis. He led the OSCE Mission in Kosovo from 1999 to 2003, in the crucial time of Kosovo’s post-war developments. Republishing his text here without editing.

There is a notorious prison in Scheveningen: the Oranjehotel. Dutch resistance fighters during World War II were imprisoned here, often until their execution. It is now a museum paying tribute to the heroes of the resistance.

In the same building complex, which no longer houses prisoners, four resistance fighters from Kosovo have been imprisoned for five and a half years, more than two of which were spent in pre-trial detention. Not as resistance heroes, as they are regarded in Kosovo, but as defendants charged with "war crimes," "crimes against humanity," and "participation in a criminal organization." A poignant irony.

The four detainees are not just anyone: a former prime minister and president, two former speakers of parliament, and a former member of parliament/party leader. All four belonged to the leadership of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, or UCK in Albanian) that sought to end the Serbian apartheid regime in Kosovo in the 1990s. They opted for guerrilla warfare because negotiations on far-reaching self-government, which Milosevic had taken away from Kosovo, proved fruitless. Although they reluctantly accepted the Western-sponsored Rambouillet peace agreement in March 1999, the struggle escalated into full-scale war when the Serbian government under Milosevic refused to agree to it. As in the Yugoslav War, the Serbs once again failed to seize the opportunity for a positive outcome.

That Yugoslavian fratricidal war had legal consequences in The Hague with the so-called Yugoslavia tribunal that tried war crimes. Not entirely without reason, this court was accused in Serbia of anti-Serbian bias. So when a Swiss senator from the Council of Europe, Dick Marty, published a report in 2011 accusing KLA leaders of nothing less than trafficking in organs from Serbian prisoners, Russia and Serbia were quick to demand special legal proceedings for Albanian Kosovars. The allegation had previously been made by Carla del Ponte and later repeated by Clint Williamson of the Yugoslavia tribunal, without any further evidence.

Under heavy international pressure and at the internal insistence of the then Deputy Prime Minister Thaci—one of the four defendants—Kosovo, now independent, agreed to a special court in 2015. Although it was made part of the Kosovar legal system, it was established in The Hague as a completely independent, international institution that enjoys supremacy over all Kosovar legal institutions. It is mainly financed by the EU and related countries but, remarkably, is run almost entirely by Americans. The Public Prosecutor has always been an American, as have the presiding judge and the lawyers for the four defendants. American justice in action on Raamweg in The Hague!

When the final indictment was published in October 2020, it appeared that the original, main reason for establishing a special court—criminal organ trafficking—no longer existed. Other charges, such as those mentioned above, had to justify its existence. More mundane reasons also contribute to the tribunal's stubborn persistence: apart from the hundreds of highly sought-after, often tax-free jobs involved, the countless hundreds millions of euros invested, and the international indifference to this process and the fate of the four Kosovars, now that attention is focused on much greater war crimes in much more important parts of the world.

The prosecutor has now announced his sentence demand: 45 years in prison. For those involved, this effectively means life imprisonment, as they are all over 50 years of age. The sad thing is that the so-called field commanders of the KLA, who were much closer to the acts of resistance in the war zone, were previously acquitted of similar charges by the Yugoslavia tribunal in The Hague.

As I have experienced firsthand, the KLA was highly decentralized, not to say quite disorderly. Local resistance groups paid little or no attention to the highest leadership. It is diddicult to understand how they can be accused of involvement in local guerrilla activities, which undoubtedly included murderous acts of revenge.

Former President Thaci, for example, spent almost the entire war abroad. It is also highly unlikely that NATO would have intervened in the conflict in favor of the Kosovo Liberation Army if its well-informed intelligence service had labeled the KLA leaders as members of a criminal organization. Various witnesses from the highest military and diplomatic circles, including NATO's then Supreme Commander, have confirmed in recent weeks the improbability of command lines between the formal KLA leadership and local resistance groups.

Looking at the big picture, I fear that international justice is not being served by this dubious trial.

A week or two ago, Kosovo seemed on track to finally appoint all vacant institutional positions after a protracted political crisis that lasted over a year, marked by endless parliamentary maneuvers and two rounds of national elections.

The breakthrough came after the national elections of 28 December 2025. The ruling party, VV, led by Albin Kurti - who relishes the politics of chaos and crisis - won by a far larger majority than anyone expected (or feared), securing the stable parliamentary majority needed to appoint the Speaker of Parliament as well as Prime Minister Kurti for his third consecutive mandate (the first was brief, after he lost a vote of confidence).

The only remaining piece of the puzzle was the position of the President of the Republic. Vjosa Osmani, in her lame-duck period, went into diplomatic hyperdrive to secure another mandate. She delivered a few recognitions of Kosovo (supported by President Erdoğan’s diplomatic goodwill) and also pivoted strongly toward the Trump administration - from signing Kosovo onto the Board of Peace to organizing a presidential screening of the film “Melania” and gathering support from individual Albanian-American entrepreneurs and members of the U.S. Congress.

Alas, none of it mattered, as Kurti did not appear in the mood to forget or forgive Osmani’s perceived intransigence in foreign policy. It is an ironic twist (and quite a backstabbing move from Kurti), considering that Osmani also worked tirelessly last year to help Kurti block Kosovo’s parliamentary life by agreeing to constitute the parliament based on unconstitutional procedure (as decided so belatedly by the Constitutional Court), nominating him twice for prime minister and choosing the election date in the middle of Christmas holidays with the greatest possible diaspora participation in mind, a key constituency for VV.

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As Osmani’s chances for a second mandate rapidly faded, Kurti moved to propose a member of Adem Jashari’s family for president. This proposal would likely have secured the votes of Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) and Alliance for the Future of Kosovo (AAK), but first Murat Jashari, a respected professor of law, and then Bekim Jashari, a former maverick mayor, both refused to enter the presidential race, choosing to keep the family legacy outside party politics.

The vote for the President must happen by 3rd of March. First two rounds of voting require a quorum of two-thirds of MPs. This specific provision always increased the tensions during previous presidential elections in Kosovo. This is why Kosovo parliamentary parties always had to compromise on presidency.

Bedri Hamza of PDK met Kurti yesterday and proposed a formula of agreeing on a “credible figure” put forward by PDK in agreement with VV. Hamza’s stance is clear: PDK has indicated some readiness to vote for Murat Jashari, but since that option fell through, it is now ready to reach an agreement with VV by nominating a candidate acceptable to both PDK and VV.

Kurti responded with a twist: as Murat Jashari distanced himself from the race, VV will propose its own candidate, and whoever secures the 61 votes should become president, with all parties providing quorum. This would inevitably mean that VV would control the premiership, the parliament, and the presidency. That is hardly a compromise the opposition is ready to support. While half of Kosovo’s voters did give Kurti a strong mandate as prime minister, the presidency requires a broader majority - and a willingness to compromise.

We’re still unsure what is the LDK stance. The rumor is that party leader Lumir Abdixhiku has already proposed Lufti Haziri to Kurti. Haziri is a moderate LDK patrician who has served as a Deputy Prime minister in past. AAK has already nominated Ramush Haradinaj as president, but with its 6 MPs, the party of Dukagjin region is in no position to have a serious role in negotiations.

It seems doubtful that Kurti will accept either the PDK or LDK proposal for president. He appears comfortable with the prospect of parliament failing to elect a president and voters being pushed toward a third round of national elections within a year. VV is in government, has already planned to disburse a 13th salary to public sector employees, and to allocate an additional €100 to pensioners and students ahead of the forthcoming Eid. The party is flush with cash and can use its incumbent position (and a newly approved state budget) to curry favor with economically fatigued voters. Kurti sees the opposition as fragmented, demoralized, and in dire straits. The leftist Prime minister of Kosovo has even stated that the 51.1% of votes from December elections have provided him with a heavenly mandate, as if “God himself wrote with a pen 51.1%”.

Only week ago, it seemed Kosovo would elect a President and most likely candidate was Murat Jashari. Kurti kept his cards close to his chest but as we approach the actual vote, he doesn’t really seem to have a reserve joker up his sleeve.

It’s a high-stakes gamble this. Kurti is playing a game of chicken with the opposition, hoping his political opponents will blink first - much like the fatal showdown in Rebel Without a Cause - but hubris has a way of blinding even the most disciplined tacticians, and if no one swerves, the resulting crash could end up weakening his authority and shorten his mandate as a prime minister.

In the end, he may discover that brinkmanship is a dangerous substitute for governance.

Madame President must be a bit stressed these days. When Vjosa Osmani was elected as only the second woman ever to serve Kosovo as President of the Republic, the political landscape looked very similar to what we see now in Parliament. Prime Minister Albin Kurti was riding high on the back of a deep electoral victory, the opposition was fragmented, and Osmani was a shoe-in thanks to the votes of Kurti’s Vetëvendosje, the non-Serb minority MPs, and the opposition Democratic League of Kosovo, a severely weakened party that nevertheless provided the necessary two-thirds quorum.

Five years later, Kurti is still riding high on the back of a new electoral tsunami, the opposition remains fragmented, and Osmani is once again a candidate for the presidency. But this is where the similarities end.

While in 2021 Kurti and Osmani were in a formal and seemingly happy coalition, Osmani’s political party Guxo has since melted under Vetëvendosje’s large tent. LDK’s vote is far from assured, and most importantly, Albin Kurti has shown a distinct lack of enthusiasm for Osmani. He has not endorsed her. He has not even politely acknowledged her desire to continue as president. He has adamantly refused to compliment or even utter anything positive about Osmani’s signature on the creation of the Board of Peace and her diplomatic offensive in Washington, D.C.. Kurti’s silence is indeed deafening - to use an old cliché.

Kosovo’s Kuvendi must meet and start electing the president by March 4. There are three rounds of voting, but the first two rounds require the participation of at least two-thirds (80 out of 120) of all MPs. Albin Kurti has established a majority of 66 MPs consisting of his parliamentary group and a conglomerate of Turkish, Roma, Bosniak, and Egyptian parties, along with the single Serb MP who does not belong to Serbian List. Fourteen MPs from the Democratic League of Kosovo could create a quorum, but LDK leader Lumir Abdixhiku, still licking his wounds from a divisive party congress where he barely scraped a vote of confidence after his (non)resignation, has already indicated that LDK MPs may decide freely whom to support - knowing well that several backbenchers will not endorse Vjosa Osmani.

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What can happen next?

Osmani can still win. She is, after all, the incumbent president. Everyone knows that failure to elect a president after three rounds of voting will inevitably trigger new snap elections. If Kurti stands firmly behind Osmani, it is difficult to imagine that a majority of LDK MPs - as well as potentially AAK - would boycott the session, thereby causing new elections and inviting fresh uncertainty about their own electoral fortunes. So, by and large, Osmani ought to be the bookmakers’ favorite for a second mandate.

Yet there are glaring uncertainties. PDK is unlikely to vote for Osmani, based on statements from party officials (despite her too-little-too-late pivot to the issue of Hashim Thaçi’s trial in The Hague). LDK has given mixed signals, asking for a “political agreement” with VV on the election of the president - something many have interpreted as a (pipe dream) desire to negotiate a broader formula that could include LDK joining the government. AAK has not indicated in any meaningful way that it supports Osmani, instead proposing former prime minister and party chairman Ramush Haradinaj as an “opposition candidate.” The numbers for Osmani simply do not appear to be there - especially since Kurti himself has refused so far to provide an unflinching support, or indeed any support at all.

Part of Osmani’s problem is that she has failed to cultivate durable political alliances inside Kosovo. She did not develop strong personal ties with MPs across the political aisle, instead often behaving more like a partisan actor than a unifying president. She (and her husband, who has shown a propensity to act as a one-man praetorian guard to his presidential spouse) has also damaged her relationship with much of the media. A senior correspondent of the prestigious German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung even tweeted that Osmani engages in “intellectual prostitution.”

Osmani won her mandate on the back of a coalition with Kurti, but since those early days, their relationship has been under strain, with tensions occasionally spilling into public view. Her good relations with the United States are not necessarily an advantage with Kurti, who is known to tolerate little political competition around him.

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So really, what are the other options?

Rumors suggest that Kurti has already spoken to a member of Adem Jashari’s family about a potential presidency. That person is most likely Bekim Jashari, who once ran (unsuccessfully) for mayor of Skenderaj with VV’s support. He is considered a loyal Kurti ally. A candidate from the Jashari family might entice PDK and AAK to provide quorum.

Another possible candidate is Glauk Konjufca, the former speaker of parliament and newly appointed foreign minister who is considered as somewhat of a patrician within VV. His candidacy would ensure VV controls the trifecta of governance: the presidency, parliament, and government. Yet he is also regarded as relatively moderate and is well liked across the partisan divide. Many opposition MPs respect him and may be far more inclined to support him than Osmani.

It would not be surprising if a completely unexpected candidate were to emerge, a woman or man who would pose no threat to Kurti’s forthcoming drive to fully consolidate power, but who commands a modicum of respect sufficient to cross the quorum threshold.

There is only one reason why none of us (or even MPs themselves) know who will be president in a fortnight: Kurti is silent. He is keeping his cards very close to his chest. The situation underscores just how powerful he has become in Kosovo. His lack of transparency on this and many other matters is troubling for institutional watchdogs, media, and civil society, yet it has not harmed him electorally. He cultivates, almost banally and comically, the mystique of the “man with a plan.”

Kosovo will most likely elect a president in a few weeks. Kosovo’s PM has started consultations and has already met PDK’s affable technocrat leader Bedri Hamza. Hamza gave a pointes statement after the meeting: “We do not support candidacies that do not represent civic unity, in accordance with the spirit of the Constitution. I hope there will be reflection from those who have the constitutional responsibility to propose candidates with broad support, avoiding short-term party calculations." Kurti will meet rest of opposition leaders later this week, but again - we’re far still from the white smoke up the parliamentary chimney.

No one wants new snap elections. We do not know who she or he will be, but we do know that the only acceptable candidate will be one who meets Kurti’s expectations for remaking Kosovo according to his own image and ushering in what he has called the “Third Republic.”

A president unwilling to provide guardrails against the capture of independent institutions, the Constitutional Court, public service, intelligence and security agencies, and other oversight bodies, will not find a place in Kurti’s calculations.

A background note

We are approaching the very end of the trial of Kosovo’s former President Hashim Thaçi and other leaders of the KLA at the Specialist Chambers in The Hague. This special court (together with the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office), formally part of Kosovo’s legal system but operating in the Netherlands with fully international staff, was established by the Kosovo Assembly in 2014, after immense pressure from both the Obama Administration and the EU. As a number of academics have argued: “Specialist Chambers was imposed on Kosovo primarily by the EU using Kosovo’s stabilization and association process with the EU as a political instrument to accept the creation of the Specialist Chambers.”

The KSC itself was created largely in response to ghastly allegations in the 2010 Council of Europe report authored by Swiss senator Dick Marty, which claimed that Kosovo Prime minister Thaçi and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in organ harvesting during Kosovo war.

The Marty Report was drafted as a CoE report, following requests from mostly far-right and far-left members of Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe, led by Konstantin Kosachev, a Russian MP, then chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs from the Russian Federation. Kosachev is now sanctioned by the EU for his role in enabling Russian occupation of Ukraine. In his memoirs, the former Serbian Ambassador to Switzerland Milan St. Protic has admitted that he has provided “evidence” from Serbian government to Dick Marty to ensure the publication of this infamous report.

Ironically, Dick Marty spent his last years of life under armed Swiss police protection following intelligence from Swiss state that a assassination plot by Serbian secret service was targeting him and his wife. Marty himself publicly stated that Serbian intelligence structures were behind threats on his life, aimed at framing KLA leadership during the trial.

The indictment against Thaçi and others was made public in June 2020, at a politically sensitive moment while Thaçi was flying to Washington DC for meeting with President Trump and expected to participate in U.S.-brokered talks with Serbia.

Former prosecutor Jack Smith, an American prosecutor appointed in 2018, oversaw the indictment process before later leaving the post in 2022 to take a role as a Special Prosecutor in a case involving President Trump.

The trial has been unusually lengthy. Pre-trial procedures alone lasted more than two years, leading to accusations that Smith launched the indictment before having the evidence.

During this period, Thaçi and co-defendants have remained in pre-trial detention since 2020, with judges repeatedly rejecting requests for release, despite several NATO member countries providing sovereign guarantees for house arrest of the former President of Kosovo in their respective territories.

The prosecution’s case, led by Smith, has relied on two central premises:

1. That the KLA functioned as a “joint criminal enterprise” with a “real” army with a clear command structure and unambiguous chain of command.

2. That Hashim Thaçi was a central military leader within that organized structure.

The defence, coordinated by Pierre-Richard Prosper, the former US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, has countered that:

1. The KLA functioned largely as a highly decentralized, mostly rural uprising that emerged as a people’s liberation response to Serbian state atrocities.

2. Thaçi’s role was primarily political rather than operational or military across different zones of KLA activity.

Defense witnesses for Thaçi included Wesley Clark, a retired United States Army four-star general and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe; Christopher Hill, former US ambassador and Assistant Secretary of State under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama; James Rubin, former Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs under President Clinton; James Covey, former Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Kosovo; John Stewart Duncan (OBE), a senior British diplomat seconded to NATO, etc.

I, for one, believe the defense has done more than enough to ensure there is more than reasonable doubt in the indictment. Prosecution has failed to prove that KLA had an unambiguous command and control. As Lord Robertson, the Former Secretary General of NATO has quipped, the KLA was more of a “ragtag army” with no real leadership. Individual crimes that have happened as acts of revenge or criminality cannot be prescribed to an organized, planned and executed criminal process of a “joint criminal enterprise”

But this trial has reportedly cost close to one billion euros, and it remains to be seen in spring whether nefarious political considerations will prevail over justice and historical truth.

The Essay

On this occasion, I am republishing an essay - or more precisely, a book review - written by Dr. Nevenka Tromp in 2023. She read this in an event in Prishtina which I attended, in presence of journalists, foreign diplomats and Albanian politicians from Kosovo, Albania and North Macedonia.

From 2000 to 2012, Dr. Tromp worked as a researcher on the Leadership Research Team in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), where she served as principal researcher on history and politics in the trial of Slobodan Milošević. She also led research related to the investigation into events in Srebrenica conducted by the Dutch Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), commissioned by the Dutch government.

The Meaning of “Myth”

The term “myth” refers to a traditional story, often of unknown origin, that explains natural phenomena, customs, or beliefs of a culture. A “myth” typically involves gods, heroes, and supernatural events that articulate cultural values, explain the unknown, and provide moral lessons.

In colloquial use, the word “myth” usually refers to a slightly exaggerated narrative of heroism and success that does not correctly depict reality. It is used as a figure of speech in which the accuracy of the factual foundation is subordinated to the moral message the myth conveys.

Foundational Myths and Nation States

Every nation-state will — sooner or later — come up with a relatively short but comprehensive story about its foundation. This type of narrative is also called a foundational myth. “Myth” does not imply that the story is false, but that the story conveys a simplistic, yet heroic, interpretation of past events.

The foundational myth becomes a semi-“official” version of the origins of the nation and of the way the nation-state was created for a general audience. A foundational myth will usually include: a few defining historical events, such as the date and place of at least one important political gathering; the beginning and end dates of a war deemed a liberation war; a massacre of civilians that symbolizes collective suffering of people belonging to the nation; and the names of a few individuals who distinguished themselves in this liberation struggle with exceptional leadership, wisdom, and bravery.

Foundational myths enter the “collective memory” of a nation because they are comprehensive, relatable, and easy to grasp. The foundational myth, as such, serves the purpose of cultural transmission of values and beliefs accessible to every member of society. By presenting succinct narratives of unwavering bravery of its main protagonists, a myth captures the imagination and attention of listeners, ensuring that important messages are easily remembered and passed down through generations.

For example, a foundational myth will carve out patriotism and heroism by presenting these as individual and collective virtues of the “good” side and contrasting them with the adverse “evil” side. It will celebrate liberation from oppression as the ultimate victory of the “good.”

The Foundational Myth of Kosovo

The foundational myth of the Kosovo state has been built upon two pillars. The first pillar in the narrative is its rebellion against the apartheid oppression and repression against the Kosovo Albanian population by Serbia during the 1990s. The suffering and heroism of Kosovo people led to liberation, and liberation led to the creation of Kosovo as an independent state.

The second pillar in the narrative is the support of the “free world” — consisting of the major liberal democracies — for Kosovo in its liberation war and the subsequent declaration of independence in 2008 and beyond. The role of liberal democracies’ support of Kosovo — in words and deeds — makes Kosovo’s foundational myth part of the global struggle between “good” and “evil” that the world has faced in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Kosovo’s determination to side with the “free world” of liberal democracies was not merely a security issue at the time when Kosovo’s fragmented armed forces took up the fight against Serbia’s security forces in the 1990s and needed military support to win the war. It was an important civilizational choice made by Kosovo’s leadership during and immediately after the war of the 1990s. Kosovo pledged to become a liberal democracy and, on the path to becoming one, it has dedicated its politics to cooperation and not confrontation in resolving the hurdles on its path to becoming a fully functioning de jure state. It also means that Kosovo, as a state, adopted the highest standards of rule of law and has pledged to organize its society and political institutions accordingly.

The Book and Its Place in the Foundational Narrative

The book published about President Hashim Thaçi’s role in the creation of Kosovo as an independent state is an important piece of prose that underlines both pillars in Kosovo’s foundational myth: the suffering and heroism of the Kosovo people that led to victory, and the dedication of Kosovo to the rule-driven international liberal order, as expressed in practice through its continuous cooperation with the Euro-Atlantic alliance and the UN.

The continuous close cooperation with the UN, US, and the EU is thus also the guarantor of the irreversibility of Kosovo’s independence and a guarantor that Kosovo needs to pursue a strategy to transition slowly but steadily from a “de facto state” to a “de jure state” and a future member of the UN — something that can only be achieved with the support of its allies.

President Thaçi’s book opens many more complex issues that derive from the structure and status of Kosovo as a “de facto” state. When this book was first published in English, the Kosovo Specialist Chambers (KSC) already existed. The KSC’s official website cites the Council of Europe report compiled under the authority of Dick Marty as the reason for the court’s establishment.

In Marty’s report on the alleged crimes committed by KLA leaders, the region of Drenica features prominently. The name of Hashim Thaçi — who, at the time the Marty report was published in 2010, was Prime Minister of Kosovo — has been mentioned over 30 times throughout the document.

The frequency of the appearance of President Thaçi’s name in the report indicated that the authors of the report — and those who were feeding information to the authors — were aiming at the creation of a specialist court and that President Thaçi could most probably be one of the indictees. Paradoxically, the court could be formally established in 2015 only after Hashim Thaçi, as Prime Minister, pushed hard to lobby for amendments to the Kosovo Constitution that would allow a court of such format to be outplaced to The Hague, the Netherlands.

This did not contribute to President Thaçi’s popularity among his fellow Kosovars. The opposition used it in the political power struggle against him and his party; his own party members and prospective voters took it against him as well. In the elections of the fall of 2019, his party lost the elections — partly because of his support for the creation of the KSC.

In the same year — 2019 — coinciding with the time when his party lost elections to the opposition — the then still-sitting President of Kosovo, President Thaçi, received a request for the first of the interviews with investigators representing the SPO, the KSC’s Prosecutor’s Office. By the summer of 2020, the SPO announced indictments against President Thaçi and three more high-level military and political KLA officials. The trial started in February 2023 and is still ongoing, with no judgment day in sight yet.

Why Is the Personal History of Hashim Thaçi Important for the Foundational Myth of the Kosovo State?

Firstly, it represents the complexity of historical processes, where no one-dimensional, straightforward, and continuous story exists. This is when and where the foundational myth needs to be expanded — or followed — by history writing. The static power of a myth needs to be transformed into the dynamic process of history writing, where event history needs to include causality — how did things happen and why?

Secondly, this book presents a typical historical source. It is an authorized biography, or rather memoirs, the difference being that a biography usually covers a whole life of an individual, while memoirs are concentrated on a specific period and events of someone’s life. In this case, President Thaçi’s life before he was indicted for serious crimes as defined by International Humanitarian Law, for the period of several months during the armed conflict in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999.

Thirdly, this book demonstrates the complexities in the transitional period, where legal mechanisms to deal with past atrocities and human rights abuses can upend the heroism of the winning side by imposing legal accountability for crimes. What does a transitional society that exists largely of victims of crimes inflicted by the other (defeated) side do with its own heroes being indicted by a court? How does it deal with a hero who maybe is — or will be — found guilty of violations of International Humanitarian Law? Shall (and could) a conviction and a prison sentence define this person definitively, overshadowing all former military, diplomatic, and political achievements?

Foundational Myths vs History Writing

Foundational myths are important and useful as collective memory narratives that convey, in a nutshell, important parts of a nation’s history. They are useful for dates to be made national holidays, for street names named after fallen soldiers, and for monuments in central squares that visualize suffering, heroism, and martyrdom. They are good for short history lessons in schools and other state institutions, but no foundational myth can replace the writing of national history.

If one defines history as an interpretation of the past, then the recording, collecting, and preserving of written documents, artefacts, audio, video, and electronic data need to be taken seriously by every nation-state aiming to write its own history in the language its citizens understand. This applies even more to a young state such as Kosovo. Many of you still vividly remember the war years — and many of you have never put your memories on paper to preserve them for future generations. President Thaçi’s book is a good example of why every personal account of past events is important. His book would only gain in importance if more similar accounts about the same period from many angles are published. This book should serve as encouragement for all of you with war memories and a story to tell to do so.

The Debate Around the Creation of the KSC

I shall now turn to the central issue of President Thaçi’s role in the formation of the KSC. The book touches upon it but does not follow the controversy that has been ongoing and has remained unanswered to date. The core issue of the debate is whether President Thaçi’s support in creating the KSC was an act of political weakness or political strength.

How could he support its creation, knowing that he would most probably be one of the first indictees, given the frequency of his name being repeated in the Marty report? In past years, we have heard and read all sorts of interpretations that cast President Thaçi’s role in the creation of the KSC as political weakness. This narrative is best summarized as “a political bargain that went wrong.” President Thaçi allegedly cooperated with the US and EU on the foundation of the KSC because he was given guarantees that if he helped with the constitutional amendments vote, he would not be indicted. But once the amendments to the Kosovo Constitution were adopted and the KSC was founded, his Western allies let President Thaçi down, and he was indicted after all.

This discourse of a “bargain gone wrong” casts President Thaçi’s role in the formation of the court as leadership weakness. His allies failed him, the KSC has the potential to undermine the heroic foundations of the liberation war as depicted in Kosovo’s foundational myth, and he and his war comrades ended up indicted for defending their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters from Serbia’s apartheid repression.

Another discourse interprets the role of President Thaçi in the creation of the KSC as leadership strength. It goes like this: President Thaçi, understanding the risks that once the court existed he would most probably be indicted himself, put the long-term strategic interest of Kosovo before his own personal and professional interests.

How could he not cooperate with Kosovo’s allies on this or any other issue that could jeopardize the role of the US as Kosovo’s patron state? Kosovo, as a “de facto state,” has serious limitations as an active actor in international relations. For Kosovo to continue as a “de facto state,” it needs at least one patron state to support and advance Kosovo’s interests where Kosovo cannot do it bilaterally or multilaterally.

The relationship between a “de facto state” and its patron state cannot be an equal partnership, because a “de facto state” is more dependent on long-term support from a more powerful patron state than the patron state needs the “de facto state” it chose to support. This partnership can exist and continue as a long-term commitment only when it is based on trust, respect, and mutual understanding.

If President Thaçi had refused active cooperation on this issue, where would Kosovo be now — almost 10 years later — and how would Kosovo’s citizens be looking at their immediate future without the support of allies?

The question that needs to be raised here is: Why did Kosovo’s allies, with the US in the lead, find it necessary to create a specialist court to deal with accountability for alleged crimes committed by the KLA? Was the creation of the KSC a concession to Serbia — a tactical step aimed at appeasing Serbia and keeping it participating in dialogue talks for normalization of relations with Kosovo in the post-2008 period, which would compel Serbia to fulfill its part of the bargain, i.e., to recognize Kosovo as an independent state within its current borders? What happens if Serbia, despite all concessions made, does not fulfill its part of the bargain? If so, is there any contingency plan by the US, EU, and QUINT to act if Serbia, after achieving the interim objective of prosecuting the KLA at the KSC in The Hague, does not fulfill any of the concrete agreements on the path to normalization?

Liberal Democracy, International Law, and the Court

A second reason why President Thaçi’s cooperation with Kosovo’s allies in the foundation of the KSC is important is that once Kosovo was constituted as a liberal democracy, President Thaçi could not but support a court that deals with International Humanitarian Law. Compliance with IHL and human rights, and their application in practice, are among the most important achievements of the international liberal order since its development after the end of World War I in 1918, when the League of Nations was founded, followed by the foundation of the UN in 1945.

Kosovo, as a state, adopted all fundamental principles of the international liberal order, and its commitment to this order is reflected in its cooperation in the constitution of the KSC. Complying with US and EU direction, the cooperative attitude of the Kosovo government headed by Hashim Thaçi demonstrated the determination of the Kosovo state to stay on the path of liberal democracy and to stay on the right side of history. President Thaçi accepted the accountability mechanism of the KSC with the expectation that the trials at the court would be fair and the verdicts just.

Justice, Trials, and Historical Truth

The outcome of his trial in The Hague will be a watershed moment to revisit how right or wrong President Thaçi was when putting his trust in Kosovo’s allies and their institutions.

Judicial and legal justice is peculiar — it produces verdicts based on the test of whether a person has been found guilty beyond reasonable doubt on the charges in the indictment. The criminal process is not calibrated to prove someone’s innocence. There are many reasons why the “truth” coming from the forensic process of a criminal trial cannot be held in higher regard than political or historical truth. We cannot allow lawyers and judges to have the last word for many good reasons.

Legal justice and legal truth are frozen in time. Once a judgment is final, it remains frozen in time. If a criminal trial has been finished with a final appeal judgment, there is still a way to reopen the case if new evidence appears that might be deemed powerful enough to reverse the judgment and verdict. If a defendant has died in the meantime, there is no legal way to reopen the case.

Memoirs, History, and Political Legacy

President Thaçi’s book shows the importance of memoirs, diaries, biographies, and autobiographies as historical sources for critical history writing of Kosovo’s independence path. It needs to evaluate, in stages, the historical periods that led to current realities. History writing needs to move narratives about the past from one-dimensional heroism and martyrdom to critical evaluation of protagonists who were in decision-making leadership positions.

Foundational myth narratives need national heroes and martyrs, but historical narratives need to emancipate themselves from too much emphasis on the contribution of individuals by balancing it with evaluation of historical processes depicting national and international dynamics. President Thaçi’s book is a very important step in this direction.

But this book is more than a historical source about a very relevant period of Kosovo’s history. This book opens many ongoing political issues that Kosovo, as an independent state, faces today.

A Generational Story

This book makes us see Hashim Thaçi as a representative of a whole generation of young Kosovars who were coming of age in a trying political time at the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s. From growing up as teenagers, apprentices, and students, they became activists rejecting Serbia’s apartheid system in Kosovo.

They took up arms to protect their homes, mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters from a state that was supposed to protect and not oppress them. This generation of Kosovars, despite their young age, rose to the occasion and fought the war that will be marked in the history of Kosovo as the “liberation war.” After the war, they became politicians.

It is generally known that people usually become politicians out of idealism or opportunism. Regardless of their initial motivation, the best politicians become those who eventually become pragmatists — those who understand politics as the “art of what is possible.” This “art” also implies that a good politician is one who can distinguish between his or her private and particular interests and the public and national interest of the state he or she represents. This requires every politician to practice the skills of cooperation and compromise. Political skills such as bargaining, deal-making, and compromising replace the heroism and bravery needed to win a war.

From Politician to Statesman

What is then the path that an effective politician has to make to transition into a statesman?

A statesman is a politician who, in challenging times, can make visionary decisions to advance his people’s interests and the interests of the state he represents. A statesman needs to be a good tactician but an even better strategist who might sacrifice some temporary state interests for the sake of a long-term future position that would benefit his people and the state he represents.

A statesman will find ways to cooperate and persuade others to follow strategic goals and give legitimacy to achieve consensus for a political vision that might not be equally clear to everybody. A statesman is a politician who will be unselfish and bold enough to advance his vision even when most of the people around him do not see as far as he does at that moment.

In Kosovo’s political history, there have been many able politicians who successfully articulated and represented the interests of the Kosovo people, but who among them have been perceived as statesmen? Not too many. In the absence of role models, this wartime generation of Kosovo politicians and post-war Kosovo leaders has been setting examples of what modern-day political leadership should be about. Only with the passage of time shall we be able to recognize which of these politicians will turn out to be statesmen.

(I’ve edited the text by Dr. Tramp for grammar, typos, punctuation, and very small flow fixes. I added subtitles only for readability.)

Back in February 2025, as election results were published, Kosovo’s acting prime minister and leader of Vetëvendosje, Albin Kurti, staged an impromptu celebration of “victory.” With a coarse voice, he dismissed (literally screaming) opposition leaders as “stupid animals.” More than joy, the speech betrayed tension. Kurti had indeed won, but with diminished support. A majority of Albanian voters in Kosovo had, in fact, cast their ballots for opposition parties. It seemed that Kurti’s hold on power was about to slip away. What followed was a spring, then a summer, and finally an early-winter politics defined by the systematic grinding down of opponents.

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Four Seasons of Stalemate

First, Vetëvendosje delayed the constitution of parliament by proposing (more than fifty consecutive times) a former justice minister as Speaker, a candidate rejected by the opposition parties and put forward by VV despite the party lacking the necessary majority. Twice, the Constitutional Court ruled these maneuvers unconstitutional. The outgoing government then attempted to alter the voting procedure itself - again struck down by the Court. Finally, Vetëvendosje backed the appointment of Nenad Rašić, a Serbian MP, as Deputy Speaker to represent the entire Serb community, despite his party having secured less than 10 percent of the Serb vote. That move, too, was later deemed unconstitutional by Kosovo’s highest court.

He understood that the opposition was fragmented and unlikely to unite behind an alternative government, largely due to LDK leader Lumir Abdixhiku’s insistence that he would join neither Vetëvendosje nor the largest opposition party, the PDK. Parliament was eventually constituted, yet Kurti then allowed the two-week deadline granted by President Vjosa Osmani to form a government to lapse. Osmani, who in recent years had shown a measure of independence from Kurti despite having run on the same ticket in 2021, chose this time, on dubious grounds, to place her full confidence in him, granting Vetëvendosje a second attempt at government formation. Kurti wasted the time to the fullest, buying another two weeks, only to once again fail predictably to form a government.

By then, the PDK had changed leadership, appointing Bedri Hamza, its seasoned former central bank governor and finance minister as party president. The small opposition alliance between AAK and Nisma disintegrated, while the LDK continued to reel from a weak electoral showing and discouraging opinion polls for the old establishment party. Against this tumultuous backdrop, Kurti’s strategy (and his informal but full alignment with Osmani) became increasingly clear: he was steering the country toward elections during the peak Christmas holiday season, when hundreds of thousands of diaspora voters would be in Kosovo, a constituency in which he has historically commanded overwhelming support.

Furthermore, despite a clear and explicit ruling by the Supreme Court that an acting government cannot take executive decisions, Kurti began dispensing an unprecedented wave of financial largesse. His caretaker cabinet twice issued €100 grants to all students and pensioners (including those who lived abroad), vastly expanded social benefits, and raised the minimum wage - measures carrying an immediate and projected cost of at least €700 million, all under a budget that had not been approved by parliament. At the same time, his ministers visited the Kosovo diaspora no fewer than 200 times in 2025, consolidating support among a voting bloc carefully calculated to offset declining backing for Kurti within Kosovo itself.

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The Tsunami

In retrospect, the outcome was somewhat predictable - but the elections held between Christmas and New Year’s delivered a shockingly decisive victory for Kurti, who secured 51% of the vote. The PDK maintained its base, finishing with 21%, while the LDK collapsed to 13%, and AAK barely crossed the 5% threshold. Nisma vanished from the parliamentary landscape entirely, marking the first time since its formation as a PDK splinter group in 2014 that it failed to have any MPs.

Just months earlier, the U.S. government had suspended the Strategic Dialogue with Kurti’s government, and for much of his mandate, the EU imposed sanctions on Kosovo, creating a serious stumbling block in relations with Brussels. Tellingly, no foreign leader rushed to congratulate him with the usual celebratory tweets or telegrams.

VV achieved a victory that, just a few months ago, seemed unimaginable, driven in large part by unprecedented support from the diaspora. Other factors helped too.

• Exit polls indicate that around 12–15% of voters voting within Kosovo itself, identified themselves as non-resident and here only for holidays. Tens of thousands of Kosovars living abroad also voted by mail or through embassies and consulates. In cities such as Oslo, London, and Bern, VV captured 92%, 94%, and 90% of the vote, respectively. Overall, between 8–10% of final VV’s votes came from voters outside Kosovo.

• Secondly, Kurti ran a strong campaign, aided (unethically if not also illegally) by extensive use of government resources, while the opposition, stretched thin across two national elections, municipal elections, and two rounds of mayoral contests, could not match VV’s overwhelming campaign machinery. From memes to mass rallies, from disciplined social-media messaging focused solely on Kurti’s persona, to the quiet mobilization of party networks embedded in state institutions, VV dominated both the digital and physical campaign space, leaving an exhausted and underfunded opposition unable to compete on either scale or speed.

• Thirdly, voters reliant on social support were also influenced by the distribution of millions to those in need. Indeed, municipal results show VV performs particularly well in poorer and less-educated regions. Kurti’s Robespierrian-style populist rhetoric and disciplined messaging remain unmatched.

The aftermath

A month after elections, the Parliament has not yet been fully constituted. A vote recount revealed significant irregularities, particularly in the Prizren region, where dozens of commissioners reportedly manipulated votes within parties. While overall party results remain undisputed, allocation of individual MP seats could shift, and over hundred arrests have been made, including candidates’ family members for alleged fraudulent counting.

More significantly, once Parliament is finally constituted, Kuvendi must elect a new President of the Republic by the first week of March. Kurti needs a two-thirds majority to approve a candidate, which means the opposition must provide a quorum.

This is where the stakes get high. Despite President Osmani’s efforts to accommodate VV throughout 2025, Kurti could still orchestrate a dramatic political move (read: backstabbing) by proposing an alternative candidate. Neither Kurti nor other VV officials have confirmed whether they will support Osmani. The outgoing - and incoming - Prime Minister has remained deliberately vague, emphasizing the need for a candidate who can secure the backing of 80 out of 120 MPs.

Insiders say Kurti was miffed with Osmani’s actions in Davos, where she signed Kosovo onto President Trump’s Board of Peace, without discussing this with Kurtit. Kosovar participants in Davos say that Osmani and Kurti did not meet, despite being only meters apart. Neither Kurti nor the Foreign Minister publicly endorsed Osmani’s solo diplomatic moves.

Several scenarios lie ahead. Kurti could ultimately support Osmani as a candidate, scraping just enough votes with the backing of LDK and minority MPs - though this assumes all LDK deputies align, which is far from guaranteed. Alternatively, he could back a candidate potentially acceptable to PDK and AAK; the story in town is that he’s already discussed a potential presidential candidacy with a member of Adem Jashari’s family with close ties to Kurti. Another option would be to invite LDK into a junior coalition to ensure the votes and longer-term stability.

Some observers, and even Kurti himself, have predicted that Kosovo could face yet another snap election in April if a President is not elected after three rounds of voting. Kurti would likely hope to achieve an even larger victory against a demoralized opposition, but such a gamble carries significant risk.

Keeping the power but losing the legacy?

Regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, Kurti is firmly in the driving seat. His brand of populist politics has given him elections results that may make him the longest-serving Prime Minister in Kosovo’s history. Yet he has very little to show in terms of flagship projects, economic results or diplomatic achievements, and the Constitutional Court has repeatedly reined in VV’s attempts at full state capture.

We are now in a different political era. Kurti’s accelerationist approach - an effective blend of opportunistic tactics and theatre, shock and awe - targets the dismantling of the ancien régime, including core principles of the Ahtisaari Plan underpinning Kosovo’s independence, and mirrors locally what the Canadian Prime Minister described at Davos as a “great rupture” with the old consensus.

The open question is whether Kosovo is entering an era of Kurti - or whether Kurti will be remembered as an ineffective local echo of a new era and forces far larger than himself.

The house(s)

We rarely remember houses in films. They are always façades or props, but in recent years, several films gave their respective houses distinct political and emotional weight around which the narrative unfolds.

Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning class-struggle movie Parasite has a memorable, fancy-minimalist house up the hill. You’ll remember the story: by posing as domestic help, the lower-class Kim family slowly works its way into the wealthy Parks’ household, where the very house itself comes to reflect their rising ambitions. The effects are disturbing, especially when the living in the modernist house on the hill is juxtaposed to the depraved conditions of living in the flooded basement of the working class neighborhoods in Seul.

In Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, the house of the Lisbon family stands as a silent, almost oppressive character in its own right. Situated on a quiet American, suburban street, its austere exterior mirrors the strict and claustrophobic upbringing of the Lisbon sisters, more of a prison foreboding the melancholia and the tragedy that is about to unfold.

In Alfonso Cuarón’s semi-autobiographical Roma, the house projects a different feeling - not of brutal coldness of contemporary life and ruthless social dynamic but of spontaneous warmth of a space oozing with love, memory and emotional family references. Roma was also centered around a indigenous house maid Cleo living in the upper middle-class family house, but her presence was ingrained in the most caring manner in the life of the family she served.

Similar feelings are evoked in the Brazilian Oscar-winner I’m Still Here by Walter Salles, where the Paiva family’s beachfront mansion in Rio de Janeiro embodies both political freedom and debate, as well as intimate daily life, standing in stark contrast to the encroaching repression of Brazil’s dictatorship. No wonder that this particular house was recently transformed into the Casa do Cinema Brasileiro.

And then we come to Joachim Trier’s film Sentimental Value, in which the house of the fictitious Borg family is a centerpiece where drama unfolds. It’s a house that changes as the film unfolds, it even changes the color of exterior and the design of the interior as the story moves back and fro, through decades of family lore.

The movie actually starts with the focus on the house - the main character Nora, played exquisitely by Renate Reinsve, describes her house from the perspective of a child: The House has a “belly” where she and and her sister can run up and down the stairs. She wonders whether The House likes to be empty, whether The House floorboards like to be stomped on.

And so continues this film, which is actually also a film within a film (and a film about films), and a theatre play within a film - but directed not in a manner that obfuscates or complicates, but gently leads us to observe, relate, contemplate the relations between an emotionally distant father who became a famous film director in the mold of Ingmar Bergman (necessary gravitas provided by Stellan Skarsgård) who was always gone with work and daughters who had to somehow grow up.

I watched this film with my wife Arlinda, and it resonated strongly with her because her father had passed away a few months earlier. Some of the scenes - deeply human, almost as if they were not in a film but unfolding mesmerisingly right in front of us - touched her in the way only the death of a parent can: remembering love given, words spoken, and other words left unspoken.

I, too, watched the film with a sense of longing, but for a different reason. You see, I actually recognized this house immediately. I had walked past it countless times - a house hiding in plain sight on Thomas Heftyes street in Oslo’s Frogner district. Much of the film’s urban atmosphere (masterfully supported by a haunting soundtrack, opening with Terry Callier’s folksy “Dancing Girl,” which eases us effortlessly into the story) I recognised from streets and families I had known in my late teenage years, when I lived in this part of Oslo.

The Neighborhood

Frogner neighborhood itself carries a certain quiet, self-contained elegance, a part of the city that rarely announces itself yet inevitably leaves a lasting impression, especially for an impressionable boy from Kosovo who moved in from a city under Serbian cruel, apartheid regime. Its streets are wide and deliberate, lined with tall poplar trees and orderly buildings whose façades suggest Scandinavian stability (and yes - sentimentality) rather than posh spectacle of Paris 16th arrondissement or London’s South Kensington. There was always a certain calm confidence to the area: cafés that seem permanently settled, windows of the bakeries glowing softly in the dark, cold, early winter mornings, the muted rhythm of everyday life unfolding behind curtains and balconies.

Over time, I came to understand that Norwegians were deeply home-centered, more so than we were in the southern Europe, and this quiet domestic focus seemed to shape the very rhythm and character of neighborhoods in Oslo.

Thirty years ago, my movements traced a quiet arc across this part of western Oslo: football at Friggfeltet, countless beers at Hilaros Café, a small, unassuming place that somehow felt like the heart of the neighborhood, movies at Frogner Kino, video rentals at Video Nova on Skovveien street - and stays with the Eskeland, Buli, Døhlie-Saltnes, Bratz, Folling and Milligan families, whose homes, where I resided or visited over half a decade, became my own markers on a map of memory, friendship, and the seemingly ordinary adventures of youth.

Frogner is full of inherited houses, legacies that usually get passed down from one generation to the next. It’s a beautiful part of Oslo, captured delicately (and aesthetically) by Trier - so much so that one of Norway’s foremost literary critics, Bernhard Ellefsen, was merciless in his review of all that beauty: “A concrete and consistent sign of this hollowness is to be found in all the beauty. Every single shot in ‘Sentimental Value’ is beautiful… When all shots and scenes are beautiful, one gradually stops believing in any internal logic other than beauty. What is present here is not present because it is true, but because it is beautiful.”

Yet, in Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier transforms this sense of beauty (and legacy) into something quietly devastating: a meditation on what we inherit - not only houses or objects, but emotional habits, silences, and unfinished conversations.

Thus, Frogner becomes not merely a setting but a temperament: orderly, composed, and somewhat emotionally reticent, its calm façades concealing complex inner lives. And by the film’s end, what lingers is the understanding that sentimental value of memories is not nostalgic but active and unsettling - so embedded in places we thought we had left behind, yet which continue, quietly, to shape who we are.

Post Scriptum

A few years ago, I returned to the area for a brief visit with my family. It happened to be one of the coldest Januaries in decades in Oslo, with temperatures hovering around −25°C, yet we ventured out on foot from Vigeland Park, with its hundreds of sculptures of snow-covered, naked humanity, towards the Royal Palace park. Around the corner on Bygdøy allé, we huddled at Åpent Bakeri for kanelbolle and hot coffee, and suddenly I noticed a surprising, brand-new urban reference in the familiar streetscape, one that hadn’t existed in the 1990s but now seemed to belong as if it had always been meant to, a house with a Kosovo flag: the Embassy of the Republic of Kosovo at Colbjørnsens gate 4, standing quietly, like a new memory made real.

The Geography of Manufactured Triumph

The second round of local elections is over in Kosovo, and every major party has declared victory of sorts. VV, which currently leads the acting government (with little, if any, legal and political legitimacy), together with its smaller coalition partner Guxo, increased its number of mayors from four to seven. They now control Mitrovica (flipped from PDK), Fushë Kosova and Obiliq (both flipped from LDK). Kurti seemed ecstatic, despite the party shedding record number of votes.

(Nota Bene by the author: Serious allegations have been raised by PDK observers that many voting ballots in Mitrovica have mismatched serial numbers. Request for new voting in Mitrovica is now being decided in the Supreme Court)

LDK retained the electoral jewel of Prishtina, giving the party (and its leader) some breathing room and financial muscle. The party’s final vote tally is 183,000. They celebrated accordingly.

PDK, meanwhile, won more votes as a party than ever before in local elections (188,000), becoming the largest political force in Kosovar municipal assemblies, and held on to major cities such as Prizren and Ferizaj. They celebrated as well, albeit more quietly after a bruising fight in Mitrovica and internal divisions in Drenas.

AAK, despite repeatedly being questioned about its ability to cross the 5% threshold in national elections, managed to retain mayors in five municipalities and secured healthy return of 87,000 votes in municipal assemblies. A good reason too, to be happy.

But behind the bluster and the blunders, a visible pattern emerged. The ruling regime prefers to keep the narrative simple: a dominant popular movement with an undisputed leader on the quasi-patriotic left (I always remember Mélenchon), facing a fragmented opposition of the ancien régime, always “trying to block Kurti”.

“It’s the economy, stupid“

If we set aside the Serb-majority municipalities - which unfortunately mirror the autocratic political landscape in Serbia, where a single party forcefully holds power - the rest of Kosovo resembles a Jackson Pollock canvas.

Look closer at the map, however, and a pattern emerges: Kosovo’s electoral geography doubles as a geography of grievance. As the oldest political cliché from Clinton era goes, “it’s the economy, stupid.”

VV is now slowly but surely creating its own electoral base in north-eastern Kosovo. In municipalities such as Gjilan, Mitrovica, Kamenica and Podujeva - where VV won mayoral runoffs in two consecutive local elections - voters seem to be more susceptible to Kurti’s political meta-narration. These are also the municipalities with an enduring economic frustration, weaker public services, transport connections and lower educational outcomes than in rest of Kosovo. Those structural disadvantages help explain why VV’s anti-elite, anti-establishment, anti-everything message lands best in the north-east.

Lowest salaries in Kosovo (again, if we ignore Serbian municipalities) are recorded in the newly established VV strongholds. Municipal profiles published by OSCE and other local surveys by NGOs show that parts of north-eastern Kosovo lag behind in basic infrastructure, employment opportunities and access to higher-quality education. From the top 15 biggest tax-paying and exporting corporations in Kosovo, most are from Prishtina, Peja and Ferizaj. None come from the north-east of Kosovo.

These are not abstract deficits, they are the everyday reality that shapes political preferences. National statistics turn this pattern into a social mechanism. Kosovo’s labour surveys and yearbooks show that unemployment is heavily concentrated among the less-educated: people without formal education or with only primary schooling face the highest joblessness. Where formal-sector jobs, tertiary education pipelines and private investment are missing - combined with geographic isolation of facing Serbia’s hostile territory as a neighbor, citizens are more likely to vote for VV, a populist party promising systemic change and redistribution, as well as focus on “sovereignty”.

A side note on education: Albin Kurti has never shied away from leveraging the educational gap among his voters. Back in 2016, as VV was preparing for a “revolution,” Kurti authored a 56-page manifesto that outlined both an internal reorganization of the movement and a radical agenda for Kosovo. He demonstrated a clear understanding of how to reach less-educated demographics in poverty-stricken regions:

“Gossip is a source of (dis)information. We should not underestimate its power. It thrives especially in societies like ours, where functional illiteracy (people who can read letters but make frequent spelling and grammar mistakes) affects nearly 40% of the population. Clarity and simplicity are essential to counter misunderstandings and misinterpretations… Certain policies of ours, in specific contexts and times, should in fact be spread precisely in that way - as gossip […] Strategy and tactics must acquire an extra dimension. Legal organizing is not possible everywhere. In municipalities, neighborhoods or villages with entrenched clientelism and deep poverty, one must prepare for deep, informal - even semi-legal or illegal - forms of organization.” - by Albin Kurti, 2016, “On Political Organization (during Restructuring)”

Agon Maliqi, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC noted the importance of economic disparities too. In a recent Facebook post after second round of local elections, Maliqi says:

“Kosovo has effectively split into three “economic zones” that experienced the post-war period differently, as trade routes and the meaning of borders changed dramatically - and this is now reflected politically. Zones 1 and 2 were relative winners after the war: new trade corridors opened (including highways), formerly isolated central highland areas were connected, and borders stopped being economic walls and became oxygen. In these places - in cities like Ferizaj, for example - prosperity grew faster, and the VV’s message that “Kosovo has been ruined for 25 years” resonates less. That’s why the former opposition remains dominant there. Zone 3, by contrast, became a relative loser: a kind of economic dead end, where the post-war border hardened and blocked traditional trade routes (toward Novi Pazar, the Preševo Valley, etc.). Add the physical proximity to Serbia, which heightens the sense of threat, and it becomes clearer why VV’s message dominates in this zone.”

Where the War Burned Deepest, VV Never Wins

Another stubborn pattern in Kosovo’s electoral geography is found in the towns that bore the brunt of Serbia’s onslaught in 1998–99. In communities where homes were burned, civilians expelled, and mass graves uncovered, wartime memory is neither abstract nor negotiable. Voters there tend to favor parties rooted in the older liberation narrative and the popular belief of wartime legitimacy. In places where loyalty was forged under fire, VV’s attacks against “old establishment” simply do not resonate as strongly. The result is consistent: where the scars of the war are deepest, VV struggles to break through. In regions which have suffered most, such as those where PDK and AAK loyalty is strongest in Drenica, respectively Dukagjin, VV never stood chance. Kurti’s extremely hostile political attitude towards key KLA leaders such as former President Hashim Thaçi as well as Ramush Haradinaj, only reinforced this division.

Where Piety Meets Populism

Years ago, I met a Dutch researcher who half-jokingly said:

“Kosovo could almost be divided into a western part of Dukagjini plain, where people are more relaxed about religion and enjoy their raki and wine since the Roman times, and an eastern part, where tea houses set the social rhythm.”

There’s a grain of truth in that image. In north-eastern Kosovo, VV’s cementing of voters’ support reflects deeper socioeconomic and cultural dynamics: slower post-war development, limited private investment, geographic isolation due to border with Serbia, fewer education opportunities, and a population that feels left behind. Kurti’s outreach to more religious voting blocks (usually far from media) - unusual in Kosovo’s largely secular political scene - also played a role. In 2017, Kurti even invoked religious language in a party gathering: “I swear by the Quran and by the Mushaf, we shall win Llap [wider Podujeva region]”, highlighting his appeal to local cultural sentiment and symbolism.

Eastern and northern Kosovo’s more traditional Sunni conservatism, shaped by informal networks cautious toward urban elites, contrasts somewhat with the western Kosovo’s Sufi-influenced pragmatism, historic Catholic presence, and stronger ties to wartime secularist, nationalist structures. Towns like Podujeva and Mitrovica, as well as many rural border towns, have become bit more religious since the war, as a recent EU-financed study indicated. Coupled with insecurity near the Serbian border, this helps explain why northeastern Kosovo has become a key arena where VV’s messages of “dignity” resonate most strongly.

Every Rule Has Its Exceptions: Mapping The Outliers

That all being said, Kosovo’s political geography is far from absolute.

• Wealthier, better-connected urban areas and regional centers often show stronger support for establishment parties or diverse opposition coalitions - partly because these voters have different stakes: business ties, public-sector jobs, or simply more to lose from disruptive policy shifts. Within some cities, however, urban elites also harbor strong grievances over post-war public investment “redistribution” (and alleged corrupt enriching of regional powerbrokers) - as in Gjakova or Prishtina, where many voters in urban areas who fared well under former Yugoslav communism, now consistently vote for VV.

• VV also won in relatively affluent Fushë Kosova this week - perhaps simply because LDK had governed there uninterrupted for 25 years.

• Northeastern Kosovo has also seen grave attacks by the Serbian army, such as the horrific massacre of Bogujevci family in Podujevë. VV’s MP Saranda Bogujevci is the only survivor of an unspeakable crime by Serbian police unit “Scorpions” that wiped out her entire family, women and children included.

• Religion, meanwhile, has never been a fundamental decisive factor in municipal voting. It’s seen more as a nudge rather than a fundamental variable capable of determining outcomes. Several conservative or religious MPs have even left Kurti’s ranks in recent years over disagreements about gender and sexual identity provisions in the draft Civil Code.

All of this underscores that Kosovo’s political landscape remains highly fragmented, with several exceptions to any neat east–west economic or societal divide. There are many outliers to be considered in such a fragmented political map.

International assessments consistently underline that Kosovo remains one of Europe’s poorer countries, but poverty and opportunity are unevenly distributed. These disparities have long fueled Kurti’s populist appeal since his entry into politics, which brought him a shockingly large majority in 2021 national elections.

As much of the country has grown far more skeptical of his disruptive message and disappointed with meagre results of his governance, these regional differences are now becoming increasingly visible at the local ballot box.

Those not following Kosovo’s politics closely may be forgiven if they can’t quite grasp the current parliamentary crisis. The whole series of decisions and (non)decisions does seem arcane, absurd even. But beneath the months-lock procedural deadlock lies something far more corrosive: the incessant attempts of unilateralism over consensus, fueled by the reckless instinct of the ruling party, Vetëvendosje (VV), to govern not through cooperation but corruption of democratic process.

A reminder: the roots of this paralysis go back to the February 2025 national elections. VV emerged weakened yet defiant, refusing to acknowledge the necessity of coalition-building. Instead, it chose obstruction. First, by blocking the election of the Assembly Speaker - VV nominated the very same candidate for speakership over 50 times, then blocked proceedings by insisting on a secret ballot, in blatant disregard of procedures. Constitutional Court had to intervene and, in both cases, admonished the former ruling regime of unconstitutional behavior.

In an attempt to break the deadlock, the former opposition did relent in the end: PDK voted Dimal Basha as the Speaker of Parliament, much to the chagrin of its core constituency who were alarmed by Basha’s earlier academic writings in which he described Kosovo Liberation Army a drug cartel of sorts; while LDK voted for Serbian MP Nenad Rasic as a Deputy Speaker, probably in violation of the Constitution (the case is pending before the highest court), which calls for Serbian parties themselves to agree on who represents them. But deadlock was broken - or so it seemed, for just a few days.

VV then failed miserably to muster the votes needed to form a government. The much-touted coalition with small breakaway opposition party NISMA failed to materialize as Kurti refused to give the kingmakers the speakership. In the end Kurti secured only 56 of minimum majority of 61 votes required, thus entering history as the first-ever official nominee who have failed to become a PM.

As all other Albanian political parties stated clearly that they too lacked a majority to govern (courtesy of the LDK's leader Lumir Abdixhiku who inexplicably ruled out joining “any” government, a decision he probably regrets) - the options for the President seemed confined to declaring new national elections, likely to be held on December 7 or 14.

Alas, the President decided instead to use her authority to grant VV a wish for a second attempt at forming the government, however futile and time-wasting it seemed. VV then proposed Glauk Konjufca as its prime ministerial candidate. Kurti, not too surprisingly, seemed to undermine his own candidate immediately after the announcement, stating that “Glauk will get same votes as I did - 56. There’s no chance for any coalition!”.

And so Kosovo’s game of musical chairs without music and without anyone actually sitting in the proverbial chairs, continues.

Nine months after elections, Kosovo finds itself without a functional legislature, without a budget, and without any roadmap beyond the same circular blame game that has defined Albin Kurti’s second term.

In the meantime, public institutions are running on fumes. Ministries are frozen, corruption allegations are mounting, municipal grants are delayed, and public employees are increasingly uncertain how long their salaries can be sustained. What began as a political standoff has metastasized into a full-blown governance breakdown. The chickens have come home to roost after months of blockade, and a certain panic has begun to set in.

Kurti hastily announced the approval of a new budget laden with colossal new policy commitments - from increases in various welfare payments and subsidies to higher pensions, a raised minimum salary, and even a one-time cash disbursement of €100 to all students in Kosovo. The problem, however, is that Kurti is, strictly speaking, acting illegally in taking such executive decisions. Only months ago, the Supreme Court made it clear that sitting MPs cannot exercise executive powers, given Kosovo’s strict division between the legislative and executive branches.

Civil society organizations have cried foul over this attempt by an acting government to ram through a budget. The American Chamber of Commerce representing big chunks of private sector is not amused either. Other parties have already stated that approving such a massive budget is dead on arrival.

Now, several sequences, dilemmas, options, and tactics are interwoven:
How will Kosovo pay its obligations if it enters a budgetary shutdown? How can Kosovo expect hundreds of millions in EU grants if it fails to ratify the Growth Plan in time? When will the President call elections — and could elections held during the Christmas holidays ensure maximum turnout from the diaspora, a key VV constituency? If elections are declared in December but produce the same results, how will the Parliament elect a President in April, when the quorum requires an even higher two-thirds threshold? Kurti has already hinted that yet another national election may be due in April - a continuation of his political game of chicken.

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But what are the options to resolve the conundrum? These are some of the scenarios:

• The first (and most perilous) is that VV somehow corrals enough votes to pass its bloated budget, packed with massive policy shifts that would tie the hands of any future prime minister. This would cement the party’s control well beyond its democratic mandate, effectively governing through fiscal entrenchment and handouts rather than democratic consent. Such a move would inevitably end up before the Constitutional Court, and chances are the entire enterprise would be declared unconstitutional.

• The second, whispered even in certain diplomatic corridors, envisions a “technical government” led by Glauk Konjufca. Such an arrangement might soothe the crisis temporarily, extending Kurti’s authority under a different banner until April. But in Kosovo’s current polarized landscape, few see either the political will or the legitimacy for such a maneuver. It is inconceivable that Kurti would ever share power with others, and it is hardly credible to expect for the former opposition to commit political suicide by approving VV’s Santa Claus budget.

• The third and most pragmatic scenario is a minimalist compromise: an emergency budget jointly approved by the acting government and the former opposition, ensuring the state continues to function until April (there are clear provisions allowing for such a measure). This would keep salaries paid, institutions open, and allow sufficient time to organize new elections in December, alongside the formation of a new government and the election of a new president. For this to happen, two consecutive sessions of Parliament are needed: first one where such a budget would be approved, in addition to the EU’s Growth Plan, and second one on voting Glauk Konjufca, which will lead to the disbanding of the parliament and declaring new elections.

Kosovo has weathered political storms before, but rarely has its democratic machinery been so deliberately jammed from within. Kurti bears the overwhelming guilt, yet the opposition too has been entrapped in endless contemplation, showing little in the way of real statesmanship. What we are witnessing today is not an ideological clash or a policy debate; it is an assault on procedure itself. Cooler heads must prevail. The former opposition must advance an option that is constructive yet firm in ending this absurd crisis, one that now threatens to transform Kosovo’s political landscape into a constitutional terra incognita and an economic wasteland.

Post Scriptum

I mentioned that few European diplomats are quietly inquiring/suggesting/nudging an idea of a VV-led technical government (or even an immediate VV-LDK coalition), mainly out of concern over budget and the EU growth plan. One well-informed ambassador from an EU member state told me that “a certain unease” may also be shaping European thinking, as they try to gauge the Trump Administration’s stance on the future of the Kosovo–Serbia dialogue. A recent unreported visit by a very senior US diplomat to Kosovo, which must have been cleared by an even more senior Administration official, given the ongoing government shutdown in the USA that restricts all foreign travel, went largely unnoticed in Kosovo, but it may have ruffled some feathers in one or two European capitals.

Albin Kurti’s destructively long political performance reached its moment of reckoning on Sunday. After months of grandstanding, a self-imposed parliamentary blockade that consisted of nominating the same person 50 consecutive times for parliamentary speakership and cryptic declarations implying he has a majority to continue as Prime minister, the self-proclaimed guardian of moral absolutism failed to do the usual thing expected in a proportional democracy: form a government.

He thus went down in history as the first Prime Ministerial nominee unable to rally even the bare-bone minimum of 61 MPs to form a government. Not a single Albanian MP beyond his own narrow party circle lent him their support.

His refusal to negotiate power, to share, to compromise - all wrapped in the language of integrity - has finally revealed what many suspected. The king is, indeed, naked. And he is utterly alone. Inside our own parliament, and outside in the wider world.

He resembles another tragically lonely Shakespearean royalty who lacked a sense of pragmatism, King Richard: “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

Kurti’s political brand has always rested on the idea that he alone embodies virtue, while everyone else is a merchant of vice. His narrative of “cleansing” Kosovo’s politics from corruption resonated in 2021, when Vetëvendosje’s tsunami of popular support seemed to rewrite the rules. But today, that same absolutism has turned inward and corrosive (and far more corruptive and corrupted as Ivan Krastev surely would have guessed in his trio of essays on anti-corruption). By refusing to engage even minimally with potential partners, Kurti has reduced moral politics claiming ownership of truth to untruthful moral vanity and belief that governing is an act of faith, not of negotiation.

In a proportional system like Kosovo’s, coalitions are not a flaw; they are its democratic design. They ensure inclusion, temper excess, and reward dialogue. But for Kurti, coalition-building seems like contamination - a compromise that would stain his perceived purity. On the election night, he exultantly and crudely called all other party leaders “hajvan” (“stupid animals” in Turkish). He refused to even consider giving Fatmir Limaj, who controlled three crucial MPs who broke from former opposition, the position of Speaker. He pretended to want LDK in a grand coalition but sent a deliberately insulting “invitation” to its leader, Lumir Abdixhiku in a move clearly calculated to be rejected. As for PDK, he never overcame his troublesome personal animosity towards legacy of Hashim Thaçi to even contemplate a coalition.

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Today’s failure is not merely procedural. It is existential. It exposes the paradox at the heart of Kurti’s project: a man who came to power preaching people’s sovereignty but governed how he alone imagined sovereignty, unburdened by realities of Kosovo or global geopolitics. When the arithmetic of the Assembly demanded negotiation, he offered dogma and vicious and banal online attacks by his army of trolls in social media. When smaller parties (and an occasional Ambassador) advised him privately to extend hand, he withdrew behind slogans about “no bazaars for votes” and “no votes from opposition aligned with Belgrade”.

But democracy, especially in newborn republics like Kosovo, is not built on leading alone. 2021 election results were an outlier, not a pattern to strive to. Our democracy is built on a parliamentary architecture that requires the ability to align competing wills toward a shared future, across political and ethnic lines.

I distinctly recall when I first learned a lesson of parliamentary alliances: it was the Norwegian elections of 1997 (I lived there then), when the fourth-most voted party who won a mere 13%, secured the premiership because its leader, Kjell Magne Bondevik, a good, old Lutheran minister, showed the greatest willingness to compromise. In Germany, both the CDU and SDP have routinely granted the FDP a disproportionate influence, recognizing the necessity of coalition with a smaller, kingmaking party. Across Europe, countless examples show that compromise, far from being weakness, is the very mechanism that enables effective leadership.

His apparatchiks will now say this is the price of staying “clean”, that all other parties were obliged to vote for The Dear Leader as an act of faith, a result of a mysterious epiphany. Yet politics is not a mosque nor a monastery, and leadership is not abstinence. It is about building bridges over differences. Kurti seems determined to burn them all, even if it leaves him stranded on an island of moral and political isolation - both in Kosovo and beyond.

But a word of warning to the former opposition: while there is a poetic symmetry in today’s outcome, for the man who once declared that he had the numbers to rule alone the Assembly now stands lonely, there’s no room for schadenfreude. Kurti has taken us all for a ride into an isolated desert, surrounded with tumbleweeds of nationalism, regress and international isolation. For far too long has opposition counted on Kurti’s mistakes to return to power. Time has come for real alternatives to be presented and for Kurti-centered discourse to radically change. Snap elections are probably right around the corner and many voters are not quite convinced that former opposition is a welcomed change from the unrealized change that Kurti promised.

For years, Kurti has cast himself as the people’s mirror: uncorrupted, unbending, untouchable. But mirrors can shatter when faced with their own reflection.

The king is naked. The question is whether Kosovo’s former opposition, whose past mistakes handed Kurti the premiership and a lonely ivory tower, can shatter the house of Kurtian mirrors.

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In Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale, the emperor continues his parade, fully exposed, while the city finally sees the truth. King Kurti now must be ignored, if Kosovo is to have leaders who bring it new clothes: a government built on internal and external compromises, courting coalitions (again, internally and externally) and clear ideas of what progress means and what cost it requires.

Only by embracing these unvarnished realities can the country move past moral absolutism and toward functional republic based on values of inclusivity and alliances, as the original founders of our republic, from Ibrahim Rugova to Hashim Thaçi (to Martti Ahtisaari) - and many, many other brave women and men, intended only few decades ago.

Tens of thousands of Albanians, led by the veterans’ organizations from Kosovo, protested last week against the “grave injustice” unfolding at the Specialist Chambers prosecuting the co-founders of the ragtag guerrilla army that started the uprising against Milosevic regime.

Albania’s Prime minister Edi Rama as well as key Albanian leaders from Balkans endorsed strongly the protest, with few notable exceptions: the President and the former Prime minister of Kosovo stayed mostly silent. As matter of fact, the former ruling party Vetevendosje of the acting Prime minister Kurti published a harsh statement insinuating that Hashim Thaçi brought this upon himself, that he supported the creation of the Special Court and therefore has no one to blame for being indicted by it. It’s a convenient narrative, one that allows VV to claim prophetic foresight for which Kurti is famous: I told you so. But it’s also a cynical distortion of history, and a perfect example of how Kurti’s permanent state of righteousness can rot into historic revisionism.

VV’s claim of course reminds us of Gospel of Matthew (26:52), where Jesus tells Peter: “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” It’s one of the most quoted Biblical references and reflects well VV’s intended message to Albanian public, parroted incessantly by VV apparatchiks and their army of trolls across social media. But it’s a fallacy. A dangerous fallacy.

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The context VV chooses to forget

Few years ago, Dr. Nevenka Tromp, an experienced war crimes researcher and investigator at The Hague Tribunal (ICTY) gave a lecture which outlines well the context when and how the Specialist Chambers were established:

“The frequency of the appearance of President Thaci’s name in the Dick Marty report indicated that the authors of the report - and those who were feeding the information to the authors - were aiming at the creation of a specialist court and that President Thaci could most probably be one of the indictees. Paradoxically, the court could be formally established in 2015 only after Hashim Thaçi pushed hard to lobby the parliament for the amendment to the Kosovo Constitution that would allow that a court of such format be outplaced to The Hague. This did not contribute to President Thaci’s popularity amongst his fellow Kosovars. The opposition used it in the political power struggle against him and his party… This discourse of a “bargain went wrong” casts President’s Thaci’s role in the formation of the court - as his leadership’s weakness.”

So, let’s be clear: the Special Court was not some sort of President Thaçi’s pet project. It was a product of geopolitical coercion, a blackmail even. In 2015, then–U.S. government applied immense pressure on Kosovo leaders and Members of the Parliament to establish the court, as a response to Dick Marty’s organ harvesting allegations. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland made an unambiguous threat - if Kosovo refused to create its own tribunal, the United Nations would impose one, but Kosovo’s “relationship with the international community would also be put on hold”.

The choice for Thaçi and the governing coalition of PDK-LDK at that time, therefore, was not between having or not having a court, but between a Kosovo-led process or one led by the UN under Resolution 1244. Key allies of Kosovo in the US, from then Vice President Biden to Chairman of Foreign Affairs Committee in US Congress, Rep. Eliot Engel, to former Senator Bob Dole gave a clear message to Thaçi et al.

President Thaçi, Prime minister Mustafa and their government chose to safeguard Kosovo’s alliance with the USA. It was not some sort of a moral or ideological stance; it was a strategic concession. By taking ownership of the process, Kosovo preserved at least a fragment of its sovereignty and preserved relationship with the USA. Today’s VV’s rhetoric erases that reality entirely, pretending as though Thaçi willingly invited foreign judges to dismantle his own legacy.

Dr. Tromp proposed, in the same above-mentioned lecture held in Prishtina (which was unsurprisingly boycotted by VV) invites observers to see the creation of the Special Court from a different angle:

“Another discourse interprets the role of President Thaci in the creation of the KSC as his leadership’s strength. It goes like this: President Thaci, understanding the risks that once the court is there, he would be most probably indicted himself, he put the long-term strategic interest of Kosovo before his own personal and professional interests.”

Strawmen and False Dilemmas

This is VV’s specialty: simplifying the complex issues to claim moral victory based on a populist discourse of moral absolutism, this all propagated with a Robespierrian vigour. By portraying Thaçi’s decision as a personal betrayal of Kosovo, they build a strawman they can easily burn down. In VV’s binary world, there are only two choices: total resistance (which they would have heroically led now, despite being less than eager to fight when it mattered in 1999) or total surrender to American interests.

But I repeat, this is a fallacy. A textbook false dilemma. Refusal was never a clean or a safe option for Kosovo. It would have triggered the very outcome US government warned us about: a UN-imposed court, completely outside Kosovo’s control. VV’s moral absolutism pretends that such real-world tradeoffs don’t exist, that politics can be conducted as a purity contest.

This kind of rhetoric works well for populist rallies and Facebook posts. It flatters the faithful, frames the past as a simple morality play, and permanently and perpetually absolves VV of ever having to explain the cost for Kosovo had the Parliament refused to approve it.

Benefit of the handsight

There’s a great American phrase “Monday-morning quarterbacking”. It comes from American football culture: games are usually played on Sunday, so on Monday mornings, fans of the losing teams are always discussing what the team’s quarterback should have done differently. We have all engaged in such an exercise, in football or life, but Kurti excels at it in our political landscape.

It’s always easy to judge the past when you know how the story ends. But in 2015, the outcome was far from clear. Thaçi, Mustafa and those leaders who accepted the court faced not a choice between good and evil, but between bad and worse: between losing control of Kosovo’s judicial process or risking backlash by creating a domestic legal framework under international supervision.

At that time, no one could have been aware that a certain politicized American prosecutor Jack Smith would pervert the course of justice not by stating the obvious: there is no evidence that KLA engaged in organ harvesting conspiracy in a desolate “Yellow House” and sold body organs via NATO-controlled Tirana Airport in 1999 - but by starting an unwieldy, never-ending process claiming Thaçi was an undisputed military leader of the entire KLA, claiming that this rural guerrilla was actually a super-organized “joint criminal enterprise” hellbent to kill Albanian Catholics, Serbs, LDK members, in an organized fashion and by design.

Daniel Serwer, a former US diplomat and a well-known observer of Balkan politics writes in a recent column titled “A tribunal that has gone astray”:

“I never imagined the “Specialist Chambers” would do what it has done. In 2020, it indicted Hashim and three of his KLA colleagues for constituting a “joint criminal enterprise” that committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, not including the organ trafficking allegations…There is a lot wrong with this picture, or more accurately my view of this picture. First is the bait and switch. The Kosovo parliament believed, as I did, that the main focus of the tribunal would be the organ-trafficking allegations. The defense team has argued this point in court and lost, because there are some other allegations in the Marty report. But to a layman–that’s me–if you want your customer to be happy you don’t sell one thing and deliver another. Of course the tribunal has no reason to care much about me as a customer, but I am one. Tribunals of this sort are supposed to deliver justice, not retribution based on deception.”

VV’s “we told you so” narrative is nothing more than hindsight disguised as prophecy by the Dear Leader. It assumes omniscience that no one, least of all, a parliament of a small state under pressure, could have had. And it ignores the burden of leadership: decisions made in the fog of uncertainty, not in the clarity of commentary.

Perishing by the sword

So, in the Gospel’s warning, those who live by the sword perish by it.

VV’s sword is moral absolutism, in all manners of political decision-making, from the debate on Special Court, to the dialogue with Serbia, always propagated with a certain Robespierrian vigour, . Yet, this particular brand of resultless populist rhetoric is now turning against them. This black-and-white worldview may serve vicious partisan attacks, but it impoverishes Kosovo’s political discourse. It impoverishes Kosovo of allies. It poisons relations between Albanians as well as Albanians and others. By reducing complex history, difficult decisions in diplomacy, economy or politics to personal blame-game, VV betrays the very intellectual honesty they claim to espouse.

The decision of Kosovo Parliament and Thaçi himself to establish the Special Court was not some heroic act but it certainly wasn’t cowardly either. It was pragmatic: an imperfect choice made under pressure and threats, within the limits of a small state trying to survive the demands of its most powerful allies who have played a key role in liberation and independence. VV’s refusal to acknowledge that complexity isn’t moral clarity; it’s moral laziness, if not worse.

Politics, like faith, demands humility. And those who insist on swinging the sword of righteousness at every opponent may soon find that history, too (and the popular vote in elections), has a sharp edge.

I just spent a week at a seminar in Salzburg and, while I left Prishtina rather pessimistic about the state of global affairs - and rather depressed about the state of Kosovar politics - I returned home with a few faint signals worth considering amid today’s tumult of tragic wars, polarization, and extreme political antagonisms.

The setting

The event I attended was titled “What Next for the U.S.? What Next for America in the World?”, organized by Salzburg Global, an organization that has been inviting thinkers, doers and makers in the famous Schloss Leopoldskron since 1947.

This forum has an interesting history and is based in equally intriguing physical premises. It was founded by a group of thinkers who were keen to establish a post-WW2 cultural and intellectual bridge across the Atlantic, sparking a dynamic exchange between Europe’s diverse national cultures and polities and the United States. Since the very first seminar in 1947, this global forum has welcomed more than 40,000 participants from more than 170 countries.

The location provided the necessary inspiration.

Leopoldskron is an imperial palace set beside a lush green park and a dreamy lake rich in history. It was commissioned in 1736 by the Archbishop of Salzburg, who had enriched himself after expelling more than 22,000 Protestants from the city. Later, it became the site of the lavish engagement party of Empress Sisi and Emperor Franz Joseph, and the place where the most famous Salzburger, young Mozart, at just four years old, performed.

In 1918, the palace was purchased by Max Reinhardt, the renowned theatre director. Under Nazi Germany, it was confiscated and stripped of masterpieces by Titian, Dürer, Poussin, Rubens, and Rembrandt. Reinhardt barely escaped and died in poverty in the United States.

After the Second World War, Leopoldskron served as a base for the American army and the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. This is when the Salzburg seminar was founded and since then, the non-profit who runs the seminar, has purchased the castle, renovated it and manages an inspiring agenda of events. It’s also a place where the famous film “Sound of Music” was shot, so by all means, this manor steeped in history and with rooms featuring art from rococo period to Ai Weiwei, provided ample space for contemplation and debate.

Initial thoughts before travel

Organizers of the seminar (and here I have to mention and thank two key figures Charles Ehrlich, Director, Peace and Justice and Antonio Riolino, Senior Program Manager) asked us to contribute with some initial essays before departure, as basis of our forthcoming participation in discussions. I wasn’t particularly optimistic in my input on the issue of the future American involvement in Balkans. Here’s an excerpt:

“A few years ago, most would have agreed that if we looked ten years ahead, the United States would remain the “indispensable gardener” (in Robert Kagan’s verse): when it tends the hedges of the liberal order, the paths stay open; when it looks away, the jungle grows back.

But frankly, both the tools and the terrain have changed - and so has the gardener’s attitude toward the jungle. The best we can now expect from the U.S. is a version of principled pragmatism: deterrence first, values second and only when feasible, and a tacit acceptance that the pursuit of perfection is no longer on offer.

The second scenario is darker. Driven by domestic exhaustion, an unmistakable sentiment among many American - and European - voters, Washington’s political climate could become permanently-ish skeptical of “forever commitments.” This scenario, too, divides into two possible outcomes: in the best case, Washington withdraws from Europe in a managed process; the worst, it actively undercuts European diplomacy for short-term tactical gains - for example, by selectively siding with local actors to extract concessions in unrelated arenas such as trade, energy, defense spending, or even future issues like AI regulation. In both cases, U.S. military presence and diplomatic influence in the Western Balkans would diminish rapidly by design.

The gardener quits the job.”

The Aftermath

I enjoyed the discussions at Salzburg. It was a well curated agenda with refreshing political and professional diversity of participants. I enjoyed workshops led by Will Dobson, whom I enjoyed reading - many years ago - when he was an editor in Slate magazine (when Slate mattered); Timothy Head, senior republican strategist; the keynote speech by Candace Rondeaux, the author of “Putin’s Sledgehammer”, a unique study of Wagner group; discussions with Eddie Hartwig who he led the United States Digital Service (USDS), a technology startup inside the White House. Truth be told, this was a group from which you could learn something in every discussion during or after the official agenda.

My pessimism started dissipating.

Because once you’re surrounded by such a range of minds, from academics and technologists to journalists, and strategists - you’re reminded of the sheer depth and reach of American capacity. The United States, for all the noise (immense noise), current bout of self-doubt, and polarization, still contains within it an astonishing ecosystem of innovation and intellect and provides important, directional signals in the midst of the noise. No other nation so effortlessly brings together Stanford engineers, Iowa farmers, Harvard professors, and military tacticians into one conversation that still somehow functions, however chaotically, as a debate about the world’s future. The American university system, the incredibly impressive (if somewhat dangerous) tech industry’s dynamism, and the vast web of philanthropy and private capital - all continue to churn ideas, produce tools, and show the money that shape global trajectories. The gardener may take a rest but he never really stops.

Even in the realm of hard politics, recent events remind us that Washington still holds the world’s biggest levers. The most recent Trump plan for Gaza - however controversial - demonstrates again that when the America decides to engage, the tectonic plates can shift. For better or worse, it remains the only actor capable of stopping wars or tilting the balance toward some form of order. Even progress,. It’s an old cliché but yes: Europe debates, America acts. And though the current execution of policies may appear haphazard or transactional, the very fact that an American initiative can still dominate the global conversation shows that its centrality is still intact.

The gardener might have put away the pruning shears, but he still owns the garden.

That doesn’t mean my overall pessimism has evaporated. I remain deeply concerned about the corrosion of civic trust or even social structures through social media, about algorithmic platforms that so uncarefully reward outrage. And I’m still pessimistic that the Western Balkans (and Kosovo of course) will ever regain the attention we need to drive our own meaningful change. We are, after all, small countries in a noisy world. But perhaps that’s precisely the point: if one listens past the static, there are faint but vital signals. Important discussions are unfolding. Dialogue has not ceased. The world, though disordered, is not collapsing into a permanent jungle. Somewhere between the noise of decline, the implosion of old ‘liberal consensus’ and the quiet insistence on and persistence of reason, a few gardeners are still at work.

Photos are from this year’s Salzburg Global American Studies seminar “What Next for the U.S.? What Next for America in the World?”

By Invitation | A bit of Balkans in the Middle East?

The Balkan state’s former foreign minister on what international “governing boards” need to get right

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S plan to end the Gaza war offers something rare: a way forward for the people of both Gaza and Israel. The 20-point proposal will need fleshing out and further negotiations, but it addresses the short-term necessity of stopping the bombings and killings, the return of Israeli hostages and the release of Palestinian prisoners. Crucially, it also provides a medium-term formula for an interim administration that can usher in a new era of peace for both Palestinians and Israel.

A key element of the plan calls for Gaza to be run “under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” made up of “qualified Palestinians and international experts”, with oversight by an international transitional body, the “Board of Peace”, chaired by Mr Trump—and with Sir Tony Blair, a former British prime minister, playing a central role.

This type of interim governing board is not a pipe dream. Nor is it, as some have suggested, a relic of a colonial past. It can work. The example of my country, Kosovo—a state twice the size of the Palestinian territories, and with a population slightly smaller than Gaza’s—shows why Mr Trump’s initiative deserves support.

When, in the late 1990s, Kosovo faced destruction at the hands of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, prompting NATO bombing of the Serbian military machinery, many sceptics doubted that peace could hold or there could be reconciliation in that part of the Balkans after so much bloodshed.

Yet Western powers moved quickly to create an interim administration under the provisional mandate of the UN. It was led by credible international figures such as Sérgio Vieira de Mello, a highly experienced Brazilian diplomat, and Bernard Kouchner, a former French foreign minister.

The interim mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) quickly proved its worth. Kosovo Albanian leadership seized the opportunity and agreed to the demilitarisation of the pro-Western guerrillas. But it was the interim international administration that managed the reconstruction, opened the territory to global engagement and, most important, prepared the ground for free and fair elections.

Out of chaos, Kosovo began building democratic institutions that allowed its people to control their destiny. Various countries chipped in with their expertise: Norway’s top diplomat, Kai Eide, helped create a professional police force; America helped build modern banking and justice systems (in addition to providing troops for NATO’s KFOR mission); the EU funded physical reconstruction and support for businesses; the OSCE organised free and independent elections; and KFOR provided overall security.

Even though the parallels are not perfect—Kosovo exists on the edges of the EU, whose rich, peaceful and democratic countries are all keen to see it succeed—Mr Trump’s Gaza plan has echoes of this tested model. Encouragingly, the plan appears to strike a careful balance between local ownership and international expertise. By considering key roles for figures like Sir Tony, who has deep, if controversial, experience in the Middle East—as well as hero status in Muslim-majority Kosovo following his role in the NATO air campaign in 1999—alongside credible Palestinian figures, the peace proposal may just be able to avoid being perceived as dominated by outsiders. The broader the coalition of stakeholders, the less chance the project also falls foul of machinations on the UN Security Council, or gets pulled into the morass that is Palestinian politics.

There are other elements of the Kosovo precedent that explain why Sir Tony is keen to draw on experience there in devising plans for a transitional Gaza authority. The interim mission in Kosovo quickly combined the legitimacy of international figures and organisations with the knowledge and buy-in of local leaders of all political stripes. Efforts were made to ensure gender, ethnic and religious balance.

In Gaza such a hybrid body should start rebuilding the shattered economy, channelling resources for reconstruction while ensuring that political realities and cultural sensitivities are respected. Sir Tony brings stature and experience on the world stage; Palestinian leaders bring the lived experience and the local credibility necessary to connect and represent the people of Gaza.

The final strength of Mr Trump’s plan lies in its promise of a path forward to peace, albeit one that is not yet fully clear. Embedded within the plan is agreement with Arab countries that the people of Gaza will not be left in limbo and that they have the right to remain in their ancestral land. The key will be to look at the interim administration and its Board of Peace as a process, not a destination. This means organising democratic elections, putting governance in the right Palestinian hands and making firm guarantees of Israel’s security.

Kosovo teaches us that such clarity is vital. UNMIK succeeded in the immediate aftermath of the war only because its mission was transparent: to stabilise existing institutions and build new ones as needed. But Kosovars grew anxious when transition slowed down as the interim UN bureaucracy started to take on a whiff of permanency. A process was devised and negotiations started for the final status—and Kosovo did not fall apart after the interim mission wound down. It became independent under a plan shepherded by Finland’s then president, Martti Ahtisaari, for which he won the Nobel peace prize. Remarkably, Kosovo today is one of the safest destinations in Europe, according to Gallup.

The war in Gaza is horrific. True reconciliation may never come. But the Trump plan is pragmatic and grounded in precedent. It is exactly what the people of Gaza need. ■

Petrit Selimi is a former foreign minister of Kosovo. He is a fellow at the University of Southern California Centre on Public Diplomacy.

Note 1:

After James Rubin’s testimony at the Specialist Court in The Hague, the question of Hashim Thaçi’s role at the Rambouillet Conference has resurfaced. Today, historians (and anyone interested) can consult thousands of sources that clarify the truth about Rambouillet and the roles of its protagonists. But in those days when the conference was at its most decisive point, it wasn’t easy to make accurate analyses and predictions. I wrote the original piece for the Albanian language magazine Zëri, where in the 1990s I kept a weekly column, while I was in Budapest, where I was attending a conference.

That day I was pressed for time; I had one hour to send the text to the newsroom, and I didn’t know what was happening in Rambouillet, where the Kosovar delegation was under the pressure of an ultimate decision. I tried many times to call someone from the Kosovar delegation - everyone had their phones switched off. At one moment I dialed, for the umpteenth time, the number of Bukurie Gjonbalaj, who was an assistant on the British team, and miraculously she picked up the phone. In an noticeably excited voice, Bili told me: “Hashim has just agreed; in principle the agreement will be signed—we’re all thrilled!” I congratulated Bili and rushed to find a quiet corner at the venue where the conference was being held and wrote the column in one breath.

I once republished it on Facebook with an introductory note, but I decided to repost it again in full with a note, hoping that this time it will receive more attention.

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Note 2:

I published the original article “Hashim Thaçi’s skin” on February 27, 1999, on the most critical day of the Rambouillet Conference, when the international “ultimatum” to sign the peace agreement was expiring. The challenge was that the agreement had been rejected by the Serbian side, while the Kosovo delegation had hesitations: it favored the political platform that envisaged the creation of Kosovo’s self-governing bodies, but lacked explicit guarantees—first, the right of self-determination for Kosovo (left as an open process), and second, it required the Kosovo delegation to make the sacrifice of fully dissolving the KLA, because the role of security guarantor would pass to the international force, which was later installed as KFOR.

I am republishing the article with the idea that even today, for example in the arrangements for peace in Ukraine, the apple of discord is becoming “security guarantees.”

Today we have the possibility to rethink the behavior of the great powers, especially the USA, which as our ally, even 26 years ago, could not guarantee us full sovereignty, but did not betray Hashim Thaçi for the agreement that was reached: KFOR remains on duty even today; it may appear status-neutral, but what mattered was the partiality of U.S. and European great-power policies, which supported Kosovo - and especially Hashim Thaçi as a new political figure - so that independence would be declared through a coordinated political process.

Even for achieving the full sovereignty of Kosovo it was necessary to cultivate carefully and respectfully the friendships with strategic allies. But what did our illusionist sovereignists such as Kurti (now leading present government) do? Gripped by a delusion of grandeur in policymaking, they chose as their starting point that myopic mindset of miscalculations - with colossal errors in assessing Rambouillet, the Ahtisaari Plan, and the declaration of independence - considering them “failures”!

Note 3 - the original article from 1999:

Is Rambouillet a success or a failure for the Albanians? It is difficult to give a definitive answer to this question. Each person will respond from their own framework of evaluating the positive aspects (which are indeed many, and of historic importance) and the negative ones.

The Legalization of the KLA

But in these first moments, just as we received the information about the delegation’s agreement in principle with the Accords, I would first focus attention on the key figure of this conference, who found himself at the center of the contradiction. I am speaking of Hashim Thaçi, the leader of the KLA delegation. At the Rambouillet Conference not only was the KLA definitively legalized as Kosovo’s armed formation, but its leader - despite some ambiguities on the competencies that remained somewhat unclear - was chosen as the head of the delegation, marking the peak of his personal affirmation as a politician and as a potential new leader of the Kosovars’ national movement.

From diplomats’ statements it is known that Hashim Thaçi left them with strong impressions. The entire work of the Albanian delegation is said to have been excellent, which can likewise be linked to the fact that Thaçi was at its helm. Understandably, this harmony must also have been contributed to by other members of the delegation, especially those known for their sensitivity regarding leadership issues. Yet it happened that neither Rugova, until yesterday the uncontested leader of the Kosovars, nor Qosja, with his ambition to present himself as the “father of the nation”, opposed Thaçi’s leading role at Rambouillet in the least.

Why did this happen? Certainly not only because they were convinced (this applies particularly to Rugova) that the KLA had turned into the principal guiding force of the movement, one that could lead the political developments. They respected the balance of power, the fact that the KLA had become a driving factor and guarantor for resolving the Kosovo question, but they also had some more refined political forecasts.

First, Rugova, but also Qosja and others who would claim the role of leader, already understood that the Rambouillet Conference in no way promised the immediate realization of maximal Albanian aspirations; thus they attempted to make the political leader of the KLA a scapegoat for signing autonomy, given his limited political experience. Rugova, likewise, with this concession for the first time demonstrated (our of demagogy or sincere conviction?) the sense of a conscientious politician by placing the supreme national interest above his personal interests as leader. This would certainly have its effect, especially if it was something he had been advised to do by his external prompters. If Rugova had the ambition to remain in power in the coming period during and after the transitional phase - this momentary concession he made at Rambouillet, in relation to his supporting public opinion in Kosovo, was by no means a sign of his weakness (many said his political star was fading) but the opposite: that he was now assuming the position of a politician of historic stature.

Rugova ceded the place that “belonged” to him by all criteria (he was the only personality elected by the direct vote of Albanians) to a new political leader, for the sake of the cause.

The Pressure to Sign the Agreement

But let us return to the unenviable position of the KLA leader in Rambouillet.

In the final moments, as the second ultimatum’s deadline to the parties was passing, Thaçi was the only person in the Albanian delegation who still opposed, despite all pressures from advisers and from representatives of world powers, to accept the agreement.

A situation had arisen in which the other 14 delegation members were convinced, while Thaçi hesitated to yield. I believe that even Hashim Thaçi, privately, was convinced that the agreement was good, that it offered the maximum possible under existing circumstances, with a series of guarantees (still not sufficient to fully guarantee independence, but negotiable and attainable) for its implementation to the benefit of citizens and as a historic step toward the final resolution of the Kosovo issue. But he faced a major problem: by accepting this agreement he would be sawing off the branch he was sitting on. The agreement in question, in fact, demanded from the Albanian delegation, in one way or another, the dismantling or transformation of the KLA. This was indeed an enormous challenge. The KLA leader was being asked to give up what he helped create: the Kosovo Liberation Army, but, of course, for the sake of the very goal for which that guerrilla force had been created.

It is known that earlier Madeleine Albright, in her conversation with Thaçi and the KLA delegation, advised them that, since it was foreseen that Kosovo would be controlled by NATO during the transitional phase, he and his comrades should demilitarize and form a political party that would fight - by political means - for the goals for which they had taken up arms and successfully resisted the Serbian occupier. With this proposal, the KLA was advised to transform into a particular political force, to enter competition with the other formations, in order to reconfirm its position through the people’s vote. This offer overturned the revolutionary logic with which the KLA had entered the war, according to which the legitimacy of all things springs from the revolutionary act of representing the true interests of the people. From this revolutionary position, of legitimacy secured by sacrifice of rebels dying in battlefield, they also opposed any legitimizing claims of the parallel institutions of power created by the LDK and other parties in Rugova’s camp.

Creating a New Reality

The fate of the KLA, therefore, was one of the main topics of discussion in Rambouillet. This also conditioned the insistent demand that the guarantees of the agreement be pressed so that the two documents - the one on the three-year provisional status for Kosovo and the one on security and guarantees - be approved as one package. The Serbs did not contest much, except on several crucial elements, the political agreement, but sought at all costs that it be separated from the security and guarantees agreement, which foresaw the entry of around 30,000 NATO troops into Kosovo.

Throughout Rambouillet a vicious circle formed around these issues: to sign the political agreement, the Albanians demanded that the security guarantee be signed simultaneously. The Serbs, on the contrary, insisted that the political agreement should be renegotiated and signed so that security issues could be discussed at a later stage. Meanwhile the mediators - who likewise saw the problem as a whole, but also as something that could be realized in two steps, did not know how to overcome the impasse, since neither the Albanians nor the Serbs would give way on the key points that would move the process forward.

Finally, the mediators realized that political pressure on the Albanians could succeed (to have them sign the political agreement) so as to open the way for military pressure on the Serbs, since the latter would not agree to the security arrangements without more serious threats of a military intervention to accept the plan in its entirety and thus stop the war. Diplomats therefore advised the Albanians to sign the political part, because only this and not their stubbornness, would open the door for the activation of NATO’s order and for compelling Belgrade to comply with the demands of the Contact Group, the informal grouping of great powers that have a significant interest in Balkans, composed of United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia.

In general, the negotiation process was difficult. I congratulate Hashim Thaçi for his courage. It is important that the agreement be reached as soon as possible. Even though it does not satisfy maximal Albanian aspirations, it marks the beginning of a historic turn. The main thing is that the Serbian police will withdraw from Kosovo. The international community is creating an entirely new environment, from Bosnia to Macedonia, for achieving regional security. We must participate in this process so that both in Kosovo, and as a nation as a whole, we gain time to consolidate institutions and reactivate our potentials.

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(note from Petrit: Maliqi’s article is translated with AI, with minor edits for clarity)