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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
In a period when Western military engagement has unleashed violent sectarianism global terrorism, and become a catalyst for the biggest exodus of migrants since the Second World War, the 1999 Nato intervention in Kosovo remains a unique and shining example of a process that led to a peaceful transition from vicious ethnic war to modern democracy. Less than twenty years ago, a young ethnic Albanian student leader called Hashim Thaçi, led a revolution against Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian tyrant with the biggest military force in Europe, and convinced the West to bomb Belgrade out of Kosovo. The aerial bombardment beckoned a period of unrivalled peace in the Balkans which Western leaders who sought to subsequently overturn other tyrannies in foreign lands would view with envy as a rare successful model. Nato intervention in Kosovo, led by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, resulted in democracy and the rule of law. By contrast, however, attempts by George W. Bush to effect regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by America, Britain and France to do the same in Libya, have left lethal power vacuums filled by Islamist insurgents, and brought about the downfall of Western leaders themselves. This book is the story of the rare success of Western military intervention and the first biography of the new President of Kosovo, the youngest country in Europe.
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NEW STATE, MODERN STATESMAN
HASHIM THAÇI – A BIOGRAPHY
ROG E R BOYESAND SUZY JAGGER
CONTENTS
FOREWORD BY BOB DOLE
‘Thaçi’s journey is Kosovo’s journey’
My first visit to Kosovo was in the summer of 1990, less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was part of a congressional delegation meeting with Serbian authorities who did not seem too excited to see us there, claiming it was too dangerous for us to move around the countryside.
It became apparent during this trip that Kosovars are some of the most pro-American, pro-democracy people in Eastern Europe. It was also clear to me that they were being subjugated by the Belgrade government to the level of second-hand citizens. Evidence began to surface – photos of tortured people and ill-treated communities – indicating that Kosovo was a nation in despair. Our bipartisan delegation witnessed all too clearly the vile nature of Slobodan Milošević’s regime and the dangers that escalation of violence in Kosovo posed for the stability of the entire region. This concern extended to the administration of President George H. W. Bush, who within two years of my first visit sent a ‘Christmas Warning’ to Milošević, informing him that Serbian aggression in Kosovo would bring a unilateral military response by the United States.
As it happened – and rather tragically so – Milošević decided to test the resolve of the United States, and he launched a campaign of genocide and violence that prompted the largest military intervention on European soil since the Second World War. Milošević was ousted, and the entire Western Balkans entered a period of relative peace and stability.
The now independent Kosovo is striving towards becoming a stable democratic country – at peace with neighbours, secular in nature and a staunch ally in the global fight against religious and ethnic extremism. It is a country of young, dynamic people who are fully committed to European Union and NATO accession – progressive people who care deeply about ethnic reconciliation and global interfaith dialogue.
Kosovo has had an incredible journey, and one man critical to the development of this bastion of democracy in the Balkans is President Hashim Thaçi. As a young man barely thirty years old, he headed the Kosovar Albanian delegation at the international conference at Château de Rambouillet in France. Thaçi came to the table as an unknown quantity, but by the conclusion of the conference two weeks later, he was recognised as the voice of reason during a time of severe internal factionalism. The fate of the nation rested on Thaçi’s keen ability to convince his fellow fighters to compromise – not an easy task for those in the field who were witnessing the atrocities being committed by the Serbian forces.
When Milošević adamantly opposed any peace agreement and his diabolic plans for ethnic cleansing were stopped by NATO, Thaçi again proved his mettle by enabling the full demilitarisation of Kosovo in less than three months. The ability of Kosovar leadership to pacify and stop the cycle of violence is admirable, especially when we consider recent conflict areas such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. When, in 2000, Thaçi lost his first national election, he accepted the results even though he was the political leader of the KLA, signalling a new era of democratic behaviour among Kosovars.
By 2008, the then recently elected Prime Minister Thaçi declared the independence of Kosovo, establishing the youngest state in Europe and ensuring the democratic freedom of every Kosovar.
Kosovo has had other great ‘fathers of the nation’ over the past several decades. They tried to organise peaceful resistance. Milošević, however, did not believe in dialogue with Kosovars. It took a new generation of leadership, headed by President Thaçi, to call Kosovo’s allies to action.
Thaçi’s journey is Kosovo’s journey. The United States assisted Kosovo because we recalled our own fight for independence. We saw our own values reflected in Kosovo’s dedication to self-determination and protection of human rights. Kosovo is a shining example of success. This is a nation that defies the typical ethnic and religious fault lines in the region. Though a majority Muslim country, the Constitution approved by President Thaçi’s government bans any discrimination on the basis of religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Kosovo’s minority groups are considered integral to the nation’s heritage and, along with the country’s security services, are strong allies in the renewed fight against ISIS and other terrorist organisations. Kosovo may be a small nation, but its value as a young democratic republic is of global proportions.
I hope this book, written by two of Britain’s most renowned journalists – Roger Boyes and Suzy Jagger – will provide an enlightening glimpse into the birth of a republic and a country whose inspiring people I am proud to call my friends.
Robert Joseph Dole served as a US senator from Kansas from 1969 until 1996, also serving as the Senate Majority Leader from 1985 until 1996. He was the Republican nominee for President of the United States in 1996.
PREFACE
HASHIM THAÇI AND THE FIGHT FOR KOSOVO
History is full of guerrilla leaders who die in combat, who fail to topple regimes or whose revolutions go adrift. Few mourn them. Some, those with shrewd political brains, courage, and good instincts, do indeed achieve their goals and become leaders of liberated, independent countries. Nelson Mandela is the name that still carries the most resonance in this regard, but there are many others in South America, Israel, decolonised Africa and Asia who have made this transition from insurgent to head of state.
Yet in modern Europe only one man, Hashim Thaçi, has made such a successful passage. Still in his forties, Thaçi has steered Kosovo from a suppressed colony under the boot of one of Europe’s most savage dictators to a vibrant democracy. It has been an extraordinary political journey and it is still not complete: as President of the new country, he is struggling to bring it into NATO and the European Union, to build bridges with Kosovo’s enemies. When he and Kosovo have achieved this goal, they will have reshaped the Balkans and turned Europe’s historically unstable south-eastern borderlands into a part of a modern community of states.
Thaçi has faced, and is facing, four great battles. All have been a test of leadership on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. Leaving his village in the mountains of western Kosovo, Thaçi studied history and philosophy in the capital, at Pristina University. Appalled by the near-apartheid conditions imposed on ethnic Albanians by the Milošević regime, he began to organise protests. Serb leader Slobodan Milošević reacted to the upheavals of 1989 – the peaceful revolutions that brought communist regimes tumbling down across Eastern Europe – by becoming even more nationalist and trampling on the rights of the Kosovars. As Thaçi shifted into the underground resistance, dodging arrest, he realised that Milošević could not be blocked by passive resistance. This became Thaçi’s first major challenge: to convince those Kosovars who followed the intellectual resistance leader Ibrahim Rugova that they were leading the province into a cul-de-sac. Rugova imagined himself to be a kind of Václav Havel: the standard-bearer of the Czech Velvet Revolution. But it would be impossible to win back even a limited amount of autonomy from Milošević without the shedding of blood. Beaten down by years of repression, many Kosovars simply could not picture how it would be possible ever to impose their will on the Serb leader. The only sensible option, it seemed, was to keep one’s head down and keep alive, as best one could, the flame of an independent Kosovo. Thaçi’s first foe, then, was the defeatism that spread out from Rugova’s circle. He understood, and had to communicate that insight, that Milošević was on the road to war, that the whole region was about to be set ablaze. And Kosovo had to be ready. Not to prepare for war, he told his underground cells, would be an act of irresponsibility.
For Thaçi, there has always been a time to fight and a time to strike a deal. Neither stratagem was ever going to be easy. In May 1940, Churchill told Cabinet members: ‘We shall go on and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.’ Thaçi saw the situation in a similar way: to negotiate with Milošević would betray weakness and the outcome of talks would be worse than if the Kosovars had taken up arms. And, like Churchill, he understood that the war would only be won when the Americans were drawn into the fighting by the pluck and the suffering of the victim-nation.
And that was to be Thaçi’s second test of leadership. Having put together the ideology of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA/UÇK), its brain and organisational skeleton, he had to find a way of winning a guerrilla war. The answer was clear to him: engage the West. It was US force (backing up the on-the-ground Croatian and Bosnian soldiers) that had ended the war in Bosnia. That meant talking NATO, the world’s greatest military alliance, into fighting together with the KLA. Again and again, top US officials warned that NATO could not be used as the air force of the rebels.
Thaçi persuaded them otherwise. In long, tactically ingenious negotiations at the Rambouillet conference in 1999, he outflanked Serbia, and nudged the US towards a war it did not really want to fight. At the time, Thaçi was barely thirty-one years old and suddenly found himself at home with the foreign and defence ministers of NATO and the EU. He had seen the weakness of Kosovo’s handgun army and, through a remarkable piece of alchemy, transformed its vulnerability into a position of strength. No other guerrilla movement has leveraged its limited power so successfully. And NATO did not feel duped: their action didn’t just loosen Milošević’s grip, it also gave the alliance a mission. It discovered that it could conduct limited military interventions without risking its ground troops. Kosovo became alliance shorthand for the projection of power against those who committed atrocities: an answer to all those who had accused the West of passivity in the face of genocide in Rwanda and elsewhere. The success of Kosovo, of liberal interventionism, tempted Western leaders into the morass of Iraq and a long, disastrous involvement with the Middle East. But this did not detract from Thaçi’s standing among Western politicians; to this day he is a figure of respect.
Thaçi’s third test, the great post-war dilemma, was how to reach an accommodation with the recently defeated enemy. That meant in the first place trying to ensure that Serb residents of Kosovo would not become victims of vendetta after the war. This was difficult, and only patchily successful. However, Thaçi managed to prevent friction and occasional blood-letting turning into an all-out conflagration. And he addressed the broader question of reaching an understanding with Belgrade, the erstwhile occupier and, to many, many Kosovars, the eternal foe. The Serbs did not trust Thaçi – indeed, Serbia still has a warrant out for his arrest – but he managed to talk at least some of the moderate Belgrade politicians into entering a modus vivendi with Kosovo. The carrot offered by Thaçi, and by his ally Baroness Ashton, the representative head of European foreign policy, was that Serbia was more likely to enter the EU if it came closer to recognising Kosovo. Even after a lost war, most Serbs continue to believe that Kosovo is an integral part of their homeland. Other Serbs questioned whether their country should even aspire to become part of the European Union that was home to so many of its former enemies. Russia had never stopped lobbying Serb leaders to stay out of the orbit of the EU. Today, Russian efforts to influence the politics of the region are stronger than ever. Most recently, Russian intelligence operatives are suspected to have organised an assassination attempt against the Montenegrin Prime Minister to derail the country’s accession to NATO.
These were powerful opponents for Thaçi, and remain so. At home, meanwhile, he was accused by fellow KLA veterans of appeasing with the enemy, trying to strike compromises with a power that had slaughtered Kosovars and driven them at gunpoint from their homes. For Thaçi, sitting face to face with Serb politicians whom he would once have been ready to kill was an extraordinary challenge but only he could bring it off; it was strategically akin to the anti-communist President Richard Nixon travelling to communist China. Like Nixon, Thaçi had carefully calculated the odds. His record as a war leader made it less likely that Kosovars would reject outright the makings of a deal. Thaçi was counting not so much on the healing power of time as on the rise of a new generation of Serbs with different, more pressing priorities than reclaiming ancient battlefields. All this required resourcefulness, determination and a readiness to swim against the tide. Thaçi’s legacy demanded that he present himself as a national unifier: of the ethnic Albanians, of the Kosovan Serbs, and of the Roma. The agreement he reached with Serbia netted him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination by a bipartisan group of US Congressmen and members of the European Parliament. He may yet win it if he succeeds in his aim to bring about the full reconciliation between Kosovo and Serbia.
There have been other, more dangerous scrapes in his life: assassination attempts, the murder of a friend with a screwdriver, the perils of leading a mule laden with weapons across the mountains to arm up his ragamuffin followers. Yet the final challenge, as a freshly elected President, is the most complex. It is about winning recognition for his nation state, building institutions and building trust, harnessing popular energy and fending off more insidious enemies. Kosovo is now recognised by over 110 states but important players, notably Spain (worried that Kosovo’s breakaway will encourage Catalonia) and Russia, have dug in their heels.
Thaçi’s mission is to convince the world that the scramble for recognition is not attention-seeking, an attempt to keep in the international spotlight. Rather it is about reinventing the whole south-eastern flank of Europe, which since the sixteenth century under the Ottomans has been seen as backward, a region of blood feuds out of sync with the rest of the continent.
Surrounded by a group of young advisors and backed by the West, Thaçi has found a way of changing that image: through encouraging digital diplomacy and tapping Kosovo’s remarkable reservoir of entrepreneurial talent. It is, demographically, a young country; effective leadership would mean finding ways of persuading the new generation to stay in the country, or to study abroad and return with new skills. All in the name of reclaiming and rediscovering Balkan space. A bold vision.
The advances made by Kosovo have irritated the Kremlin. If Thaçi accelerates towards prosperity and aligns itself with the EU and NATO, then Moscow believes its sphere of influence in the region will shrink. Serbia, Russia’s traditional ally, could, Moscow fears, be drawn in a similar direction. Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian leadership has been determined to show that getting closer to the West brings nothing but chaos and destruction. Kosovo proves otherwise. As a result, Thaçi finds himself pitted against the Kremlin’s Dirty Tricks department, which applies pressure and calls in favours to block Kosovo’s acceptance by symbolically important organisations such as UNESCO.
These are the new battlefields. Thaçi is clear: it is in the self-interest of Europe and the West as a whole to integrate Kosovo fully into their community. His war against dictatorship and ethnic cleansing was fought at the very end of the last century. Western leaders in the twenty-first century cannot allow Kosovo to inhabit a limbo; to do so would be a surrender of values and demonstrate a failure of resolve. And in Hashim Thaçi the world has a leader who does not easily surrender.
CHAPTER 1
THE WAL KER
He’s a walker, Hashim Thaçi – a hardy one. As a boy in the Kosovo highlands he hunted pheasant in the early mornings, side by side with his father, and learned to slide noiselessly down the scree. Later, as an insurgent leader, he would don his hiking boots to trek across the mountains to and from Albania, his backpack loaded with ammunition and weapons. ‘I must have made the journey thirty times or more,’ he says, ‘usually together with comrades-in-arms such as Kadri Veseli.’ Sometimes it took him three days following the smuggler routes through the passes. In a rush to reach international peace talks outside Paris, blocked from conventional transport by the Serbian government, he took shortcuts through the minefields on the Kosovo–Albania border and managed the journey in six hours flat. ‘I could slither my way around the high mountain passes,’ says Thaçi. ‘My first nickname was The Student, but later my comrades gave me the nickname The Snake.’ Snake in the old Albanian folktales is also associated with protecting the household.
Sometimes, though, the longest walks are the shortest. Dodging the Serbian secret police, the history student Thaçi would trudge cautiously through the backstreets of the Kosovan capital Pristina, as treacherous in the days of martial law as any craggy upland. That was in 1989, when elsewhere across Europe communist governments were tumbling. In Poland, a round table deal between the regime and the Solidarity opposition essentially handed power to the dissidents. In Prague, a Velvet Revolution spearheaded by the playwright Václav Havel booted out a thuggish government. In Berlin, the Wall fell. The political landscape was transformed with little blood spilled; it seemed like a blueprint for a future free of ideology.
But not for Kosovo. Although change was in the air, the Serbian communist leader Slobodan Milošević was embarking on a plan to crush the province and make the whole of Yugoslavia, with its patchwork of republics, into a commonwealth centrally steered from Belgrade. The brand of communism that had held Yugoslavia together under Josip Broz Tito was to be replaced by a strident Serbian nationalism. The Yugoslav army was the fourth largest standing army in Europe and its officer corps was overwhelmingly Serb; it stood at Milošević’s disposal.
Since 1389, when Ottoman forces of Sultan Murad trounced the Serbian knights of Prince Lazar on the Kosovo plains, it has been regarded as a place worth fighting for. Surrounded by mountains, laced by gurgling rivers, Kosovo has become wrapped up with Serbia’s sense of destiny. Lazar had, according to Serbian poems and legends, performed a God-given duty in resisting the encroachment of Islam on Christian Europe. That it failed was immaterial for most Serbs; their victory came from the martyrdom on the Kosovo Polje, the so-called field of blackbirds. That sense of righteous victimhood, coupled with the resentment stored up from more than 600 years of Turkish domination, is still the lifeblood of Serbian nationalism. Kosovo Albanians campaigning for a fully independent, internationally acknowledged state fight to this day against the deep irrationalism of its neighbour.
Milošević understood the Battle of Kosovo as a debt to be settled. On the Kosovo plain 600 years after the battle he told a throng of one million that ‘we are again involved in battles, and facing battles. They are not battles with arms but such battles cannot be excluded.’ To win, he said, Serbs had to be ready to demonstrate ‘decisiveness, courage and sacrifice’.
The old battlefield, in other words, was soon to become a new one. The fierce Balkan wars of the 1990s – that raised so many modern questions about post-communist Europe, about the role of military intervention to prevent massacres, about toxic nationalism – were rooted in ancient hatred and vendettas.
Hashim Thaçi could not in 1989 begin to answer the questions thrown up by the ruthless rise of Milošević. But he could see trouble brewing, and over the coming years entered an almost gladiatorial duel with the Serb strongman. No one in Thaçi’s native Drenica Valley had any illusions about Serbian intentions. ‘My family was always anti-Yugoslav, anti-communist, against the Serbian state,’ he recalls. ‘My grandfather had been a fierce opponent of communism and around the kitchen table stories of defiance were passed down through the generations.’ Nor was there any doubt that ultimately the Serbs would use force against them. ‘My parents sent four of their sons for one year into the Yugoslav army for compulsory military service, though I was exempted as a student,’ says Thaçi. ‘But while conscription was a moment for celebration elsewhere in Yugoslavia, for Kosovo Albanians it was a sombre and fearful moment.’ Albanians were bullied by Serb officers, given the most demeaning tasks; few were ever promoted. Almost 100 Kosovo Albanian soldiers in the Yugoslav army would return home in coffins. Their families were not allowed to open their coffins and were forced to bury their sons without seeing their bodies one last time. Thus, the first military uniform he wore was not a Yugoslav one but that of the Kosovo Liberation Army in late 1996.
Milošević manipulated the Yugoslav army into declaring martial law in Pristina. It turned out later that he was more talented at orchestrating the start of a war than running one. Kosovo, so much under the thumb of his secret police and with a big Yugoslav army presence, did not, however, seem to present a significant military challenge to Milošević in 1989. It was, despite its immense symbolic importance to Serbian nationalists, merely an unruly province that had to be subjugated. Two years earlier, as a mid-level communist apparatchik, he had started to beat the war drums at a Pristina rally of Kosovo Serbs. When the police, made up of ethnic Albanians, tried to disperse the crowd, Milošević exploded: ‘They will never do this to you again! No one will ever have the right to beat you!’ And, in a chilling prophecy, he declared: ‘This is your country, these are your houses, your fields and gardens, your memories… Yugoslavia doesn’t exist without Kosovo! Yugoslavia would disintegrate without Kosovo! Yugoslavia and Serbia are not going to give up Kosovo!’
Those few Western governments to take notice dismissed that Milošević speech as a purely rhetorical outing designed to nudge along his rise to the top of the Serb establishment. Thaçi, though, had understood the message: ‘It was a declaration of war. He was saying there could be no independent existence for Kosovo Albanians since that would pose an existential challenge for Serbia and Yugoslavia.’
It took Milošević another year of outflanking his political rivals in Belgrade and in swelling rallies across Serbia – dubbed ‘Meetings of Truth’ – to turn himself into the premier champion of the Kosovan Serb minority and the standard-bearer of a nationalist revival. ‘Every nation has a love that warms its heart. For Serbia, it is Kosovo,’ he told a gathering of one million Serbs in Belgrade. ‘We are not afraid.’ 1
And on the Kosovo fields, in his elaborately staged commemoration of the 1389 battle, he strongly hinted that he was about to unleash an extraordinary wave of violence.
Posters of Milošević – still some way from seizing the Serbian presidency – were pinned up in barber shops and cafés. For many of his fans he was simply ‘Slobo’; Serbia was readying itself for radical change but not the kind that would, as in the rest of Eastern Europe, encourage crowds to sing along to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’. This was to be a rebirth that reached back into a long resentful history of blood and retribution.
The Belgrade choreography began to unfold rapidly. The head of the Kosovo Albanian communist party Azem Vllasi opposed any attempt to further sap the province’s fragile autonomy. So Milošević had him arrested, accused of ‘counter-revolutionary activities’, and replaced by a more loyal placeman. Miners from Trepča – pit workers had played an important role in both the Polish and Romanian revolutions – barricaded themselves underground and threatened to blow themselves up unless Vllasi was reinstated and discrimination was ended against Kosovo Albanians. Some 300,000 Albanians took to the streets of Pristina in sympathy. Kosovo was the poorest region in Yugoslavia, hopelessly underfunded, with a young population faced with a choice between unemployment or emigration.
Milošević demanded that the Yugoslav army be deployed to restore order and choke off the ‘separatists’. Croatia and Slovenia opposed any slide towards martial law, fearing (not unreasonably) that once Kosovo was crushed, they would be next. Both republics felt trapped in the decrepit, inefficient and Serb-dominated Yugoslavia. Milošević, meanwhile, accused them of financing the Kosovo miners because they wanted to foment the destruction of Yugoslavia. And he swiftly played his next card – he had hundreds of thousands of Serb workers bussed into Belgrade to protest outside the federal Yugoslav Parliament, threatening to ransack the capital unless action was taken immediately against the Kosovars in Pristina.
Milošević got his way. In March 1989, the tanks of the Yugoslav army rolled into Pristina. The miners’ strike was ended. The Serbian Parliament abolished even the limited autonomy that had been granted to Kosovo by the late dictator Tito; it was now little better than an occupied colony. And Milošević sensed that one man with strong will and a simple vision, at the head of an unbeatably strong army, could remake the husk of Yugoslavia into a Greater Serbia, the dominant power of south-east Europe.
Thaçi, watching the Serb’s manoeuvring, understood, with a young man’s intuition, that Kosovo was the starting pistol for a round of Balkan wars – and that they would only end after Kosovo had secured a just peace and independence from Belgrade. The young men from the Drenica Valley had always assumed that their region would be the crucible of opposition to Serbian rule. The mountains and dense woodland had provided cover to earlier rebellions, notably the Kaçak uprising against the Serb occupation of Kosovo after the First World War. The rebels demanded Albanian-language schools and self-administration, but were beaten down. Now it seemed that Pristina too was going to be in the front line. And since 1981 – when a student fished a cockroach out of his meal in the refectory – the university had been in political ferment. Already, at the age of fifteen, as news of the cockroach uprising reached his parents’ smallholding, it was clear what he wanted to do: study history at that hotbed.
A simple protest by a few hundred students fed up with living conditions had rolled into a month of stone-throwing and open confrontation with the authorities. Their slogans mutated from ‘Better food!’ to ‘We are Albanians – not Yugoslavs’ and ‘Kosovo Republic!’ There was, so it seemed from the vantage point of the valley, revolutionary potential in the capital too. Stiff jail sentences were handed down to more than 1,200 people; many were just leaving prison when Thaçi arrived at the university, determined to stir things up.
Why history? One of his associates – who would later emerge as the country’s very active foreign minister – remembers that it was the most free-thinking of faculties. ‘Promoting Albanian history, that was a way of framing our thoughts about national identity,’ he says.2 In the cafés of Pristina, as the Milošević crackdown got more and more oppressive, Hoxhaj, Thaçi and others thrashed out what could and what should be done against the overpowering existential threat posed by Milošević.
It seemed as if a Greater Serbia entailed the wiping out of all Albanian cultural memory. Place names were changed to Serbian. The shutters were pulled down on the Kosovo ballet, the Kosovo theatre, the Kosovo Academy of Sciences. More than a dozen Albanian journalists were jailed. All state-employed Albanians – and the state was by far the largest employer – were forced to swear an oath of loyalty to Serbia or face instant dismissal. Serb authorities began to pulp Albanian language books in the Pristina National Library. Over the coming years, two-thirds of Kosovo’s 180 libraries were shut down; 900,000 books destroyed.
But, just as Thaçi had seen Pristina University as a magnet for resistance, so Milošević saw it as a prime target. If he was to eliminate the very idea of Kosovan independence then he had to start by killing its brain. Quotas were imposed on university enrolment by Kosovo Albanians; the ceiling was set at 18,000 rather than the 40,000 that usually attended lectures. Separate entrances were installed for ethnic Albanians and for Kosovo Serbs. ‘It was tantamount to apartheid,’ says Thaçi.3 When lecturers protested, 863 were sacked. Many were accused of ‘separatism’, although the actual physical separation was being commanded by the Serbian authorities. Public gatherings were outlawed.
The crackdown reached all levels of the educational system. Serb and Albanian children had to study in separate classrooms and on different shifts. Dozens of Albanian-language primary schools were closed. The number of ethnic Albanians allowed to continue schooling after the age of sixteen was drastically thinned. As a result, the Kosovars devised their own shadow system of education, similar to the ‘Flying University’ set up by Polish and Czech dissidents in the 1970s. A typical lecture or classroom might be set up in an old shop, hidden from view by lace curtains, planks on bricks substituting for desks. Albanian-language textbooks were smuggled into Kosovo by pack donkeys. Serb police would stop buses coming into Pristina and check the documents of those of university age. ‘“Why do you study when you have no university?” That’s what the cops would yell,’ said one former underground student, now a businessman in Germany. Typically, another student recalls fleeing across the mountains to Macedonia after particularly brutal police treatment. He would return to sit clandestine exams, the results of which would be duly entered into his Index, a record of university achievement.
Hashim Thaçi was elected pro-rector by the student body, essentially their spokesman and organiser. He had stood out as someone with absolute clarity of purpose and the attributes of Lech Wałęsa or Václav Havel. ‘I was always convinced,’ he says, ‘that our right would triumph over Milošević’s might.’ Above all he grasped, and was willing to fight against, Belgrade’s plan to decapitate the up-and-coming generation of leaders in Kosovo. ‘By 1991, our educational system had largely shifted underground, so I would move between sacked lecturers and secret students, from one private apartment to another,’ he said. Thaçi was under observation by the Serbian security police. ‘I had to be extremely careful. I never used a phone or a fax if I could avoid it,’ he said. Despite having become an object of interest for Belgrade, he enjoyed a special freedom, helped by the fact that he was paid 80 German Marks a month from funds raised by Kosovo émigrés. ‘It was a time when I began to understand what Kosovo’s political aims should be, not just those of the students. I tried to lead a normal life as a student but then at night get back to Drenica where we would discuss how to organise resistance with the likes of Adem Jashari, one of the most vocal leaders of resistance in the region.’
Thaçi capitalised on the anger of the Kosovo Albanians as they strained under the yoke of Milošević:
Back in 1989, there was nothing they could do about football matches between Pristina and Belgrade. They were real grudge games. The whole of the capital filled the stadium, there was a lot of fighting on the pitch; nationalist slogans off it. So of course everything we couldn’t say on the street we shouted out in the stadium. Every match became a political demonstration not just by fans but everyone who felt the deep disappointment of occupation.
‘Of course he got roughed up sometimes by the police,’ says his friend Enver Hoxhaj. ‘But it wasn’t all about brutal confrontation.’4 They met in cafés and apartments, drank beer together and debated the issue that gripped the whole of their generation: what next?
‘It was a heavy burden to be so young and to be so public,’ reflects Thaçi. ‘I could have continued with a good life as a young man. I had siblings living in the diaspora – so it wasn’t easy at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three to go off and start a war. It could have been different – but I never regretted it.’
1 Milošević quotes are taken from an author interview with Adam LeBor, biographer of the Serb leader.
2 Author interview with Hoxhaj
3 Author interview with Hashim Thaçi. Unless otherwise stated, all Thaçi quotes are taken from twenty hours of interviews with Thaçi conducted between 2015 and 2017.
4 Author interview with Hoxhaj
CHAPTER 2
LEARNING FROM THE NEIGHBOURS
Two days before Romania’s ruling couple Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu were gunned down by a firing squad, Kosovo Albanian dissidents formally set up the LDK, the Democratic League of Kosovo. In the same month, December 1989, dissidents across the province were gathering together to give a formal face to the civil resistance to Milošević and the brutality of martial law: Adem Demaçi established a human rights council, while Veton Surroi founded the Pristina branch of the Yugoslav Democratic Initiative and immediately spoke out in favour of striking building workers. Suddenly there were free trade unionists, a liberal party, a national party: all talking shops designed to vent the Kosovar frustration with Serbian rule, all inspired by the splintering of communist authority in Eastern Europe. But the most enduring group was the LDK, which would define Kosovan politics for almost the whole of the following decade.
The outside world barely noticed. Blood was flowing in Romania and there was a real risk that a year of peaceful change in central Europe was about to give way to broader chaos. Milošević, despite his incendiary speech-making, was not seen as a problem by Western analysts. As long as he presented himself as a non-ideological reformer (he had, after all, been a banker in New York, at a time when that was still a mark of acumen) and as someone who would not allow regional upheavals to change borders, then he was viewed by foreign diplomats as a stabilising factor. Kosovo, instead of being seen as the potential trigger for new devastating Balkan wars, became the stuff of unread memos in the chancelleries of Europe. Vital was the future of Germany, the explosive potential for full-scale confrontation with the Soviet Union and the dangerously orphaned Red Army tank regiments stranded on the frontline of a crumbling Warsaw Pact.
The Kosovo Albanians were in an unfortunate situation, but they were out of step, it seemed, with the great march of history. The West, and the United States in particular, wanted to be reassured that Yugoslavia was not going to fall apart. The great minds of NATO could only deal with one crisis at a time. When James Baker, the US Secretary of State, turned up in Belgrade in June 1991, he spoke as a southerner, an American whose ancestors had experienced the devastation of a long civil war: ‘We don’t have a dog in this fight,’ he announced, telling pro-independence republics that they could not expect recognition from Washington.
That was a depressing signal for the Kosovars.
Abandon your dreams, the US administration of George H. W. Bush seemed to be saying, don’t rock the boat. In this cautious and naive worldview, the literary critic Ibrahim Rugova appeared to be the right man in the right place: someone in tune with the more peaceful rhythms of 1989, an intellectual who behind his smudged glasses seemed to be a Balkan equivalent of Václav Havel, Europe’s favourite chain-smoking revolutionary. Rugova’s father and paternal grandfather had been killed by Tito’s partisans, he spoke foreign languages, wrote poetry and preached a non-violent resistance against the troops of Milošević. That was an attractive pose not just for Washington but also for some Kosovan Albanians, who were all too aware they were overwhelmingly outgunned and outmanned by the Serbs. And Western diplomats were willing to overlook Rugova’s chronic alcohol problem and his manifest weakness as a leader in return for policies that avoided confrontation. In the summer of 1990, Kosovo Albanian representatives went to Parliament to declare limited independence from Serbia, found their way blocked by police and so made their statement on the steps instead. When the LDK eventually met to draw up their new constitution for a Republic of Kosovo it had to do so in secret and Rugova’s ambition was clear: Kosovo was not striving for statehood but to be a republic with equal status with other constituent parts of a Yugoslav confederation.
For Thaçi, this kind of self-limiting revolution could lead nowhere except the further draining of Kosovo, its continued subservience to Serbia. Thaçi’s yardstick, as he transformed himself from student protest leader into the leader of a national insurgency, was not the appeasement of Rugova but rather the dignified defiance of Adem Jashari, a rugged smallholder from the Drenica Valley, a man with a clear understanding of the sacrifices needed to move forward. For Jashari, fifteen years his senior, the balance of forces between the Kosovo Albanians and Belgrade had to be changed. That could not be achieved by essentially abandoning armed struggle and allowing the Serbs to treat the Kosovo Albanians as colonial serfs.
‘I had admired him since I was in high school. He was a special man for me,’ says Thaçi.
Jashari had taken part in the 1989 demonstrations. I became engaged with the illegal political organisation the People’s Movement for Kosovo through Kadri Veseli. Adem Jashari and two activists, Zahir Pajaziti and Sali Çekaj, led groups that travelled to Albania for military training. At the end of December 1991, the Serb police tried to raid his home and, together with his brothers, his father and the whole village, he fought back.
After that we met only secretly during my tenure as pro-rector, to discuss seriously about how to organise resistance in the towns. During the 1989 protests, I saw Adem Jashari for the first time fully armed and together we threw Molotov cocktails at the Serbian armoured vehicles.
And that was to be one of Thaçi’s great early contributions to the uprising: to bring disciplined thought, structure and system to the uprising, to identify its leading lights.
He was a real military leader, the symbol of the still-undeclared Kosovo Liberation Army, the UÇK. In May 1992, a student was killed by the Serb police in Skenderaj. Ten thousand turned up for his funeral and I spoke in my capacity as student rector. ‘If repression continues, it will lead to open, armed resistance,’ I told the mourners.
After the funeral, Thaçi drove to Jashari’s house, a large compound that had been fortified following the Serb attack five months before.
‘“Hashim, you did the right thing,” he told me. “We have to tell the truth openly about war – but be careful.”’
Thaçi was indeed careful. Kosovo was in no sense prepared to wage a war against the heavy weaponry of Milošević. Although most farms had a few rudimentary weapons, there was no great hidden arsenal. Despite Jashari’s mission to Albania, there was precious little training. And the people of Kosovo had yet to be convinced that rising up against the Serbs was not, as Rugova portrayed it, a suicide mission, an invitation to be steamrollered out of existence. Thaçi, moving secretly, taking long walks in the open, embarked on an elaborate act of national persuasion.
‘This was going to be an authentic movement,’ he recalls,
not something grafted onto society. It was clear what the uprising shouldn’t be. I had watched a lot of movies about partisans fighting Germans – films from the era of Tito or the Albanian Enver Hoxha – you know, with brave heroes singlehandedly killing ten Germans at a go. I never believed that stuff.
And of course I watched John Wayne too, but real life was different from the heroism I saw in socialist or Hollywood cinema, though I obviously preferred the Hollywood movies.
Real-life examples were even less useful. ‘I read a lot about the IRA, the Kurdish PKK and the ETA group in the Basque land. But I didn’t want a terror group that would harm civilians, not the IRA and not the Palestine Liberation Organization. The KLA would never plant bombs in Serbian cities to hit soft targets or civilians.’ Thaçi was chiefly concerned that the frustration of Kosovo Albanians would turn into a doomed intifada, squashing the hopes of a generation.
‘That was dangerous,’ he says. ‘When I talked to the Marxists in the resistance, they said: “We have to prepare the people for the uprising.” But from my reading, that wouldn’t work either.’
The Kosovan cause could not flourish as an ideologically driven movement, least of all a Marxist one at a time when communist rule was being discredited and toppled throughout Europe. Strategic patience wasn’t the answer either; it smacked too much of Rugova’s all-too-passive resistance. Rugova’s approach wasn’t even Gandhian; Gandhi, after all, had called for constant demonstrations against the colonial ruler. Rugova judged even this to be too risky. Instead, Thaçi calculated, a war had to be organised and orchestrated. It had to be seen as just by the outside world, it had to be adequately financed and it had to have the central aim not of the glorious battlefield victories that fuelled Serbian dreams but of outwitting and exposing the cruelty of an oppressive dictator.
The beefing up of the LDK and other groups was thus important to Thaçi even though he was sure that only a combination of political and military means could bring about a desirable political outcome. The executive of the LDK included not only home-based Kosovars but representatives from the diaspora in Europe and the United States; it was less of a party than an NGO, one with over 500 branches. That was a source of strength for the resistance but also a cause of friction – notably between the government-in-exile of Bujar Bukoshi (Cabinet sessions were held in Zürich’s Mövenpick Hotel) and Rugova in Pristina.
The power of the diaspora was in the first place financial. Kosovo Albanians inside and outside the country were contributing financially to the establishment of a ‘parallel state’. Voluntary contributions from the many Albanians and Kosovo Albanians working abroad in Germany and Switzerland raised at least 120 million Deutschmarks between 1990 and 1999. This money was transferred to the Dardania Bank in Tirana and then physically carried across the border into Kosovo to fund the some half a million students in the underground education system and the 166 impromptu clinics. Thaçi as pro-rector knew exactly how these sums were distributed and their value to the running of the shadow society. Kosovo was a remittance society surviving on the cash sent home by the hundreds of thousands of Kosovars working as Gastarbeiter, ‘guest-workers’, in the foundries and factories of German-speaking Europe and Scandinavia. The government-in-exile asked that they sacrifice 3 per cent of their wage packets – or 10 per cent of business profits from the wealthier emigrants – to keep the homeland alive.
They gave above all because of the sense of menace in the Balkans. What would happen to their family smallholdings, their kinfolk, the graves of their ancestors, if Kosovo was to be swallowed up by war? Their fears were reinforced by events in Slovenia and Croatia. On 25 June 1991, Slovenia defied James Baker’s warnings, raised its flag, tugged down the Yugoslav one, declared independence and took control of its borders. The Yugoslav general staff had drawn up two plans. The first entailed the deployment of 2,000 troops to take back border crossings and Ljubljana airport. The second was a proper invasion and occupation of Slovenia by the Yugoslav army’s Fifth Military District.
The first, more modest, plan was implemented – and Slovenia plunged headfirst into war. It was a short, limited conflict: Slovenian militia besieged Yugoslav army bases, cutting off their water, telephones and electricity. A Yugoslav helicopter was shot down and in ten days of fighting, forty-four Yugoslav soldiers were killed against only a handful of Slovenian fatalities. And, despite the anger of some Yugoslav generals, Slobodan Milošević let it happen. His scheme was to pretend to fight for the integrity of Yugoslavia while in fact laying the groundwork for a new Serbian order, a kind of Serboslavia. While paying lip service to the independence of republics within a Yugoslav federation, he was in fact paving the way for a nation that would unite all Serb minorities. Tiny Alpine Slovenia was 90 per cent inhabited by Slovenians. There were, however, 600,000 Serbs in Croatia; in Bosnia 31 per cent of the population was made up of Serbs. Slovenia could go free – it sounded the death knell for a Yugoslavia in which Milošević was no longer interested and ushered in the beginnings of a new Greater Serbia baptised by blood.
For Thaçi, the Slovenian war and the rapid unfolding of violence in Croatia and Bosnia carried important lessons. One was that the US administration really did not see Milošević in the same way as the toppled tyrants of Eastern Europe. ‘Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism,’ said George H. W. Bush in August 1991. That line – in favour of Yugoslavia sticking together with Milošević as its natural leader – had to be changed. But how? Second, Slovenia had shown how to get ready for an intelligent war: its 35,000 men were well trained and highly motivated. The Slovenian defence minister Janez Janša had been buying arms, including anti-tank weapons. True, Slovenia enjoyed certain advantages – it was rich, Kosovo poor. It was a republic, not a subjugated province. It had no emotional significance, unlike Kosovo, for Serbian identity. Yet Kosovo too, with careful planning, with the funds from its countrymen abroad, with the help of neighbouring Albania, could become a fighting nation in its own right. All it needed was leadership – and guile.
Croatia was the real target of Milošević. In Slovenia, the Serbian leader had essentially struck a deal with Milan Kuçan: get out of Yugoslavia and leave me free to create a Serboslavia, a Greater Serbia that would link up the Serb communities in Croatia and, even more explosively, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The troops that were being taken by train in the direction of Slovenia were in fact intended to fight for the Serb minority in Croatia. The outline of a Greater Serbia had been drawn up by the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences on the basis of the works of the nineteenth-century nationalist Ilija Garašanin. His idea had been to dispatch spies into targeted territories, to set up parallel military and security forces and prepare them for annexation. That was exactly the plan followed in 1990 as Milošević’s men started to arm up Serb militants in Krajina; control Krajina and you can separate the Croatian capital Zagreb from the Croatian coastline. The Milošević response to the collapse of European communism was thus to return to the nineteenth century with twentieth-century armaments.
