The Verdict That Reopened the Kosovo War

Alfred Lela

Hashim Thaçi fell today as a martyr to a war whose front lines disappeared more than two decades ago, but which, it now seems, has continued its uninterrupted life backstage, amid the great geopolitical clashes of the world.

His conviction, together with those of Veseli, Krasniqi and Selimi, crosses several spectacular lines. The gravest is the equation of victims with executioners, of freedom fighters with those who denied freedom, of those who suffered genocide with those who perpetrated it.

Declared guilty and persecuted initially over the Yellow House—a fiction of a kind produced only by the infamous Russian kompromat, deployed in the West throughout the decades of the Cold War and still at work today—the four KLA leaders have now been formally convicted, although on fewer charges than those originally brought against them by the prosecutors of the Special Court.

There are two poisonous ironies.

Hashim Thaçi became the principal proponent of the very special court that today handed him the guillotine. He became the kind of politician who rearranges his own house according to the tastes of a friend, only to lose his freedom precisely because he sought to share the task of setting that house in order with those beside whom he had fought for the freedom of his people.

Deeper still is the irony of his conviction shortly after Ratko Mladić, a genuine war criminal, left his Hague cell through the door of the morgue—only to be resurrected at an almost state funeral, amid quasi-governmental honours and pan-Serbian ceremonies that transformed the criminal into a hero.

Thaçi’s conviction is a telegram of condolence to Vučić and the Serbs, and to their enduring mythology of imagined persecution.

Thaçi and the other commanders seem to have been convicted also as representatives of a people such as the Albanians—a people whose freedom has always been questioned, repeatedly interrupted, rarely lived, and forever left teetering on the edge of history.

What Kadare regarded as the Albanian century appears to have sunk today with the conviction of the leaders of a war for freedom—leaders of a people who may be left without alternatives and begin to seek them among freedom’s enemies. That would constitute a colpo di grazia for the destiny of an ancient nation, European in its roots and its anthropology.

As in an inverted Greek tragedy, Hashim Thaçi trusted the foreign gift, unlike his political opponent Albin Kurti, who played Cassandra, foresaw Thaçi’s fate, and today possesses not only power but also the authority of the oracle conferred upon him by that prophecy.

Whatever the case—prophecy or coincidence—the Albanian political and historical space narrowed today. Serbs and Albanians, standing on opposite sides of the war, are now two equally misunderstood peoples. This will only drive them to lock horns ever more fiercely within that misunderstanding.

The heavy shadow of this misunderstanding—in which the historical aggressor and the historical prey set off towards the centuries ahead carrying, before their eyes and upon their backs, a war left unresolved and returned to them by their former arbiter—is more politics than this peninsula can bear. A peninsula which, in Churchill’s phrase, produces more history than it can consume.

The Hague, a cold and cynical northern city, has revived a cold war that will continue to heat up: as psyops; as flashes of parallel worlds across social media; as armed cross-border incursions; as skirmishes in stadiums and international forums; as a peace in search of war; as a Versailles that produces the Bulge; as a battle dreaming of being fought—not to finish off the enemy, but to destroy his myth.

The Hague verdict keeps Serbian mythology alive, and the unfinished Battle of Kosovo returns to the stage.

With the same likelihood that, in the end, a sultan will win the war.