Shkuran: Mero Baze
A journalist friend of mine in Kosovo sent me a video today that made me sad. Some Albanian "patriots" in Kosovo were stopping cars with Serbian license plates and painstakingly pasting Albanian flags on their windows.
Kosovo's independence celebration comes this year at the height of a division between the US and Europe, at the death knell of transatlantic politics, and the only food that people in Kosovo are fed today is primitive nationalism that secures votes, but not the future of Kosovo.
The first victim of the "new world" that is emerging is the death of transatlantic politics, and Kosovo is the orphan child of this divorce.
Today, after 27 years of freedom, thanks to transatlantic politics, Kosovo continues to remain with incomplete recognition, lack of membership in the UN, and an endless dialogue with Serbia, which has become a mechanism for exhausting Kosovo's independence process.
The military success of transatlantic policy in 1999 did not translate into political success. The endless dialogue is an expression of a dangerous process that has left Kosovo in a gray area of sovereignty.
Although in 1999 we all believed that Kosovo would be the model child of transatlantic politics, over the years it lost its objective and today is an object of crisis management and periodic ethnic tensions by the West.
All of this came about because Kosovo became a victim of divisions within the West, especially European divisions.
In 2018, the White House began a process of reviewing the Kosovo–Serbia agreement, which ultimately resulted in a draft agreement proposing mutual recognition of Serbia–Kosovo, a permanent amnesty for Kosovo war actors from both sides, and a territorial exchange.
The truth is that the US stood firm behind the agreement and woke Europe up. At a meeting in Tirana with representatives of the US embassy at the time, which I attended, the acting deputy ambassador gave us a speech quoting national security adviser John Bolton who spoke of a “new creative destruction in Kosovo.”
The agreement was never made public, but proposed by the White House and negotiated with several Western chancellors, including the US, it raised a not unjustified alarm in Brussels, but also among US transatlanticists at the time in opposition, which motivated anti-Trump prosecutor Jack Smith to issue an arrest warrant for President Hashim Thaçi and other KLA leaders, taking them to The Hague.
The reason they went to The Hague was not war crimes, which are still not being verified, but the crisis of transatlantic politics. They are the first martyrs of this crisis.
With President Trump's return to the White House, this agreement is no longer on the table, but the normalization of Serbia-Kosovo relations is.
It is not certain whether the White House will achieve its objective, but in the conditions of the death of transatlantic policy, if the US does not take over Kosovo, third actors will intervene, Russian influence in Serbia will increase, Chinese economic penetration may increase and, as a reaction, the populist nationalist spirit in Kosovo, which will make Kosovo's grave even worse.
It serves today as an electoral base for Albin Kurti, but it cannot be a fuel that keeps Kosovo's journey in history moving. Kosovo is not just a bilateral problem with Serbia, but the only successful illustration of Euro-Atlantic architecture in the Balkans. It does not die by leaving alone, but takes with it everything the West has done for it and for itself.
In the conditions of the death of transatlantic politics, the political class in Kosovo should not act or think about how to fight the new vices of the West, but how not to become its enemy. The danger is that Kosovo is now no longer a strategic project of the West, but an annoying diplomatic dossier of its own. And this is very dangerous.
I know that it is not very European for Vjosa Osmani and Edi Rama to go to the White House to the Peace Board, but refusing would be a great luxury for a small pro-American nation like Albania. On the contrary, let this participation be a signal to Europe whether it will stick to the reasons why it liberated Kosovo or not. And of course, if the US does this alone and without Europe, we should be grateful for life.
Kosovo is today a child left on the streets by the divorce between the US and Europe. Those who are exalted today in Pristina by stopping cars with Serbian license plates and putting up Albanian flags are the consequences of an orphaned child left on the streets, who in the end kill themselves.
t7 live
