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Albania in mourning, Belgrade in celebration

2026-09-17 09:14:37Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA PROF. ASOC. DR. MARENGLEN KASMI
Albania in mourning, Belgrade in celebration
Jakup Krasniqi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi, Hashim Thaçi

Even before the microphones in the courtroom in The Hague were properly turned off, a reaction came from Belgrade that perhaps explains better than many analyses the political significance of the September 16 decision. Serbia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, Ivica Dačić, declared that the court’s decision confirmed that “the so-called KLA was a criminal and terrorist organization.” According to him, the narrative built about “national heroes” and the “just liberation war” had also been overthrown. He further linked the decision to Kosovo itself, stating that a state cannot be built on the graves of murdered Serbs.

In a few sentences, Dacic moved the court's decision wherever he wanted: from the sentencing of Hashim Thaci, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi, and Rexhep Selim, he moved on to the KLA, to the character of the war, and from there to Kosovo.

A few hours later, Aleksandar Vučić spoke. The Serbian president focused on the fact that the court had not found a widespread or systematic attack against the civilian population. According to him, this was done in order not to damage the “credibility of the KLA.” Then, as he often does to self-victimize Serbia, he summed up his position with one sentence: “Serbs will always be the criminals, while everyone else will be liberators, heroes and brave.”

The reactions of two senior Serbian leaders show that in Belgrade the decision immediately began to be read beyond the criminal responsibility of the four convicted.

Meanwhile, we try to console ourselves and say that the KLA was not punished. Legally, this reasoning is completely correct. Even the presiding judge explained that the trial was about individual responsibility and not about the legitimacy of the KLA or the independence of Kosovo.

Legally, again, okay, but the problem is that history is not only written in courtrooms.

For more than two decades, Serbia has called the KLA a terrorist organization, presenting the war as a state confrontation with terrorism and NATO's intervention as aggression against a sovereign state. Now this narrative has been added to the conviction in The Hague of some of the main leaders of the KLA. Dacic immediately showed us how this fact will be used.

This is why it is not enough to say that the KLA was not convicted. The court can define the legal limits of its decision, but it cannot determine how this decision will be used in politics, diplomacy, the media and, over time, in history.

Serbia has an advantage that we often underestimate: continuity. Governments come and go, international circumstances change, but Belgrade's main theses on Kosovo have not changed. They are repeated in political statements, in diplomacy, in international organizations, in the media, in publications and in every debate where the Kosovo issue is raised.

The strength of this strategy lies precisely in repetition and continuity. Belgrade does not necessarily need its version to be accepted today as the true version of the Kosovo war. It is enough for it to be constantly present, not to go out of circulation and, whenever a new opportunity arises, to be enriched with new arguments. The Hague decision is one of them.

Over time, things can change. From the propaganda thesis, one can move on to the “Serbian version” of history. After a while, when the generations that lived through the war leave, the distance between the “Serbian version” and the “Albanian version” may seem much smaller to a public that does not know well what happened. Instead of a historical process with causes, responsibilities and certain power relations, only two national narratives remain that contradict each other.

This is why the verdict against the KLA leaders has special value for Belgrade. It gives an old narrative a new argument, this time produced not in Belgrade, but by a Kosovo court in The Hague.

Serbia has long used another mechanism, the shifting of the debate. Instead of the discussion remaining on the process that led to the Kosovo war, the debate is thus shifted to the crimes committed during the war. In this way, attention is diverted from the question of what happened in Kosovo during the 1980s-1990s and how it came to armed conflict, and the discussion is increasingly focused on the question of who killed whom and how many crimes each side committed.

Of course, crimes must be judged, but reducing history only to the crimes committed truncates historical memory. This creates the balance that Belgrade is interested in: Serbs and Albanians committed the same crimes and were sentenced the same way. Even the Albanians with more years in prison.

After this, it is much easier to read the Kosovo war no longer in the context of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Belgrade's policy towards Kosovo, and the developments of 1989–1998, but as a conflict between two ethnic communities committing crimes against each other.

According to this logic, historical revision does not need to be done by denying the facts. It is enough to change the weight given to them.

The Kosovo War did not begin with the KLA, nor did it begin in 1998. After 1989, Kosovo's autonomy was abolished, its constitutional position changed, Albanians left the institutions en masse, and state repression intensified. For years, parallel institutions were established and the path of peaceful resistance was pursued, without a political solution being reached. The KLA emerged at the end of this process.

This does not make the crimes committed by its members, if they were committed, acceptable. If people were tortured, killed or mistreated, those responsible must be held accountable. But crimes committed during a war and historical responsibility for the process that led to that war are not the same thing.

If this distinction is lost, the Kosovo war risks being historically normalized as another Balkan ethnic conflict, where after many years two sides remain who have fought and committed crimes against each other. For Belgrade, this would be a significant change in the way the war is remembered.

This is where our responsibility begins. It does not help us to deny the crimes committed by the leaders of the KLA or to “tie our heads in a scarf” and mourn the black fate that always follows us. The problem is that we have talked a lot about the Kosovo war among ourselves and have done much less to make it known outside the Albanian space. Serbian historiography on Kosovo and the dissolution of Yugoslavia has a very wide presence in major European languages, in academic and university publications. In contrast, Albanian historiographical production, especially that published outside Albanian, remains significantly more limited. This inequality also affects the sources from which the public and European scholars create their knowledge about Kosovo.

So, how much have we invested in opening and publishing archives, in serious studies, in their translation, and in the presence of Kosovo's history in Western publications and universities? How much of what we know about Kosovo in the 1990s is known to a student in Berlin, Paris, or London?

These questions do not belong only to historians. Pristina and Tirana have their own responsibility. Not to produce an official history nor to tell historians what to write. The task of politics is to create the conditions for documents to be opened, research to be funded, studies to be published and serious work on Kosovo to circulate in major languages.

Because Serbia will continue to tell its version. They will never tire, as the over 150-year history of our relations shows.

We have wasted too much time telling the history of Kosovo to each other. While it is not too late, let's start telling it to others.

 


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