Europe Blocks Progress, Stability in West Balkans

In the centre of the Kosovo capital, Prishtina, whose nightlife attracts armies of European youngsters while their elders cannot break the curse of Milosevic which condemns the infant nation to enduring infancy you can now see a maroon railway carriage from era of the post-1945 railway boom before WizzAir, and Easyjet took over.

It is a new monument to the last great use of rail carriages to transport political undesirables from their home towns to exile and worse, Curated by the journalist Jeta Xharra Kosovo Director of BIRN (Balkan Investigative Reporting Network), it is a cattle freight wagon from post-1945 Yugoslav railways used to deport Kosovars, especially women and children from their homes to try and break the Kosovar mass resistance to the cruelties of Slobadan Milosevics’s rule as he tried to deny the right to European democracy to Kosovars after 1990.

The carefully folded nightdress for a little girl the same age as my granddaughters brings home the cruelty of modern Europe and the United States under Trump as both the EU and the US are indifferent to helping Kosovo to be fully free.

40 years ago, Europe was ready and waiting for democracy. Polish Solidarity was organising after its Kremlin ordered repression in 1981.

Vaclev Havel and a young Hungarian liberal, Viktor Orban, were putting in place, the intellectual-activist networks that took Czcechs, Slovaks and Hungarians into the democratic world.

Willy Brandt, a left-wing social democratic in Exile during Hitler’s reign, had developed the concept of détente which the Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev seized on as leading to trade and investment possibilities with the West that would keep Russians happy as shopping replaced Stalinism in the evaporating Soviet Union.

Just as Greece had freed itself from Ottoman domination in the 19^th century and Ireland had become an independent nation state free (mainly) of English domination and rule everywhere in Europe 40 years ago there was a sense of a new springtime of democratic nations.

The one exception was the Balkans. In 1986 a new leader emerged as Leader of the League of Communists of Serbia. Slobadan Milosevic, young activists in the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, gripped by an early form of ethnonationalist ideology which now pervades many far-right, racist parties in Europe including Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement nationale in France, Nigel Farage’s Reform party in England, the AfD in Germany, Matteo Salvini’s Liga in Italy, VOX in Spain.

But in 1986 it was Serb intellectuals and activists who led the way to an assertion of Serb nationalism and a deniel of the right of one small European nation, Kosovo to self-determination.

In Slobodan Milosevic they found their leader. He shared their belief that the Albanian speaking Kosovars, nominally Muslim though with a capacity for drinking alcohol like Europeans from Poland to Ireland, were not so much UnnterMensch as the Nazis called Jews, but UnMensch, not from the same gene pools as Serbs and in consequence unfit to run their own country.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Yugoslav federal state broke apart into its national components – Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia, North Macedonia but Serb supremacism refused to allow the people of Kosovo the right to self-determination and a free existence along with other West Balkan states who in due course joined the UN and EU as member states.

Resistance was brutally crushed. Go into a graveyard in rural Kosovo and you will see Muslims and Christians buried side by side. But again all the Kosovar Muslim headstones have the same date – the day the Milosevic Serb supremacists paid their visit to kill Muslim Kosovars pour décourager les autres as Voltaire might have put it.

Weak leaders in London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin and Rome, wrung their hands but did nothing. In the end public opinion rose up and forced a new generation of social democratic leaders headed by Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder in Europe and their friend, Bill Clinton in Washington, decided enough was enough. Their NATO troops crossed into Kosovo and their warplanes bombarded the strutting, arrogant coward killers in the Serb army.

Milosevic was arrested and put on trial for war crimes in the Hague. But despite the presence of Nato troops authorised by the UN on the ground up to this day no-one in the UN, or EU has found the keys to unlock an enduring peace.

Recently a major conference with the star names in the world of post-conflict justice, reconciliation and national building assembled in Pristina for two days of intense discussion.

Former ministers, chief justices, prosecutors at the International Tribune for War Crimes at the Hague, journalists like the Economist’s Tim Judah whose reporting from the Balkans over 25 years is exemplary, and human rights campaigners from Serbia all gathered in Prishtina for 2 days of intensive debates.

But they could not solve three main questions. Firstly, the stubborn refusal of Spain, Greece, Slovakia, Romania and Cyprus to recognise Kosovo as a European nation 25 years after Belgrade rule over its colony ended means Kosovo cannot join the EU, the Council of Europe, or even take part in the European Song contest despite having in Dua Lipa, one of Europe’s biggest pop stars.

Belgrade’s still very much present diplomatic network backed by the Kremlin fanned out across Europe and the world to present Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia, amputated from the motherland by Anglo-American military might.

The Serb -Russian propagandists told Spain Catalonia would be next, in Greece they pointed to the Muslim Turkish invasion and occupation of Northern Cyprus, and hinted that small Hungarian minorities in Slovakia and Romania might cite Kosovo as a precedent.

It was all political nonsense. Kosovo left Serbia as the result of the cruelty and racist brutality of Milosevic’s ethnonationalism.

West and Northern European nations were flooded with asylum seekers from Kosovo and the press and TV was full of of the mass murder of Kosovar men, women, children by Milosevic aided by his press chief the young Aleksander Vučiċ who today rules Serbia and shows no interest in reconciliation with Kosovo.

There was a belief at the time that interntional law, tribunals, judges could allow a peaceful separation of Kosovo and Serbia. It was a fallacy.

Under pressure from the United States, Kosovo accepted the creation of a Special Court in 2015. The idea was to examine alleged crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army, set up to defend Kosovar villages facing Serb army and Milosevic death squads in the 1990s.

A Swiss jurist and obsessively anti-American parliamentarian, Dick Marty, produced a personal report for the Council of Europe in 2010 full of lurid allegation of Kosovans organising organ extractions from Serbs for sale in the Middle East.

His report had no evidence and idea that in the middle of fast moving guerilla conflict it was possible to set up sterile operating theatres and assembled surgeons and medical staff to extract organs for sale was inherently improbable.

Nonetheless, despite the lies in the Dick Marty report, Hashim Thaci, the young leader of the Kosovan PDK party and the brilliant communications chief who had charmed the global media and the US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright finally rejecting the much more sophisticated, well financed Serb propaganda operation volunteered to surrender to the Special Tribunal in the Hague in November 2020.

He has been rotting in prison ever since. There is simply no evidence or witness statements that can convict him. The naïve US hope that putting on trial Kosovan leaders as if they were on a par with the Milosevic Serb death squads has turned out to be a dead end.

But so much has been invested in the idea that international courts, judges, prosecutors, or legal procedures can bring closure, reconciliation, harmony after a bitter, cruel conflict that no-one is willing to tell the truth that Kosovo is condemned to remain a stunted partial state while the EU permits the fiction it need not be recognised.

The internal politics of Kosovo do not help either. In June 2026, Kosovo held its 7^th parliamentary election since 2010. No party can win a majority and all refuse to cooperate to form an effective governing coalition as is the norm in most European nations where 5-6 or more parties all win representation in the parliaments. The three main parties all born out of struggle for independence in the 1980s onwards cannot work together due to personality animosities and differences.

There is no international mechanism that can force democratically elected politicians to cooperate within their own nation.

So squeezed between the EU that cannot make all its member states offer the most basic hand of support to a new nation in Europe, and the United States, imposing a special tribunals on just one side in what was a struggle for liberation inspired by the American revolution throwing of British rule, and its own political class with a key leader in prison on trumped up charges Kosovo limps on and the people of this South East corner of Europe remain without much hope.