Albin Kurti

That's our origin story.

And I covered the creation of the tribunal, uh, for the Justice Tribune, and actually even interviewed now Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti, who was then, like, the big opposition leader and still super against the court.

And since 2016, I moved back to The Hague and covered it for Reuters out of The Hague, and mostly it was kind of low-key, but that was until Hashim Thaci, former KLA top commander and Mr.

Independent Kosovo, uh, then president of the country, stepped down to hand himself in to the court.

Yeah, and here I would, I would like to share also a similar case.

For instance, Albin Kurti in 2021 was not allowed to, uh, run in the elections because, uh, obviously there is a law in Kosovo which doesn't allow people to run for an MP if they have, like, an ongoing court case, which in, in Kurti's case was related to tear gas in the parliament when they were in the opposition.

And Kurti did not run.

He ran symbolically.

Usually, the other minorities are either part of the government or not as challenging as the Serbs.

And then you have only 10 Serbs, which are also part of the government formally, but they cannot block everything.

The problem in Kosovo is the Albanian majority parties are, are testing the constitution limitations, but I think this is something that Albin Kurti always, you know, had as part of his, his political sort of character, that the international setting that made Kosovo what it is now, it's imperfect, and perhaps also his political sort of agenda is to fix it once and, and, and for all.

And you know how it went with Dayton and, uh-

I don't know what the estimates, but when Oliver was alive, and that's why I mentioned him, and this was 15 years ago, maybe even more, he would say that privately that there were about 30,000 to 40,000 Serbs.

Today, my suspicion is that there are not that many, which means that when Prime Minister Albin Kurti has been saying, I do not want an association because it will be a new Republika Srpska.

Now, politicians are free to say what they want, but there is no way that the ASM, the Association of Serbian Municipalities, can be a Republika Srpska because if we talk about an overall population of Serbs of, let's say, 100,000 in a country of 1.7 million Serbs, There's no way that they can be a destabilizing or unsettling element.

I think that until we see that association or some form of it, we will not be seeing a full normalization of relations.

They are not happy with it.

Um, I know the Prime Minister of Kosovo, the, uh, Albin Kurti, who was only sworn in over the last couple of weeks, he's saying that it was wrong, uh, that The Hague's decision was wrong.

Uh, he was only coming out in recent weeks as well condemning what happened in Serbia with their celebration and state honors for Ratko Mladić, the, the former Serb leader who was convicted of war crimes.

So, um, over the last few nights, we've had protests in Pristina.

Because, yes, as you mentioned, the numbers of Serbs keep falling, and the long-term Pristina strategy is full sovereignty, and so this is going exactly against this goal.

goal.Yes, and in the last couple of years, so from the time, uh, when Albin Kurti became the Prime Minister of Kosovo, that means 2021.

Okay, it's the, the second Kurti's government, but the first one, uh, had a very, uh, short, uh, time, uh, phase to learn.

So, uh, they did not have time to such, um, decisions.

But from the beginning, uh, of the second government of Kurti, they started to make steps to extend Pristina's, uh, sovereignty on the north of Kosovo as well.

You have to know that before this time, it worked more or less like little Serbia in the territory of Kosovo.

So they used the Serbian symbols, Serbian, uh, flags-

Serbian currency, Serbian, uh, products in the, in the markets.

Russia has suspended diesel exports due to those Ukrainian attacks, which coupled with the effects of the Iran war has driven domestic diesel prices in the U.S. over $6 per gallon.

In Kosovo, that country's parliament re-elected Prime Minister Albin Kurti on Sunday, but it may not matter because, somewhat inexplicably, it still failed to elect a president.

While the two largest parties in the legislature, Kurtis Vetevendosia and the Democratic Party of Kosovo, LDK, agreed a couple of weeks ago to back a joint candidate for president—we covered this in the newsletter— Several of the latter's MPs have decided to revolt against that deal.

Any presidential vote requires a two-thirds quorum in parliament to be official, and those LDK rebels are able to join with other MPs to prevent the legislature from reaching that threshold.