As part of his agenda in Kosovo, Prime Minister Edi Rama attended the promotion of the book “Kur Heshtja Flet – When Silence Speaks” by Ahmet Shala, an academic and former Ambassador of Kosovo, who has written about the trial in The Hague against the leadership of the KLA.

At the event, attended by prominent figures from the political and academic life of Kosovo, Albania, North Macedonia and beyond, Prime Minister Rama addressed those present.

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Prime Minister Edi Rama:

Greetings to everyone and thank you for having me here.

I received the invitation from Professor Ahmeti to take part in the presentation of this book before we received the grim news from the tribunal in The Hague regarding the absurd request by the prosecutors to sentence each of the four leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army to 45 years in prison.

To be truthful, I found it difficult to write a speech from beginning to end because in the face of such a situation, words are not easy to find.

Those convicted by that court, or more precisely by international justice, include Radovan Karadzic, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for an entire era of terror and ethnic cleansing. Ratko Mladić, likewise sentenced to life imprisonment as the face of the machinery of extermination and the globally condemned perpetrator of the massacre of 8,000 innocent people in Srebrenica. Stanislav Galić, also sentenced to life imprisonment for the terror of snipers who targeted children and women as if it were a human safari. Milan Lukić, sentenced to life for crimes that defy even the vocabulary of the worst atrocities, a man who tied living people and threw them into a river, watching with satisfaction as they struggled and drowned. And three other perpetrators of rapes, murders and some of the most macabre crimes.

Now, according to the request of the Prosecution at The Hague tribunal, four others from the opposite side of the barricade are to be added to that list. Meanwhile, the Prosecution has not been able to prove anything remotely similar, because there is nothing remotely similar in the actions of the four leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

There is no connection whatsoever between their activity and that of the Kosovo Liberation Army and terror against the civilian population, ethnic cleansing, mass graves of innocent people, the targeting of children and women by snipers placed there for that very purpose, or rapes, killings, drownings in rivers. Nothing.

Those four men did not take up arms to build a policy of extermination; they took up arms against a policy of extermination. They did not take up arms to impose their rule on foreign territory; they took up arms to remove foreign rule from their own land.

In fact, with their own hands they voted in the Parliament of Kosovo for a court which, on paper, is a court of Kosovo. It is not a court established to place Kosovo itself in the dock.

Today we find ourselves in a situation where what appears to be nearing a final shape, although the final word, of course, belongs to the court, is the realization of a long-term plan that began with the infamous report of Dick Marty, may he never find rest where he lies, alleging organ trafficking by the leadership of the Kosovo Liberation Army. That plan was advanced by the representative of Vladimir Putin in the Council of Europe.

It was then built upon a resolution by the Council of Europe, which to this day, to its shame, the Council lacks the courage to review, even though no organ trafficking of any kind has been proven in any form. The plan continued with the establishment of a court and a process that took shape on the very day when the President of the Republic of Kosovo was on his way to Washington and was turned back from a meeting where another step would have been taken towards the normalization of relations with Serbia under the auspices of the then and current President of the United States, President Trump, because clearly other forces did not wish for that to happen. From that moment onward, the President of Kosovo was effectively taken hostage.

It may be a state secret here in Kosovo, but it is not a state secret for me that even the President of Kosovo was threatened. You do not know this because it has never been said before, but I am saying it today. She was threatened because she did not allow prosecutors to violate the office of the President of Kosovo on the pretext that they would search for evidence of crimes against humanity, something that would naturally have placed Kosovo in the eyes of the world as a state where even in the President’s office evidence of crimes against humanity could be found. The pressure on the President lasted two years. But to her honor and to the honor of Kosovo, she prevented such a thing.

We are here today. We may say whatever words we wish among ourselves. We may use the full richness of the Albanian language to vent our legitimate anger at a prosecution of fools. But the issue is that they are not merely fools. They are instruments of a court that is, regrettably, even more political than the courts of Serbia in relation to Kosovo.

If we refer to the laws in force at the time of the war, and if the Kosovo Liberation Army had not won the war and the people of Kosovo had not been liberated, in the courts of that Serbia the sentences requested by the prosecutors would have been impossible. Under those laws, a 45-year sentence, effectively burial alive, did not exist.

International justice, funded by democratic states which, to their shame, continue to follow all of this with the greatest indifference, a catastrophe not only for four entirely innocent individuals but for Europe and the democratic world, compels us to ask ourselves what we can and must do.

I do not have the answer. But I am certain that we must do more. Because this is a catastrophe for international justice itself, for Europe, for the democratic West which Kosovo once tested, and fortunately the West passed the test of its own humanity by recognizing Kosovo. But if today the West fails this test and assumes responsibility for burying four innocent men alive, thereby grievously wounding the people and the Republic of Kosovo, then this will remain a grave problem.

This is hostage-taking for political reasons, not of the West as a whole, but of those forces that have sought to equate two things that cannot be equated: the ethnic violence of a wholly fascist war machine and the liberation struggle of an army that bore the name army but in reality was a popular mobilization. Those treated in court as commanders of a regular force were in truth the spiritual, moral and political leaders of that mobilization.

And above all, there is something even heavier. If Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi are to be buried alive for the war and for what occurred during the war in Kosovo, then arrests must continue. Bill Clinton must be arrested. Javier Solana must be arrested. Tony Blair, without question, along with the other prime ministers who gave the green light to the bombings. In effect, exactly what Slobodan Milošević preached would have to happen.

This is unimaginable. And yet, as I speak, every word feels inadequate, weightless, disconnected, because what is happening is profoundly grave. We must speak, we must write books, we must tell the story, but above all we must find a way to act.

I repeat I do not have the answer as to how. But I believe that together our two states can find that answer. So that in the end we do not tell ourselves that we failed to try this or that, but that we tried everything, naturally within the norms to which we have freely and fully submitted ourselves as part of the democratic community, as part of the Euro-Atlantic community, and so on.

Professor, thank you once again for the invitation. It was truly a pleasure to be here. I would have wished that we were gathered at this promotion without carrying on our shoulders the heavy burden of those 45 years for each of the four hostages of international justice. But as the history of Kosovo, the history of its liberation and its state-building has shown, there are challenges we choose and challenges that choose us.

Our duty is not to leave the first unwon, and not to avoid the second, doing everything in our power to prevail. If hope, as they say, dies last, then hope in the search for justice, and above all hope in the path of reason of those who will deliver the final judgment, will not die, and must not be allowed to die.

Thank you all very much.