In 2014, Palestinians in Gaza were grappling with renewed attacks from the Israeli military. At that time, Vetëvendosje (VV), a political movement in opposition in Kosovo, was at the peak of its political mobilization. That mobilization was largely built against the endemic corruption of Kosovo’s political elite and the colonial (like) approach — as they called it — of structures of liberal interventionism in Kosovo. 

During the 2014 war on Gaza, VV issued a declaration condemning Israeli violence, stating among others that: “Albanians know too well what it means to be occupied, subjugated and threatened to be wiped out from your own land.” VV and its leader, now Prime Minister Albin Kurti, were not oblivious to the Israeli systematic and colonial violence in Gaza either, drawing parallels between Kosovars and Palestinians who had been exposed raw to long-standing violence from Serbia and Israel, respectively. Equally, they were not oblivious to practices of Western interventionism in Kosovo or the British mandate system in Palestine — also referred to as the “tutelage of advanced nations.” 

The statements of solidarity have now been removed from VV’s digital archive, while the current Kurti government in Kosovo known for its anti-colonial and equity rhetoric has been completely mute regarding the genocide in Gaza. What survived from those archives of solidarity are a few scattered screenshots and the memory of those who were moved by them. 

While other contemporaneous VV statements can still be found on their website, the removal is obviously selective to the statements relating to Palestine and VV’s past confrontational relations with U.S. ambassadors to Prishtina. VV’s archive has been selectively and conveniently sanitized from its website, as is the evidence of those political actions. These two are not entirely incidental or unrelated.

Kosovo and Palestine 

More than 38,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military over the past nine months. In (primarily) Western media, it has become customary — if not mandatory — to contextualize this death toll by referring to Hamas’ attack against Israeli citizens in October 2023. It is important to mention that the Israeli regime’s ongoing attacks on Palestinians — breaching international law and warfare conventions — are merely an extension of the longest occupation in contemporary times and Israel’s settler colonialism. This occupation started and proliferated long before Hamas existed. 

The most recent genocide has resulted in a massive popular pro-Palestine movement across the world as well as in the Balkan region. In Kosovo, solidarity with Palestine marches, protests and poetry readings are not just relatable to people because of their own recent past but also because Kosovo’s history is not entirely different from Palestine’s. For many Kosovars, Palestinians are not foreigners. They are our brothers and sisters, people Kosovars know from shared histories of post-Ottoman purges, of meeting them at Hajj, of knowing each other and each other’s struggles. Indeed, the first prime minister of the short-lived All-Palestine Government established in the Gaza Strip in 1948, Ahmed Hilmi Pasha, was of Albanian descent. A small Albanian community lives in both Jerusalem and Acre. 

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, initial Serbian and later the Yugoslav authorities engaged in settler colonial projects in Kosovo via the so-called agrarian reforms, which ultimately led to the dispossession of hundreds of thousands Albanians who emigrated primarily to Türkiye and the former Ottoman space. Much like the Palestinians, who had to be removed to make room for the newly coming Zionists to establish the promised state of Israel, the Albanian majority in Kosovo — described as a “horrible demographic structure” by Serbian elites of that time — had to be removed to make room for the “holy Serbian land.” 

Just as Serb settlers saw the colonization of Kosovo as a righteous return to the imagined heart of Serbia, Zionist settler colonialism is premised on return to the promised land; both engineered and emboldened in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. In addition, Kosovars and Palestinians share the similar post-Ottoman predicament of being racialized as Muslims and backwards and subjected to violent European-backed reconquista colonial projects.  

As Serbia’s war against Kosovo Albanians reached new heights in 1999, it was Palestinian intellectuals like Ghada Karmi who wrote at that time about the similarities between Israeli and Serbian violence against Palestinians and Kosovo Albanians respectively. 

For many Kosovars, these solidarities notwithstanding, the fact remains that Palestine has not recognised Kosovo. In December 1999, a mere half a year after the end of the war in Kosovo, former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat invited Slobodan Milošević to the Orthodox Christmas festivities in Bethlehem. Additionally, since Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008, Palestinian authorities have also come out against Kosovo’s membership in organizations, such as UNESCO. However, these seem to have become comfortable and strategic scapegoats for many Kosovar politicians and intellectuals alike. The common narrative to have resurfaced in the past nine months in Kosovo’s public sphere is that Palestinians — or Arabs — unlike Israelis, did not align with Kosovo during the 1998-99 war. 

On October 7, 2023, following Hamas’ attack on Israeli citizens, Kosovo Prime Minister Kurti condemned the attacks, tweeting: 

The Republic of Kosova unequivocally condemns today’s terrorist attacks against the State of Israel. Our thoughts are with the people of Israel during this incredibly challenging time. We condemn all acts of violence and stand in unwavering solidarity with those affected.

— Albin Kurti (@albinkurti) October 7, 2023

Since then, Kurti himself and members of the VV-led government have remained muted towards the Israeli government’s brutality in Gaza. In late January 2024, Kurti participated in a commemorative ceremony for the Holocaust victims organized by the Israeli embassy in Prishtina. It is logically and politically implausible, if not morally problematic, that the same prime minister refuses to see or to comment on the contemporary genocidal violence of the Israeli state against Palestinians. 

The last time we heard Kurti talk about Israel was in June 2024, when he signed the visa liberalization agreement between Kosovo and Israel with Israeli Minister of the Interior Moshe Arbel. The silence is unusual given Kurti’s vocal stance on the war in Ukraine.

Kosovo government’s stance toward Palestine — or to Israel for that matter — is conducive to its own political status. Kosovo still remains an unfinished state, not being a member of the United Nations, the only institution that guarantees participation in the society of independent states. To this end, the political and ideological alliances of a state such as Kosovo are subordinate to it fostering or finalizing the unfinished or the missing statehood. These alliances however, are sometimes outright racist. 

For example, Kosovo’s government was unambiguous in its pro-Ukraine stance following Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine in February 2022. Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani and Kurti have systematically drawn parallels between Russia’s and Serbia’s crimes, their hybrid warfares in Kosovo and Ukraine, as well as the victims of sexual violence in both countries. 

In 2022, making the case for Kosovo’s membership to the Council of Europe, Deputy Speaker of the Kosovo Assembly Saranda Bogujevci finished her speech with “Slava Ukraini,” showcasing, once again, Kosovo’s position. As the majority of Western and European countries embarked in unified support for Ukraine, Kosovo sought to jump on the same bandwagon by unveiling a giant Ukrainian flag captioned with Slava Ukraini at the iconic Hotel Grand in Prishtina. 

All of this support notwithstanding that Ukraine does not recognise Kosovo’s independence. In fact, traditionally, for the majority of the Ukrainian political elite Kosovo is much more similar to Crimea than it is to Ukraine. In maintaining these double standards, Kurti — much like most of the political and intellectual elite in Kosovo — continues to perform the very same hierarchies and racializations that are created and reified by the West.  

In November 2023, a group of activists unveiled a similarly large Palestinian flag at Hotel Grand in Prishtina, adjacent to the Ukrainian one. The Palestinian flag was swiftly removed by the Kosovo Police. The action took place hours before a men’s football match between Kosovo and Israel that was initially scheduled for October 15, 2023, but was rescheduled following Hamas’ attack against Israel on October 7, 2023. 

The removal of the Palestinian flag showcases two fears of the current political establishment in Kosovo. First, the Palestinian flag complicated Kosovo’s geopolitical calculations as for the political elite in Kosovo the Palestinian flag sends the wrong message to Brussels, Berlin and Washington and it might derail Kosovo’s “European path.” Second, the Palestinian flag risks racializing Kosovars as non-white, and Muslim subjects: by extension non-Europeans and ultimately undesirable to the “European family.” 

On the one hand, be it when Kosovo’s political elite openly supports Ukraine — a non-recognizing state — or when it keeps quiet about the bombing of civilians in Gaza, Kurti’s audience — much like for his predecessors — is not his voter in Kosovo. Rather, it is politicians and technocrats in Brussels and Washington whom the Kosovo establishment believes its legitimacy depends on. On the other hand, it seems that more than a move to foster Kosovo’s sovereignty, VV’s silence about Palestine brings to the fore its inability to understand decoloniality beyond the readings of Karl Marx, whose blind spots towards hemispheres of color, gender and sexuality have been long exposed and conveniently recovered to maintain a seemingly leftist discourse but ultimately racist and reactionary policies. 

The US dimension 

VV came to power with a landslide victory in February 2021 after the first Kurti-led government was ousted in a parliamentary coup orchestrated by the Donald Trump administration amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S.-backed post-coup Kosovo government was then shuttled to Washington D.C. to sign a “normalization” agreement with Serbia in which both countries agreed to open embassies to Jerusalem; for Serbia, this meant moving its existing one from Tel Aviv, whereas Kosovo would open its embassy in Jerusalem after mutual recognition with Israel. Kosovo opened its embassy in Jerusalem in March 2021, whereas Serbia quickly backtracked on its pledge and in October 2021, announced that it would not move its embassy, although it has since opened a trade office in Jerusalem. 

That the “normalization” of Serb-Kosovo relations had to be negotiated through their mutual recognition of Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem, is illustrative of how commitment to the Zionist project is another way in which U.S. foreign policy distinguishes friends from foes. After the first coup, Kurti understood that any oppositional thinking towards the U.S. will very likely have him removed.

Towards the U.S., in his second tenure, Kurti has developed something Serb colonial administrators sought to instill on their Albanian subjects: strahopoštovanje, or fear-based respect. The opposition, aware of Kurti’s complicated history with U.S. ambassadors and administrations, has sought to characterize him as supposedly anti-American — a label that once could easily cause elections in Kosovo. 

A defining characteristic of VV and Kurti was their outspoken critique of liberal and international interventionism in Kosovo, arguing how the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, was acting as a colonial-like structure in Kosovo or how the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, EULEX, had turned Kosovo into an experimental site to try out different models of liberal statebuilding. Though evidence to these attributions have been sanitized from VV’s website, many remember their graffiti: UNMIKCOLONIALISM at UNMIK’s offices in Prishtina or EULEKSPERIMENT, a graffiti omnipresent in Kosovo. 

VV’s sage and well-articulated critique did not go unnoticed by structures of liberal interventionism in Kosovo. The U.S. embassy in Prishtina was particularly apprehensive about VV’s rhetoric and Kurti as a political figure in the making. For example, in the diplomatic cables from 2007 released by Wikileaks, then-U.S. Ambassador to Kosovo Tina Kaidanow wrote that Kurti’s arrest — following the violent protests of February 10, 2007 when Romanian UN police killed two VV protesters — was “good news for Kosovo” and that Kurti posed “a flight risk for prosecutors and a danger to public safety.” 

In 2011, VV became a political party and ran in that year’s elections. The day before the elections, the then-U.S. Ambassador to Kosovo Christopher Dell toured the headquarters of the political parties to wish them all a fair and democratic process. When journalists asked him whether he planned to also visit VV, Dell curtly declared “I have not met them and I will not meet them,” sending a message to Kosovo’s voters about which political parties had the blessing of the U.S., an implicit attempt to influence voters. 

Once inside the national parliament in 2014, VV asked repeatedly about Dell’s involvement in the dubious highway contract worth 800 million euros of the U.S.-Turkish consortium Bechtel-Enka. The same allegations were reported by The Guardian that year. In 2013, VV activists tried to prevent another U.S. ambassador, Tracy Ann Jacobson, from entering Kosovo’s Assembly, allegedly bruising her right arm. Currently, there is no trace of any of these happenings on VV’s website, including the compelling letter they sent to the U.S. ambassador reminding them of the importance of protests in democracies, including Occupy Wall Street in the U.S.. 

While Kurti has sought to appease the U.S. administration in his second tenure, U.S. officials have gone out of their way to question him as a reliable “partner” and further pressure his government through the ongoing Serbia-Kosovo dialogue. The U.S. and EU courting of Serbia in the larger geopolitical context of the war in Ukraine hasn’t helped and has largely exposed Kosovo as their bargaining chip to keep Serbia in the Euro-Atlantic fold by forging a closer partnership with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić’s authoritarian regime. Their outward support for the establishment of an association of Serb Municipalities in Kosovo, akin to Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the Kosovo Police prevented a Belgrade-orchestrated terrorist attack in September 2023, along with opposition to the Kosovo’s Central Bank’s decision to ban the Serbian dinar in parts of the country was sharply criticized by then-U.S. envoy Gabriel Escobar.

That Kosovo was sanctioned by the EU for allowing freely-elected Albanian mayors to enter municipal buildings in northern Kosovo against the EU’s proposal that the mayors should work from alternative venues while Serbia faced no sanctions for orchestrating an attack on Kosovo from those very Serb-majority Municipalities is a signal to the Kosovar government that the support for the suspended sovereignty of Kosovo is neither guaranteed nor sustainable. Intimidated by Western gaslighting, the Kurti government’s response has been to go all out in reassuring the Euro-American diplomats that Kosovo is unquestionably on the Euro-Atlantic path by abandoning any memory of its questioning of U.S. and EU policy in Kosovo and simultaneously erasing earlier politics of Palestinian solidarity. 

The selective erasure of the solidarity statements by VV and the silence from their governing offices is significant, as it shows that the erasure of Palestine is imposed everywhere just as the affirmation of Israel’s further settler colonization is the mark of admission into the Euro-Atlantic club. Palestine will be free and political projects that were built on its destruction, genocide and erasure will not be able to move beyond their complicity — regardless of how invested they claim to be in democracy and human rights, feminist and LGBTQ+ rights. 

Nowhere was this banal instrumentalization of gendered violence towards Zionist ends more obviously utilized by Kosovo’s government than when shortly after the October 7, 2023 attacks. Vasfije Krasniqi-Goodman, a key figure in bringing visibility to survivors of rape during the Kosovo war, traveled to Israel with a Kosovo delegation to show support for the Israeli state. There is not a single mention in her social media of Palestine, none. Indeed, it has now become normalized to silence and ignore Palestine in order for the Bosnian and Kosovo genocidal violence to be acknowledged by the West. In other words, the price victims of genocidal violence have to pay for their trauma to be recognized is to erase Palestine, the way VV has erased it from its archives and politics.

On the possibilities of solidarity and pluriversality 

The (selective) erasure of digital archives is by no means trivial. Archives, digital or physical, are spaces where truths and facts are laid bare, unlike in museums where truths and facts get to be narrated, sequenced and staged. Much like in museums, selectively erasing or keeping certain parts of archives are in function of crafting and reifying certain narratives and ultimately erasing others. 

In 2020, Albanian author Ardian Vehbiu wrote about the poverty of hyperlinks and the erasure of digital archives of Albanian speaking media, an oblivion to the importance of memory. Many of these media, it seemed, simply could not afford to store old news items on clouds. VV is not oblivious to either the importance of keeping an archive or selectively erasing it, however sanitized. In fact, Kurti’s daily Facebook posts are about events, battles, personalities of Kosovo’s (not so) recent past. If anything, both Kurti and VV (used to) have a very strong attachment to the politics of archive and memory. The question here is what solidarities and sensibilities are being erased and to what end?  

If we learned anything from socialist politics of removal of figures from photography, archives and public memory is how the more people were erased, the more absurd, alienated and paranoid the apparatchik class became — both for fear of being the next one to be erased but also the fear of reactions the erasures could produce. Erasure is a reactionary colonial tactic of not coming to terms, of not addressing the cause but dwelling on the consequences of the casualty. But there are limits to erasure, especially at the stage when the West has unapologetically revealed all its imperial violence. The writing on the wall, like the recent graffiti on the Bill Clinton statue in Prishtina, is clear: Free Palestine.

When VV claims leftist politics, like almost all European leftists abstract humanism today, it does so from theoretical Hegelian distance to save face from its complicity in genocide. It also does it in the most clownish and occidentoxic manner, seeking European affirmation by calling on the European canons of enlightenment and universality while having nothing to say about how those seemingly universal but ostensibly European rights were only awarded to Ukranians but not Palestinians. 

The politics of occidentosis require erasure because like Iranian novelist Jalal Al-e-Ahmad notes in “Occidentosis: A Plague From the West,” it impairs one’s reasonable judgment, it severs the ties between present and past and it therefore stands for nothing and on nothing — “like a particle of dust suspended in the void, or a shaving floating on the water… He is a thing with no ties to the past and no perception of the future. He is not a point on a line, he is rather a hypothetical point on a plane or even in space.” Whatever remains of VV’s leftism or hypothetical abstractions on self-determination serves as a good reminder that securing Western-backed post-colonial sovereignty is neither liberation nor self-determination but rather mere extension of colonial relations of power.

Palestine has turned into a litmus test and magnifying glass for any political movement. Solidarity for Palestinians from the people of Kosovo, as well across the Balkan region, shows a shift that is today obvious across the world. 

The emergence of pluriversal politics of solidarity from people who have flooded the streets of cities across the world in the face of silence by their governments on the genocide in Gaza, is the politics to come. Without solidarity for Palestine and the larger Global South, Kosovo’s sovereignty is neither secure nor sustainable. As so many people across the world have acknowledged, there is no going back to normal after Gaza. 

Editor’s note (July 25, 2024): A previous version of this article erroneously stated that it was the Kolektivi për Mendim dhe Veprim Feminist — Collective for Feminist Thinking and Action — that unveiled a large Palestinian flag at Hotel Grand in Prishtina. Kolektivi për Mendim dhe Veprim Feminist was in the group of activists who unveiled the flag, but was not the only actor. The article has been updated to reflect this fact.  

Editor’s note (July 26, 2024): A previous version of this article used the Arabic names for the cities of Kuds and Akka. These cities are better known internationally by their English names, Jerusalem and Acre. The piece has been updated to refer to these cities by these names. 

Feature Image: Majlinda Hoxha / K2.0.

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