After Kosovo finally established a government in December 2014 after a six-month hiatus, the start of the year was marked by the desperation and struggle of thousands of Kosovars who, having lost faith in this country, left their homeland and threw themselves in an often high-risk journey across the borders of Serbia and Hungary towards Western Europe, and more concretely, towards Germany. This modern exodus represents in the scariest form of its expression the situation in which Kosovo has been left. Those who decided to leave should not be seen as part of a marginal problem or as part of a problem that does not affect those who stayed:Kosovar irregular emigrants are Kosovo 2.0’s Person (or People) of the Year because of their embodiment of the struggles that ordinary Kosovars continue to face every day.

During the first months of 2015, Kosovars watched on TV and saw in their newspapers, images of big groups of people, entire families, overcrowding Prishtina’s bus station, where they would take buses to Belgrade and continue on their way north. The shocking images, which also came from different cities in Kosovo, showed young men, scared and crying children, women as well, who had taken the decision that leaving would be better than staying. Not only did they endure winter’s freezing temperatures while sleeping in poor conditions, often without a roof; many also endured police abuse, and violations of their human rights once they were caught in an irregular situation in Hungary, where a fence has subsequently been built in recent months to stop the transnational movement of persons. Repeatedly, those held in detention centers discovered that they had a high chance of receiving humiliating treatment. By early February 2015, the European Commission announced that 1,500 Kosovars were crossing the Hungarian border every day. In the first months of the year, 42,000 Kosovars applied for asylum in the EU, adding to the 37,000 that applied in 2014; in reality, the number of those attempting to leave Kosovo is likely to have been even higher.

While getting a Schengen visa is still possible for some Kosovars to travel safely into Europe — albeit with many restriction — the opportunities to travel legally for those who have a low income or no job are severely limited at best. The exit of thousands and thousands of Kosovars during the end of 2014 and the first months of 2015 brought three structural problems, which Kosovars seem to have got used to, back to the public agendas and discussions: poverty, apathy towards the institutions and isolation. Though this wave of illegal migration became an international problem, as Kosovars represented month after month the third biggest group of asylum seekers in different European countries after Syrians and Afghans, this migration flow from Kosovo was not only shocking for the international community, but also for Kosovar society, and not only among political elites.

EU Special Representative, Samuel Zbogar, and even German ChancellorAngela Merkel herself, sent messages to Kosovars on repeated occasions, asking them to stop trying to seek asylum in the West, because they wouldn’t get it. Those individuals who felt forced to leave were offered no choice but to come back home, to a place where choice is again taken away.

This October, Dimitrious Avramopoulos, European Commissioner of Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, asked about the issue of the most recent migration flows from Kosovo, cited as a positive sign the visa liberalization dialogue with Kosovo, about which he said, “[it] remains a powerful instrument to strengthen Kosovo’s institutions to address irregular migration, human smuggling and threats to the EU’s internal security.”

On December 15, the European Commission denied Kosovo’s visa liberalization one more time, forcing Kosovo to basically live in a ghetto in which the poverty rate is of 29.7 percent, the unemployment rate is over 35 percent, and there is grave lack of quality of jobs, to consider only some indicators. If Europe continues to build a prison around its external borders, and Kosovar leaders are not ready to tackle the problems that motivate the high flow of irregular migration even in extreme circumstances, then after all, irregular migration may not be a choice, but the only option for many.[logo]

This year in Kosovo

K2.0's sideways take on 2015.

Kosovo 2.0