From Paris student to campaigner for Albanian rights

Rugova in Pristina in April 1998. Photo: EPA/SRDJAN SUKI.

“The death of President Rugova happened in the most critical era of country’s new history, at a time when it was expected that, under his leadership, the Kosovo delegation in status negotiations would successfully conclude the process of state-building, which had started with the pluralist movement of 1989-1990,” former newspaper publisher Blerim Shala wrote in an editorial on January 22, 2006, one day after the chain-smoking leader lost his battle against lung cancer.

The Kosovo newspaper Koha Ditore opened its 22 January edition with the headline: “Kosovo as lost its president in the final phase of independence.” It added: “From today, Kosovo should find the courage to face this heavy loss and continue the fight for independence for which only one single battle remains.”

Born in December 2, 1944 in the village of Cerrce, in the western municipality of Istog/Istok, both Rugova’s father and grandfather were killed by the Yugoslav Communists only weeks after his birth, shortly before the end of World War Two.

After a difficult childhood, he finished school in Istog/Istok and PejePec before graduating from the Philosophy Faculty in Pristina at the Department of Albanian Language and Literature.

In 1976-1977, he studied in Paris at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes under the supervision of Roland Barthes, where he developed his scholarly interests in literature with a focus on literary theory.

In 1988, as political conflict erupted in the former Yugoslavia, he was elected chairman of the Kosovo Writers’ Association, which opened a way for him to become more active in the media as an advocate of the rights of Kosovo Albanians.

On December 23, 1989 when the one-party rule of the League of Communists was ended in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Rugova and a group of other Kosovo Albanian intellectuals established a new party, the Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK. He was elected chairman of the party on its first day, a post he held for more than 16 years until his death.

In May 1992, Kosovo Albanians staged an unofficial vote for a president and parliament, which the then Serbian authorities ignored. Rugova was elected president, but the parliament elected in these elections never became operational.

In 1998, there was another round of elections that were more contested by political rivals because of the timing. These took place after parts of Kosovo, especially the Drenica region, had been targeted by the Serbian police, less than three weeks after Serbian forces had killed Adem Jashari, a commander of the newly formed Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA. Jashari was killed along with 58 of his relatives in a three-day battle.

Under Rugova’s leadership, in the first free elections held in Kosovo, just after the war with Serbia ended, in 2000, the LDK surprised many when it won control of the vast majority of municipalities.

Convinced humanist with a prophetic side

Tens of thousands of Kosovo Albanians protest against Serbian rule in Pristina in March 1998 at a rally called by Rugova. Photo: EPA/ANJA NIEDRINGHAUS.

Rugova took no part in these military confrontations, insisting instead on pursuing a purely political and non-violent campaign for independence.

In the late-1980s, as head of Kosovo Writers’ Association, he had raised his voice about the rights of Albanians in Kosovo, which had enjoyed autonomy as a province within the Yugoslav Communist federation – which Serbia’s new leader, Slobodan Milosevic, was determined to dismantle.

A former Kosovo journalist who was then a youth activist, Halil Matoshi, said Rugova started advocating the rights of Kosovo Albanians at a time when nationalist rhetoric was rising all over Yugoslavia.

“Rugova was a distinguished intellectual and above all a humanist,” Matoshi told BIRN.

“You could see his great ideas in his books. He powerfully defended the Kosovo issue at a meeting of writers in Novi Sad [in Serbia] in 1985, and at a discussion between Serbian and Albanian writers in Belgrade in November 1988,” he recalled.

“Rugova naturally and powerfully entered a political course as a visionary who felt the trajectory of global politics in the late-1980s, silently awaiting Kosovo’s moment,” Matoshi added.

Working as journalist in 1990s, he recalled the numerous interviews in which Rugova had urged the international community to intervene and help find a solution to the Kosovo issue.

Matoshi said he was also prophetic. “In 1993, as state repression by Yugoslavia, dominated by Serbia, culminated, in an interview he declared that, ‘NATO will protect us’ – which duly happened in 1999,” Matoshi noted, referring to the 78-day NATO air campaign that ended in June 1999 with Serbia’s withdrawal from Kosovo.

Matoshi said Rugova remained a humanist by conviction. As a result, he said, he fought not only for “the continuation of the biggest project of Albanian nationalism … since 1913 [one year after Albania gained independence] but also for a liberal and prosperous state at peace with its neighbours”.

His constant refrain in the media was that, as an independent and sovereign state, a free Kosovo would be “open towards [both] Albania and Serbia”.

Matoshi said the modern Republic of Kosovo owes its basic principles to Rugova, being built on three main pillars: “The first is secularism and a pro-Western course, the second is independence, built on the principles of people’s sovereignty, and the third is an unambiguously liberal democracy.”

“Rugova-ism was based on a political philosophy of non-violence and political argumentation,” Matoshi concluded.

Criticism grew of non-violent course

Officials from Rugova’s LDK party pay tribute on the anniversary of their leader’s death. Photo: BIRN.

Not everyone admired his outlook, however. When the international community gathered the leaders of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia at a US military base in Dayton, Ohio, to end the war in Bosnia in November 1995, Kosovo Albanians were deeply concerned.

Kosovo’s future was not part of the Dayton discussions. Many feared their non-violent approach had not born fruit.

Muhamet Mavraj, then a student at Pristina University, was at the time attending lectures in the basements of private houses, because most Albanian students had been expelled from Serb-run public universities.

In 1997, he was one of the student leaders who hungered for a more radical approach. “The Dayton Conference de facto ended Rugova’s inactive policy. No promise he had made during the previous five years had been fulfilled. The West had not rewarded his policy while the youth of Kosovo kept migrating,” Mavraj recalled.

“I interrupted my studies… and for almost two years worked to find friends within the university for a concrete movement,” he said. That work culminated on October 1, 1997, when thousands of students in Kosovo gathered for the first public protest in many years.

They had not marched more than a kilometre from the edge of Pristina to the university campus when the police intervened with teargas, arresting the student leaders and their rector.

Mavraj said the day marked the start of the armed resistance to Serbia by a new guerrilla force, the Kosovo Liberation Army.

“October 1, 1997 marked the end of a passive policy and the beginning of a phase that should open the way for the liberation of Kosovo through other means,” he said.

“Our protests continued until April 30, 1998, and all sectors of society became familiar with them, and by then Kosovo was at war,” he added.

Mavraj said that a meeting between the students and Rugova did not end well, after he urged them to cancel their protests.

“At the end of the meeting, he pulled out the fear card. He told us there would be bloodshed at the protest, and I asked: ‘How do you know that? We are meeting the same people as you are [Americans].’ He looked back with his eyes on the floor,” Mavraj said.

However, Mavraj concedes that Rugova merits the respect with which he is held. “A completely non-violent course without any single manifestation to provoke the Serb regime brought him the respect of the internationals – which Kosovo needed for a long time,” he admitted.

Capture, exile and return in triumph

Supporters of Rugova welcome him on his return to Pristina in July 1999. Photo: EPA/ANTONIO BAT.

But the most difficult time for Rugova was yet to come. When NATO started air strikes in an attempt to force Milosevic to withdraw Serbian police, military and paramilitary forces from Kosovo, in March 1999, police broke into Rugova’s house, putting him and his family under house arrest in the Pristina neighbourhood of Velania.

Three days later, to the anger of KLA leaders, he was forced to travel to Belgrade to meet Milosevic and appear on state-controlled television, shaking hands with him, at a time when Kosovo was half-emptied of its people, who had been expelled from their homes and taken shelter in Albania and today’s North Macedonia.

After more than a month under Serbian police control, Rugova and his family were allowed to go to Italy in May 1999. He returned home to Kosovo after the war ended, on July 21, 1999, and was greeted by thousands of his supporters in Pristina.

In May 2002, Rugova again faced Milosevic, now in another capacity. Two months earlier, he had been elected the first president of Kosovo.

Milosevic in the meantime had been arrested in 2001 and sent to The Hague to face accusations of war crimes filed by international prosecutors.

“It was not something that I wanted at all, but the accused requested it and that was what was conveyed to me. And if I hadn’t gone, there would have been consequences,” Rugova told the court.

A day after his death, the Pristina newspaper Kosova Sot described Rugova as “Kosovo’s Gandhi”.

But for Halil Matoshi, the true role model for Rugova was not the pacific Indian independence leader but a more recent European figure. “He is comparable only to Vaclav Havel; he believed in the power of politics and in non-violence,” Matoshi concluded.