Kosovo sits in the southern Balkans, bordering Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. Once a province of Serbia within Yugoslavia, it is overwhelmingly ethnically Albanian, and many Kosovars see themselves as part of a wider Albanian nation split apart by borders drawn by outside powers. As Yugoslavia broke apart, Kosovar Albanians declared independence, and in 1998–99 the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fought Yugoslav forces carrying out ethnic cleansing until NATO intervened. Of the roughly 12,000 documented victims of the war, the vast majority were Albanians killed by Serbian forces. In 2008 Kosovo declared independence again, this time with the backing of the United States and most of the EU, and it is now recognized by roughly half of the UN’s members.
Today Kosovo is out of war, but exists in conflict politically. Three parties dominate the proportional, single-chamber parliament: Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s Vetëvendosje (LVV), the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) and the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK). Since February 2025 the country has held three general elections, as parliament failed to form a government by their inability to elect a president. Hanging over all of it is the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, a court created by Kosovo’s own parliament in 2015 and seated in The Hague to try crimes committed by members of the KLA, further complicating electing the presidency.
In November 2020, former president Hashim Thaçi, PDK’s founder, resigned and was taken to The Hague along with Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and former acting president Jakup Krasniqi, all former members of the KLA. On September 16th, 2026, the court convicted all four of war crimes, including the torture of 303 people and the murder of 96, most of them detainees, seen as opponents of the KLA. Many of the victims were fellow Albanians, LDK supporters among them. The four were acquitted of crimes against humanity, and the verdict can still be appealed. The judge delivered it “in the name of the people of Kosovo,” and crowds in Prishtina answered with the slogan “Jo në emrin tim”: not in my name.
Protesters’ anger has a main grievance over the fact that the court’s mandate covers only crimes by the KLA, and veterans complain that it tries Albanians while many Serbian crimes go unheard. Many also question the evidence and the testimony. But a double standard in who is prosecuted does not erase what was proven. If international law is to apply equally, it must apply to the KLA too. One innocent life is enough to demand justice, whatever the victim’s nationality, and a cause that only mourns its own dead has stopped asking where its ethics lie.
The PDK and its supporters refute this; rather than to separate four men from the cause they fought for, party leader Bedri Hamza fuses them. “The KLA is the people of Kosovo,” he declared after the verdict, calling it absurd to describe the war as a joint criminal enterprise. Yet the presiding judge stressed that the four were convicted for their individual responsibility, not for the KLA’s war. Before the verdict, Hamza had promised “we don’t forget who negotiated in Rambouillet,” a nod to Thaçi himself. Once the defendants become the KLA, and the KLA becomes the nation, any criticism of PDK’s founders becomes an attack on Kosovo.
The PDK’s strategy of essentially leveraging the specialized court worked as the PDK made a law curbing the court's power in exchange for electing a president with the LVV, and on the 6th October parliament passed it 88–0. Hamza had insisted the KLA must never become “an object of transaction for a position.” In the end, that is exactly what it became.
The KLA’s war was a war fought for a people, with injustices at its edges. This is to say, the memory of war should not be spent protecting political parties.