Second paragraph of third chapter:

These horrors lurked for Kosovo, too. Arkan, rewarded for his slaughtering crusade in Bosnia, was put up as a candidate for Kosovo in the Serbian parliamentary elections. Surrounded by his thugs, he took up residence in Pristina’s Grand Hotel. Milošević, brushing off Arkan’s crimes to a Croatian envoy in November 1993, declared: ‘I too must have people to do certain kinds of dirty work for me.’ Then he laughed out loud. They weren’t laughing in Pristina. The candidacy of Arkan, says the Harvard-educated Minister of Dialogue Edita Tahiri, a formidable negotiator, ‘held up a mirror to the future of Serbian democracy.’

One of those books where I know the subject, and the subject matter, reasonably well. Hashim Thaçi emerged from the shadowy world of Kosovo exile politics to become one of the political leaders of the new polity after the war of 1998-99 (the West likes to think of the NATO conflict of 1999, but it started a year earlier). the biography is by two journalists from The Times of London; I got my copy from Thaçi himself at a book launch in London in 2018; the Albanian translation came out earlier this year.

The book is unashamedly partisan, but I did not spot any factual inaccuracies, and it covers all of the main events fairly. It digs into Thaçi’s own perceptions and intentions in depth. There aren’t a lot of first-person narratives from actors in the Balkan wars (though I did also read an extended interview with Ramush Haradinaj, twenty years ago). The book therefore shows the biases you would expect – including consistent hostility to Ibrahim Rugova, Kosovo’s pre-war leader, who I must agree was way out of his depth. (On the shelf in my office, I keep a rock that Rugova gave me the first time I met him.)

One of the areas where the book needs to tread gently is its coverage of the horrifying organ-smuggling allegations against Thaçi made by a former war crimes prosecutor and by members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I have always been astonished that anyone took these allegations seriously. It is an improbable scheme in the first place, and any attempt to implement it would have left an undeniably clear logistics trail. The EU was unable to find any evidence for it, likewise the Kosovo Specialist Chambers tribunal. It seems to me to be another Martinović case writ large. (If you don’t know about the Martinović case, lucky you, and I advise you not to Google it.)

Unfortunately the book doesn’t quite deliver on the promise in the blurb to explore how come the Kosovo intervention was largely successful when Iraq and Afghanistan failed. But there is a repeated emphasis that Thaçi was planning for the day after victory – how to get to independence, and also how to avoid the trap of becoming a mono-ethnic society. It’s fair to say that the Kosovo Liberation Army went in much less for civilian reprisals than its counterparts on all sides in Bosnia, and its leadership should get some credit for this. It’s also fair to say that Thaçi became the most important political figure in post-conflict Kosovo for a time, though his dominance was never complete or unchallenged, and that his rhetoric on ethnic relations was always responsible.

Anyway, I think that there are more comprehensive books about Kosovo and the Balkans out there, but I don’t think there is a more comprehensive book about Hashim Thaçi. You can get it here.

This was published in 2019, at the point when Thaçi was President of Kosovo but was also under pressure from the Kosovo Specialist Chambers tribunal in the Hague, which duly indicted him in 2020 for war crimes. The book obviously doesn’t cover that but I just want to say up front that the prosecution evidence is remarkably poor, and the key points have been refuted by the ranking US diplomat in Kosovo at the time. Like his rival Haradinaj, Thaçi surrendered immediately on his indictment, and Kosovo has complied fully with its obligations under international law. Not every state in the region has as good a record.

This was the shortest book on my shelves acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is The Geraldines; An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald