Just when things had gone quiet in Kosovo, the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague has found a way to spice matters up. It has acquitted former Kosovo Albanian premier Ramush Haradinaj of war crimes, which puts him back in the political game down in Pristina. Not that he ever really left that game after his 2005 indictment: popular with the UN and Western governments, he is suspected of making a lot of essential decisions behind the scenes over the last few years. The West liked him because he was a powerful freedom-fighter who wasn’t Hashim Thaci, the distinctly difficult former political boss of the Kosovo Liberation Army…
But late last year Mr. Thaci achieved his long-held, and oft-thwarted, dream of being elected prime minister (in polls many internationals would have liked to avoid) and he’s now the international face of the sort-of-independent state. If Ramush returns to public politics, there won’t be fireworks straight away – the Kosovo Albanians are doing a good job of presenting a united front for now. But now there are two Big Men in town, will they really be able to avoid factionalism?
I think we can look forward to some good old-fashioned political in-fighting down in Pristina before too long.
