by FITIM SALIHU
Hashim Thaçi inauguration ceremony, later disrupted by tear-gas PHOTO/Prishtina Insight
What was predicted to be “The Kosovar Spring” in fact turned out to be opposition’s “Spring of the great loneliness”, if we can raise an analogy with one of the masterpieces of the Albanian novelist, Ismail Kadare, The Winter of the Great Loneliness in which he describes Albania’s break with the Soviet Union in 1961 and the solitude of the country, which had just turned its back on the Warsaw Pact.
A similar kind of solitude is now being felt by the Kosovo opposition despite early hopes that the entire spring will be a season of demonstrations against the government and the newly elected president, Hashim Thaçi. But when no one expected it, the opposition bloc split and its constituent parts began to fight bitterly, coming under the mockery of the government, under the sting of analysts, under the criticism of the international community, and under the mistrust of masses of the people.
But, in retrospect, how was this opposition bloc forged? Unnatural in appearance, this bloc was born out of the necessity to oppose the governing coalition, which had received 2/3 of the Kosovo vote. Realizing that alone none of the opposition parties would succeed in shaking the foundations of this government, three of them – Albin Kurti’s Self-determination! movement, the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo” (AAK) led by Ramush Haradinaj (former prime minister and one of the most famous ex-commanders of KLA) and Initiative for Kosovo of Fatmir Limaj (another famous ex-KLA commander and former member of Thaçi’s Democratic Party) – established a common front with these parties’ student organizations and some civil society groups to confront Hashim Thaçi and Isa Mustafa’s government. A casus belli was found in the form of the government’s international agreements with Serbia over the Association of Serb-majority municipalities and the border demarcation with Montenegro. And as it was expected, these topics “turned on” the masses.
But why do we say that the merger of the three opposition parties in a single front was unnatural in the first place? The Self-determination movement, since its founding in 2005 and especially since entering in the Parliament in 2010, is noted for civic activism, with a special concentration on topics of corruption and nationalism, accusing of national treason most other parties while at the same time claiming to champion social causes and declaring themselves a leftist party. A frequent target of their accusations were the two parties with whom The Self-determination entered into a bloc: Haradinaj’s AAK and The Initiative of Fatmir Limaj (the latter being accused by Self-Determination of being the most corrupt of Kosovo politicians when he was minister in Thaçi’s PDKgovernment).
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