Kosovo’s Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj visited the U.S. to advocate against a proposal put forward by his President.
The 50-year-old former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an ethnic-Albanian paramilitary group that fought for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia in the 1990s, believes a proposal supported by his fledgling country’s president could return the Balkans to war.
“I’ve been myself part of the difficult experiences of the wars and tragedies, so I don’t want to see our children now experiencing what we experienced 20 years ago,” Haradinaj told Newsweekduring a meeting in Kosovo’s consulate in New York.
But Kosovo’s President Hashim Thaci, another former member of the KLA, thinks he has a solution to the decades-long dispute with Serbia that has kept Kosovo outside of international institutions such as the United Nations and the EU. The proposal, which has been floated by Thaci and his Serbian counterpart Aleksandar Vucic, would see parts of northern Kosovo inhabited by ethnic Serbs exchanged for parts of southern Serbia inhabited by ethnic Albanians. The territory swap, described in a New York Times op-ed last month as “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” has long been opposed by members of the international community who bristled at the idea of redrawing borders along ethnic lines.
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