Frederic Haber
The mendacity and demagogy of leading politicians is outrageous. Talking about democracy and human rights, portraying themselves as freedom fighters and then defending the genocide in Gaza with ridiculous arguments, outright lies or by playing dumb. The German Greens, US democrats, almost all social-democrats and also a number of ‘leftists’ and ‘socialists’ have rightly lost much of their credibility.
Albin Kurti also has a problem with his credibility. He is relatively unknown on the global political stage. Elected Prime Minister of Kosovo in 2019 and again in 2021 he is considered one of the few left-wingers in a leading position in the Balkans or more generally in Eastern Europe. And indeed Kurti was different from such as Edi Rama, Prime Minister of Albania, or Stevo Pendarovski, the President of North Macedonia, who was recently voted out of office. Kurti did not originate from a bourgeois party disguised as a social democratic party, which developed from the Stalinist party after 1990.
Instead, Albin Kurti, who was just 15 years old when Yugoslavia collapsed, built up his own party, which for a long time did not explicitly see itself as a party, but as a movement. Its name ‘Levizja Vetevendosje!’ is Albanian for Movement Self-Determination!. It was able to mobilise tens of thousands for demonstrations. The self-determination that Vetevendosje demanded was not only independence from Serbia, but also from the USA and the EU, which have politically controlled the Republic of Kosovo since its formation. Indeed they continue to control it politically and militarily through UNMIK (United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo) and KFOR (Kosovo Force) and – in the case of the USA – use it as a military base (Camp Bondsteel near Ferizaj) to dominate the southern Balkan region.
In February 2007 UNMIK used brutal measures against actions by Vetevendosje (VV), in which two demonstrators were killed. Albin Kurti was arrested and this was expressly welcomed by the US envoy, who said Kurti’s arrest was a ‘good news for Kosovo’.
VV also had a clear position on Palestine. The internet magazine KOSOVO2.0 writes: ‘During the 2014 war on Gaza, VV issued a declaration condemning Israeli violence, stating among others that: ‘Albanians know too well what it means to be occupied, subjugated and threatened to be wiped out from your own land.’ VV and its leader, now Prime Minister Albin Kurti, were not oblivious to the Israeli systematic and colonial violence in Gaza either, drawing parallels between Kosovars and Palestinians who had been exposed to long-standing violence from Serbia and Israel, respectively. Equally, they were not oblivious to practices of Western interventionism in Kosovo or the British mandate system in Palestine – also referred to as the ‘tutelage of advanced nations.’ (https://kosovotwopointzero.com/en/silencing-solidarity/)
Kurti gets normalized …
After entering parliament and, above all, after winning the 2019 elections, a change began: the former movement became a governing party and politicians were taken over from established parties, which had previously been attacked as corrupt. Plans such as a progressive income tax and the reversal of ‘unnecessary’ privatisations, e.g. in healthcare and education, were not implemented. What remained were purely symbolic acts such as a child benefit of €10 per month.
Kurti’s only option to secure his position is nationalism, but the other, right-wing bourgeois parties in today’s Kosovo are also very good at muffled nationalism. Kurti, like his predecessors, has reduced this to anti-Serbian nationalism. He has stopped all attacks on US and EU imperialism. Worse still, his behaviour on Palestine shows him to be a puppet of the Western imperialists who imprisoned him years ago and undermined his first government in 2019.
… and submits to US imperialism
Not a word has been said by the Kosovo government since the start of the Gaza war. Worse still, VV’s earlier statements have been removed from the internet archive. Vjosa Musliu and Piro Rexhepi write about this on KOSOVO2.0 :
“As the majority of Western and European countries embarked in unified support for Ukraine, Kosovo sought to jump on the same bandwagon by unveiling a giant Ukrainian flag captioned with Slava Ukraini at the iconic Hotel Grand in Prishtina.
In November 2023, a group of activists unveiled a similarly large Palestinian flag at Hotel Grand in Prishtina, adjacent to the Ukrainian one. The Palestinian flag was swiftly removed by the Kosovo Police. The action took place hours before a men’s football match between Kosovo and Israel that was initially scheduled for October 15, 2023, but was rescheduled following Hamas‘ attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.
The removal of the Palestinian flag showcases two fears of the current political establishment in Kosovo. First, the Palestinian flag complicated Kosovo’s geopolitical calculations, as for the political elite in Kosovo the Palestinian flag sends the wrong message to Brussels, Berlin and Washington and might obstruct Kosovo’s ‘European path.’ Second, the Palestinian flag risks racialising Kosovars as non-white, and Muslim subjects: by extension non-Europeans and ultimately undesirable members of the ‘European family.”
Protest
The authors of the article on KOSOVO2.0 are to be congratulated for exposing this falsification of history. Solidarity with Gaza is also growing in Kosovo. We, as the League, support an open letter to Kurti. The worldwide Palestine solidarity movement can also help the small left in Kosovo to overcome its isolation both in the country itself and internationally.
At the same time, however, the example of Kosovo, its prime minister and his party shows that the struggle against national oppression is not so simple: a party and movement that had clearly committed itself to this struggle in its own country and internationally is being forced to abandon it under pressure from US imperialism. It subordinates itself and makes itself a tool of imperialism, be it against the Palestinians or against Serbia, which is ultimately also an oppressed and exploited country within the framework of world imperialism.
From the justified struggle against the national oppression of the Albanians in Yugoslavia, especially under Milosevic after the collapse of Yugoslavia, Kosovo and its liberation Movement UCK quickly took the path of selling out to US imperialism and in turn oppressing the national minorities in Kosovo. Kurti and his party, on the other hand, had also demanded and advocated self-determination against the USA and the EU. Now their fight for self-determination has also turned into narrow and self-centred nationalism – which, especially in the Balkans, but not only there, has allowed the great powers for centuries to instrumentalise one people against another, to let this one fall today and another tomorrow and to instigate conflicts and wars as they see fit. The economic ground for such conflicts, the hardship and lack of economic prospects for the majority of all people living there, is provided by these great powers anyway through their exploitation of labour and natural resources.
So how can it even parties and peoples who have recently experienced the suffering of national oppression and led the fight against it, be prevented from committing themselves to an ‘ultimately racist and reactionary policy’, as the authors of KOSOVO2.0 correctly put it?
Their explanation for this, however, is a complete aberration: “On the other hand, it seems that more than a move to foster Kosovo’s sovereignty, VV’s silence about Palestine brings to the fore its inability to understand decoloniality beyond the readings of Karl Marx, whose blind spots towards hemispheres of colour, gender and sexuality have long been exposed and conveniently recovered to maintain a seemingly leftist discourse but ultimately racist and reactionary policies.”
No, it is not that VV misunderstood decoloniality or was too Marxist. It is precisely the opposite: VV took up social demands, but never questioned private ownership of the means of production and capitalism. It is subject to exactly the same misconception of most supporters of decolonialist ideologies; that decolonisation is possible on a national level and that it is possible within the framework of capitalism.
Capitalism means the exploitation of labour power by capital and, on an international level, the exploitation of other nations and peoples by imperialist powers. And just as in every country the working people have to be se against themselves and oppressed in order to ensure the exploitation of the majority by a minority, so the imperialist powers divide the ‘semi-colonial’ countries in order to exploit and dominate them. They try to utilise every struggle for freedom for their geopolitical strategies, they use every conflict between two semi-colonies to weaken them.
So it is precisely the fact that VV never had a socialist anti-capitalist programme that has led them to capitulate to US and EU imperialism. A few Marx quotes are no substitute for that, they can indeed also decorate a decolonialist policy.
A revolutionary programme would start from Marx’s insight that national and racial oppression – as well as that of gender – is a necessary component of the exploitation of labour power. That the perspective of ‘workers of all countries unite’ is therefore also directed at the most oppressed and therefore usually more exploited.
Even if stand in solidarity with the struggles of all oppressed peoples, it is clear to us that ultimately only the international revolution, the overthrow of capitalism on a global level, can form the basis for peaceful and equal coexistence of peoples.