Singing the hits of '99

Until lately, Kosovo had a decade of padding to quarantine itself from the rawness, violence and fear that clasped to the coattails of liberation in 1999, infecting the “provisional government” months that followed, carrying their bacillus of internecine murder – of alleged collaborators and of LDK members -- a good two years into the new decade (even longer in Ramush-land). It’s just been ripped away. 1999 is back. In our faces.

It’s been poking and pawing its way back to us since summer last year. Through his eight years of exile from the premiership, PDK leader Hashim Thaci cultivated a softer image, an impression of modernisation, gradually airbrushing away his scary 1999 provisional turn. But could the new pastel colours survive his actual election? Left alone together in the same room, could the prime minister be protected from Hashim?

After eight years scuttling about under the floorboards, lurking in cupboards and attics, the provisional government’s secret service, SHIK, stepped out into the light of June 2008, thanked a bemused public for its cooperation, announced its own disbandment, and percolated its cadres into the elected government.

PDK officials insisted that SHIK’s provisional government lineage made it a legal structure, awkwardly hinting at restoration of the unelected administration, disbanded at the outset of 2000.

Simultaneously Hashim began gnawing on the prime minister: bawling out and intimidating the police over the burglar intrusion at his home 6 June 2008, creating out of it shades of the Lord of the Rings or The Exorcist with a press release stressing his government’s commitment to “continuing the struggle against evil”.

From here on the bearers of the provisional government baton accelerated efforts to engulf freestanding institutions established under UNMIK. Police comment: “Other governments never dared interfere with us.” Editors and journalists bombarded by Hashim’s phone calls and SMSs recall: “Previous prime ministers did not do that.”

Businessmen worry: “If we continue like this, by next year there’ll be only 20 companies left – all close to government, all in crime.”

The resonances strengthened: threats from Infopress, a young tabloid staffed by PDK militants, now growing fat on government advertising, mirrored those doled out by forebears Kosovapress agency and Dita newspaper in late 1999 and Spring 2000. Back then, the ex-provisional premier’s rage at the International Crisis Group’s report What Happened to the KLA? was reflected by several break-ins at the organisation’s office and its temporary evacuation of a staff member.

By the time he met representatives of an international organisation in October 2008 Hashim had the independent republic’s democratically elected prime minister cornered in his office, in a headlock, forcing from the unfortunate a stream of phrases unbecoming of his position: “I have been merciful to you so far... put you behind bars... no place for you in Kosovo... you’ll see who’s boss now.”

And strengthened: the PDK’s campaign in Prishtina for the 15 November mayoral election was an assault on the senses. Its incessant, repetitive attacks upon the LDK incumbent came over as thuggish -- provoking total recall of what for many Prishtina natives was the rape of their city by the influx of rough KLA men from the countryside in the second half of 1999, and a humiliating rejection of the PDK candidate.

The 1999 reflex ratcheted another notch with the PDK leadership’s tired and emotional response to the shifted electoral landscape: a rushed and soon regretted decision on reshaping the government taken from the depths of Zanzi Bar, the quintessential Prishtina KLA haunt of late 1999.

Layer by layer, the KLA’s political successors have themselves created the backing track for an unwanted soloist, to sing the hits of 1999. Nazim Bllaca came out to perform to the media in front of parliament on Sunday 29 November: former geography teacher, a bleak personality, relaxed in his desperation, confessing to a past in one of SHIK’s teams of assassins.

Especially in his 30-minute DVD confession, it is the detail, the immediacy, and quantity of the information he offers that astound: shredding the veil of mystery, vaporising the intervening ten years. It remains to be tested by police and judicial investigation, but it is just too detailed, too precise to be wished away. Koha Ditore newspaper in particular has been chasing some of his leads, who for the most part confirm details of his account.

Like a gaggle of disparate scientists urgently experimenting with different remedies to plug a rent in the ozone layer, commentators from the accused wing of politics have tried whatever they could: a front extending from Bllaca’s court-appointed lawyer (now recused) to Express newspaper suggested that he is insane. The Infopress tabloid claimed the whole affair to be instigated by Serbia, to destroy Kosovo’s image just as the International Court of Justice case commences, with EULEX and Kosovo’s liberal media serving as Belgrade’s accomplices. The PDK called for the dismissal of the two LDD MPs who first publicised Bllaca’s revelations.

But none of these technologies seem to work. The anaesthetic padding that separated us from 1999, a fabric containing a mix of time, PR, road- and school-building, cannot be so easily reconstituted.