“Prime Minister Edi Rama is trying to establish a difficult balancing act: He wants to integrate the Western Balkans internationally and secure Kosovo as an independent state, but at the same time heal phantom pains of Serbia,” the leading German newspaper “Der Spiegel” wrote.
“The decision to declare the independence of Kosovo was the right one,” PM Rama told the German newspaper.
Following is the full story by Der Spiegel.
“Putin says: Kosovo, Kosovo, Kosovo”
“Russia is fuelling the conflict in the Balkans and endangering its fragile peace. Prime Minister Edi Rama explains what can help against distrust and hatred- and what Angela Merkel has to do with it.”
The Prime Minister welcomes his guests barefoot. Edi Rama is a tall man with a forehead scar and deep-set eyes. Wearing black shorts, a white Adidas and no shoes, Rama was sitting together with his wife Linda in the garden of a beach house.
The villa is built in the sixties near the idyllic coastal village of Dhërmi, nestled among pine trees. The state has them once built for the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. Policemen guard in the front door. The most powerful man in Albania is on vacation.
“You don’t disturb me,” Linda Rama tells to the SPIEGEL reporters, as she wears a white cotton shirt and a peaked cap over the black curly hair. In her husband’s position there is no real vacation. Albanian citizens elected Edi Rama by a large majority as their Prime Minister for first time eleven years ago.
As mayor of the capital Tirana, Rama painted colourfully the city’s streets and embarked on a fight against the corrupt justice system. Critics now claim that Rama himself maintains contacts with the mafia, something he strongly rejects.
And corruption is far from Albania’s only problem. The war in Ukraine, only about a thousand kilometers away, has just opened up old wounds in the region. The big powers are again tugging the most fragile Western Balkans. In the past few months, the situation has once again intensified between Serbia and Kosovo, with Albania is closely connected. At stake is no less than peace in the Balkans.
Just like Ukraine, Serbia threatens to become a cause for dispute between Russia and the West: the country wants to join the EU, but can’t also break with ally Russia.
While Putin is turning off the gas tap in Europe, Russia is supplying Belgrade with particularly cheap energy and with guns. The price for this is loyalty, a requirement that Serbia almost torn.
“Nobody can destroy our relations with Serbia,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said recently, after his planned visit to Belgrade was cancelled at short notice due to denied over flight rights. It sounded like a threat. Russia is not concealing its desire to curb U.S. influence in the Western Balkans.
Behind Rama, the turquoise sea water sparkles, while skeletons of the half-finished luxury hotels rise on the hills of the Dhërmi Bay. Several five-star hotels will soon open here. It is difficult to imagine that just two decades ago Albania faced a civil war. After the collapse of the communist system, the country fought with gangs, militias and local vigilantes. Today the young state relies on the tourism industry.
Albania is smaller than Brandenburg, and with just 2.8 million inhabitants live here, less than Berlin’s population. However, the tiny Western Balkan country is strategic to defence and significant to counter Moscow’s possible disruptive manoeuvres. A NATO member since 2009, and aspiring to EU, Tirana acts as a kind counterweight to Serbia.
Just before the attack on the Ukraine, NATO had just started the reconstruction and expansion of an old airfield in southern Albania to transform it into an air base for the Alliance. Rama’s government has also offered the transatlantic alliance to build a future NATO naval base near the port city of Durres. If clashes between the Serbs and for the Albanians were to erupt in the future, in Kosovo north for example, Tirana would probably play a central role.
The people in the region are split between Putin opponents and Putin supporters, Rama explains. And he believes: “Russia would be delighted if something was to move towards conflict in the Balkans.”
“A good 80 percent of the Orthodox Serbs think positively about how Putin is demonstrating his force to the West in Ukraine, if we can put it that way,” Prime Minister Rama said. The recent fresh tensions in the Balkans run quite exactly along the old Soviet and the Western lines of influence.
In Albania, only 0.7% of the respondents agree with Putin’s actions, according to a survey conducted by his government.
Rama thinks that sympathies for Moscow are strong in Serbia, even “much stronger” among a majority of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Serbs-dominated Republika Srpska.
In Montenegro, there is a huge gap between the Montenegrins and Serbs. “We should be aware that this influence can turn into something terrible.”
Even 23 years after deployment of NATO troops in Kosovo, the country is guarded by the Western military alliance. In 2008 Kosovo finally declared its independence.
The dispute with Serbia has never politically solved to date.
NATO launched an air campaign to stop the murder of thousands and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Albanians back in 1999.
Almost a hundred countries have now recognized Kosovo. However Russia, China and also some EU member states, including Spain and Greece, haven’t recognized the country.
One can also say the NATO-led mission in Kosovo serves Putin as a kind of an excuse for its aggressive annexation policies in Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Abkhazia and Georgia.
It was probably the beginning of today’s crisis. Can the catastrophe of the Yugoslav wars be repeated?
Rama replies by making a counter question: “Have you heard how often Putin mentions Kosovo in his speeches?”
He keeps saying: “Kosovo, Kosovo, Kosovo!” The Kremlin chief is unerringly stirring “the most painful of all unsolved problems” in the Balkans and doing everything to set a new fuse.
Rama sees his own country firmly anchored in the West. Unlike few politicians in the region he has caught the world of different Interests and cultivates the international relations and contacts from Riyadh to Istanbul, Paris and Washington.
“ When Hillary Clinton called me a year ago and asked to take in a few thousand undocumented Afghan refugees, my answer was a flat ‘yes’,” Rama said.
Because of his support in the 1999 Kosovo war, Rama would never turn down a request from the Clintons.
In the turn of the century, the lecturer at Tirana’s art academy and son of a well-known sculptor affiliated with the democracy movement, at that time there weren’t many like him: good athlete, free artist, inspirational speaker.
But in Rama’s fight for Kosovo’s recognition, Albanian nationalist tones are sometimes mixed up.
Again and again he presides joint sessions of the governments in Prishtina and Tirana, provoking Belgrade’s fears about establishment of a “Greater Albania”.
Rama grew up in an isolated country. For decades, Albania was considered the North Korea of Europe.
Also from this experience out, the 58-year-old tries a difficult balancing act: He wants to integrate the Western Balkans internationally and secure Kosovo as an independent state, but at the same time heal phantom pains of Serbia.
“The decision to declare Kosovo’s independence was the right one!” Rama states and stretches his hands in the warm summer air.
After all, there is now a “peace and reconciliation process”, even if it is one now it’s been a long time.
After his election to office in 2013, Rama travelled to Belgrade in the first visit by a Tirana government head in 68 years. But, when he asked the Serbian government at the press conference to recognize Kosovo, his Serbian counterpart Vučić took him aside, telling him that his personnel were demanding to throw “the arrogant guest” out.
According to Rama he replied to Vučić that they were just officials, but he was smarter and therefore the head of government.
“Recently, however, there are some encouraging developments in the Balkans too. So I want Serbia, Albania and Montenegro build a kind of mini-Schengen area to trade better.
The “Open Balkan” project unites him with his “dearest enemy “Aleksandar Vučic. The promised freedom of movement between the countries is a small sensation.
Towards the end of the visit, Rama still wants say that all this was actually an idea of Angela Merkel. Through here, he and Serbia’s Vučić found a stable working relationship, “despite our history of pain and bloodshed.”
“In 2014, the then German Chancellor invited the six heads of government of the Western Balkans to what she called ‘the Berlin Process’. She told us we were Europeans, although not yet members of the European Union. “
For the first time in the history of the Balkans, top politicians sat together at a table once a year – Rama says – always in a different European city; London, Paris, Trieste, Vienna.
“Until the day she left politics, Merkel was present every time in person. That changed everything,” the Albanian Prime Minister says.
At these meetings, the six leaders of the Balkan countries agreed not to agree, but they all shared a common will to turn the tide of history,” PM Rama concluded.
