Obituary

Ibrahim Rugova
Jan 26th 2006
From The Economist print edition


Ibrahim Rugova, president of Kosovo, died on January 21st, aged 61



DURING the worst years of the Bosnian war a very strange, almost Ruritanian drama played itself out in another part of the dying Yugoslavia. In 1992 Ibrahim Rugova was elected president of Kosovo.

Once installed, he was driven to work in a black presidential Audi. His office issued daily communiqués about whom he had seen and what he had done. Ordinary people came to pay court and ask favours of the man they increasingly came to regard as the father of the nation.

And it was mostly fantasy. Mr Rugova had been elected president by Kosovo Albanians in a poll conducted in private houses. It was deemed illegal by Serbia, of which Kosovo was, and technically still is, a part. Mr Rugova's office was a wooden bungalow reached by skipping around muddy puddles behind the football stadium in Kosovo's capital, Pristina. No country in the world recognised Mr Rugova's claim to be the president of an independent state, save neighbouring Albania.

But it worked. Any week now talks are due to begin, organised by the United Nations, which are likely to take Kosovo a giant step closer to full independence. Of Kosovo's 2m people, more than 90% are ethnic Albanians.

Those years in the bungalow were strange indeed. While Serbian security forces prowled through Pristina in armoured personnel carriers, Mr Rugova and his colleagues plotted how to make their phantom republic real. They organised a parallel schooling system and health-care network which employed ethnic Albanians who had either been sacked by the oppressive regime of Slobodan Milosevic or had refused to work for the Serbian state any longer. At the same time, Mr Rugova kept in touch with a government-in-exile in Bonn which raised taxes to pay for all this among the Kosovo Albanian diaspora. A few men were sent to train as soldiers in military camps in Albania.

Mr Rugova gathered clever men around him and took a keen interest in his people's welfare. He himself inspired fierce loyalty and devotion. But to meet or interview he was phenomenally dull. His only topic was Kosovo's need for independence. In later years, especially after 2002 when he was formally elected president of Kosovo (since 1999 under UN jurisdiction), he often seemed more excited by his mineral collection than by humdrum daily politics. Visiting diplomats and foreign dignitaries could work out their relative importance to him and to Kosovo by the size of the rock he would give them as a gift.

His patriotism was imbued young. He was barely six weeks old when, in 1945, his father and grandfather were executed by Communist partisans taking over Kosovo. In 1976 he spent a year in Paris studying under Roland Barthes. He returned to Kosovo to become a professor of Albanian literature. From then on, he cultivated a bohemian air. He always wore a silk scarf, except in August. He was partial to drink and a heavy smoker, which may explain his death from lung cancer.

He became head of his party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), almost by accident. When it was formed in 1989 he was despatched to ask Rexhep Qosja, a prominent nationalist writer, to lead it. Mr Qosja refused and, to block anyone worse, the party's founders gave the job to Mr Rugova. “He was a total outsider,” recalled one journalist in the group. “He was a kind of loser who sat in the corner drinking too much coffee.”

Surprised by war

During the 1990s Mr Rugova urged peaceful resistance to Serbian rule. For this he was regarded as the “Gandhi of the Balkans”, especially when its other leaders seemed bent on war. But he was against it only because the Albanians had no arms and, until 1997, no way to get them.

When the Croats fought the Serbs in the early 1990s they tried to lure Mr Rugova into starting an uprising, a second front, which the Croats thought would weaken the Serbs. It might well have done, but Mr Rugova was having none of it. He did not want to give Mr Milosevic an excuse to drive out Kosovo's Albanians. This, of course, was exactly what the Serbian leader tried to do in 1999 during the war begun by the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). This time, though, NATO responded by bombing the Serbs.

The coming of war took Mr Rugova by surprise. He seemed uncertain what to do. Supporters of the KLA charged him with treachery. When the bombing began he was placed under house arrest, forced to appear on television with Mr Milosevic and then sent into exile in Italy.

After the war he was slow to return; he seemed to be yesterday's man. Gradually, however, he realised his own strength. In the wake of the war many of the former KLA leaders appeared thuggish and violent. Members of Mr Rugova's party began to be assassinated and, without doing anything, he found his stock soaring once more. He seemed saintly and untainted with the suspicion of corruption.

In reality he was president only of Kosovo's Albanians and cared little for its other citizens. After the war, when ordinary Serbs and Roma were murdered and driven out by vengeful Albanians, he said nothing to defend them. It would have cost him popularity and, as he knew, the less he said the more popular he became.

Obituary

Ibrahim Rugova

President of Kosovo devoted to the cause of peaceful resistance

Eve-Ann Prentice
Monday January 23, 2006
The Guardian


Like so many Balkan leaders, the Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova, who has died aged 61 of lung cancer, had early experience of mortality. He was barely six weeks old when his father and grandfather were killed by communist forces in January 1945. But unlike other Balkan chieftains, who perpetuated a cycle of war, Rugova espoused a policy of peaceful resistance in his campaign to see an independent Kosovo, modelling himself on Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

The softly spoken Sorbonne-educated academic, with his trademark silk scarf, came to international prominence when the Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic revoked Kosovo's status as an autonomous region of Serbia in 1987. Milosevic had propelled himself to power in part by taking up the cause of Serbs in Kosovo, who complained that they were being swamped by a huge growth in the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo.
As head of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), the first political party in Kosovo to challenge the communist regime head-on, Rugova responded to the subsequent Serbian crackdown by launching a parallel, underground system of education, health and local government for the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo, paid for by the Albanian diaspora in the west. A "government-in-exile" was also set up and shuttled between European capitals. Rugova, meanwhile, remained in Pristina, where he regularly spoke to any western reporters who made the trek down to Kosovo to visit him at his tiny offices. Serbian secret police were well aware of these meetings and it was suspected that the Serbian authorities tacitly tolerated Rugova as the devil they knew.

Rugova was born in the village of Cerrce in Kosovo. He attended secondary school in Peja and went on to graduate from the Albanian studies department at the philosophy faculty of Pristina University in 1971. He spent the academic year of 1976-77 at the Sorbonne in Paris, studying literature. The author of 10 books, Rugova also became an editor of the Pristina-based students' newspaper Bota e re (New World) and the magazine Dituria in the 1970s. For the next two decades, he worked for the Institute for Albanian Studies in Pristina, as a senior research fellow in literature.

Like almost every other leader in the former Yugoslavia, Rugova also became a member of the Communist party, but he was expelled after joining others in demanding changes to Serbia's constitution. In 1988, he was elected president of the Kosovo Writers' Association, an organisation that became the focus of the growing ethnic Albanian opposition to Serbian rule in Kosovo. The following year, he was elected president of the LDK.

In 1991, federal Yugoslavia began to unravel with the wars in Croatia and, later, Bosnia. As the Croats and then Bosnia's Muslims fought to shake off Serb domination, some Kosovo Albanians argued that they should open a "southern front" to win their own freedom. Rugova replied that this would be disastrous. After hundreds of thousands of people had been driven from their homes in Croatia and Bosnia, he feared the same could happen to Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population.

His parallel system of government won widespread support among the ethnic Albanians until disillusion set in during the mid-1990s, when Kosovo's status was ignored in the Dayton peace agreement drawn up between Milosevic and western leaders to mark the end of the Bosnian conflict in November 1995.

By early 1998, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had become the dominant resistance organisation in Kosovo, espousing war instead of pacifist tactics. Many people began to write off Rugova. His reputation was particularly tarnished after he was televised meeting Milosevic at the height of the Nato bombing campaign of Yugoslavia in 1999, which had followed the intensification of Milosevic's crackdown in the province. Rugova, who had been put under house arrest in Pristina after the outbreak of the bombing, appeared to criticise the bombardment. Many ethnic Albanians lost all faith in him when he then went to Italy with his family, apparently helped by Milosevic.

However, after Nato's intervention, the KLA began to lose support among moderate ethnic Albanians who opposed the killing of Serb families who stayed behind after the Yugoslav army was forced out of the province by Nato. Moderate ethnic Albanians were also dismayed to find that they, too, were subjected to harassment by hardline members of the KLA. Rugova himself seemed to feel at risk from ethnic Albanian extremists, and often travelled with bodyguards. The ethnic Albanian disillusion with the KLA became evident when elections were held in late 2000 and Rugova's LDK won 58% of seats in local authority elections.

Rugova's comeback was completed in March 2002, when he was elected president of Kosovo. A few weeks later, he came face to face with Milosevic once more, when he gave evidence for the prosecution at the former Yugoslav leader's trial in the Hague. The Kosovo parliament re-elected Rugova as president in December 2004.

Rugova's death leaves a power vacuum, coming days before negotiations on Kosovo's future were due to start in Vienna. His commitment to moderation is likely to be missed by the international community overseeing talks, conflict-weary Serbs and ethnic Albanians. He leaves a wife, Fane, and three children.

· Ibrahim Rugova, writer, academic and politician, born December 2 1944; died January 21 2006