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