Ibrahim Rugova

Ibrahim RugovaDecember 2, 1944 - January 21, 2006Steadfast leader who became 'Kosovo's Gandhi' with his passive resistance in the fight for independence
WITH his characteristic red scarf, which he swore he would not remove until Kosovo became free, Ibrahim Rugova was a leading figure in the politics of the Balkans from the late 1980s until his death. His political life was devoted to the cause of Kosovan freedom, but if he was unflinching in his objective he was equally determined upon the means to its attainment: he was, and it was an analogy he was not shy of using himself, Kosovo’s Gandhi, a man dedicated to peaceful resistance and to the achievement of one’s goals by nonviolence.
Ibrahim Rugova was born in a small village in the Istog area of Kosovo in 1944. It was a turbulent time in Kosovo. During the Second World War the area had been included in Albania, the majority of Kosovo’s inhabitants being, like Rugova, ethnic Albanians. After the Germans had withdrawn, Serbian communist partisans reimposed rule from Belgrade. And this they did with considerable brutality. On January 10, 1945, they shot Rugova’s father and grandfather. They were but two of the many who died during the reimposition of Belgrade’s authority, an authority which was to be maintained with great strictness until the second half of the 1960s.
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Rugova finished his secondary schooling in the town of Peja, graduating in 1967 before moving on to the University of Pristina, where he was a student in the Faculty of Philosophy’s Department of Albanian Studies until 1971. He then enrolled as a research student concentrating on literary theory and receiving his doctorate in 1984 for his thesis The Directions and Premises of Albanian Literary Criticism, 1504-1983.
As part of his advanced studies he spent 1976-77 at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris where his supervisor was the redoubtable Roland Barthes. In Pristina he also edited the student newspaper Bota e Re (New World) and the magazine Dituria (Knowledge). In the early 1970s he worked in the Institute for Albanian Studies in Prishtina. He also continued his journalistic activities, serving as editor-in-chief of the Institute’s periodical Gjurmime albanologjike (Albanian Research). Like most intelligent men and women of his generation, Rugova joined the Communist Party, primarily as a means of ensuring a decent career. As a conscientious academic he published a number of works in his own field and in 1988 was elected president of the Kosovo Writers’ Association. This appointment came with potential political change — and danger.
By the late 1980s tensions between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo were rising rapidly as President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia sought to tighten the central control over Kosovo which had been relaxed under the Yugoslav constitution of 1974. The writers’ association became an important factor in the Albanian protests, and eventual resistance, to the reimposition of Belgrade’s control. When Milosevic’s regime produced new constitutional proposals in 1989, Rugova was one of the 215 who signed the Appeal of Kosovo Intellectuals against the proposal. He was immediately expelled from the Yugoslav League of Communists and pushed into the maelstrom of political dissidence. In December 1989 he was a founding member of the Democratic Alliance of Kosovo (LDK) and was immediately chosen as its leader.
Rugova’s response to the tightening of Serbian control in Kosovo was passive resistance. This included the boycott of elections: to vote would imply recognition of the legitimacy of the existing state power. This did not greatly upset the Serbian authorities. Having refused to have anything to do with the Belgrade parliament, the Kosovan deputies then went underground, declared Kosovo a republic and established a virtual parallel state. This conducted both parliamentary and presidential elections, Rugova winning both the latter. The parallel government, operating from a grubby building in Pristina, provided Kosovo’s Albanians with education and medical services, most of the money coming from Kosovan Albanians abroad.
In the late 1990s Rugova’s star waned temporarily. When the Dayton Accords brought no change in Kosovo’s status, many questioned his policy of passive resistance. In 1998 the appearance of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) presented a direct threat to his domination of the Kosovan political scene. During the Nato campaign of 1998-99 Rugova appeared to have been elbowed aside, and when the Rambouillet conference met the United States treated the leader of the KLA as a more important figure than Rugova. But Rugova did not make his position any more credible by his own conduct: he appeared on Serbian television with Milosevic in an appeal for an end to the bombing campaign, though it is quite possible that this was done under duress.
The damage was not long-lasting. When the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) established a new system of government in the area, Rugova returned to his former dominant position. In the elections of October 2000 the LDK won 58 per cent of the votes and on March 4, 2002, Rugova was elected President.
As President, Rugova maintained that the only long-term solution for Kosovo, which was still technically part of Serbia, was that it should become independent. Nothing else would satisfy its Albanian population, he argued, and that an independent Kosovo would serve as a buffer state between Serbia and Albania and would therefore make the Balkans more stable. Rugova was equally insistent that independence had to be secured not with Kalashnikovs but through negotiated agreements with all the parties concerned. This was not to the taste of the heirs of the KLA, but in November 2004 Rugova took an uncharacteristic gamble and made Ramush Haradinaj, the former KLA commander, Prime Minister, even though he was under investigation for alleged war crimes. With crucial negotiations with the United Nations on Kosovo’s future on the horizon, Rugova wanted to unite all Albanians.
These negotiations were approaching a critical stage when, in August 2005, Rugova was flown to a US military hospital in Germany. It was later announced that he had lung cancer.
Rugova at times showed an inflexibility which perhaps came from his training in literary theory, but most of those who met him found he possessed a personal, quirky charm, represented not only in his red scarf but also in his passion for geology. After official business had been completed, all visitors were shown the presidential collection of crystals and then given a sample as a present. It was a carefully graded process with leaders of delegations receiving theirs wrapped in a small velvet cloth while the others had to be content with a napkin. The size of the crystal could also reflect Rugova’s pleasure, or otherwise, at the outcome of the meeting and as a result diplomats in Pristina were constantly comparing notes.
His dedication to peaceful resistance and non-violence brought Rugova a number of awards, including the peace award of the Paul Litzer Foundation in Denmark in 1995, and, three years later, the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize. He was awarded the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Parisin in 1996.
He is survived by his wife, Fana, and their three children.
Ibrahim Rugova, President of Kosovo, was born on December 2, 1944. He died on January 21, 2006, aged 61.