Kurti is offering the opposition “water in a sieve”

At the height of an unprecedented two-year crisis, when Albin Kurti cannot form a government and cannot elect a president, he has managed to find a perverse solution, which combines the naivety of the opposition and his own cunning on a sensitive popular issue, connected with the conviction of four senior KLA leaders by the Specialist Chambers.

He has agreed that at Monday’s session a bill on the Specialist Chambers be examined, which places important limitations on the Court’s further activity, but which, in essence, has no guarantee that it undoes the convictions of the KLA leaders. On the contrary, it pushes Kosovo even further into the spiral of conflict with the West, which is also a feature of Albin Kurti’s political identity.

The PDK has a direct political and emotional interest in the Specialist Chambers issue. Its former main leaders and those of the KLA have been tried in The Hague, and the change of the law is presented as an attempt to correct what the PDK considers an overreach of the Court’s mandate. For this reason, Kurti’s support for the initiative can be sold as a great concession to the PDK.

But, if it is looked at more carefully, it may be exactly the opposite.

Kurti can take from this agreement what he needs immediately, the way out of the crisis of electing the president. Whereas the PDK, on the other hand, receives “water in a sieve,” as they say in Albania when someone is thirsty and seeks water from the opponent. Instead of a full glass, he offers you water in a pierced vessel, from which nothing reaches your lips.

Law No. 05/L-053 directly touches the jurisdiction of the Specialist Chambers, the sentences, the appeal and the execution of decisions, but the Specialist Chambers were not created only by an ordinary law of the Assembly of Kosovo. Their architecture rests on the constitutional amendments of 2015 and on the international commitments that Kosovo has undertaken towards the European Union. For this reason, changing the law does not necessarily mean an effective change of the Court’s mandate.

Here lies the political trap.

If the changes are approved and then face opposition from the EU, a constitutional review, or the juridical impossibility of producing effects on the processes in The Hague, Kurti can say that he supported the initiative. The political clash with international partners and the disappointment over the lack of concrete results will remain mainly with the PDK.

Albin Kurti is giving the opposition a vote for a law, but not necessarily the result that the PDK seeks from that law. After this, Albin Kurti is washed clean, and the war that he himself has waged against the West, ever since he came to power, he delegates from tomorrow onwards to his opponents, washing his hands like Pilate.

Kurti moves the PDK from the position of the opposition into the position of co-responsibility for a major state decision. Until yesterday, the PDK could criticise the government for relations with Western allies. After the approval of a law that touches one of Kosovo’s most sensitive international commitments, it itself may find itself at the centre of the debate with the European Union.

This is also the most insidious part of the agreement. Albin Kurti enters this battle with a certain result for himself, while the opposition becomes part of a mechanism that loads onto it the sins of Albin Kurti.

The four KLA leaders approved the Specialist Chambers with the awareness that this would have consequences. What happened to them is a savagery of the judges and prosecutors of The Hague, which has no chance of being undone by a populist initiative of the Assembly of Kosovo. The only thing this initiative can do is lower Kosovo’s reputation in the West even further and serve Albin Kurti’s cause of becoming all-powerful in Kosovo and armed even with the opposition against the West.

The mechanism to free the four KLA leaders in the future is a strong legal battle on appeal and a more powerful international lobbying in the West, among the political factors that influence the Specialist Chambers. The populist defiance of the Assembly of Kosovo leaves Kosovo both without an opposition and with the KLA leaders in prison, deepening the clash with the West.

The way in which the four KLA leaders arrived in The Hague and have faced justice is exemplary and has done honour to them and to Kosovo. The battle is not yet over, but the trial proved that Kosovo has not committed crimes against humanity, and Dick Marty’s fabrications about organ transplants have been thrown into the rubbish bin.

On Monday in Parliament, Kosovo will gain nothing more than the enmity of the Court and of the West, appearing as an immature state that violates its agreements with the West. While inside the country it will definitively lose the opposition, turning Albin Kurti into an all-powerful leader, who now also has some opposition figures as musketeers against the West, after offering them a glass of water in a sieve to quench their anger with the Specialist Chambers.