Belgin’s Beating: Our National Disgrace
Kosovo, born from genocide, now flirts with fascism, beating children of minorities while leaders, media, and intellectuals stay silent. This is not justice. This is shame.
There is a moment in every nation’s history, when silence itself becomes a complicity too heavy to bear, a moral abyss into which all claims of justice, democracy, and human dignity are swallowed. In Kosovo, a young boy, Belgin Jashari, fifteen years of age, a child, a citizen, a sportsman, and a member of the Ashkali community was physically and verbally assaulted during a football match. The aggressor: not another youth acting in the heat of play, but a grown adult, a parent, who stormed the field with the fury of inherited prejudice, delivering not only blows to a child’s body, but to the very soul of a society still claiming to recover from the wounds of systemic oppression and ethnic hatred.
What followed, or rather, what failed to follow is more damning than the act itself. The halls of power remained unmoved. The Prime Minister's office, so vociferous in moments of political theatre, suddenly found no voice. Our so-called intellectuals, often quick to pen poetic lamentations of our national suffering under Serbian hegemony, sat this one out. Media outlets, whom we once credited as vanguards of truth in post-war Kosovo, opted for indifference, or worse, opportunistic silence. They did not rush to cover the assault as a matter of public concern. It was only after the Football Federation of Kosovo (FFK) issued a generic statement1 that even a flicker of public attention was paid, and even that flicker2 came not from the bastions of serious journalism but from those who tread cautiously, fearing the discomfort that truth brings to the unprepared conscience.
And herein lies our existential crisis: we, a nation forged in the fires of resistance, born from the womb of struggle against racialised oppression, stand perilously on the precipice of becoming what we once reviled. The very premise of our collective identity justice for the marginalised, dignity for the oppressed, now hangs in a fragile balance, threatened not by external enemies, but by the creeping rot of internal apathy and moral cowardice.
Belgin Jashari’s beating is not an isolated incident to be archived as another banal episode of "rowdy behaviour." It is, if we are honest, the eruption of a volcano long ignored, a volcano of latent racism, festering under the thin veneer of our post-war euphoria. The Ashkali, Roma, and Egyptian communities have long dwelled in the shadows of our nation’s promise. Their children walk the same streets, dream the same dreams, yet are often denied the same rights, the same protections, the same embrace that we so loudly demanded for ourselves when we were the ones being crushed.
To dismiss this as a triviality, a "street-level scuffle," is to insult the memory of every ethnic-Albanian Kosovar who once stood trembling before a Serbian paramilitary, every child who watched their home reduced to rubble, every mother who buried her son wrapped in the flag of an unrecognised republic. For what, after all, did we fight? Was it for the right to inherit the tools of tyranny, now turned against our own most vulnerable? Was our blood spilled so that we might recreate in miniature the horrors once inflicted upon us?
The shame does not lie with Belgin Jashari, nor with his community. It lies with us. It lies with the journalists who failed to see this as a front-page story, who chose, perhaps in cowardice or cynicism, to let others lead the narrative. It lies with the intellectuals, whose pens should have burned with indignation, but remained still, as if their principles were limited only to causes that flatter their public profiles. It lies with the politicians, who when faced with the brutal beating of a child under their guardianship could not muster even a symbolic gesture, let alone a policy or a plan. And yes, it lies with us, the citizens, for every time we let such moments pass, for every time we told ourselves it is not our fight.
We cannot afford this silence. We cannot afford to become the caricature of nationalism gone sour, where the purity of our suffering is weaponised to excuse the suffering we now impose on others. Our moral duty is not to defend the indefensible, but to challenge it, to stand in the breach and declare that Kosovo will not be a nation that trades in the currency of fascist nostalgia, however much we might justify it by historical grievance.
To those who say, "But they betrayed us during the war," I say: betrayal is an act of individuals, not communities. Justice demands discernment, not collective punishment. If we are to hold others accountable for their crimes, let it be through the courts, through evidence, through law, not through inherited prejudice masquerading as patriotism. The road to fascism is paved with exactly such justifications, where the sins of the few become the chains of the many.
This is not just about Belgin Jashari, though his pain should be enough. This is about the kind of society we wish to build. A society where every child, regardless of surname, skin tone, or lineage, can play, learn, and thrive without fear. A society where violence is not excused, but condemned; where racism is not rationalised, but eradicated; where leadership is not silent, but brave.
If we do not act now, if we do not speak now, we risk losing not only our moral compass, but our very legitimacy as a nation born from the struggle for human dignity. We must ring the bells. We must write, protest, organise. We must demand of our leaders that they lead, not merely rule. We must demand of our media that they report, not merely repeat. And we must demand of ourselves that we never again let such a crime slip quietly into the dustbin of forgotten outrage.
To Belgin Jashari and to every child like him, we owe not only our sympathy but our solidarity. We owe them the fight we once fought for ourselves. We owe them a future free from the fear of being othered in their own homeland. Let Kosovo not be the place where the oppressed became the oppressors. Let it be, instead, a beacon, a place where the lessons of suffering forged an unbreakable commitment to justice for all.
We shall not forget. We shall not allow this to pass. And we shall, if we have any decency left, rise together for peace, for love, for equality. The time to fight is now. Not with fists, but with courage.
Tucker Carlson, The Jester Who Mocks Genocide
I was appalled. No. Eviscerated in fact, to witness a man of my own noble profession, a supposed custodian of truth, laughing at the unspeakable horrors of the former Yugoslavian wars. Tucker Carlson’s grotesque mirth was not mere ignorance; it was a desecration of the graves and memories of those who perished in that blood-soaked crucible. His cavalier chuckling was a macabre symphony, an affront to decency, echoing the chilling indifference that permitted genocides to unfold while the world dithered in moral paralysis. When he speaks of "Christians being bombed," let me clarify, we Albanians are also Christians, you ghastly, bloodthirsty vile reprobate. Your selective, grotesquely distorted narrative is a spit in the face of history and a mockery of the dead.
FFK reagon për rastin e Belgin Jasharit i cili dyshohet se u sulmua fizikisht gjatë një ndeshje futbolli — Kallxo.com.