In the Ashes of War and the Shadows of Power

In Kosovo, coalition is not compromise, it is capitulation. Sharing power with the architects of plunder is not politics. It is betrayal.

It was not the bloodied snow of Bakhmut nor the harrowing dispatches from the siege of Mariupol that initially compelled my attention toward the Balkans once more, it was, rather, the dissonant echo of another war, long declared ‘over’ by the architects of modern diplomacy, but far from resolved in spirit or consequence. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 triggered within me not only a professional urgency¹, as it did for many of us in the journalistic fraternity, but also an unexpected introspection: what, I asked myself, was truly going on in Kosovo?

That curiosity was not idle. It led to a journey, physical, intellectual, and emotional that returned me to the land where history has not so much passed as it has lingered, festering beneath a veneer of democratic order. It led to reportage². And from that reportage emerged a disturbing, if not wholly surprising, realisation: the media landscape of Kosovo was and remains profoundly corrupted³.

Many so-called ‘news portals’…