I was 11 years old when Sloboda…

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That moment marked the beginning of a year-long ordeal that has steadily dismantled my ability to work. Since then, my accounts have been repeatedly suspended, my content restricted, my reach curtailed and my monetisation placed under successive sanctions. Each action appears disconnected in isolation. Together, they form a pattern that has made it…

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Gabriel Escobar completed his assignment. Jeffrey Hovenier retired after more than 34 years in the United States Foreign Service. Christopher Hill left Belgrade as one presidential administration gave way to another.

These explanations are plausible. They are also incomplete, according to a source familiar with United States government discussions whose identity, official position and access have been verified by my newsroom in London.

The source says the three diplomats did not leave merely through rotation, retirement and political transition. The source says an internal examination, triggered by my reporting on Escobar in March 20241, expanded into scrutiny of the American diplomatic missions in Pristina and Belgrade. According to that account, the examination produced adverse findings concerning Escobar, Hovenier and Hill, ended their assignments and resulted in the revocation of their security clearances.

That i…

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Gashi, it was said, was suspected of having caused discord by “damaging and changing the truth of the liberation war in Kosovo”.

That formulation matters. It matters because it reveals, i…

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The sequence of events began with the sudden suspension of the personal Facebook account1 of , chief editor of The Gunpowder Chronicles. The suspension followed what appeared to be a high volume of user reports alleging violations of Facebook Community Standards. The account was rendered inaccessible, with no detailed explanation of the specific content or behaviour that triggered the action.

Within hours, after contact with journalistic and legal representatives in the United Kingdom, the personal account was restored. Facebook did not provide a substantive explanation for the reversal. However, the reinstatement proved temporary. Subsequent restrictions were applied again, including limitations on commenting and public interaction, despite no new enforcement notice identifying a policy breach.

At the same time, Facebook permanently removed the publication’s main pages, and its Albanian language counterpart . As of publication, these pages have not been restored. No detailed justification has been provided to explain how the pages violated platform rules, nor has a clear appeal mechanism been offered to challenge the decision.

The enforcement actions appear to be linked to previous content moderation decisions. One article shared by the editor, analysing the October 7 2023 Hamas attacks and the subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza2, was removed under Facebook’s policy on dangerous organisations and individuals. The article explicitly condemned the killing of Israeli civilians, described Hamas as responsible for terrorist violence, and critically examined the actions of governments and international institutions from a human rights perspective. No language in the article advocated violence or supported any organisation designated as dangerous.

In another instance, a video recorded from a television broadcast and shared with critical commentary was removed on the grounds of copyright infringement. The decision was issued without clarification as to how the content failed to meet standards for journalistic use or commentary.

Together, these enforcement actions have accumulated against the account, contributing to automated restrictions that Facebook representatives later described as system driven rather than the result of identifiable human review. When contacted through live chat support, Facebook staff stated they could not access full enforcement details and were unable to escalate the matter to senior moderation or editorial review teams. The support session ended without resolution.

In parallel, Facebook placed a hold on monetisation payments associated with the account. According to the platform’s own dashboard, earnings exceeding 500 US dollars were accrued through content monetisation and marked as pending. Payments were later restricted due to what Facebook described as unusual activity. No allegation of fraud was made, and no final determination has been communicated. The funds remain unpaid

The restrictions have had immediate professional consequences. The editor has been prevented from engaging in public discussion, managing pages, and distributing reporting through one of the largest social media platforms in the world. The removal of the publication’s pages has disrupted access for readers and subscribers, particularly in regions where Facebook functions as a primary news distribution channel.

The publisher () believes the actions may be the result of coordinated mass reporting rather than substantive policy violations. While Facebook policies acknowledge that reporting mechanisms can be abused, the platform provides limited transparency into how such reports are assessed or how journalistic content is distinguished from prohibited material.

Facebook states that it supports free expression and journalism, while also enforcing policies designed to prevent harm. However, cases such as this illustrate the tension between automated moderation systems and the realities of conflict reporting, political analysis, and investigative journalism. Without clear explanations, effective appeals, or consistent human review, enforcement decisions risk undermining trust in platform governance.

As of now, The Gunpowder Chronicles continues to publish independently through its own platforms. Readers have been advised that the publication’s Facebook presence will be re established where possible, while documentation of the enforcement actions is being maintained for further review by journalistic and professional bodies.

The incident highlights broader questions facing news organisations worldwide. As social media platforms increasingly act as gatekeepers of public discourse, the balance between moderation and press freedom remains fragile. For independent outlets operating without the protection of major institutional backing, that balance can determine whether reporting reaches the public at all.

Persona Non Grata: Why Rohde Must Go

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This is the stark and deeply disturbing case of Eugen Cakolli, Programme Manager at the Kosovo Democratic Institute (KDI), a flagship NGO often presented as a beacon of civic responsibility and democratic values. Funded generously by the European Union, the German Cooperation, USAID, the Swiss Government, and British Foreign Aid, KDI positions itself as a promoter of transparency and institutional accountability.

But when one of its senior representatives embarks on a public crusade to delegitimise the very justice mechanisms that seek accountability for wartime atrocities, one must ask: Who is KDI truly serving, the people of Kosovo, or a selective history built on impunity?

A Post on Facebook, A Window Into Dangerous Narratives

On 30 July 2025, Eugen Cakolli posted the following statement on his personal Facebook profile1 – a platform he regularly uses to engage with the public in his capacity as a civil society advocate:

“Nuk mund të gjykohet askush ‘në emër të popullit të Kosovës’, kur provat e pranuara në proces gjyqësor vijnë pikërisht nga ai aparat që planifikoi dhe ekzekutoi spastrimin etnik kundër po këtij populli... Prandaj, protesta e 7 gushtit është e domosdoshme. Jo kundër drejtësisë, por kundër padrejtësive në emër të saj.”

At first glance, such rhetoric may appear cloaked in patriotism or indignation at perceived injustice. But dig even slightly beneath the surface, and what emerges is a calculated attempt to delegitimise the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague – an internationally sanctioned tribunal tasked with investigating crimes committed during and after the 1998–1999 Kosovo War.

Cakolli’s post is not just a political opinion. It is a public accusation, disseminated by a representative of an NGO subsidised by foreign governments, alleging that the Court is using fabricated or tainted evidence from Serbia – without presenting a single piece of credible proof.

This is not civil society at work. This is the subversion of justice under the banner of civic resistance.

Raising Questions Met With Contempt

In my role as a journalist and as someone who has covered armed conflicts and war crimes in some of the most complex theatres of the world, I considered it my responsibility to seek clarification. I publicly addressed Cakolli with a series of pointed, respectful, and professional questions aimed at understanding the factual basis of his claims.

Among them:

• Which specific documents allegedly sourced from Serbian institutions have been admitted as evidence?

• Where exactly in the judicial records are these documents found?

• Is he claiming that all evidence presented by the Prosecution is tainted simply by virtue of origin?

• How does he reconcile his position with the fact that many Kosovar Albanians, too, have demanded justice for crimes committed by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)?

• Is he not concerned that such rhetoric may discourage witnesses and undermine fair trial guarantees?

From Accusation to Evasion: When a Transparency Advocate Ducks Transparency

None of these questions received direct, credible answers. Instead, Cakolli responded with ad hominem attacks, unfounded insinuations about my motives, and an astonishing refusal to engage with the content of the questions.

This gallery documents an extended public exchange between me and Eugen Cakolli, Program Manager at the Kosova Democratic Institute / Transparency International Kosova, over Cakolli’s controversial public claim that Kosovo’s Special Chambers accept as evidence documents originating from the Serbian wartime security apparatus.

Below is a gallery of screenshots showcasing the exchange.

The Ad Hominem Playbook

Instead of engaging in good-faith debate, Cakolli pivoted to character assassination:

“Besoj, kaq pak, kupton edhe ti, përveç nëse dëshira për ta pa dikë në burg, ta errëson arsyen...”

When pressed further for sources, Cakolli redirected me to a single article on Nacionale.com, a portal widely criticised for its ownership ties to Berat Buzhala2, a businessman linked to Zvonko Veselinovic3, an individual sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for organised crime and destabilisation activities in Kosovo.

When I raised legitimate concerns about the credibility of this source, Cakolli accused me of being “unserious” and of pursuing an agenda:

“Agjendë është, pa pikë dyshimi. Edhe tendencë.”

He then proceeded to dig through past Facebook posts to label me biased and discredit my professional integrity, a desperate pivot from fact to personal attack, emblematic of those unwilling to defend their claims under scrutiny.

“Gabimi yt, është që harroni se postimet janë publike, edhe ruhen. I tille është edhe ai i yti, i 5 janarit 2017...”

This behaviour is not only intellectually bankrupt, but deeply anti-democratic. It reveals a mindset in which anyone who asks questions becomes the enemy, an attitude chillingly familiar in societies where accountability is viewed as betrayal.

The False Martyrdom of a Civil Society Actor

Let us be unequivocal: the Kosovo Specialist Chambers is not prosecuting the KLA. It is prosecuting individuals suspected of serious crimes, some of whom happen to have been members of the KLA. This distinction matters.

Cakolli’s rhetoric, however, deliberately blurs this line, conflating individual accountability with collective condemnation. This serves no one, except those seeking to shield power behind the fog of nostalgia and nationalism.

His insistence that the Court is weaponising “Serbian documents” is a dangerous fabrication, one unsupported by judicial filings and unsubstantiated by any third-party analysis. And yet, he refuses to acknowledge this or to provide even the most basic citations.

Worse still, he claims that he does not speak on behalf of civil society, despite using his publicly verified platform as KDI’s Programme Manager to speak to thousands. This kind of duplicity, disavowing institutional accountability while leveraging institutional visibility, is profoundly unethical.

KDI Must Answer

This brings us to the inescapable question: What is Kosovo Democratic Institute’s position on all this?

How can an organisation purporting to advance democratic governance and rule of law continue to employ a senior figure who:

• Publicly undermines international justice mechanisms;

• Makes unsubstantiated accusations against a court of law;

• Encourages public protest against legitimate judicial procedures;

• Frames journalistic inquiry as an attack, and refuses to engage with facts;

• References platforms linked to sanctioned individuals as credible sources?

If KDI’s silence is meant to be interpreted as neutrality, it is in fact complicity. Foreign funders including the EU, USAID, FCDO, and SDC, must now reckon with the fact that their development funds are subsidising a narrative hostile to justice, transparency, and the international rule of law.

The Greater Danger: Polluting the Public Sphere

What Cakolli is engaged in is not just a debate. It is a systematic attempt to pollute the public sphere, to transform judicial accountability into betrayal, to treat critical inquiry as sabotage, and to frame legitimate Kosovan and European institutions of justice as foreign conspiracies.

It is a strategy lifted from the populist playbook, one that weaponises emotion, denies nuance, vilifies dissent, and elevates mythology over fact.

This is not merely a civil disagreement between two voices in the public square.

This is an insidious effort to undermine the foundations of justice in Kosovo.

The questions posed to Eugen Cakolli remain unanswered. They will continue to linger, because they are not personal. They are public. They concern every Kosovar who believes in justice, accountability, and truth.

If civil society leaders cannot uphold these principles, they forfeit the moral right to speak in the name of the people.

And if institutions like KDI allow such figures to act unchecked, then they must be held to account, not just by donors, but by the very public they claim to serve.

This is not about Mr Cakolli.
This is not about me.
This is about Kosovo.
And about the solemn truth that justice does not thrive in the dark, it dies in silence.

Against this backdrop, the so-called interview raises grave concerns not only about media ethics but also about the coordinated political project of memory manipulation and institutional subversion.

There is a grotesque irony to former President Hashim Thaçi's attempt to condemn the Banjska attacks as a national tragedy. That the very architect of Kosovo's post-war decay would now drape himself in the garments of wounded patriotism is not merely an insult to public intelligence, it is an affront to the dead.

The Banjska’s Kremlin-aligned aggression on September 24, 2023, was no isolated eruption. It was the logical culmination of a decades-long betrayal. A metastasis of criminality planted, nurtured, and protected under Thaçi's own watch. To feign surprise or moral indignation is to willfully erase a blood-stained history.

Let us not indulge in revisionism. Milan Radoicic, the paramilitary commander behind the Banjska attack and an open agent of Belgrade’s expansionist ambitions, did not emerge from the shadows. He walked into the Prime Minister’s office in Pristina during Thaçi's tenure2, not as an outsider, but as a known figure of power, granted impunity by the very government he would later try to undermine through violence.

Radoicic was not merely tolerated. He was emboldened, legitimised, allowed to operate freely in Kosovo’s north, turning it into a gangster dominion ruled by smuggling, extortion, and fear. He became the de facto governor of a criminal enclave, a no man’s land that Thaçi's administration helped carve out with its Faustian pact to keep the north under control without governance, under silence rather than sovereignty.

This was not an administrative failure. It was policy. Thaçi, intoxicated by dreams of territorial swaps and partitionist diplomacy, was prepared to trade away the north and its people, institutions, and underground resources in a cynical gambit to preserve his political legacy. He pursued a deal with Serbia that would have handed over Kosovo’s strategic Ujman Lake and its mineral-rich lands, all while cloaking the concession in the language of "normalisation."

When Banjska burned, it was not a surprise. It was the final act of a drama Thaçi helped script.

How dare he now issue laments about Kosovo's fragility? This is a man who, for twenty years, governed by proxy through guns, graft, and the ghosts of wartime mythologies. Under his rule, political dissent was not debated; it was disappeared. Journalists who dared investigate his networks were threatened, silenced, or worse. The murder of Ali Uka in 1997, an Albanian journalist last seen alive in the very flat he shared with Thaçi, remains a haunting footnote to a legacy steeped in shadows.

Uka was not the only one. The post-war period was littered with the bodies of whistleblowers, critics, rivals and journalists. Each death was a data point in the broader decay of Kosovo’s democratic experiment, each uninvestigated murder a message from the powerful: silence is safer.

Thaçi built a state not on the rule of law but on the choreography of loyalty and fear. His Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) functioned less like a political entity and more like a cartel of wartime elites, rebranded as statesmen.

And the media?

Manipulated, muzzled, or made complicit. The very broadcasters who today present his ghostwritten "interviews" from The Hague are the same outlets that helped manufacture his myth.

His latest performance, a heavily produced monologue aired on Klan Kosova3, devoid of verification, facial expression, or audio authenticity, is not journalism. It is an infomercial for amnesia. His words, filtered through narrators and stripped of spontaneity, are unrecognisable as his own. Thaçi has never spoken with such polish or caution. The language is not his; the agenda unmistakably is.

This is not a man confronting justice; it is a man attempting to control its narrative.

But no amount of stagecraft can obscure the facts. The Banjska attack did not spring from a void. It was born of a political environment where violence was an instrument of negotiation and criminal networks were indistinguishable from local governance. It was enabled by a leadership that chose power over principle, impunity over investigation.

Thaçi is not a bystander to this legacy; he is its author. The north was lost not because Kosovo was too weak to govern it, but because Thaçi made a calculation: that it was more useful unmanaged, more politically exploitable as a threat than as a responsibility. That decision has now come home to roost in the form of terror attacks, armed incursions, and Serbia’s growing appetite to test Kosovo’s resolve.

And still, from The Hague, he postures.

He speaks of sacrifice and sovereignty, of dignity and justice. But these are not reflections. They are deflections. Thaçi has no moral authority to critique Kosovo’s leadership or institutions. He is not a father of the nation. He is the absentee landlord of a broken house, seeking to collect rent on a legacy he helped demolish.

The people of Kosovo remember. They remember the privatisations that enriched cronies and gutted the state. They remember the secret negotiations, the backroom deals, the American-brokered handshake agreements never brought to public scrutiny. They remember the Association of Serb-majority Municipalities, an entity Thaçi himself helped legitimise, now wielded by Belgrade as a constitutional dagger aimed at Kosovo’s sovereignty.

And they remember the silence. The silence of leaders when activists were jailed. When critics were smeared. When journalists were killed, when politicians were shot at their doorstep. When northern Kosovo became a safe haven for smuggling networks and Serbian-backed provocateurs.

Banjska is not a break from the past. It is the continuation of a betrayal that began under Thaçi and continues to haunt the republic.

So let him write from his cell. Let him reimagine himself as a victim of history. But let us not forget: he is also its engineer.

Kosovo must move forward, yes. But it must do so with clear eyes, not clouded by nostalgia for those who mistook statehood for spoils. Thaçi does not get to narrate the story of Banjska. He is not its chronicler. He is its progenitor.

Let history place him accordingly, not among the defenders of the republic, but among those who undermined it from within.

Kosovo deserves a reckoning.

And Thaçi deserves to face it.

In a grotesque twist of irony, the Organisation of Veterans of the Kosovo Liberation Army (OVL-UÇK)1, once the custodians of a liberation struggle born out of resistance to tyranny, has now debased itself by penning a sycophantic letter to Richard Grenell2, a man whose name has become synonymous in Kosovo with foreign manipulation, disinformation, and the cynical erosion of democratic institutions3.

Let us not mince words: by appealing to Grenell, a disgraced diplomat with a sordid record of meddling in Kosovo’s political affairs and ties to anti-democratic forces across Europe, the OVL-UÇK has not only insulted the memory of those who gave their lives for Kosovo’s freedom, but they have aligned themselves, wittingly or not, with the very structures of impunity, political violence, and foreign subjugation they once claimed to resist.

This is not just a political misstep. This is moral …

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When opposition parties like PDK, LDK and AAK, voted against the report that would validate the parliamentary mandates this Tuesday, they cited constitutional and procedural irregularities. But to the discerning eye, it was less about legality and more about stalling a government that has systematically dismantled the oligarchic structures they once presided over. It is a betrayal, not just of politics, bu…

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Under Trump’s watch, Kosovo faced a brutal test. Figures like Richard Grenell, Trump’s former envoy and political operative, have positioned themselves alongside Serbian and Russian-aligned interests. Grenell, notorious for blurring diplomacy and self-interest, pushed economic deals that served Serbia’s agenda, often sidelining Kosovo’s needs and undermining its sovereignty. Grenell’s actions fit into a larger playbook of empowering Serbia and appeasing Russia, bolstering Serbia’s i…

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