A Nation Forced to Look at the Blood on Its Hands

Kosovo’s independence celebrations turned into a roar of defiance this February, as the trial of Hashim Thaçi forces a painful reckoning with the wartime past.

On 17 February 2026, Kosovo marked eighteen years since independence with flags, speeches, and the familiar choreography of a young state insisting on its own permanence. Then, in the same capital, a second kind of procession gathered momentum. By early afternoon in Prishtina, a mass march moved under the slogan used by organisers, “Drejtësi, jo politikë”, Justice, not politics, in support of four detained former senior figures of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi, and Jakup Krasniqi, who are on trial in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity and who all plead not guilty¹.

Demonstrators attend a protest in support of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi and other former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) members, who are on trial for war crimes at a court in the Netherlands as Kosovars celebrate the 18th anniversary of independence, in Pristina, Kosovo, February 17, 2026. [Reuters]

For an outside reader, the scene can look like a paradox, a cou…