Gazeta Express Covers Tenney’s Call for Popovic’s Release

Claudia Tenney’s staunch support for Serbia, reported by Gazeta Express, highlights her controversial advocacy for the release of Igor Popovic amid her anti-Kosovo rhetoric.

In the thicketed landscape of Balkan politics, where memory is long and grievance never far beneath the surface, clarity is rare. Yet clarity abounds in the record of Representative Claudia Tenney, a Republican congresswoman from upstate New York, whose unwavering allegiance to Belgrade is as consistent as it is conspicuous. This week, Prishtina bsed online outlet Gazeta Express reported¹ on Tenney’s public call for the immediate release of Igor Popovic, a Serb official arrested by Kosovo police for public insults directed at the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The statement, packaged in the gloss of human rights advocacy, was anything but impartial. What the outlet did not mention an editorial omission of no small consequence is that Tenney is not simply an observer of Balkan affairs, but an active and honoured partisan in them, having been awarded Serbia’s highest state honour, the Order of the Serbian Flag (First Class²), by President Aleksandar Vucic himself.

To understand the full implications of Tenney’s intervention is to wade through her record, a voluminous and unambiguous chronicle of favouritism towards Serbia, consistently casting Kosovo as the perennial provocateur and Serbia as the rational actor in pursuit of peace. This bias is neither latent nor rhetorical, it is foundational to her congressional career.