Patriot in Disguise, Criminal by Record

A scripted monologue aired by collaborators who register Peja as “Peć, Serbia” isn’t journalism. Thaçi’s lies are no less lethal just because they now arrive dressed in narration.

In this analysis, I closely examine the recently broadcast, heavily stylised, and meticulously polished “interview” of former President Hashim Thaçi, aired by Klan Kosova¹, a private media outlet widely recognised for its editorial strategy that aligns with Kremlin-aligned Serbian narratives against Kosovo’s national security. This segment, presented as a journalistic exclusive, instead serves as a vessel for image rehabilitation, carefully curated to omit scrutiny. Notably, Klan Kosova and its corporate affiliates have been implicated in the promotion of Serbia’s constitutional claims over Kosovo, including registering Kosovo’s cities such as Peja and Gjakova as “Peć, Serbia” and “Đakovica, Serbia” in business listings, an act that directly echoes Belgrade’s denial of Kosovo’s statehood.

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.

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1. Rubikon me Adriatik Kelmendin - Hashim Thaçi ekskluzivisht nga Haga! - 24.07.2025 - Klan Kosova — YouTube.

2. Kosovo media: Hashim Thaci met Milan Radoičić in his cabinet at his own invitation — KOSSEV.

3. On the Fabricated Return of Hashim Thaçi

A staged transcript, a silenced voice, and a complicit outlet, this isn’t journalism; it’s political necromancy for a man indicted for war crimes. — The GPC.