Say “Hero” Loud Enough and the Looting Disappears
Heroes don't need silence, thieves do. This was never about a hero. It was about who controls memory, who profits from silence, and how quickly a state panics when the spell breaks.
In December, before the calendar had even made up its mind whether to turn the page, I found myself reading the same sentence dressed up in different outfits, again and again, across Kosovo’s media and social feeds. Hashim Thaçi as hero. Thaçi as the man who carried the war on his shoulders. Thaçi as the name you say with a lowered voice, as if criticism itself were a kind of betrayal. It was not only repetition, it was choreography. You could feel the invisible hand guiding the tone, the pacing, the little moral cues about what a decent person is supposed to think.
I do not mean the ordinary reverence that societies keep for their wartime memories. I mean something more transactional, the way a flag can be held up like a receipt. You can almost hear the implied bargain. Accept the story as offered, and you will be allowed to belong. Question it, and you will be made to feel you have stepped outside the warm circle of the nation.
By the end of that month I had stopped thinking of it as commentary and started thinking of it as pressure, the soft kind that does not leave marks on the skin but can still rearrange a person’s breathing. It was not the claim itself that bothered me most, it was the confidence with which it was delivered, as though two decades of postwar reality could be erased by saying the word hero with enough force.
On 9 January 2026, I wrote what I had been carrying around in my chest and trying not to turn into a performance. I posted it on Facebook1 and then on X2, as plain as I could make it.
“Hashim Thaçi nuk është hero.”
There are sentences that land with the weight of a stone not because they are complex, but because they cut through a whole architecture of pretence. In the post, I laid out the core of what I meant. That for twenty years Kosovo had been ruled and looted. That interests aligned with Serbia had been protected and normalised inside Kosovo’s institutions. That in The Hague, Thaçi had sought to separate himself from the very war narrative that his political aura has long traded on, and that this strategy, whatever its legal logic, carries a moral cost for a society that built much of its postwar identity around collective sacrifice.
I wrote about the paradox as I saw it, and I used the kind of language that refuses to whisper. Either he lied for years about what he was, or he is lying now to protect himself. And then the line that still makes people flinch, because it names the unspoken mechanism.
That he was willing to criminalise his comrades and the liberation war in order to save himself.
Even if you disagree with me, you can feel why it touches a nerve. In Kosovo, war memory is not only memory. It is currency. It is also shelter. When ordinary people are crushed by prices, when the young leave, when cynicism becomes the most reliable export, the war remains the one story that still promises meaning. The easiest way for a political class to keep power in that climate is to keep the nation emotionally parked in the war, forever mid sentence, forever one more chant away from redemption.
Two days later, on 11 January, I wrote again3. This time the tone was less declarative and more intimate, as if I were speaking while walking beside someone, letting the thoughts arrive in order. I began with a sentence that admitted what propaganda often exploits, that human beings can understand almost anything if they are pushed into the right fear.
“I understand how some call it heroism when a politician wraps himself in the glory of war to justify a twenty year looting.”
The post turned into a kind of portrait of a country being emptied quietly, like a house robbed at night by people who swore they would guard it in daylight. I wrote about how “peace” had been used as a label to sanctify the installation of Serbian interests inside Kosovo, how truth can be drowned slowly so it does not make noise, how killings do not always come with bullets in public view but can also arrive through darkness, forgetting, mud.
And then I drew the line again, but softer, almost tender in its insistence.
“No. I do not call this heroism.”
Heroism is not looting. Heroism does not fear the free word. Heroism does not need new graves to protect a lie.
There is a reason this kind of language travels. It is not because it is perfect. It is because it speaks to a fatigue people rarely admit out loud. The fatigue of being told that the highest act of patriotism is silence. The fatigue of watching men in suits borrow the dead as decorations. The fatigue of seeing the same faces on television telling the same moral tale while the ordinary world keeps getting harder.
Later that same day, I posted a third time4, and I changed the angle. I wrote about veterans, about the years after the war, about the people who were celebrated in speeches and then abandoned in life. I cited reports and the veterans organisation’s claims that dozens of former fighters took their own lives after the war, not from Serbian bullets but from hunger, poverty, abandonment, and the inability to feed their families. I wrote about commanders building villas, building power, building a Kosovo where the fighter mattered only as décor. I wrote the sentence that made the moral frame explicit.
“Today we are asked for loyalty to crime, not justice for the dead.”
And then I wrote a line that, in Kosovo’s political climate, is treated as both sacrilege and hygiene.
“Whoever uses the name of UÇK to protect thieves is a traitor to it.”
When you write like that, you are not only stating a belief. You are touching the wiring of the country. Kosovo’s political spectrum has been shaped by a long, unresolved struggle over who owns legitimacy. For years, a certain class of men could end arguments by pointing at their war credentials, real or embellished or strategically narrated. That credential became a passport into wealth, influence, and impunity. In the background, a second Kosovo grew, the one where teachers and nurses and shopkeepers measured their lives in invoices and remittances, the one that learned to love the country while distrusting its rulers, the one that watched patriotism become a private business.
My posts were not a policy proposal. They were a refusal. And refusals do something interesting online. They create a sudden clarity that forces everyone else to choose where to stand, or at least where to perform.
Then came the reaction, and it arrived not as a conversation but as a surge.
The numbers on the screenshots tell a story of their own. Hundreds of thousands of views on one post, tens of thousands on the others, thousands of interactions, a thick wave of comments and shares, and an audience profile that leans heavily adult, with a striking concentration in the thirty five to forty four bracket, then forty five to fifty four, then twenty five to thirty four. This is not a schoolyard argument. It is the age group that carries bills, children, disappointments, and the long memory of what the nineties promised and what the two thousands delivered. It is the generation that watched the state being built and then watched it being captured.
The numbers speak when the cartoons are dismissed.
What mattered more than the numbers was the texture of the public reaction, and the way it mapped Kosovo’s political psychology in real time. There were those who leaned in, relieved to see someone say plainly what many only say in kitchens. There were those who tried to pull the discussion back into sacred territory, the old insistence that any criticism of Thaçi is a criticism of the war itself. There were those who responded with fury that sounded less like disagreement and more like panic, because panic is what you hear when a myth feels threatened.
There were also the familiar tactics that appear whenever someone tries to puncture a profitable narrative. The sudden questioning of motives. The attempts to reduce the argument to personality. The little insinuations that the critic is working for someone else. The smear of being “pro Serbia” flipped around like a knife, used not to protect the country but to protect a brand.
This is one of the deeper consequences of a society that has not fully processed its postwar traumas. It becomes easy to weaponise identity as a switch. If you criticise the wrong person, you are no longer a citizen with a view, you are an enemy. When that becomes routine, politics stops being a contest of ideas and becomes a contest of tribal alarms. It is a form of social engineering, and it produces a public that is constantly being trained to react rather than to think.
In the middle of the noise, I tried to do what I always try to do when the internet turns into weather. I read, I watched, I took notes on patterns rather than individual insults. I reminded myself that most people are not villains, they are simply tired, and tired people cling to whatever story makes them feel safe. I also reminded myself of something that Kosovo’s modern politics has proved repeatedly. When you touch the myth economy, the response is never purely emotional. It is organisational.
That is when the media response began to unfold in a way that felt less like journalism and more like enforcement.
On 12 January, Nacionale published5 an article that presented itself as a scandal, not about what I wrote, but about who liked it. A consular official in Frankfurt, Gëzim Gashi, had liked the post, then removed the like after questions were sent, and the consulate replied that the like was accidental. The framing was not subtle. A state official had touched a dangerous idea, and the system moved quickly to isolate the contact, to make it look like a mistake, to remind everyone that even a finger tap can be treated as a political crime.
The article quoted a portion of my words and complained that “no facts” were offered, while the deeper move was happening in plain sight. The move was surveillance as narrative. Who liked what. Who agreed. Who dared. It is the kind of attention that teaches a public lesson.
Do not think too loudly.
Do not click too honestly.
Do not leave traces.
When insajderi6 and paparaci7 republished the story in copy paste form, the mechanism became clearer. It was not an isolated editorial choice. It was a network behaviour, the media ecosystem moving as a unit when the central myth is challenged. The message spreads horizontally, quickly, with the same tone, as if the country’s discourse were being run through a stencil.
Then another layer arrived, the political layer, with Artan Behrami calling for the consular official’s dismissal8 and claiming that if the president and foreign minister did not act, they would prove they were on a Serbian agenda. It is a familiar trick in Kosovo, and it deserves to be named gently but firmly because it has consequences. The accusation of serving Serbia is treated as the ultimate moral weapon, yet it is often deployed not to defend sovereignty but to defend factional power.
Here is what happens psychologically when that tactic becomes normal. People stop using the language of evidence and start using the language of impurity. The public sphere becomes a place where you win not by proving your case but by staining the other person’s belonging. That is corrosive for any democracy, but especially for a small state still building confidence in its institutions. It turns politics into a permanent loyalty test, and it rewards the most theatrical accuser, not the most truthful citizen.
At this point, the story had travelled through three layers of Kosovo’s postwar structure. The citizen voice. The social media crowd. The media network. And now the political apparatus, eager to turn a Facebook like into a state scandal.
But the real question beneath the noise was older than any platform. Who gets to define what Kosovo is allowed to remember, and how.
When I wrote that Thaçi is not a hero, I was not trying to confiscate anyone’s war memory. I was trying to separate the war from the men who have used it as a shield. That separation is precisely what frightens the networks built on war legitimacy. Because once the war is not theirs to rent out, they have to answer for what they did with the peace.
And peace, in Kosovo, has been heavy. Peace has been unemployment and migration. Peace has been a state that often feels like it belongs to a handful of people. Peace has been the quiet normalisation of corruption, presented as pragmatism. Peace has been the slow training of a society to accept that justice is something you praise in speeches but do not practise when it touches powerful names.
This is why the veterans question matters so much. When former fighters are left to struggle, and some fall into despair, it is not only a social failure. It is a political revelation. It shows what the ruling myth is really for. Not to honour sacrifice, but to control it.
If the liberation war is treated as sacred, then the men who claim ownership of that sacredness can demand silence in exchange for belonging. They can say, you must not ask about property, about contracts, about political killings, about intimidation, about how wealth appeared so quickly in the hands of so few. They can say, you owe us gratitude, and gratitude means obedience.
The consequence is a society that lives in two moral realities at once. In one reality, the war is sacred and must never be questioned. In the other reality, everyone knows someone who has been cheated, threatened, pushed out of work, denied a chance because they did not have the right party tie. That split produces a deep national cynicism. People clap at ceremonies and then curse at home. They celebrate independence and then leave. They tell their children to love Kosovo, and then they tell them to get out.
When my posts went viral, I think they did so partly because they spoke directly into that split. They did not ask people to stop loving the war memory. They asked people to stop letting war memory be used to suffocate the present.
Then, as always, the counter machinery tried to shrink the argument into a manageable target. Not a debate about accountability, but a story about me.
Nacionale called me “so called journalist.” Another outlet described me as “close to power,” a phrase that in Kosovo is used not as analysis but as a warning. These labels do not aim to clarify. They aim to pre condition the reader emotionally. If the writer is framed as illegitimate, you do not have to engage the claim. You can stay inside the comfort of the myth.
This is where Kosovo’s media crisis becomes not only an ethical issue but a democratic one. When media outlets operate as extensions of political and economic networks, the public is left without a shared set of facts. People retreat into their camps, each camp with its own outlets, its own heroes, its own villains. The country becomes less a civic space and more a collection of competing tribes, each convinced that the other is not only wrong but dangerous.
And that is exactly the environment where external actors thrive. If a society cannot agree on what is true, it becomes easier to push it. If institutions are distrusted, it becomes easier to bypass them. If journalists are routinely smeared as enemies, it becomes easier to intimidate them. In the Balkans, where Serbia and Russia both understand the strategic value of narrative warfare, a fractured Kosovo is not an accident. It is a prize.
This is why the Hague question sits in the background of my entire latest timeline. The Kosovo Specialist Chambers, whatever one thinks of its politics or its imperfections, represents a challenge to the postwar impunity system. It says, in effect, that even the highest war names might be judged, that the war aura does not automatically translate into moral exemption.
A network that fears accountability will inevitably try to delegitimise the mechanism of accountability. It will say the court is anti UÇK. It will say it is a Serbian narrative. It will say it is an insult to the war. It will try to collapse the distinction between judging individuals and judging the cause. That collapse is not a misunderstanding. It is strategy.
In my longer work, I have described attempts to undermine the court9, smear prosecutors, intimidate witnesses, and coordinate narratives. I am not going to reproduce my articles line by line, because the point here is not to drown the reader in an archive. The point is to show the shape of what unfolded around these January posts, and what that shape reveals about Kosovo’s political ecosystem.
What unfolded was a miniature demonstration of a larger system.
First, a citizen voice punctures a myth.
Then, a crowd reacts, revealing the underlying moral tension of the society.
Then, media networks scan the crowd, looking for leverage, turning a like into a scandal.
Then, politicians escalate the scandal, framing it as treason or foreign agenda.
At each stage, the goal is not clarity. The goal is control.
And the most chilling part is how ordinary the machinery has become. Surveillance dressed as reporting. Moral accusations used as party weapons. Institutions dragged into online theatre. The public trained to view dissent as betrayal.
When I stand back far enough, I can see the country’s political spectrum not as a left right chart but as a struggle between two instincts.
One instinct is civic. It wants institutions, accountability, a state that belongs to citizens rather than clans. It is impatient with myth when myth is used to excuse theft. It is willing to honour the war while still asking what was done with the peace.
The other instinct is transactional. It wants power protected. It wants the war to remain a moral shield that cannot be penetrated. It treats the state as spoils. It is comfortable with a media ecosystem that performs loyalty rather than scrutiny. It thrives on fear, because fear is cheaper than persuasion.
The tragedy is that both instincts often exist inside the same person. A man can love the war memory and still suspect the war elites. A woman can resent corruption and still feel anxious when a sacred name is criticised. That inner conflict is what makes Kosovo so vulnerable to manipulation, and also what makes it so capable of sudden moral clarity when the right words arrive at the right time.
My words arrived at a moment when the myth economy was already strained. People feel the cost of living. They feel the humiliation of needing a cousin abroad to send money. They feel the anger of watching officials live well while public services remain thin. They feel the insult of being told that asking questions is disloyal.
So when I wrote “heroism is not looting,” it did not land as poetry. It landed as recognition.
And recognition is dangerous to systems built on controlled memory. Because once a society recognises its own manipulation, it becomes harder to manipulate it the same way again. That is why the response becomes personal. That is why the smear arrives. That is why the surveillance angle emerges. That is why the consular like becomes headline material. It is not about the like. It is about signalling.
Look what happens when you touch this.
Look how quickly we can make you regret it.
And then I sat and thought. If I wanted to keep the reader beside me, as if I am speaking quietly while the storm rages elsewhere, then the final part of the story is not the outrage. It is the choice I made, and the choice Kosovo keeps being asked to make.
I did not respond by retreating into silence. I responded by continuing to write, by placing the events into a timeline, by showing the mechanics. I treated the reaction itself as evidence of the system I were describing. I said, in effect, if a single post can trigger surveillance, copy paste amplification, and political calls for dismissal, then perhaps the posts touched something true about how power behaves.
This is one of the strange gifts of social media, even in its ugliness. It accelerates cause and effect. It showed me, within days, the nervous system of a country. It showed me which myths are guarded by institutions, which names are protected by networks, which criticisms are allowed to pass quietly and which ones trigger alarms.
And it reveals, in the most human way, what happens to the ordinary person watching all this. They learn that politics is not only about laws, it is also about atmosphere. They learn that silence is rewarded. They learn that speaking can cost you friends, opportunities, safety, peace of mind. They learn that even a like can become a liability.
A society that teaches its citizens to fear a like is not stable. It is brittle.
Britain has a phrase for this kind of thing, though it is usually said about families rather than states.
We do not talk about that.
Kosovo has spent years not talking about certain things, not because people do not know, but because knowing is not the same as being able to say. When you write plainly, you widen the gap between what people privately know and what they are publicly allowed to say. That gap is where political change begins, and also where backlash breeds.
If there is a consequence worth naming gently, it is this. Every time a media outlet turns scrutiny into mockery, every time a politician turns dissent into treason, every time a network turns a moral argument into a personality attack, the country becomes a little more exhausted. And exhausted societies do not build strong institutions. They look for saviours. They cling harder to myths. They become more vulnerable to foreign games, because foreign games always offer simple stories.
The alternative is slower and less cinematic. It is the work of separating the war from the profiteers. Separating honour from impunity. Separating patriotism from obedience. Letting people love their country without having to love the men who captured it.
That is why my January posts mattered, regardless of who agrees with every line. They did not merely accuse a man. They challenged a method. They challenged the method of borrowing the dead to protect the living who have done harm. They challenged the method of treating criticism as betrayal. They challenged the method of using Serbia as a rhetorical ghost to silence domestic accountability.
When I say “Kosova lives,” I am not only saying Kosova lives. I am saying it can live without false heroes. It can live without the moral blackmail that tells citizens they must accept theft as the price of independence. It can live with a more adult patriotism, the kind that insists on dignity not only in war memory but in everyday governance.
And perhaps the most revealing detail in the whole timeline is the simplest one, the one that still makes me pause because it is so perfectly Kosovo.
People are watching, reacting, arguing, taking sides, but not moving towards deeper reading, deeper evidence, deeper inquiry. That is not a moral failure of the audience. It is a symptom of a society trained to experience politics as a spectacle, not as a responsibility. It is what happens when citizens are kept in a permanent emotional state, always outraged, always defensive, rarely empowered.
If Kosovo is to shift, it will have to shift there, from performance to participation. From myth guarding to institution building. From tribal reflex to civic patience.
That change does not begin in parliament. It begins in language. In the refusal to let the loudest network define what is allowed to be true. In the willingness to say, calmly, without theatrical hatred, “no, I do not call this heroism.”
And then to keep saying it, even when the room gets cold.
January 9th, 2026, Facebook Post “Hashim Thaçi is not a hero”.
January 11th, 2026. Facebook Post, “He is not a Hero”. — X Post.
January 11th, 2026. 3rd Facebook Post — X Post.
Konsulli i Kosovës në Frankfurt e pëlqen postimin ku Hashim Thaçi akuzohet për vrasje e plaqkitje: E bëra pa qëllim — Nacionale.
Copied from Nacionale [Konsulli i Kosovës në Frankfurt e pëlqen postimin ku Hashim Thaçi akuzohet për vrasje e plaqkitje: E bëra pa qëllim] — Insajderi.
Copied from Nacionale [Konsulli i Kosovës pëlqen postimin ku Hashim Thaçi akuzohet për vrasje e plaqkitje] — Paparaci.
Artan Behrami’s Facebook Post reaction on Jan 12, 2026.
The Conspiracy Against Kosovo’s Justice System Unraveled
In response to manipulated attacks, we’re granting free access to our latest investigative report, ensuring every reader sees the unfiltered truth. — The GPC I Unit.