The Deadlock, The Presidency and the Missing Explanation
On CNN, Vjosa Osmani described Kosovo's crisis. What remained unexplained was her own role in the sequence of events that produced it.
When Vjosa Osmani appeared on CNN this week1, she spoke as if she had arrived at Kosovo’s crisis from the outside. She described a country exhausted by deadlock2, damaged economically, delayed internationally and endangered by the failure of political compromise. She warned that repeated elections were harming Kosovo’s hopes for the European Union and NATO. She spoke of national interest, unity, Serbia, Western alliances and the urgent need to prevent another vote.
What she did not explain to CNN’s audience was the central question now hanging over Kosovo’s political crisis.
What was her own role in producing it?
That omission matters. It matters not because Osmani is an ordinary opposition figure offering commentary from the edge of events, but because she was Kosovo’s president during the very sequence of institutional breakdown that helped send the country to its third parliamentary election in sixteen months3. She was not merely an observer of the fire. Critics in Kosovo argue that she …
