The Prime Minister and the Spy Suspect

Rama’s courtroom pageantry meets Sheholli’s street mobilisations: a duet of posts, rallies, and insinuations that flatters Belgrade’s script while Kosovo’s institutions absorb the damage.

Two hours after posting a rallying call on Facebook¹ »LIRIA KA EMËR… mijëra zemra do të bashkohen këtë të premte… për të kërkuar njëzëri DREJTËSI PËR ÇLIRIMTARËT²« Edi Rama had, intentionally or not, distilled a decade of his Balkan statecraft into a single performance, the prime minister as impresario of grievance, the red theatre-curtain of patriotism drawn tight over a stage where law is the unwanted extra. The message is familiar by now. Albania’s strongman casts himself as steward of a wounded memory, even as his policies³ have increasingly dovetailed with the strategic needs of Belgrade and the personal needs of men whose greatest service to Serbia was to present themselves as Kosovo’s salvation⁴.

Across the border, the choreography looks less like solidarity than like strategy. In recent months, Fatmir Sheholli, a ubiquitous talking head in Prishtina, arrested this October on suspicion of espionage⁵ and ordered into one month’s pre-trial detention under Article 124 of Kosovo’s Criminal Code, spent the late summer and early autumn seeding social media with posters and calls to muster in Tirana and The Hague. In his feed are dates, times, mottos; the UÇK emblem stamped like a seal on proclamations for »DREJTËSI PËR ÇLIRIMTARËT«⁶. The movement’s public face is veterans and sympathisers. One of its most committed amplifiers, by his own timeline, is Sheholli. That Rama’s own posts were promptly shared and celebrated in the same networks does not, on its own, prove coordination. It does, however, place the prime minister’s megaphone inside an echo chamber whose organisers have pressed, relentlessly, to delegitimise the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and secure the release of Hashim Thaçi.