The Republic of No Paper Trail
Kosovo’s postwar republic became a franchise, secrecy for currency, calendars as alibis, prosecutors as shields. Names with motorcades prospered, the law performed never enforced.
For two decades after its 1999 war, Kosovo was ruled not by civilians but by its former commanders, a generation of wartime leaders who traded uniforms for suits and turned liberation into dominion. Under their tenure, politics fused with patronage, ministries became private banks, the press was terrorised into silence. Journalists were shot, police investigators vanished, and corruption metastasised into governance itself. The state that emerged was less a republic than a franchise, a fragile democracy managed by men who had learned in war that power is kept not by law, but by loyalty.
Those years, the long post-war era of Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, and their political satellites left a deep scar. The European Union financed the state-building, the United States called it stability. What grew instead was a political caste that looted public funds, sabotaged investigations, and treated accountability as an existential threat. The judiciary became a garrison of impunity, its senior ranks hand-picked by the same war-era networks now on trial in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Then came 2020, and with it, rupture. A young reformist movement led by Albin Kurti won Kosovo’s first true popular mandate only to be toppled weeks later in what Kurti called a coup orchestrated from abroad1. The catalyst was Richard Grenell, then the Trump administration’s special envoy for the Balkans, whose heavy-handed diplomacy in Prishtina was later condemned even in Berlin for flirting with Europe’s far-right. His intervention fractured Kosovo’s government, restored the old order for a year, and reminded the public that foreign power could still do what domestic elites always had, overturn democracy when it threatened their interests.
Kurti’s return in 2021, by landslide, was a collective exorcism, but not a clean one. He inherited institutions still riddled with the ghosts of that twenty-year tenancy, a police service infiltrated by loyalists of the old guard, an intelligence agency accustomed to operating without oversight, and a prosecutorial hierarchy still shaped by Thaçi’s appointees, while Thaçi himself sits, quite literally, in The Hague.
It is inside that inherited architecture that the latest scandal unfolds.
The calendar as an alibi
Power is never more dangerous than when it hides behind procedure. Kosovo’s institutions have mastered that art. This week’s reporting by KALLXO.COM2 on the AKI’s “special operations” fund is not just an accounting scandal, it is a case study in how a postwar state converts secrecy into impunity and then calls it governance. According to AKI’s own dossier, delivered to the Special Prosecution, three successive intelligence chiefs Driton Gashi, Shpend Maxhuni, and Kreshnik Gashi, spent roughly two million euros from a covert fund between 2017 and 2020, with hundreds of thousands untraced. On his last day in office, April 10, 2018, Driton Gashi allegedly withdrew €350,000 cash; investigators say there is no record of where it went. The Special Prosecution has now closed the case for two of the former directors by invoking the statute of limitations; for the third, it says there is no criminal evidence. The destination of large sums remains undocumented. This is not oversight. It is a system that has learned to erase its own footprints.
The outlines are depressingly familiar. Cash moves in envelopes; internal procedures are ignored; when the inspectors arrive, the clock is allowed to run out. The probe describes €500,000 routed, in nine tranches to political operative Fatmir Sheholli, who confirms cooperation with AKI but refuses to say for what. Another €300,000 is alleged to have been handed by then AKI chief Shpend Maxhuni to then Foreign Minister Behgjet Pacolli, who denies knowledge of any such transfer3. The Prosecution’s answer to all of this is not to resolve the contradictions but to declare time’s up. Legality becomes a calendar, not a standard.
The reflex will be to treat this as a discrete abuse within the intelligence service. It isn’t. To be explicit, I am not suggesting that these AKI funds were linked to Milan Radoicic. I cite him for one reason only, the pattern4. The same architecture of consequence-free decision-making that let a confessed organiser of the 2023 Banjska attack to operate, posture, and retreat into Serbia’s protection also enables budgetary opacity at home. He confessed. He is still at liberty. He was briefly detained in Belgrade and released. Kosovo has indicted dozens over the attack, Serbia has declined to hand them over. The chief facts are uncontested, the impunity is the point.
The connective tissue is institutional, secrecy wielded to prevent scrutiny, “independence” invoked to avoid accountability, and statutes interpreted to protect officeholders rather than the public. When Special Prosecutor Blerim Isufaj sat for a July interview5, he alternated between disclaiming authority and citing “higher instances.” He acknowledged being informed while insisting on autonomy he now uses as a shield. It is the bureaucratic dialect of captured systems, everyone is responsible in theory so that no one is culpable in practice.
The AKI file only sharpens the indictment. If a national intelligence service cannot document where hundreds of thousands in “special operations” cash went and the Prosecution answers with a shrug of prescription, then the republic has abandoned the basic grammar of rule of law. In that vacuum, politics and security are mediated by informal brokers, loyalists, and fixers whose names recur across crises. The result is not drift but direction, a state that cannot or will not police its own elites while its northern frontier is tested by forces it publicly names and privately accommodates.
There are predictable rebuttals. That covert funds are, by definition, opaque. That sensitive operations cannot be itemised on public ledgers. True and irrelevant. Democracies manage secrets with audited chains of custody, closed-door committees, and prosecutorial vigour, what they do not do is permit sacks of cash to vanish the day a director hands in his badge. “We can’t say” is not a doctrine. It is a confession.
Kosovo’s crisis is therefore not merely corruption but architecture, oversight bodies too weak to compel, prosecutors too political to prosecute, ministers too accustomed to intelligence as a discretionary piggy bank, and a judiciary that treats deadlines as absolution. The pattern runs from the Ivanovic investigation through Banjska to this week’s ledger-less millions, when accountability threatens to reach a name with a motorcade, the process reliably goes soft. The public reads the message clearly, the law is a performance for the governed, the exemptions are for the governors.
What would seriousness look like?
Start with first principles. Publish up to the limits of classification, the oversight architecture for AKI funds, where detail must be withheld, publish the controls. Mandate independent forensic audits of all “special” disbursements since 2017, with the Prosecution required to explain, on the record, every declination and every invocation of prescription. Reopen cases where the only barrier is time and the delay is institutional fault, let courts, not convenient calendars, decide whether the public interest justifies exceptional remedies. Anything short of this is theater.
A state that cannot account for its secrets cannot defend them. Kosovo’s promise lives or dies in very pedestrian acts of record-keeping, chain-of-custody signatures, and filings made before the clock runs out. If the AKI case ends where so many have ended, in the cul-de-sac of selective amnesia, it will not be because the truth is unknowable. It will be because too many actors find the current equilibrium profitable. That is not fate, it is a choice.
Choose differently. Names, receipts, timelines, consequences. Not later. Now.
Kosovo’s Chief Prosecutor, Serbia’s Best Ally?
LONDON — On 27 July 2025, Kosovo’s Special Prosecutor Blerim Isufaj appeared on Kallxo.com to address his handling of one of the most politically volatile and nationally consequential legal cases in Kosovo’s post-war history: the Banjska attack. What unfolded over the course of that interview was not merely an exchange of legal reasoning, but a forensic study in evasion, deflection, and the art of institutional ambiguity that has come to define Kosovo's prosecutorial dysfunction at the highest levels.
Kosovo in Crisis: Is Grenell Engineering Another Political Coup?
From diplomacy to disinformation, Grenell resurfaces, fuelling chaos in Kosovo’s elections with the same tactics that toppled Kurti’s government in 2020. — The GPC I Unit.
Dyshimet për fondin special të AKI-së, 2 milionë euro pa evidencë- hetimi mbyllet me parashkrim — Kallxo.com
Kallxo.com Video Reporting — Kallxo.com
Kosovo’s Chief Prosecutor, Serbia’s Best Ally?
Radoicic confessed to terrorism. Isufaj enabled his escape. Then blamed “independent prosecutors” and “higher instances.” Justice didn’t stall, it was sabotaged. — The GPC Politics.
Intervistë: Blerim Isufaj - 27.07.2025 — Kallxo.com