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 ran…