The Thaçi Trial and the Editorial Manipulations Led by Berat Buzhala’s Nacionale

Kosovo’s media twist truth into comforting fiction, shielding those who forged our present crises while masquerading propaganda as journalism and betraying the public’s right to honest scrutiny

I was sitting at my desk in central London when the first headlines from Pristina drifted across my screen, dressed in the usual fanfare. Nacionale announced that Christopher Hill and Wesley Clark would testify in defence of Hashim Thaçi at The Hague, and it did so with the solemnity of a state ceremony. Hill, we were told, had been a special American envoy in Kosovo, a key figure in Rambouillet, a diplomat seasoned across continents. Clark’s name was polished with similar care, presented as the NATO commander who had led the seventy-eight-day air campaign against Milosevic’s forces. Both men were described as if history itself had vouched for the defendant.

Radio Dukagjini joined in with matching reverence, Hill at the UÇK headquarters in Likoc, Hill in Junik with Holbrooke, Hill the mediator, Hill the friend. The testimony was delayed by Hill’s other commitments, they said. The hearing would begin at 14:00. Every sentence seemed built to remind readers that these were not witnesses but monuments.

It would all seem unremarkable if it weren’t part of a larger pattern, an editorial choreography designed to narrow the frame of memory until only one storyline remains visible.

What these outlets never say is that Christopher Hill is not simply the diplomat who walked the roads of Drenica in the 1990s. He is also the ambassador who, in 2023, offered something close to an apology for NATO’s air campaign in Belgrade¹. It was framed as empathy, but it blurred the moral clarity of that intervention. It asked for understanding without naming the massacres and expulsions that had made it necessary. When I wrote about it at the time², I called it what it was, the softening of truth into something politically convenient.

Nor do these outlets remind their readers that in 2024, Hill publicly praised Serbia’s approach to Ukraine and its supposedly constructive engagement with Kosovo. He said this at a moment when Serbia had already signed a foreign policy alignment pact with Moscow³, months after Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine. It was the same Serbia hosting a Russian intelligence hub in Nis, enabling Wagner-linked recruitment, supplying weapons to Russia, persecuting Russian dissidents, and conducting Crimea-style destabilisation in northern Kosovo. None of these realities disrupted the flattering varnish of Hill’s commentary.

And in 2025, when the Pupin Initiative, a lobbying arm designed to promote Serbian interests in Washington, announced Hill as a senior adviser⁴, Nacionale and Radio Dukagjini did not breathe a word of it. They did not explain that this was a man now serving an agenda dedicated to rebranding an increasingly authoritarian, Moscow-aligned Serbia as a misunderstood partner. They did not tell readers that Hill’s trajectory had become the diplomatic equivalent of a slow surrender.

Instead, they froze him in 1999 and served him back to the public like an icon from a lost shrine.

This selective memory is not journalism. It is editorial engineering.

I noticed the same pattern in a glowing commentary on Hill’s testimony⁵, which praised two supposedly unforgettable moments. The first was when Hill became irritated at a description of the UÇK as one of the world’s strongest armies. The commentator recalled that the Black Tigers, the unit mentioned had operated in her village, that many of its members were local boys, some of them her relatives, some of them dead. She resented the idea of them being portrayed as pristine, well-equipped super-soldiers. Hill, too, she said, rejected the exaggeration and told the court to stop talking nonsense. His annoyance, in her telling, became a patriotic moment.

The second moment she celebrated was Hill’s assertion that Albanians had created the Republic of Kosovo through unity, both in Rambouillet and on the battlefield, defying Milosevic’s belief that they would never stand together. She cited accounts from Madeleine Albright and Marc Weller to reinforce the idea that unity had been unwavering, that even Ibrahim Rugova had insisted the UÇK must lead the delegation in Paris.

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What the Record Actually Shows About “Unity” at Rambouillet?

Diplomatic sources portray the Kosovo Albanian delegation at Rambouillet as ultimately unified, but not uniformly so throughout the process. Ambassador Christopher Hill has described three distinct factions, the LDK, the KLA, and a group of independents, whose positions were often divergent. His testimony highlights their eventual alignment behind a common signature, not an uninterrupted consensus from the outset.

Madeleine Albright’s accounts confirm this complexity.
She describes intensive pressure on all sides, weeks of hesitation, and difficult negotiations before the delegation agreed to the final text. Unity, in her telling, was something achieved through diplomacy and coercion, not a pre-existing state.

Legal adviser Marc Weller’s contemporaneous analyses reinforce this picture.
He details internal disagreements within the delegation, last-minute revisions, and competing visions of Kosovo’s political future. His work supports the conclusion that unity emerged at the end of a contested process.

Regarding leadership, Ibrahim Rugova’s role requires precision.
The historical record indicates that he accepted Hashim Thaçi’s leadership of the negotiating team in Paris under significant political and international pressure. There is no strong documentary basis for the claim that Rugova insisted the KLA should lead, rather, his acceptance reflected shifting power dynamics more than active advocacy.

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The commentary of Dafina Demaku ended by praising Hill and James Rubin for “defending the UÇK and former president Thaçi” at The Hague, as if the courtroom were a theatre of patriotic duty rather than a forum for legal scrutiny.

What was omitted, once again, was everything that would complicate the myth. Hill’s revisionist diplomacy. His indulgence of Serbian authoritarianism. His silence on Russian infiltration in Serbia. His new career polishing Belgrade’s image in Washington. None of this appeared in her adoration. Hill was treated as if he had stepped out of a time capsule, unaltered, unimpeachable.

This willingness to edit reality into a comforting script has begun to look eerily familiar. The structure resembles the information machinery perfected in Moscow, truth bent into shape, memory rewritten, inconvenient facts whisked out of view. In Russian propaganda, former critics of the regime are repackaged as lifelong loyalists. In parts of Kosovo’s media, former allies who have shifted into positions hostile to Kosovo’s interests are recast as eternal friends. Present contradictions are erased.

A similar distortion appears in the coverage of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers’ recent decision to accept documentary evidence originating from Serbian state institutions. Acting Justice Minister Albulena Haxhiu called the decision deeply unacceptable⁶, saying that these institutions were structures responsible for systematic violence, war crimes, forced disappearances, ethnic cleansing, and brutal repression. Her reaction, rooted in the lived memory of mass graves and emptied villages, was understandable. But what many outlets failed to report with any precision was the legal context.

Kosovo’s own parliament passed the law that created the Specialist Chambers in 2015. The law explicitly permits the court to request and receive cooperation from any state, including Serbia, so long as evidence meets the required standards of authenticity and relevance. Accepting material is not the same as trusting it. As the court’s spokesperson explained, the origin of evidence does not determine its use. It may never appear in a judgment. The public was not told this. Outrage was easier to sell than accuracy.

In the same news cycle, the Organisation of UÇK Veterans announced protests in support of former fighters on trial. Their rhetoric invoked justice and dignity. But little of the coverage mentioned that this very organisation had sent a letter to Richard Grenell, a disinformation peddler known for undermining Kosovo’s institutions, asking him to intervene to shut down the Special Court. I called that letter the Letter of Shame⁷, because it represented a betrayal of the very values the veterans claim to protect.

None of this made it into the mainstream narratives. The story remained one of righteous indignation.

The irony, of course, is that the Special Court exists because Kosovo itself created it, under pressure, yes, but through the votes of its own lawmakers, many of whom would later claim innocence. In 2015, when the law establishing the court struggled through parliament, Hashim Thaçi warned that those who opposed it would bear responsibility before history. His party pushed hard for its creation. Later, some of those same politicians mastered the art of pretending it had been imposed from above, erased their own fingerprints, and let the outrage machine take over.

This is the betrayal at the heart of the current media landscape, the refusal to tell the full story.

Instead, we watch as certain outlets twist their coverage to shield the very figures who authored the current political landscape. We watch as they present men who are actively enabling hostile agendas as if they were still allies of Kosovo. We watch as they erase entire chapters of history to maintain a narrative that no longer fits the facts.

For international readers, this creates a fog of confusion. For Kosovans, it erodes the ability to understand the present.

Every democracy relies on a press that is willing to keep faith with the public. To do that, a newsroom must be willing to hold the powerful to account even when those powerful figures once wore uniforms or carried the hopes of a nation. Nostalgia cannot be a substitute for scrutiny.

What we have now, in too many corners of the Kosovan media, is not journalism but choreography, selective storytelling, strategic silence, a soft-focus myth-making that treats the public not as citizens who deserve truth but as an audience to be soothed.

This, ultimately, is what makes it so dangerous. A society that forgets how to question its heroes loses the ability to defend itself from its enemies. And when truth becomes negotiable, justice becomes impossible.

We deserve better. We deserve editors who do not trade integrity for influence, and reporters who do not repackage propaganda as sentiment. We deserve a narrative that reflects the full weight of our history, not a version trimmed to protect those who fear accountability.

Because the greatest threat to Kosovo is not the darkness we remember. It is the blindness we permit.

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1. Hil za Glas Amerike: SAD su zadovoljne odnosom Srbije prema Ukrajini i dijalogu sa Kosovom — Voice of America.

2. Christopher Hill: The Enabler of Serbia’s Duplicity

Christopher Hill’s praise for Serbia ignores its destabilising actions in the Balkans, reflecting dangerous appeasement that emboldens authoritarianism and undermines regional stability. — The GPC World Watch.

3. EU candidate Serbia and Russia sign foreign policy agreement — AP.

4. Ambassador Christopher R. Hill and Dr. Kaush Arha join as Senior Advisors in an effort to expand the Pupin Initiative’s presence in Washington, DC — Pupin Initiative.

5. Dy momentet më interesante nga dëshmia e Chris Hill në Speciale — D Demaku, Nacionale.

6. Albulena Haxhiu’s — Facebook Post.

7. Veterans for Sale: The OVL-UÇK Scandal

The OVL-UÇK disgraced Kosovo’s wartime legacy by appealing to Richard Grenell, an apologist for Serbian war crimes, pleading for intervention against international justice. — The GPC Politics.