Hashim
Thaci ("Snake"), Sulejman Selimi ("Sultan") and other leaders of the
KLA were then 20 years of age. Years of Swiss education
notwithstanding, they witnessed first hand Kosovo's tumultuous
transformation into the engine of disintegration of the Yugoslav
Federation. It was a valuable lesson in the dialectic of history,
later to be applied brilliantly.
The leader of the LDK, the forever silk scarfed and mellifluous Dr.
Ibrahim Rugova, compared himself openly and blushlessly to Vaclav
Havel and the Kosovar struggle to the Velvet Revolution. This turgid
and risible analogy deteriorated further as the Kosovar Velvet was
stained by the blood of innocents. Dr. Rugova was an unfazed dreamer
in a land of harsh nightmares. The Sorbonne was never a good
preparatory school to the academy of Balkan reality. Rugova's ideals
were good and noble - Gandhi-like passive resistance, market
economics, constructive (though uncompromising and limited to the
authorities) dialogue with the enemy. They might still prevail. And
during the early 1990s he was all the rage and the darling of the
West. But he failed to translate his convictions into tangible
achievements. His biggest failure might have been his inability to
ally himself with a "Big Power" - as did the Croats, the Slovenes
and the Bosnians.
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