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Thaçi is not Mladić

2026-09-21 17:43:51Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA MICHAEL MARTENS

Thaçi is not Mladić

Michael Martens thought he had it all figured out with the decision against Thaçi. But FAZ asked him for another comment, and what he wrote is perhaps the clearest argument published so far in the German press against the thesis that “everyone is the same in the Balkans.”

FAZ recently reported on an experiment by the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, the results of which were kept secret for decades. In 1950, researchers at the institute asked around 1,600 ordinary West Germans about their attitudes towards National Socialism and the extermination of the Jews. They let the interviewees speak freely.

And precisely by speaking freely, many of the Germans who were supposedly "denazified" displayed such a disturbing persistence of racist, anti-Semitic, and authoritarian views that the institute's director, Theodor Adorno, decided not to publish the study's full results.

Was five years too short to eradicate Nazi propaganda from people's minds?

At this point, it is worth recalling the 1995 exhibition, “Crimes of the Wehrmacht.” The protests against it – although the exhibition initially had some shortcomings – were fierce. Even half a century after the end of the war, many Germans were still unwilling to question the myth of the “pure Wehrmacht,” according to which the regular German army had not been involved in Nazi crimes.

In the Balkans, two recent events have provided further examples of how difficult it is for societies to question narratives about their past, especially when it comes to its dark sides.

Thousands of people attended the funeral of war criminal Ratko Mladić in Belgrade and honored as a hero the man who was primarily responsible for the Srebrenica genocide.

A little over a week later, a large majority of Kosovo Albanians reacted angrily to the sentencing of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi to 25 years in prison for war crimes.

The anger in Kosovo is partly understandable.

If the verdict is upheld on appeal, Thaçi will be held responsible for more than 300 cases of torture and almost 100 murders. These are horrific and despicable acts.

But the conclusion, however, cannot be: “In the Balkans, everyone is the same.”

Because there are important differences between Mladić and Thaçi, even though Serbian nationalists prefer to dismiss this argument as relativization.

Mladić is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people.

In Thaçi's case, if the sentence against him becomes final, the number of victims would be approximately only one hundredth of this figure.

But it's not the same thing.

The “Kosovo Liberation Army,” the KLA, which Thaçi led, never committed anything that could even remotely compare to Srebrenica.

In Kosovo, on the contrary, there were a large number of “small Srebrenicas”, committed by Serbs against Albanians. One example is the villages of Mejë and Korenica, where Serbian forces massacred hundreds of Catholic Albanians.

Then there is the chronology of events.

Mladić committed his crimes during a war that was launched by Belgrade and the Serbs.

Thaçi's KLA, on the other hand, was born as a reaction to years of systematic and organized injustice by the Serbian state against the majority Albanian population in Kosovo.

However, now Kosovar society must also face its responsibility.

The crimes of the KLA have occurred.

Denying them by showing that the crimes committed by the Serbian side were much greater cannot be the way out.

At least Thaçi, accused and now convicted of war crimes, has called on his compatriots from prison to remain calm and not react with violence. ( Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)


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