Kurti: Honoring Ratko Mladić shows Serbia has yet to confront its past

Kosovo’s acting Prime Minister, Albin Kurti, said that the glorification in Serbia of former Republika Srpska Army commander Ratko Mladić demonstrates a lack of sincere reckoning with the legacy of the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Kurti made the remarks during a scholarly roundtable titled “The SANU Memorandum: The role of Serbian academic discourse in fueling conflicts and violence in the former Yugoslavia,” organized by the Institute for Crimes Committed During the War in Kosovo and the “Ali Hadri” Institute of History.

Referring to the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, he stressed that even four decades after its publication, the document remains important to analyze, particularly because of its influence on Serbia’s political and social discourse.

According to Kurti, in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, claims that Serbs in Kosovo were under threat were turned into an instrument of political mobilization. This, he said, was followed by the revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy, the exclusion of Albanians from institutions, discrimination and state repression.

He noted that historical developments in the former Yugoslavia show that narratives formulated and supported by political and academic circles can create the conditions for the normalization of discrimination and the acceptance of violence as a political mechanism.

Kurti also devoted part of his speech to Ratko Mladić, who was convicted of genocide and war crimes. He criticized the fact that Mladić was received with honors in Serbia after his death.

“When a society publicly honors someone convicted of genocide, it is difficult to speak of confronting the past, showing remorse or distancing itself from the policies that produced those crimes,” Kurti said.

The acting prime minister emphasized that democratic societies must have independent academic institutions, accessible archives and fact-based scholarly discussion so that the past is documented and not distorted.

He also described the documentation of war crimes in Kosovo and the preservation of evidence for future generations as essential.

Kurti concluded his speech by saying that Kosovo has a responsibility to document accurately, analyze seriously and defend historical truth through facts.