By Dritan Hila
Seen with the perspective that time gives—and with how the world looks today, a fact Clark himself alluded to at the end of his testimony—the American intervention 26 years ago was an event that had never happened before and won’t happen again for a long time.
Twenty-six years ago, a state four times larger than Kosovo (just as Russia today is four times larger than Ukraine) launched an assault to settle scores with a center of irredentism and headaches, cleansing the opposing population and leaving behind a compliant minority.
Back then, Kosovo was in a far worse position than Ukraine is today.
Worse still than Ukraine—which has a functioning state and, before the war, was the 22nd-strongest military power in the world—Kosovo at that time had nothing but the will and courage (perhaps even the madness) of a handful of young people determined either to liberate themselves or “to meet death with a smile.”
Unlike Ukraine, which enjoyed Western support from day one, at the end of the 20th century Serbia still enjoyed the sympathies of the West and of Europe’s left-wing movements.
Kosovo’s liberators had to face heavy prejudice—labeled everything from terrorists to Islamic fundamentalists—a stigma they erased with tremendous toil and blood.
Unlike Ukraine, which received arms and logistics in the earliest days, the fighters of the KLA armed themselves with rusty Kalashnikovs bought at outrageous prices. And unlike Zelensky, who came from comedy, KLA’s young men came from the drama of beatings, the persecution of their national identity, imprisonments, and humiliation.
By a fortunate alignment of stars, the Americans dragged the entire European continent into defending a miserable, poor, friendless people forgotten in a corner of history.
In a world reveling in its victory over the Eastern Bloc—so numbed that massacres like those in Somalia, Rwanda, or the former Yugoslavia no longer shocked anyone—taking the world’s largest military alliance to war for a forgotten corner of Europe, for a place with no economic or strategic interest, was the merit of a few minds in the United States who rose above the cold rules of realpolitik.
This is what Clark did not say. Clark, the former NATO commander, who even to get planes in the air had to convince allies—each with their own procedures, all of them reluctant at heart to bomb a country they secretly sympathized with.
Without American willpower, the KLA would have remained a guerrilla movement capable of destabilizing the Balkans, but Kosovo would have been left a scorched land, and Albania perched on the edge of crisis.
Like a true cavalier, like a brother-in-arms, the 80-year-old Clark—the most powerful military man of the 1990s—presented the KLA before the court as a noble creation of freedom and justice, as an equal partner of the mightiest force in history. After all, cavaliers do not judge by numerical strength, but by the measure of values. And through this lens, the KLA was a worthy ally of NATO.
Twenty-six years later, fortunately, the KLA has not disappointed its allies. Its leaders have remained an example of freedom fighters, inspiring figures like Rubin and Clark to come forward and testify that freedom has a name—a name unstained.