By Enver Robelli
On the occasion of the death of Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. He was a great supporter of Kosovo’s freedom. By coincidence, the date of his death—April 13, 2025—became a symbolic bridge to one of his most powerful essays on Kosovo, published on April 13, 1999, in an Argentine newspaper.
Literature, wrote Mario Vargas Llosa, is born out of dissatisfaction with one’s own life. Is that really true? Llosa—the most famous Peruvian in the world, at least in literary terms—had few personal reasons to be dissatisfied. He found in literature a mechanism to confront life’s discomforts. He said this himself.
Sensitivity and imagination—these are the prerequisites for being a writer. Sometimes imagination leads you down the wrong path. In his youth, Llosa was an admirer of the Left as personified by Fidel Castro. A trip to the Soviet Union so deeply traumatized him that he began to shed his leftist illusions. “Could I still defend a social model,” he asked, “when I now knew that I could never live like that myself?”
Gabriel García Márquez, the other great star of Latin American literature, remained loyal to Marxism. He paid dearly for that, as shown in a photo where bruises are visible on his face—marks left by a punch from Mario Vargas Llosa. Instigators wondered: was this scuffle political—or about a woman? “I’ll never speak about that,” Llosa told Süddeutsche Zeitung in a 2016 interview.
He was well aware that a person’s biography holds both light and shadow. “If I am ever remembered,” he once said, “I hope it will be because of my books.” For those books, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, became a member of the French Academy—the first non-French-speaking author to be inducted—and was showered with awards, honors, and literary decorations across the globe, especially in the Spanish-speaking world. “To write novels,” he said, “is to rebel against reality, against God, against God’s creation—which is reality itself.”
Mario Vargas Llosa stood firmly against Latin American autocrats. And he spared no words. He labeled Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government “an utter disaster.” One wonders what he would have called her ultraliberal successor, Javier Milei. For the left-wing populism of Venezuela, he had no doubt: there he saw only “demagoguery, corruption, and violence.” Perhaps he would have said something about Milei too, had he not announced in 2024 that he would no longer write columns for El País. At that time, he also revealed that he would no longer write novels.
Around 20 novels make up his legacy to readers. His enduring message is this: “A society of readers is a freer and more critical society. The effect of literature is to turn people into critical beings. A nation that doesn’t read is far easier to manipulate. Good readers are rebels—in the political, religious, and even sexual sense. Literature is not merely entertainment. Yes, reading Shakespeare is enjoyable; Cervantes, Goethe, Thomas Mann—sublime. But beyond the pleasure, we gain something greater: the idea that alongside our own life, there are other lives—richer, more intense. This ignites within us a kind of rebellion against reality.”
Mario Vargas Llosa was a political author. He once wrote, “When you systematically deceive everyone, you betray yourself and contribute to your own moral degradation. In an environment soaked in corruption, you must be a hero to stand against the prevailing current. Most people are not born heroes—but if even one person assumes that role, others at least learn that it is possible.”
He attempted to be a political hero—running for president in 1990—but lost to Alberto Fujimori, a descendant of Japanese immigrants, who governed with an iron fist throughout the 1990s. From 2009 to 2023, Fujimori was imprisoned for, among other things, corruption and crimes against humanity. What would Peru have looked like with a great writer in the presidential palace? That remains a matter of imagination. Few writers feel truly comfortable in the world of active politics.
Mario Vargas Llosa’s major novels have also been translated into Albanian. Perhaps he hasn’t been read as widely as he deserves, but his name became well-known in Kosovo’s Albanian society thanks to his essays in support of Kosovo’s freedom, his endorsement of NATO’s intervention, and his staunch opposition to Slobodan Milošević’s dictatorship.
In his essay “The Head of Milošević,” published on April 13, 1999—exactly 26 years ago—in the Argentine daily La Nación, Llosa demonstrated prescient insight into the dangers Kosovo (and Bosnia) could face from propaganda. He emphasized:
“I am certain that had the community which suffered the torments and plundering experienced by the Bosniaks—or now endured by the Kosovars—been Christian, the reaction of public opinion and Western governments would have been much swifter. In the West, there would never have been segments of public opinion insisting that their governments sit idle in the face of these crimes.”
He continued with difficult, uncomfortable questions:
“This is something rarely spoken aloud—only whispered among trusted circles: Are we perhaps creating a Molloch among us, a fundamentalist Islamic regime allied with Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and the ayatollahs in the heart of Europe? Could it be that, in some twisted way, Milošević and the Serbs are now fighting—just as Prince Lazar and his Serbs did on June 28, 1389—right here in Kosovo, against the barbaric and fanatical crescent moon, the eternal enemy of Christian and civilized Europe?”
These questions are now being answered—affirmatively—by far-right parties in several Western countries. The world of 2025 feels worlds apart from that of 1999. The West of then is not the West of today. And yet, Kosovo’s political class stubbornly refuses to recognize these vast geopolitical shifts. Kosovo’s society continues to behave as though the West still owes it a debt—a mindset visible even in the neglect of those who stood beside Kosovo in its darkest hours. One of them was Mario Vargas Llosa.
Yes, his essays on Kosovo have been published in Albanian—but only thanks to private initiatives. The state, the governments, the ministries of culture and foreign affairs, the academy, the universities—all remained indifferent.
A memorable evening with Mario Vargas Llosa in Pristina—this could have been a newspaper or online headline.
A lecture by Mario Vargas Llosa in Prizren—another beautiful title.
But these are now figments of imagination. Llosa will never come to Pristina, because Kosovars are free—but not liberated. (Liberated from the chains they continue to place upon themselves.)
What remains are the immortal messages of the famous Peruvian:
NATO should not be criticized for its intervention in Yugoslavia; rather, it should be criticized for intervening ten years too late, and for ruling out any ground intervention—which gave Belgrade’s dictatorship the green light to implement its ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, one of the most horrific crimes against humanity in this century, comparable in nature—though not in scale—with the Jewish Holocaust carried out by Hitler or the forced displacements under Stalin during the Russification of the Soviet Union.
