By: Enver Robelli
On the occasion of the death of Dr. Bujar Bukoshi, Prime Minister of Kosovo
1.
Nonchalance doesn’t mean carelessness. It leans more toward a kind of amiable ease. Dr. Bujar Bukoshi was, in his entirely original way, a champion of nonchalance.
“Come by, I brought some grapes from the vineyard in Suhareka,” he told me one summer day in 2017. He held his back with his hand, said he felt a slight ache, but his face betrayed no sign of discomfort. Even when he was handed a grave diagnosis, he held onto that dry, often dark humor of his.
He said: “Why did this illness have to pick me, when there are, say, 1.2 billion Chinese people out there?”
With unmatched willpower, supported by family and many friends, he confronted the illness just as much as he mocked it.
This morning, in the early hours, Bujar Bukoshi—the first Prime Minister of the Republic of Kosovo—closed his eyes for the last time.
2.
I write this piece for Bujar not primarily as a politician, but as a friend and companion in conversation.
In the dramatic phases Kosovo endured during his political engagement, great shifts, great hopes, great desires, great dreams were just as frequent as the disappointments and failures—often, without his fault. But in the end, the outcome is what matters: on June 10, 1999, Bujar Bukoshi was preparing to return to a liberated Kosovo after nearly a decade in exile.
A day earlier, Serbian forces had signed their capitulation in Kumanovo. On June 10, 1999, NATO’s airstrikes ended. That, in essence, is the date of Kosovo’s liberation.
There’s something symbolically and perhaps divinely poetic that his passing coincides with the 26th anniversary of that very day.
3.
His punctuality was German.
“I’ll be at Collection restaurant in seven minutes.”
He would arrive in an old jeep—a relic from the Battle of Koshare. No bodyguards, no posturing, none of the grotesque theatrics common to Balkan politicians.
He would order a coffee, exchange a few words with the waiter, open his cigarette box, and begin a journey through Kosovo’s modern history.
That journey would start in the Suhareka post office, through Prizren of the 1960s, the dark era of Aleksandar Ranković’s repression, through Belgrade in 1968 rocked by student protests, and into the divided Berlin of the 1980s—where Bujar earned his doctorate in urology and returned to serve in Kosovo’s main hospital in Prishtina, just as he had served earlier in Drenas during the 1970s.
Dr. Bujar Bukoshi was among those Kosovar Albanians who never saw themselves as inferior to others in socialist Yugoslavia. He could speak about medicine and literature as an equal with anyone from Ljubljana to Skopje. He was a representative of an Albanian society striving to catch the train of emancipation—a society that, just after World War II, remained in darkness, with around 50% of men and over 70% of women illiterate.
While he was studying in Belgrade, his brother fled to Albania. Though Yugoslavia was a repressive, autocratic state with elements of dictatorship, Bujar was never subjected to the kind of collective punishment practiced in Albania, for instance. He continued his studies, graduated, later went to Germany, learned the language, and specialized in a critical field of medicine.
In 1980s Prishtina, he caught the regime’s eye as politically unsuitable. He was punished—for example, denied an apartment—while technical workers loyal to the regime were rewarded.
4.
“I called myself a prime minister in exile, but in truth, I was, like many colleagues, just another knocker on the grand and barely-penetrable doors of Western diplomacy,” he once told me on a sunny day as we swam toward an island in Ksamil, back when Ksamil was still a village with two sun loungers and a half-functioning restaurant.
He was the prime minister of a state more virtual than real—but not one to be dismissed.
The peculiarity of Kosovo’s political class in the 1990s was as absurd as it was fortunate: compared to other Balkan leaders with hardened features, Dr. Bujar Bukoshi could easily be mistaken for a German physician you’d entrust with your health problems. And Dr. Ibrahim Rugova resembled a literary critic who wouldn’t scrape a chair across the floor but would lift it gently and set it down so as not to disturb the guests.
“They surprised us with their human normalcy,” a German general once told me years later during a conference by Lake Ohrid, one of those typical Western foundation gatherings.
5.
When, in the mid-1990s, Viktor Meier—the renowned correspondent of Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—retired, Bujar Bukoshi immediately appointed him as an advisor.
In a photo from that era, one can see Dr. Rugova, Dr. Bukoshi, and Dr. Meier walking into the U.S. State Department in Washington.
Bujar’s relationships with German journalists were both close and, over time, genuinely friendly. They saw him as “the German of Prishtina”—not only because he spoke the language, but also for his rebellious spirit.
After Kosovo’s independence, Bujar Bukoshi served as Deputy Prime Minister. One day he called me to say he was coming to Zurich and that we would go visit Viktor Meier at his home to personally deliver a medal awarded by Kosovo’s then-President Atifete Jahjaga to the German journalist (who, by birth, was actually Swiss, which is why he lived near Zurich).
Bujar came to Zurich without fanfare. He hadn’t requested a car or a ceremonial fuss from Kosovo’s embassy or consulate.
We took a taxi, and I remember the driver almost refused to take payment after Bujar talked at length about the African country the driver came from—and the dictator who ruled there during the 60s or 70s.
“Have you been there?” asked the taxi driver.
“No, no,” Bujar replied, “I’ve just read about it.”
Viktor Meier and his wife received us warmly, reminiscing about a past that at times—back then—felt like it would never end. It was a moment of quiet pride for two men who, each in their own way, had helped Kosovo become independent: Meier with his sharp journalism about Yugoslav affairs, and Bukoshi with his contributions during one of Kosovo’s most difficult chapters.
In the fall of 2014, we returned to Meier’s village near Zurich—this time to attend his memorial mass. He had passed away on November 22, 2014.
“See you at the vineyard in Suhareka,” Bujar told me before boarding his train to the Zurich airport.
He stepped into the train carriage like an entirely ordinary man.
It wasn’t our last meeting, but that day—after the mass and the lunch in Meier’s memory—Dr. Bujar Bukoshi seemed to be returning home with a quiet sense of pride, knowing he had not only witnessed but shaped a significant chapter of Kosovo’s history.