Ibrahim Rugova
Ibrahim Rugova ran a country for ten years without an army, a police force or a recognised existence, and lost the argument for it in 1999. He was a literary scholar who had studied in Paris, and he became the leader of the Kosovar Albanians in 1989 when Milosevic revoked the province's autonomy. What he built in response was a parallel state: Albanians withdrew from Serbian institutions and ran their own schools in private houses, their own clinics, their own taxes collected from the diaspora, and their own elections, which made him president of a Republic of Kosova that only Albania recognised. The strategy was non-violence, held to for a decade on the argument that Kosovo could not win a war and that patience would bring international support. He wore a silk scarf permanently and handed out lumps of quartz to visitors, an eccentricity that made him memorable to journalists. It failed at Dayton in 1995. The war in Bosnia was settled there and Kosovo was not on the agenda at all, because the province that had stayed quiet gave the negotiators nothing to solve. The lesson drawn by younger Kosovars was that violence was the only thing the outside world responded to. That reading is generally taken as the moment the Kosovo Liberation Army became plausible to people who had followed Rugova, and the insurgency began within two years. He was sidelined during the war of 1999, filmed meeting Milosevic in Belgrade under circumstances that were probably coercion and were used against him afterwards, and returned to win the elections of 2002. He died of lung cancer in 2006, two years before the independence he had spent his life arguing for was declared.
- Lived: 1944 CE – 2006 CE
- Nationality: Kosovar
- Roles: politician
