"I face difficult difficulties"/ Hashim Thaçi talks about his days in The Hague prison

2026-05-04 22:46:00, Aktualitet CNA

"I face difficult difficulties"/ Hashim Thaçi talks about his

The former president of Kosovo gave an interview from The Hague prison for the show Opinion, where he spoke about the court process against him, which has been ongoing for 6 years.

Thaçi has revealed in the interview how he spends his days in isolation, where he has been since 2020. He said that every day of the year in prison seems the same.

Thaçi says that for almost 6 years he has never had the flu, except when he had Covid-19. According to him, this is only due to living in Kosovo in clean air. Meanwhile, he has shown that he continues his routine with coffee in the morning.

The former president further states that even meetings and conversations with family members lack the normal emotional experience or warmth.

Thaçi's response:

Currently, my mouth is closed to speak and my hands are tied to write what my heart wants and my mind says completely. Serbia has been dealing with me for a long time. It sentenced me in absentia to many years in prison. Continuously (1993-97) it raided the house, mistreated and arrested my father, mother, sister and brothers, and in revenge it also executed Luma's brother, Haki, in the massacre in the village of Studime in Vushtrri in May 1999. In June 1999, the war ended. It belonged to the world of surviving Albanians.

Today my only "fault" is why I am alive. I do not belong to the category of people who say that prison is for men, this expression seems annoying to me. My path was neither fate nor coincidence, it is a will that stems from the depths of my world, it is tangible and transparent. From an early age I had placed my entire being in the function of the idea of ??freedom. Loneliness naturally gives me emptiness and offers futility. I try to give life to the environment in the cell. 24 hours a day and 365 days a year are the same. The calendar meaning of life is lost. Days and nights seem to pass without dates. I have reflected on Kosovo, on Albania and the Albanians, on the behavior of the world at the beginning and end of the 20th century in relation to us. We often forget how trampled we have been, while today how high we are in the rise and consolidation process as a nation with Western thinking and status.

Freedom and prison never go together. It is not just the physical wall that separates them, but also the emotion, thinking and the way you see, feel and live the world. Isolation is a cave with a lack of horizons and an elevator. Physically climbing it, I believe, can even blind you. Not in terms of the level of your diopter, but of your confusion or the way you see things. Time and distance take their toll on every person, no matter how resistant they may be. But, thanks to God and self-care, I am still fine. For almost 6 years, I have not had the flu, fever, temperature, or even the slightest cold, excluding COVID-19. I feel blessed to have walked the valleys and slopes, I have stepped on the heights and slopes of our mountains. I am still sustained by the air, spirit and energy of my homeland. This has made me feel life even more deeply and broadly. I still see my birthplace clearly, I experience it in full horizon. For me, it is health, love, faith and pride. But, a healthy life needs content, I lack this now. I do not treat loneliness as hell, a cursed anxiety, or my end. I face not easy difficulties. I visualize the experienced memory of good things, in parallel I develop the imagination for a better future. The diversity of life experience has sustained me, listening and believing with respect, but also being lied to and enduring in silence. Hope in isolation is God, wife and child, mother and father, sister and brother, neighbor and friend. It is life itself. I do not escape from myself, nor do I move or become alienated in the world that others tried to throw at me. Although, even meetings and conversations with family do not have the normal emotional experience or warmth.

Here the smile does not come from the depths of the soul, heart and joy. The food I eat, the coffee I drink or the tea I drink do not have the original taste. Everything seems temporary, artificial, superficial, but in reality there are years, deeply disconnected from free life. I make a comfortable breakfast, but it does not bring me enough of a sense of mental or physical regeneration. When I open my eyes in the morning, I listen to music without lyrics; I replace the eventual dreams of the night with reading a book or newspaper story from the world of film, art, historical and cultural tourism, sports, etc. I treat every morning dawn as a new opportunity. The tree placed in the detention facilities for the end-of-year holidays gives me inner warmth. I continue drinking coffee, which has remained more as a gesture from meetings during work in Pristina than a need for caffeine. Cooking breakfast gives me pleasure and relaxes, I try to prepare things as healthy as possible. It has now become a ritual for me.

These lines are not accounts of bad times, they are experienced and real events. They are not notes from state offices, professorial cabinets, cozy domestic salons, nor the product of the noise or influence of social networks, but sitting quietly on the blackboard with a pencil in a notebook, in a solitary cell facing the window bars. While outside the walls the rain continues, a hazy, dark environment accompanied by a strong wind and now in the last minutes it was replaced by snowfall. It is midnight between January 6/7, snow is a rare thing in The Hague. The fact that I am here does not make me curse anyone nor do I beg anyone. I owe no one in this world. Loneliness has not darkened me or locked me inside my skin. I have escaped, I broke my loneliness in reading and writing. I am not angry with anyone. On the contrary. Belief in justice helps me the most.

But, even though I am spending my sixth year in isolation, I have decided to remain perhaps the last “naive” in my country – to believe in values, humanism and justice. I am uncompromising – I follow my conscience. I believe in the Constitution and laws of Kosovo and the European Convention on Human Rights. My being has always leaned towards peace. I became part of the resistance because I wanted the people of Kosovo to live freely and in peace. In Kosovo, human interdependence was confronted with inhuman cruelty. Humanity and civilization won in the face of the politics of ethnic cleansing and genocide. I have also experienced the “for someone a mother and for someone a stepmother” mentality. There is no physical force or political storm that can shake my faith in the citizens of Kosovo. I know, today any official or former official around the world may have regretted completely unjustly for the independence of Kosovo. But, with or without Thaçi in Kosovo. This worthy process has now come to an end. Thaçi continues to languish in prison, but for the Republic of Kosovo I am convinced there will be progress. Serbia fought hard to prevent freedom and independence, and has failed to achieve this for over three decades. / CNA