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Archive : ISG Pamphlets : War in the Balkans
Adem Demaqi on the War
There have been rumours that Adem Demaqi had fled Kosova to escape death threats from a section of the KLA. He is, in fact, still in Prishtinë and held a press conference on the evening of May 25. The west has behaved like ’a bull in a china shop’ in relation to Kosova, says Adem Demaqi, former political leader of the KLA. ’NATO said in advance that it wouldn’t send ground troops to Kosova then it started bombing. By doing so it allowed the Serb side to continue its operations’ he declared. Considered for a long time as the leader of militant Kosovars and the main rival to the more moderate Ibrahim Rugova, Demaqi assured his audience that he hadn’t left his house in Prishtinë. His wife and her parents left for Skopje at the end of March and he hasn’t heard from them since. Demaqi is the most famous ex-political prisoner in Kosova - he spent twenty eight years of his life in detention. He insists that he is able to walk freely around Prishtinë. ’If someone wants to kill me they will do it. I’m not afraid’ he said. ’When the bombing started I didn’t believe it would last more than a few days. But Serbia has held out for two months. No other country has been able to hold out against such power for so long’ he said. Demaqi broke with the KLA on the eve of the Rambouillet talks in February, believing that the west was at fault in wanting to ’negotiate in the place of Serbs and Albanians’. ’If America wants to be the guarantor of an accord that’s fine’, he said. ’But on one side of the table there must be a Serb and on the other side an Albanian’. ’The west wanted to help but has behaved very clumsily, like a bull in a china shop and now NATO doesn’t want to lose face. The Serbs have taken things out on Albanians and now there is a general settling of accounts’. Demaqi fears ’the worst possible solution, an irrational solution in which the west says it will only stop when there is nothing left to be done’. He has also criticised Ibrahim Rugova who, in his opinion, ’will accept any old accord’ with Belgrade. ’Now, when he is in Europe, he is saying that he wasn’t free in Kosova. In fact Yugoslav President Milosevic has been sly and has managed to sow discord among Albanians’. ’When things exploded’ he continued, ’people said that they didn’t know that Serbia was going to commit genocide - even though Serbia has been committing genocide since 1912’.
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Adem Demaqi