Thaci in Davos: Russia to Destroy Trust Between Western States

Kosovo President Hashim Thaci is attending this year's meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, world leaders will discuss the challenge of preserving a progressive common nature worldwide.

At this meeting, he has said that the restoration of common values, which were born from the fall of communism in the 1990s, is of particular importance to the people of Kosovo. Thaci has also talked about Russia and its efforts to undermine bilateral confidence among Western states.

This is Thaci's full speech:

At this year's meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, world leaders will discuss the challenge of preserving a progressive common nature in an increasingly divided world. As president of Kosovo, a state celebrating its tenth anniversary of independence this year and which is still developing economically and politically, I cannot sufficiently stress the importance of finding and maintaining a common goal at the global level. States like my country need active support from a united world community that is interested in supporting sustainable and equal development worldwide.

The restoration of common values that were born from the fall of communism in the 1990s is of particular importance to me and my people. My country is the product of such common humanitarian values. Just two decades ago, Kosovars were experiencing genocide and ethnic cleansing in the center of the European continent. Half the population was expelled from Kosovo, while images of mass graves were disturbing the world public.

I was the political leader of a guerrilla force that was trying to resist the destructive power of one of the last dictators of the continent, Slobodan Milosevic. Our efforts to protect our people would have taken far more time and lives if there had not been a global response. The memory of the Kosovo war may have faded for many of you, but in 1998, all from Nobel Peace Prize laureates to NATO generals, from Western journalists devoted to the ground to humanitarian workers in refugee camps believed peace was a goal worth fighting for.

Even then, there were voices from political extremes that opposed the intervention that saved the people of Kosovo. Extremist left was unable to distance itself from anti-feeling - NATO and considered Kosovo's intervention an imperialist project. At the same time, the extremist right-wing viewed Kosovars as a fifth-class convoy of dangerous Muslims in Europe and was not against Milosevic's policy in Bosnia and Kosovo. In the end, however, there were the common human values of the overwhelming majority in the center of the political spectrum that enabled our deliverance. The divisive forces of isolationism, fragmentation, and Nazism were nothing compared to the collective efforts of all political and social backgrounds to protect mankind's fundamental values.

In 2008, following a negotiation process mediated by UN negotiator Martti Ahtisaari, in full co-ordination with Western democracies, Kosovo declared independence and is now recognised as a sovereign state by the majority of UN members. We have marked the highest average economic growth for the last decade in the Western Balkans and have marked continued improvement in all critical indicators of good governance, economic and political freedoms and democratic construction of the nation.

Now, nearly 20 years after NATO intervention in Kosovo, we have to admit that the world has changed since those times of intercultural interventions and international humanitarian interventions. With all the opportunities offered by the Internet and social media, I am sad and even disturbed by their harmful side. Extremists can easily find each other in the social media, creating “heho-room” powerful ones that are spreading across the network like dark matter. When we're on this topic, I don't agree with the view that Twitter or Facebook are the source of this fragmentation of global narrators.

No, it should be said clearly and courageously: there are now powerful political forces that are deliberately and systematically trying to annul a whole century of world progress and, in the case of Kosovo, a decade of freedom.

These forces originate in Russia. Efforts co-ordinated by Moscow in the middle of the state, propaganda channels, intelligence, hackers and political actors have a clear purpose. They want to destroy the numerous ties of trust: between citizens and governments within Western states, between countries belonging to NATO and the EU, but even wider.

These efforts were not created or caused by technology. These are forces that have always been there, in the background, in the extremes of our public discussion, but have already been strengthened by deliberate policies to destroy the values on which the free world is based, including communities such as the EU and NATO.

We cannot build new evaporators in a broken picture, without clearly identifying who is currently attacking world order. And we cannot develop tools of resistance against false news or cyber attacks on democratic systems without acknowledging that these are deliberate attacks. These are not virtual islands of division, but an interrelated archipelag of conscious platforms of attack on our common values.

So Davos this year will be extremely important as he is trying to analyze new geostrategic divisions, as well as ways to reconnect and reconvene our common history of human progress.