Thaci for the famous newspaper: We fought Serbs with shotguns

But, as he says, while we appreciate the achievements and challenges our state faces, we must remember the initial grim point and the subsequent road Kosovo has taken to achieve citizenship.

I was still a student when dictator Slobodan Milosevic launched a series of wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. He insisted on creating what he has called Greater Serbia and strongly imposed the apartheid regime on Kosovo Albanians”, President Thaci wrote.

The head of state stressed that Kosovo Albanians made efforts to respond through peaceful resistance during the early 1990s, but rationality did not prevail. He said that's why we had to start fighting for our freedom and hope that those who believed in Western values would help us.

Our hunting scenes could not even stand against the Serbian military and police. Our soul and our values were strong, but it was of little importance without the direct involvement of the international community. Kosovo was saved by those who felt the responsibility to protect civilians from another Balkan genocide”, President Thaci wrote.

The country's first one has added that since the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) freed Kosovo in 1999, it was clear that a new state would be born. The Republic of Kosovo became the youngest state in Europe on February 17th 2008.

President Thaci has written that those who read our declaration of independence realise that nothing in our efforts to build the state was unilateral. Negotiations led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari were deep and depleting. NATO, the European Union and other allies worked together to ensure peace and stability after independence. Their work was vital to ensuring a calm transition.

He has stressed that Kosovo has had its opponents since the first few days.

The extreme leftist “considers Kosovo a puppet of American and British imperialism, while the extreme right does not appreciate our religious and ethnic diversity. These extremes have been imposed on the political and trans-Atlantic media landscape, and, unfortunately, were helped by Russia's propagandistic machine, and the pressure on Kosovo has not been softened”, it wrote.

However, writes President Thaci, Kosovo is the country with the fastest average economic growth in the Western Balkans in the last decade.

We were the first in the region to elect a woman president. Our athletes, film producers, musicians and cultural personalities from our country have received international attention”, he wrote.

On the other hand, President Thaci wrote that challenges remain. He stressed that he has led dialogue with Serbia that produced the historic Brussels Agreement in 2013, which opened a new era for peace and co-operation between the two states after a century of hostilities. Also, he has indicated that he remains committed to working towards a new final agreement that will mark the full normalisation of relations between Kosovo and Serbia.

The European Union is somewhat confused. In the recently approved strategy for enlargement in the Western Balkans, Kosovo is hardly mentioned, allegedly resulting from Spain's concerns about separatism. However, our friends in Madrid know Spain did not have a Slobodan Milosevic, and Kosovo is not Catalon. The EU, with its claims on common trade zones and other technical issues, is missing its core. Of course, we must meet EU conditions for environment, economy and rule of law. But, we're really on the right track”, President Thaci wrote in his editorial to the American newspaper “The Wall Street Journal”.