Chirac wrote to Kadare in 1998 about the shelling of Jugosolavia

He wrote in the letter to the largest Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare, in September 1998 that France did not rule out NATO military intervention unless Slobodan Milosevic obeyed the West that would bomb the Balkan butcher regime in 1999, recalls “Koha Ditore<1>.

Kadare discovered this in the book, “Mbi crime in the Balkans: Dark literature”, published by “Onufri” in 2011.

Kadare wrote the letter to the French president in 2001 as “mailman” engaged by the then imprisoned poet Besim Zymberi, who had sent paper to the Albanian writer who lives in Paris. Zymber, from the Mitrovica Srem prison, asked Kadare to voice the call of political prisoners being held in Serbian prisons even two years after the end of the war.

“I, an Albanian prisoner at a Serbian concentration camp, ask you to shed light on a suffering that international institutions have no knowledge of”, wrote the poet Zymberi “to writer's lover” in late autumn of 2001. He and hundreds of Albanians were still suffering in Serbian prisons because of their political activity.

This sentence would integrate Kadare into the letter that President Chirac would send on 12 December 2001 for increasing pressure on Serbian authorities to release political prisoners.

“We, Kosovo Albanian prisoners, are the last Jews held in the Hitler camps of Milosevich, even after its fall... And the world continues to be blind”, written at the end of Zymber poet's letter.

Kadare quoted Zamber's two paragraphs literally in his letter to Chiracou, with which he had previously exchanged letters for the Kosovo issue and for political prisoners. Chiracou had promised in September 1998 that France did not rule out Serbia's air bombing.

“Ma has publicly directed this testimony, as a writer, earnestly asking me to let European opinion know, as well as that world”, is written in Kadare's letter.