Kosovo with “Special Location”: Benden's Engagement Over the Years

Photo: ARMAND NIMAN/AFP

In his family, Kosovo will have “special location”.

Joe Biden said this in February 2021, when he sent a letter to the then fraud of Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani's duty to congratulate Independence Day.

Kosovo continues to have a special place for the Biden family, in honour of the time our late son, Beau Biden, spent working to ensure peace, justice and rule of law for all the people of Kosovo”, Beden wrote on that letter.

The 46th president of the United States withdrew on July 21st from this year's presidential race.

Pressure on him to back off began in late June, following the first presidential debate with the republican counterCandidate, Donald Trump, in which Biden admitted having not had good performance.

Biden, 81, was in politics for over 50 years.

Over three decades of senators from the state of Dellauer, two vice mandates of President Barack Obama and a presidential mandate.

When Osmani took over the top US political post on January 20th of 2021, he said that the U.S.'s top “, from today, is Kosovo friend”.

Biden's support for Kosovo started early, as senator.

It was October 1998, when he and other senators expressed support for NATO's military actions against Serbia to stop the violence in Kosovo.

NATO launched the bombing campaign on 24 March 1999.

Just two days before the initial attacks began, the US Congress was still divided over the decision.

Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, said President Bill Clinton “administration has no plan for what it will do after shelling”.

At that session, Biden said air attacks “are in US security interest”.

He said the war was threatening NATO's credibility, while the mass refugee “wave would destabilise fragile democracies in Macedonia and Albania”.

“The national interests of the United States are threatened directly by the ongoing aggressive actions of the Yugoslav government in Kosovo”, Biden said on 22 March, 1999.

In a statement broadcast by the Voice of America, Biden said his job to end Yugoslav wars was one of the most proud “the most proud of” of his long political career.

In an authorial writing to the Washington Times in 2004, then Senator Beden said that no serious observer ever believes Kosovo will be led by Belgrade” and added that the “resolution of Kosovo's status does not allow for long-term”.

When Kosovo declared independence on February 17th 2008, Biden was among the first in the United States to welcome him and invited his colleagues to express the Senate's “support for him.

In a speech in March 2008, Beden, as chairman of the US Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, said that “any attempts by Belgrade to fuel chaos in northern Kosovo or in Bosnia and Herzegovina's Republika Srpska, should be treated with speed and determination by the European Union and NATO”.

In 2009, only four months after the post of US vice president, Biden visited Kosovo.

“The United States has made it clear that recognising Kosovo's independence is irreversible and that it will not change”, Biden said on 21 May, 2009 in Pristina.

A few months after Kosovo reached its first agreement on normalising relations with Serbia in 2013, then Vice President Biden received then Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci to the White House.

In that case, Biden stressed the importance of full and swift implementation of that agreement.

As vice president, Biden stayed in Kosovo even in 2016, when he attended the inauguration ceremony of Ferizaj-Gylan Street by the name of his late son, Beau Biden.

Beau Biden é, who served in Kosovo after the end of the war in 1999, helped train local prosecutors and judges, died of brain cancer in 2015.

In February 2021, after a month in office of the president, Beden wrote the letter to the then fraud of Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani's office, telling him that the US is ready to work with the new Government of Kosovo, which had emerged from that month's elections.

Less than two months later, Beden also wrote a letter to Osman, to congratulate her on the election to the president's position and to stress that normalising relations with Serbia requires difficult “compromising”.

That same year, in July, Beden accepted the Presidential Medal from Kosovo for the late boy.

Thanks to President Osmani through a video message, Beden said his son loved Kosovo and added that the US would remain its key <x0-partner <x0-partner”).

During his presidency, Beden encouraged Kosovo several times, but Serbia also to normalise relations with each other.

But during this period, senior American officials also criticised Kosovo for, as they said, some unilateral and uncoordinated actions, which, according to them, questioned the US partnership.

And Biden, during his recent visit to Kosovo in 2016, he ordered it: “Your success is extremely much in the interest of my country. If you succeed, the region will succeed”. /REL/