Michael Martens thought he was done with the Thaçi verdict. The F.A.Z. asked for one more comment, and what he wrote is the clearest German case yet against "everyone in the Balkans is the same.
By Michael Martens (F.A.Z) | 20 September 2026
The F.A.Z. recently reported on an experiment by the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research whose results were kept under lock and key for decades. In 1950 the institute's researchers questioned around 1,600 average West Germans about their views on National Socialism and the extermination of the Jews. They let people speak freely. In doing so, many of the supposedly "denazified" Germans revealed such an alarming continuity of racist, antisemitic and authoritarian views that the institute's director, Theodor Adorno, decided not to publish the full results of the study. Were five years perhaps too little time to erase Nazi propaganda from people's heads? A look at the 1995 exhibition "Crimes of the Wehrmacht" is helpful here. The protests against the exhibition, which was partly flawed at the outset, were fierce. Even half a century after the end of the war, many Germans were still not prepared to question the legend of the "clean Wehrmacht."
In the Balkans, two recent events have provided further examples of how hard societies find it to question narratives about their own past, especially when it comes to that past's dark sides. Thousands attended the funeral of the war criminal Ratko Mladić in Belgrade and celebrated the chief perpetrator of the Srebrenica genocide as a hero. Just over a week later, a large majority of Kosovo Albanians reacted with outrage to the sentencing of former Kosovar president Hashim Thaçi to 25 years in prison for war crimes.
The Kosovar outrage is partly understandable. If the verdict is upheld on appeal, Thaçi is responsible for a good 300 cases of torture and almost 100 murders. These acts are hideous and abhorrent. But the conclusion must nevertheless not be: "In the Balkans, everyone is the same." For there are important differences between Mladić and Thaçi, even if Serbian nationalists like to dismiss that as relativization.
Mladić is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands. In Thaçi's case, if he is convicted with final effect, the number of victims would be barely a hundredth of that. Still terrible. But not the same thing. The "Kosovo Liberation Army," or UÇK, that Thaçi led never committed anything even remotely comparable to Srebrenica. In Kosovo, by contrast, there were countless small Srebrenicas committed by Serbs against Albanians, for instance in the villages of Meja and Korenica, where Serbian forces slaughtered hundreds of Catholic Albanians.
Then there is the chronology. Mladić committed his crimes in a war that Belgrade and the Serbs had started. Thaçi's UÇK was a reaction to years of systematic, state-run injustice by Serbs against the Albanian majority population in Kosovo. Nevertheless, Kosovar society is now called upon as well. The crimes of the UÇK did happen. Denying them by pointing to greater Serbian crimes cannot be a way out. At least the alleged war criminal Thaçi has called on his compatriots from prison to remain peaceful.
Originally published in German in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sunday edition, 20 September 2026, under the title "Thaçi ist nicht Mladić." English translation by Kosovo Dispatch.
