By The Kosovo Dispatch | Prishtina Bureau - 26 October 2025
Edited and introduced by Prof. Kadri Kryeziu
There are witnesses who record, and witnesses who remain.
Jolyon Naegele belongs to the second kind.
Long before press conferences and peace plans, he was walking Kosovo’s muddy streets with a recorder in hand, speaking to those who had no microphones. Between 1986 and 2008, his voice carried Kosovo’s untold decade to the world — first through the frequencies of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, later through the corridors of the United Nations.
This interview — the first in The Kosovo Dispatch oral-history series, “Witnesses of the Transition” — is more than recollection. It is a meditation on responsibility: how memory survives institutions, how neutrality can become moral evasion, and how the small nations of Europe mirror the continent’s conscience.
Through Naegele’s calm precision, the reader hears both the music and the fatigue of history. His account moves from unpaved Prishtina to UN headquarters, from the optimism of liberation to the bureaucracy of independence. It asks, gently but firmly, what Europe has learned — and what it prefers to forget.
To read him is to confront a simple question: when the recorders are turned off, who keeps listening?
I. Origins and Memory — The First Witness
Few Western journalists chronicled Kosovo’s last years under Yugoslavia as closely as Jolyon Naegele, a native of New York City who has lived in Europe full-time for the last forty-five years. Long before diplomats arrived with blueprints, he was already walking Prishtina (Priština)’s unpaved streets, microphone in hand, listening and watching. His dispatches for Voice of America (1984–1994) and later Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (1996–2003) captured the quiet heroism of ordinary people trying to live under the weight of history.
1. When you first arrived in Kosovo, what did the world misunderstand most — the land, the people, or the stakes?
The world was largely ignorant about Kosovo when I first visited in April 1986 as a VOA reporter. To the extent that outsiders had heard of Kosovo, it was viewed as a multiethnic Yugoslav province that certain Serbian politicians, such as Slobodan Milošević, were increasingly using as a populist tool to expand their power at the expense of the Albanian-speaking majority.
Five years after the violent suppression of demonstrations in 1981 in Prishtina, tensions still lingered. During the evening corso in Prishtina, local Albanians and Serbs kept to themselves in separate sections of the promenade between the provincial government building and the Grand Hotel. At a folk-music concert in the Boro & Ramiz Cultural Center, Albanians I spoke with expressed frustration over the imposed ratio of Serbian to Albanian songs that had to be performed.
With each subsequent visit to Prishtina in the second half of the 1980s, security grew increasingly tight — more police, more armored personnel carriers parked behind the Grand Hotel.
By coincidence, I was in Kosovo just as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was unfolding. Virtually no precautions, as far as I could tell, were being taken anywhere in Serbia, including Kosovo, during that visit.
Admittedly, my interest in Kosovo was linked to my fascination with Albania, which was still under strict self-imposed isolation. Anyone curious to experience Albanian culture could find it beneath a thin Yugoslav veneer in Prishtina (Priština), Pejë/Peć, Gjakovë/Đakovica, Prizren, and Skopje (Shkup). The Albanian element was virtually unvarnished in villages across Has and Dukagjin as well as in parts of western Macedonia — in the hill villages around Tetovë/Tetovo, Dibër/Debar, and Strugë/Struga — and in Montenegro’s borderlands with Albania, around Ulqin/Ulcinj, Tuzi, Pllavë/Plav, and Gusi/Gusinje, which I visited in the late 1980s.
2. Do you remember your first walk through Prishtina — the sounds, the faces, the air of the place?
Prishtina was a provincial Yugoslav town with multiple identities — Yugoslav, Serbian, Albanian, and Turkish. I enjoyed the very Balkan atmosphere: the people, the sounds, the food, the evening corso. Knowledge of English and German was limited mostly to those who had worked abroad, and among the children of Yugoslav diplomats and foreign-trade representatives, which at the time still included Kosovo Albanians.
The architecture in the city center, built through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, was quintessentially Yugoslav — reminiscent of other administrative centers where planners sought to replace or erase the Ottoman-Balkan heritage with concrete housing blocks and monumental public buildings.
On a later visit in April–May 1989, I interviewed Ibrahim Rugova in his flat in Prishtina and also visited Ferizaj/Uroševac, Prizren, the Gora region, and Dukagjin. I made this trip with Laura Silber, a Belgrade-based stringer for the Financial Times who also contributed to VOA.
The authorities tried to limit my freedom of movement with a press pass that specified only the towns I was allowed to visit. Yet the Kosovo Albanian police who occasionally stopped me often let me pass, allowing us to reach Junik, Zym, and Zhur. We spoke to several young men who described in detail a recent shooting in which Serbian militia had fired on villagers from a local minaret.
In June 1989, I was present at Gazimestan for Milošević’s Vidovdan speech and witnessed how inebriated nationalist Serbs behaved there and later in Graçanicë/Gračanica. I interviewed Ibrahim Rugova again afterward for his reaction, this time at the LDK headquarters (Lidhja Demokratike e Kosovës) near the stadium.
3. In those years of reporting, did you sense that Kosovo was already speaking to Europe’s future — or warning it of its blind spots?
Kosovo was terra incognita for most Europeans in the 1980s, except during and immediately after the unrest in 1981, or for the occasional foreign tourist visiting the Gračanica Monastery (Manastiri i Graçanicës) or the Peć Patriarchate (Patriarkana e Pejës).
I was unable to visit Kosovo in the 1990s because my request for a Yugoslav visa was denied after I stated my intention to go there. However, as long as I omitted Kosovo from my visa application, I received permission and was able to travel to Belgrade and Vojvodina. I also visited Serbian-occupied areas of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina during the wars.
It was clear that Milošević had decided to postpone “dealing with” Kosovo until after the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. I visited Albania repeatedly, starting in 1990, including Kukës, where I saw how poorly prepared the town’s modest hospital was for what seemed to me an inevitable wave of refugees once war reached Kosovo.
I also traveled to what was then FYROM (now North Macedonia), where Scandinavian UN peacekeepers were monitoring the border with rump Yugoslavia — including the boundary with Kosovo. Near the Glloboçicë (Globočica) crossing, I interviewed UN military monitors about the constant traffic: smugglers with packhorses laden with fuel, and in the opposite direction, Kosovo Albanians fleeing persecution.
During the NATO airstrikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999, I visited refugee camps across Albania — in a Shkodër tobacco factory, in a meadow overlooking Lake Ohrid, in a basketball hall in Korça, and even on the beach at Durrës — as well as the Morinë/Vërmica – Vrbnica border crossing, just after an American airstrike had destroyed a Serbian military post overlooking the crossing.
The massive waves of refugees were among the most deeply disturbing stories I ever covered: Kosovo Albanians, mostly from Gjakovë/Đakovica, many traumatized after seeing neighbors killed by Serb paramilitaries that very morning, driving past piles of dead bodies between Prizren and the border to reach the relative safety of Albania — which at that time was still, effectively, Europe’s only Third World country. They had no idea what their future would hold or what had happened to relatives who had fled earlier.
I finally returned to Kosovo several months after the end of the conflict — my first visit in ten years. I revisited many towns in western Kosovo I had last seen in 1989 and found horrific destruction of homes, infrastructure, and cultural heritage. Later, while on trial at the ICTY in The Hague for war crimes, Milošević even asserted that the medieval kullas (tower houses) in Dukagjin, which I had seen intact in Junik a decade before their destruction by Serbian forces, had been legitimate military targets.
I also traveled to Suharekë/Suva Reka, Kamenicë/Kamenica, and Gjilanë/Gnjilane, where I interviewed U.S. and Russian KFOR (Kosovo Force) peacekeepers, local officials, and residents.
4. As a reporter who witnessed fear up close, what did you learn about the meaning of dignity in unfree places?
In an atmosphere of fear, it can be difficult to maintain one’s dignity. One must choose either to fight — if physically and mentally able — or to flee.
The dignity of hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees was remarkable. In the summer of 1999, ignoring international advice to stay put until Kosovo was secure, they nevertheless returned home after the Kumanovo Agreement and the deployment of KFOR and UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo). They came back to rebuild their homes and their lives in freedom rather than remain in exile, carrying the trauma of murdered and missing relatives.
I also witnessed fear in Preshevë/Preševo, in southern Serbia, when Serbian Red Beret forces were intimidating local residents until Prime Minister Zoran Djindjić arrived to calm the situation. On another occasion, in July 2002, when Djindjić visited Prague, I asked why he couldn’t simply acknowledge that Kosovo was lost — that Milošević had lost it — and that it was time for Serbia to move on. Djindjić replied that such a statement would be “political suicide for any politician in Serbia.” Eight months later, after discussions with UNMIK SRSG Michael Steiner and others about Kosovo’s future status, Djindjić was assassinated in Belgrade.
II. Inside UNMIK — Between Idealism and Bureaucracy
In 2003, Jolyon Naegele crossed an invisible line — from observer to participant. He joined the United Nations Mission in Kosovo at a time when the country was rebuilding itself from ashes, half-governed by outsiders and half-driven by its own impatience.
5. What was it like to work inside a mission that was both a government and a guest — running a country that could not yet call itself one?
It was an uncanny experience — being behind closed doors, taking notes at high-level meetings rather than waiting outside to be briefed, witnessing the behavior, strengths, and weaknesses of visiting dignitaries, and at times watching their unsuccessful attempts to manipulate the SRSG (Special Representative of the Secretary-General).
Fate, member-state interests, and human weakness repeatedly influenced and complicated how UNMIK was run. The first SRSG I worked under was Germany’s Michael Steiner, who hired me when the mission was supposed to be slimming down from 20,000 to 5,000 staff. It took nearly nine months for UNMIK to bring me on board; Steiner left only a couple of months later.
He tried but failed to advance negotiations on Kosovo’s future status — first through one-on-one talks with Zoran Djindjić, and after Djindjić’s assassination, with acting Prime Minister Nebojša Čović. I remember sitting with the UNMIK delegation, taking notes in the SRSG’s conference room for hours while Steiner and Čović met privately. To Steiner’s genuine disappointment, the talks proved pointless: Serbia would not, under any circumstances, recognize Kosovo’s independence.
Subsequent SRSGs’ closed-door meetings with Serbian government leaders took place not in Prishtina (Priština) but in Belgrade and New York, and were generally fruitless.
I was part of the SRSG’s delegation at numerous meetings in Prishtina with visiting foreign delegations and at the Contact Group meeting of political directors in New York in September 2003, while accompanying SRSG Harri Holkeri. On the way back, during a layover in Vienna, Austrian diplomats asked whom they should contact in the coming days as plans were drawn up to launch the dialogue formally in Vienna. In the airport’s VIP lounge, Holkeri designated me as UNMIK Coordinator for Dialogue and told me to stay behind to get the process started.
This involved logistics rather than mediation and required my presence at the dialogue’s launch and subsequent meetings of the four Working Groups in Prishtina and Belgrade. It was clear to many participants that there was little goodwill. Belgrade aimed to buy time and score political points — for instance, by waiting until Prishtina announced its delegation names before appointing a higher-ranking team of its own. At least once, Prishtina’s delegation was named only the night before a working-group meeting, leaving it unprepared.
Success depended not only on the chairs — from organizations such as the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross), which led the Working Group on Missing Persons — but also on whether the heads of the Prishtina and Belgrade delegations were genuinely constructive. That occurred in at least one of the four groups, where Prishtina’s team was led by Professor Enver Hasani.
As I was promoted to Deputy Head and then Head of UNMIK’s Office of Political Affairs, my responsibilities grew: serving as the SRSG’s representative on the Central Election Commission and as UNMIK’s participant in the mixed group of Kosovars and internationals drafting Kosovo’s Constitution. I accompanied SRSGs Joachim Rücker and Lamberto Zannier to several quarterly UN Security Council sessions on Kosovo.
These meetings offered an excellent vantage point to observe tensions among the political actors and to grasp, early on, that Russia, China, Serbia, and Spain — among others — would never recognize Kosovo’s independence. My warning at a UNMIK retreat in Skopje in 2007 met resistance from SRSG Rücker, though afterward several Russian participants approached me to say I was the only non-Russian who truly understood where events were heading after Kosovo’s declaration of independence.
6. How would you describe the inner life of UNMIK in those years — idealists fighting fatigue, or administrators protecting procedure?
It’s hard to generalize, since the human factor — the personal background, experience, and interests of individual advisers and staff — played such large roles. I don’t agree with either simplified label.
SRSG Holkeri’s team was Finnish, just as SRSG Søren Jessen-Petersen’s team was Danish — a practice that risked arrogance and poor decisions and sometimes left others out of the loop.
The gradual downsizing of UNMIK from 5,000 to 500 staff after Kosovo’s internationally coordinated Declaration of Independence in February 2008 meant I suddenly had to supervise more than 40 people instead of eight or nine, due to the liquidation of the civil-administration pillar. It became clear that some staffers, particularly those working outside Prishtina, had divided loyalties between the UN and Belgrade’s interests. At least one was openly insubordinate, convinced his view was the only valid one.
I also noticed a gradual shift in attitude among Russian staff during my last five years with UNMIK. When I was hired in 2003, my first boss, Political Director Petr Ivantsov — a seasoned former Soviet diplomat — was introduced by SRSG Steiner with the words, “I’m sure you two former Cold War warriors will understand each other.” We did: our worldviews differed, but we worked professionally and respectfully, even after his transfer to UNOSEK (United Nations Office of the Special Envoy for Kosovo) under Martti Ahtisaari in Vienna.
After the Kyiv Maidan and Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014, however, Moscow’s new internal rules for its diplomats and UN personnel — requiring them to report contacts with foreigners, including other UN staff — seriously hindered collegial communication with Russian colleagues.
7. Looking back, did the international community underestimate Kosovo’s political maturity — or overestimate its own ability to understand the place?
The so-called “international community” is really a collection of states and organizations. The views of individual countries differ widely, shaping the ability of member states within institutions to find common ground and set policy. Inevitably, many governments and senior international officials — including within UNMIK and EULEX — underestimated the post-independence pushback by Russia, China, Serbia, Spain, and others over Kosovo’s status.
8. Was the much-praised “neutrality” of international missions ever a form of moral avoidance — a way to look busy without taking sides?
That depends entirely on the mission — its leadership, mandate, and the states that deploy or dissolve it. Certainly, over the last fifteen years, one could legitimately ask whose interests are actually served by maintaining UNMIK’s continued existence.
III. Independence and the Afterlife of 2008
When Kosovo declared independence, Jolyon Naegele was inside the United Nations system—watching history fold back on itself. For many internationals, that day was liberation and defeat at once: the mission’s end and the country’s beginning.
9. What do you remember from that February day in 2008 — the atmosphere, the mood inside UN offices?
UNMIK staff were under strict orders to remain at work and not to participate in celebrations. The mood was somber. Pressure in New York on Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and in turn on the SRSG (Special Representative of the Secretary-General) and his principal deputy (PDSRSG), was immense and quickly led to their departures.
10. Do you think the world ever truly accepted Kosovo’s independence, or merely tolerated it as the least bad option?
One cannot generalize. Some states have genuinely accepted Kosovo’s independence, while others—because of domestic politics, history, or geopolitics—continue to refuse recognition. Still others took years to recognize Kosovo and may still have mixed feelings.
11. Seventeen years on, Kosovo still struggles for full recognition. Was that failure inevitable, or could a different diplomatic imagination have changed the story?
It was likely inevitable, despite wishful thinking in the United States and much of Europe. Russia used Kosovo’s declaration of independence as a pretext in the summer of 2008 to invade Georgia, occupying South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Other states, such as Spain—concerned about Catalonia—and China —concerned about Taiwan—prefer consistency and therefore refuse to recognize Kosovo.
12. Did years of supervision and conditionality leave behind habits of dependency that still shape the country’s politics?
It is debatable whether the result has been dependency or political maturity.
IV. Dialogue, Europe, and the Erosion of Trust
The dialogue between Prishtina and Belgrade began as an act of hope and gradually turned into a ritual of exhaustion. Over the years, the region’s faith in Europe’s fairness has thinned, while new powers — Turkey, China, and Russia — watch from the edges. For Kosovo, remembrance is not nostalgia — it is survival. Yet across the border, denial hardens into doctrine. Europe watches politely, tired of Balkan ghosts. For those who lived through it, that silence is harder to bear than any noise.
13. Having seen the early contacts between Belgrade and Prishtina under UN auspices, do you believe Serbia ever negotiated in good faith?
No. From the launch of direct dialogue in Vienna in October 2003, Serbia did not negotiate in good faith — except perhaps in one of the four working groups.
14. KFOR insists there is “no threat to security,” even as Kosovo reports drone incursions. What do you make of this widening trust gap between internationals and local institutions?
If true, it’s not good. It deserves closer attention from both sides before matters get out of hand.
15. Do you think the international community ever truly delivered justice to Kosovo’s victims — to the families of the missing and the survivors of wartime sexual violence?
I am not in a position to quantify this beyond saying that serious efforts were made by the international community to deliver justice to the families of the missing and to survivors of wartime sexual violence. This question should really be posed to former staffers in UNMIK’s Department of Justice, as well as to the families of the missing and to the survivors themselves.
16. How do you view Serbia’s public rehabilitation of war criminals — and Europe’s near-silence about it?
It is sickening and outrageous — but what else can one expect from a regime headed by Slobodan Milošević’s former spokesman, who, like his old boss, has never missed an opportunity to play the populist “Kosovo is Serbia” card.
17. Can a small country afford to remember as intensely as Kosovo does — or does memory sometimes become its own captivity?
Nations and states must know and remember their past so as not to repeat it. Forgetting is not a solution; it is a diagnosis.
18. What does Kosovo represent today in the European imagination — unfinished business, moral obligation, or democratic experiment?
It’s hard to generalize; it depends on whom one speaks to — a diplomat, a eurocrat, an academic, or a businessperson — and on their age, experience, and depth of knowledge.
19. What lessons can the Kosovo experiment offer to other post-conflict regions — from Ukraine to Gaza — where peace must be built before justice arrives?
Not many, since the scale — in geography, destruction, and loss of life — in Ukraine and Gaza is so immense that post-conflict Kosovo is not a suitable model for either situation.
On the contrary, having visited Nagorno-Karabakh in 1998, it later occurred to me while working in UNMIK that a visit by Kosovo Albanians and Kosovo Serbs to Karabakh would have been a sobering experience, showing the full extent of ethnic cleansing and the urgency of finding a functional solution. Unfortunately, there was no interest in UNMIK in implementing my suggestion.
In the end, the Karabakh conflict was resolved when oil-rich Azerbaijan eventually gained sufficient strength to expel Armenian forces from Karabakh and adjacent territories, later reaching an agreement with Armenia. That process had the backing of the Trump administration, particularly regarding transit traffic between Azerbaijan and its exclave Nakhichevan through Armenia, allowing it to avoid transiting Iran.
V. Personal Reckoning
Every witness eventually becomes part of the story they once covered. For Jolyon Naegele, Kosovo has been more than an assignment — it has been a mirror, a measure of Europe’s conscience, and perhaps, his own.
20. After all these years, how has Kosovo changed you — as a journalist, as a diplomat, as a person?
As a journalist, I witnessed Kosovo as an integral part of Socialist Yugoslavia, as a target of Serbian nationalist rhetoric, as a victim of FRY (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) war crimes, and later as an international protectorate.
As a UN Political Affairs Officer, I became fully engaged — reporting from the inside on political developments in Kosovo, coordinating dialogue between Prishtina and Belgrade, observing the March 2004 riots and their aftermath, contributing to the status talks, and witnessing attempts by certain UN member states to influence Kosovo’s path.
I also took part in drafting Kosovo’s Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and UNMIK’s subsequent downsizing and gradual loss of influence.
These experiences moved me from witness to custodian — and changed how I understand states, institutions, and responsibility.
21. Do you ever regret stepping from witness to participant — from chronicling history to helping steer it?
Not at all. On the contrary, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. It helped me understand how the international community functions in practice — how administrative decisions are made, implemented, and what their consequences can be.
22. When you look at Kosovo today, what still gives you hope — and what still breaks your heart?
Kosovo is barely audible on the international stage today, at least from my vantage point in the Czech Republic. What breaks my heart is that Kosovo — stymied by interference from Serbia, Russia, and other non-recognizing states in the UN and EU — does not appear to be moving forward politically.
The same political figures I knew during my fourteen years in UNMIK remain dominant. I would have expected by now a more impactful rejuvenation of the political scene and stronger efforts toward genuine regional integration.
What gives me hope is the persistence of ordinary Kosovars — their determination to hold on, to work, and to live with dignity despite disillusionment.
23. Finally, if you were to write one last dispatch from Prishtina, what would its headline be?
I can hardly say without actually being there — so please, ask me again on my next visit to Kosovo.
Editors note:
This interview was conducted and edited by The Kosovo Dispatch between September and October 2025 as part of the series “Witnesses of the Transition.”
Minor edits were made for clarity and chronology; the substance remains as spoken.
