Three actors play the unpredictability of the past

About the parallel story in which the Informer was an old friend of Bujar, Prishtina was liberated on June 11 and in the White House, when Kosovo was burning, President Clinton, Dr. Rugova, Dr. Bukoshi and I were dealing with the influence of Enver Hoxha's leftist ideology on Fatos Nano's activity.

1.

I found myself repeating the truth about the unpredictability of the past. 
Bujar Bukoshi died and something was written about him. 

Some of the writings were written as if he had not died. The 3 percent fund, the KLA-FARK, how Rugova was left without cigarettes..., stories that are made to continue a political war that began thirty or more years ago, a political war that some want to continue for the next thirty years.
In the last century and in Western culture, twenty years later - the distance that historians consider sufficient to write history - there would have been a consolidated narrative, which although incomplete - because history is always enriched with new discovered sources - would have had more or less an essential and consensual axis. In that axis, which would summarize the consensual opinion of society, Bujar Bukoshi would be a long, dignified and illustrative narrative of the consciousness of a man, of a generation dedicated to giving to his country.

In this age of social media, history is a thick book that the vast majority does not want to read. Instead of a thick book - researched with the professional education of a historian - our public space (and this is a global phenomenon) is filled with fragments of thoughts, statements and writings that carry the hope that they will become part of this virtual history - without an author, without research, without editing, without a reviewer, without a publisher, without a critical mind of the reader.

In this shared public space, I read an article about Bujar by a well-known person who admitted to having collaborated with the Serbian State Security Service during the war in Kosovo. There I also came across the statement "My father and Bujar were old friends." 

The statement was written when Bujar had already been dead for several hours and could not provide explanations for the alleged friendship. Moreover, the author's father did not have any special value as a personality - he was not a figure of culture, art or science - to enter this descriptive context. On the contrary, in a part of the intellectual structure of the city, he was a person perceived - although never with a legal proof - as an informant of the organs, as such operatives could be gently called in the then Autonomy of Kosovo. As such, it would have been completely difficult for him to be a friend of Bujar Bukoshi. 

But, Bujar was no longer important, what was important was the writing of history through Bujar and the misuse of his death, giving other meaning to events and people, so that the perception of 50 years ago would be replaced with a simple sentence of a non-existent friendship, but already said when the coffin was lowered into the ground.

2.

And then came the unreal day of the liberation of Pristina.

This year too, the Municipality continued the tradition started a quarter of a century ago, celebrating June 11 as the day when Pristina was liberated in 1999. On that day, in 1999, from a high point in the city, I saw how several rooftops in the city were burning, on the radio and TV I followed the arrival of Russian soldiers from Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in the evening until two in the morning I heard and saw the incessant fire of Kalashnikovs in the center of Pristina, part of the celebration of a part of the Serbian population of the city with the Russian soldiers. 
Pristina did not seem liberated that day and night to the remaining Albanian population in the city. But a KLA unit had likely entered a house in the village of Kolovicë that day, June 11, and this fact served to construct a discourse that has remained in our public space for a quarter of a century and that took its institutional form with the proclamation of Liberation Day on June 11.

In historical recapitulation - and this is based on undeniable facts - the “FRY” and Serbia capitulated with the Kumanovo Military-Technical Agreement on 9 June and NATO troops entered Kosovo on 12 June. The signatories to the Agreement were NATO and the authorities of the “FRY”-Serbia. The entry of NATO forces was carried out under UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which also established the civil administration of the country.

In the parallel history, which lives on to this day, the KLA liberated Pristina... and Kosovo. And then the narrative falters, because in history the same force that liberates the country also administers it, which did not happen. 
If the KLA had liberated Pristina on June 11 and Kosovo on June 12, there would have been no UNMIK, no Ahtisaari negotiations, no negotiations in Brussels... But this does not prevent parallel history: this non-existent event continues to live with the conviction that it is being repeated year after year, that someday everyone will believe it.

3.

So, gradually, I would have to start believing that the words spoken at a meeting I attended, even my own words, would be as recorded by an institute without an address, with a founder, worker, and leader, all one man. 

This weekend, a purported transcript of a meeting between President Clinton and President Rugova, Prime Minister Bukoshi and me, in May 1998, at the White House (they had forgotten Dr. Agan, who was also at the meeting), surfaced on social media. According to this transcript, fabricated in its banality, President Clinton, Dr. Rugova, Dr. Bukoshi and I had spent the meeting slandering Fatos Nano and the KLA. “Complete forgery! Or to put it in a popular way: lies, all the way through!”, I wrote. There was no need to say that this or that part was false, the entire transcript was as false as these two euros of the old coins that are appearing in Kosovo look like gold Napoleons. 
This forgery - with the claim that he has somehow secretly managed to understand word for word what we have spoken in the White House - has been alive since 1998.

When told that it is a forgery, the response of its propagandists is more or less: prove that it is not a forgery.

4.

Umberto Eco famously declared in Turin in 2015 that "Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak, when once they only spoke in a bar over a glass of wine, without harming the community... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of idiots." 

It is even worse. In this occupation, perhaps this entire century is being spent constructing a public space in which the civil right to lie has been acquired, and instead of the burden of responsibility falling on the propagators of the lie to prove that there is truth in what they say, this burden falls on the rest of us. In Eco's words, the legion of idiots can launch any untruth and the burden falls on everyone else to prove that it is not so, a mission of collecting feathers from pillows in an industrial and endless exercise of tearing.

In the conquest of lies, objectively verified truth becomes less and less objectively verified, i.e. acceptable as such. In that space, the Informer was now friends with Bujar, Prishtina was liberated on June 11, and in the White House, when Kosovo was burning, President Clinton, Dr. Rugova, Dr. Bukoshi and I were dealing with the influence of Enver Hoxha's leftist ideology on Fatos Nano's activity.

The next step is to aim for this to become a thing of the past, which we all accept.