Kosovo erupts in protest after Hague convicts ex-President Thaçi of war crimes

In The Hague, a court has handed down a twenty-five-year sentence to Hashim Thaçi, once a guerrilla commander and later Kosovo's president, for war crimes committed during the 1990s conflict with Serbia. The verdict places a founding figure of Kosovo's independence within the long reach of international law, forcing a nation to hold two truths at once: that liberation struggles can produce heroes and criminals in the same person. The protests that followed in Pristina are not merely political noise — they are the sound of a society wrestling with the unresolved weight of its own history.