Gjakova Old Timers club

27 years ago today, on June 12, 1999, KFOR troops entered Kosovo after the withdrawal of the Serbian forces. I came to Kosovo in July 1999 and served as a press- and information officer in Prishtina until January 2000. I’m proud to be a KFOR veteran.

#albaniaisnotforsale 1.5 kilometres! That’s it nothing more to add 🇦🇱❤️

Po vrehet ni fryme kaçushiane.

Nje takse 20 eur prej Fushe Kosoves ndaj prishtinalive e kish zhblloku rrethin e Fushe Kosovës - une e perkrahi plotesisht.

Montenegro is preparing for the EU–Western Balkans Summit to be held in Tivat on Friday. The Serbian regime allegedly sent a group of 90 people on a charter flight to provoke incidents. Montenegro’s Agency for National Security sent them back to Serbia.

I am the Minister of Strategic Investment for the Republic of Albania. People ask why I signed the island over before there was a business plan. I tell them this is how a small country gets chosen. The daughter swam to it. This is true. She swam out from the yacht, touched the rock, and swam back, and by the time her towel was dry the matter was, in the parlance of my ministry, under active review. We do not require a survey when a principal has already conducted one in person. For fifty years we were the place that hid. Enver poured three thousand bunkers into that one rock so we could vanish from the earth and outlast an invasion that never came. Now the son-in-law of the American president wants a spa where we kept the submarines, and you want me to wait for a feasibility study? The feasibility study was written by a firm in Tirana. I will not tell you who registered that firm last spring. I will only tell you that it found the project feasible. Strategic investor status is a beautiful instrument. It makes the ordinary rules a courtesy, and we have chosen to extend that courtesy to a man whose fund carries two billion dollars from Riyadh, money his own advisers flagged as too vast for someone so green and burdened with fees too steep for someone so unproven. They wired it regardless. Abu Dhabi added to it. Doha added more. The only due diligence anyone ran was on the surname, and the name came back clean. The park is protected, yes. It was guarded from the world like a relic under glass. Now the world pays four thousand a night to step inside the case, and that is the superior protection. The kind that wires. My cousin handles the catering. My brother-in-law owns the sole firm on this coast that pours concrete to specification, and these days the specification is simply whatever he pours. Call it nepotism if you like. I call it keeping the value at home. The Americans have a tidier phrase in their glossy reports. They call it local content. I possess an enormous quantity of local content. Everyone in this story is, you understand, extremely local. The Americans adore the bunkers. The gas masks they love most of all, the genuine ones, Soviet, still scattered in the weeds where the conscripts dropped them and ran. The resort presents one to each guest at check-in. I assured the developers it was tasteful, a tribute. I neglected to mention that my nephew walks the field at dawn and sells the masks back to the resort at nine euros apiece. Local content. SPAK opened a file on the approvals. A committee of the United States Congress opened a second. Let them both read. An indictment is merely a nation taking itself seriously, and seriousness is a luxury we can finally afford, because we have become a destination. No one audits a place that no one wants. There was a woman with a map of the seal caves. The breeding caves, she kept repeating, as though I had never studied the map myself. She attended three hearings. She missed the fourth. I hear she found other work, somewhere inland, somewhere without a coastline to defend. The seals will adapt. They always adapt. In thirty years I have never once watched a seal lodge a complaint, and I have watched every other creature in this republic do nothing but. The Serbians attempted their own version. The Belgrade army headquarters, the one NATO flattened in 1999, a protected war monument until a quiet little law unprotected it, and the same heir meant to raise a hotel from the wreckage. It died last year in a scandal. I rang my counterpart to console him, and the lesson I carried away from that call was simple: the only difference between corruption and investment is whether the doors ever open. His stayed shut. Mine will swing wide. And then a young man from the fund told me, over a long dinner, that Sazan is the pilot. He is a real estate person at heart, he said, just as the son-in-law is one. It is all about location. Had I ever reckoned how much breathtaking land on this earth simply idles there, burdened with history, crowded with people, waiting for the right eye to see what it might become? He tilted his phone toward me. White towers. A marina. A long bright beach with not a single soul upon it. Where is this place, I asked. Gaza, he said. After. After what, I asked, and he only repeated the word, after, the way my own ministry murmurs under active review, and he showed me the next slide, which was the same beach with the people still on it, and that slide was titled Before, as if a people were a phase a property passes through. He told me Sazan settles the argument. A coastline can be cleared of its history and sold back at four thousand a night, and the world will book it for an anniversary. Gaza is merely the bigger lot. The son-in-law has said the waterfront is very valuable. He has sworn there is no Plan B. Do you know what a man means when he swears he has no Plan B? He means Plan A is already pouring concrete. That was the moment I understood what I am. My island is not the destination. My island is the showroom. Sazan is the tidy little model you walk the buyer through before you drive him to the parcel that still has families asleep in it. We are the demonstration unit. We validate the concept. We prove that a place raised so a frightened people might outlast the end of the world can be photographed, priced, and handed to the very people who schedule the endings. My grandfather poured a bunker on that island with his own hands so that we would survive being forgotten. He braced that door shut against the whole of the earth. I signed one page, in good morning light, so that we would never be forgotten again. I am the man who opened the door. I want to be precise about the distinction, because people keep mistaking the two of us. He kept everyone out so we could live. I let everyone in so I could. We open for the summer in June. Nearly sold out. Even the bunker. They tell me the next site will be larger, and warmer, and that the building was never the difficult part. The difficult part is always who is standing on the land when you arrive.

Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors are investigating a luxury resort project linked to U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as protests from citizens and environmental organizations over the development persist. politico.eu/article/albanian…

Zyrat postare të Shqipërisë tash janë në Wikidata. Kosova ende po çalon me open data.

Birthplaces of the Ottoman grand viziers, c. 1320–1922.

Today I learned that a Albanian from Gjirokastra was a major general of the Soviet Armed Forces 😭

Mendime Bajrami: pasi arsyeja e vetme pse po rimbahen zgjedhjet eshte moszgjedhja e presidentit, partite ne programet politike keto zgjedhje duhet me i ofru ne rend te pare qendrimet e tyre per zgjedhjen e presidentit. Jo zgjedhje pa zgjidhje.

COORDINATE ME 2026 30 maj 2026, e shtunë 10:00-14:00 në Prishtina Hackerspace Po mblidhemi për të kontribuar në Wikidata në kuadër të garës ndërkombëtare të gjeolokimit COORDINATE ME 2026. Regjistrohuni këtu: forms.gle/kkPfps2jvU39ufDT8 Më shumë informata 👇

Serbian students would like to reclaim Kosovo. However, standing in their way is this truck, which was found in the Danube in early April 1999. It was filled with the bodies of Kosovo Albanian civilians - killed by the Serbian state.

Croatia Airlines Airbus A220-300 veers off the runway after a high speed rejected takeoff in Split yesterday.

Hotel Turizmi, Kukës

Total Jobs Created by Party (1989-2026): Democratic Presidents 50,600,000 Republican Presidents 1,469,000 The biggest scam the GOP has ever pulled off is convincing people that Republicans are good for the economy.

UN treaty body CERD confirms systematic discrimination against Albanians in the Presheva Valley: • Suspension of permanent addresses, blocking renewal of IDs and passports and restricting political, civil rights • Widespread hate speech and negative stereotyping in the media