Kosovo and Turkey: Mutual cooperation or exploitation to detain opponents?

Mohammed Abdul Ghaffar

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has succeeded in transforming all international steps and measures from a cooperative aimed at bringing security throughout the world into an unbearable evil to serve his repressive and authoritarian ambitions. Instead of using international cooperation to extradite criminals, Erdogan uses these agreements to detain his opponents in many countries.

Apparent good, hidden evil

Countries have cooperated with each other to ratify agreements that contribute to detaining dangerous criminals, regardless of their whereabouts, and Interpol was established to hand these criminals over between countries with the aim of establishing global peace and security. However, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) regime has used these agreements, especially after the scripted military coup in Turkey in June 2016, as a pretext to detain and dispose of Erdogan’s opponents abroad, accusing them of participating in the implementation of the military coup and supporting Fethullah Gulen.

In April 2018, the Turkish government announced a joint operation between the Turkish Intelligence Organization and its counterpart in Kosovo to recover 80 Turks accused of joining Gulen’s Hizmet movement, which the Turkish government described as “the secret operation.”

It was clear that the operation was secret even to former Kosovar Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj, who sent a telegram of protest to Ankara and sacked senior security officials in his country, including the minister of interior and the head of intelligence. However, Kosovar President Hashim Thaçi was aware of the operation and rejected the dismissals.

In the same year, instead of the rendition process, Ankara resorted to requesting Kosovo to deport a doctor and five Turkish teachers working for organizations affiliated with Hizmet, which was approved by Pristina.

The Kosovar parliament resorted to summoning President Thaçi in April 2019 to stand before the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee to clarify the nature of security cooperation between Kosovo and Turkey, but the president refused to appear because of the presence of an international expert on the investigation committee.

It seems that there is a secret agreement between Thaçi and Erdogan to exchange opponents of each other’s regime, as Erdogan handed him two opponents of the Kosovar regime present in Turkey.

In an official statement, the Turkish Ministry of Interior announced in December 2019 the deportation of two persons from Kosovo as part of the deportation of foreign terrorists in the country.

Neither authorities in Turkey or Kosovo revealed the nature or identity of the two people deported from Ankara, which raised doubts about the nature of the operation and its aims.

Economic support to serve security goals

During his visit to Kosovo in 2013, Erdogan said that “Turkey is Kosovo and Kosovo is Turkey”, in a clear indication of the nature of the Turkish orientation and goals in controlling Kosovo.

According to the official website of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Turkey views the Balkans and Kosovo as “important for Ankara in terms of geographic, political, economic, historical, cultural and human ties, as the Balkans region, which geographically constitutes an extension of Turkey on the European continent, is very important for Turkey because of its special position in the historical process of forming the Turkish nation and regional integration.”

This is evident in official data from the Turkish Ministry of Economy, which indicated that direct Turkish investments in Kosovo and the Balkans amounted to approximately $10 billion at the end of 2016.