Ibrahim Rugova, the President who lifted a nation in a low tone!

By Arian Galdini

In the beginning there was no myth, no statue, no title carved in stone.

There was simply a meeting between two people.

A hand that gripped mine calmly, a low voice speaking beneath the noise of history,

a plain scarf beside an overflowing bookshelf.

September 1999.

The Office of the President of Kosova in Prishtina.

Outside, streets worn down by tank tracks, the dust of bombings on the pavements,

hope mixed with exhaustion in the eyes of people who had just stepped out of refugee columns.

Inside, a slight, quiet man, with eyes that looked beyond you and yet managed to hold a warm ray of light on you.

Ibrahim Rugova, President of a Kosova newly saved and not yet rebuilt, handed me two medals: “Mother Teresa” and “Skanderbeg.”

I held them and felt at once that they were not simply decorations.

Two poles of his vision were being entrusted into my hands,the mercy of Mother Teresa and the gravity of Skanderbeg.

Before he gave them, he let his gaze rest on the medals one last time, without pathos,

as if he were not checking their form, but testing whether I was ready to bear their weight.

Then he placed them in my hands and, in that low tone of his, more confidential than ceremonial, left me with an unspoken testament, this country will need, for a long time, people who love it without slogans,

who serve it without showing off, who take responsibility even when no one is calling their name, even when no one is watching.

He had no need to speak at length or to raise his voice.

His quiet presence filled the room like a thin blanket of snow over scorched earth,

lowering its temperature.

Even the silence, inside that room, invited you to sit, to think, to let go of every excess.

With him, leadership felt more like the temperature of the air than the volume of a microphone.

Kosovo in the Rugova years lived between two horizons.

On one side, an old horizon, heavy with the bandages of a federation coming apart

and the violence of a state tightening the noose.

On the other, a new horizon opening toward independence and the West.

On such a stage, many leaders quickly turn into tribunes of anxiety.

Rugova chose to become an architect of maturity.

He understood that Kosova would not be judged only by the moment of liberation,

but by the way it walked toward that moment.

Freedom won through shouts and fire leaves one kind of mark on a people, freedom won through patience and dignity leaves another.

He saw himself as President of an in-between time, between fear and courage, between imposed silence and a deliberate voice.

In every meeting with him you felt he was not merely administering a mandate.

He was translating an epoch from the language of fear into the language of responsibility.

Every great figure leaves behind a few signs that cannot be replaced.

With Rugova, three stand out clearly, the book, the stone, and the scarf.

The book, because he came from literary criticism and had learned to live long with texts.

One who lives with text understands that reality is as much narration as it is fact.

He did not read only poems or novels, he read Kosova as an open text, written in letters of blood and silence.

Between lines and pages he saw the map of wounds, of curses, of unfinished dreams.

As a critic, he knew how a sentence is edited.

As a leader, he edited the way we told our story, he took Kosova out of the chapter “we are forgotten” and placed it in the chapter “we know how to knock as equals.”

The stone, because he chose to stand in one place even as the currents of history rushed in violent, clashing directions.

In a square of leaders constantly on the move from studio to studio, he chose to become a stone, so that his people might have a point against which to measure themselves, not a spectacle meant to dazzle.

He did not seek to be everywhere,he did the opposite, he became a coordinate.

When you knew where Rugova stood, you knew where the wavering ended and the moral axis of the country began.

The scarf, because for him aesthetics was not an external luxury but a word without sound.

The scarf on his suit, without flamboyance, told Kosova and the world that a President could be an intellectual, a reader, a man of quiet, without stepping an inch away from the seriousness of responsibility.

The scarf became his intimate flag, a signal that Albanians could step onto the world stage not only with wounds, but with culture.

He brought a different image of the Albanian leader, he does not have to descend from a horse, he can walk down the steps of a library staircase, with a book in his hand and a scarf on his shoulders, not with a raised fist and a pounding on the table.

Often Rugova has been described in the tension between word and silence.

In truth, three languages spoke through him, word, silence, and presence.

He spoke little, in measured sentences that stayed in your mind.

His silences were full, the time he did not speak was the time the word was being weighed.

He was present with his quiet body, in the way he sat, the way he folded his hands,

the way he lifted his eyes, you could read his stance.

His silence was never submission to injustice.

It was refusal to become part of the noise that feeds injustice.

He knew the Balkans is held hostage by the unthinking word, by rhetoric that ignites crowds and burns bridges.

This part of the world does not suffer from too few voices, it suffers from too little conscience able to stop them.

Instead of competing over who could shout louder, Rugova built an architecture

of moral and aesthetic silence.

He gave Kosova the rare luxury of not reacting to the rhythm of the latest soundbite, but to the rhythm of dignity.

A people that emerges from pain has two choices, to use it as an alibi for every excess, or to turn it into a memory that makes it more just.

Rugova chose the second.

He taught Kosova a third language, the quiet presence that guards the word until the moment when it truly matters.

It is the language of those who trust time, not the effect of the instant.

A literary critic knows that a text is not read only line by line, but in layers.

On the surface you read events, beneath them, motives, deeper still, metaphors.

That is how Rugova read Kosova.

On the surface, he saw a people oppressed, without a state, pushed into queues, into camps, into refugee lists.

Beneath that surface he saw a whole anthropology, the pride of ordinary people, the culture of “you are welcome,” the besa that held even when laws did not protect.

Deeper still, he saw an unspoken thirst to be part of the modern world without selling one’s soul for a visa.

He did not approach his people as an emotional mass to be manipulated, nor as a crowd to be used at a rally.

He saw them as a subject that could learn, grow, mature.

He did not spoil them, did not sing them political lullabies.

He did not feed them the story “we are forgotten and victims” as their only identity.

He taught them to describe themselves as a people who know how to claim their place without becoming executioners.

In this sense, Rugova gave Kosova a rare chance to look at itself in the mirror without illusion, without make-up, without hysteria,

with simple, hard questions:

Who are we?

What do we want to become?

What will we refuse to become again?

In the Rugova years, Kosova, almost without realising it, became a quiet school of inner leadership.

He embodied, without ever quoting a manual, what theories call transformational leadership and servant leadership.

A leader is not the one who multiplies his privileges, but the one who turns values into social energy.

He does not ask first “what do I gain?”, but “what do my people become as a result of what I am doing?”

In plain terms, Rugova sat at the opposite end of power.

He did not seek to dominate, he sought to lead.

To lead means to go first along the road you ask others to follow.

He took himself to the place where he wanted to take Kosova, the side of dignity, of peace, of reason.

He did not put on a diplomatic mask just for show abroad.

He built the image from within: in the way law was lived in daily life, in how people stood in line, how they spoke on television,

how they disagreed without insult, resisted without hatred.

This is a civilisational transformation.

Politics usually promises results, Rugova gave his country a new face.

To make Rugova purely perfect would be an injustice.

His pacifism had its human and historical limits.

There were years when the patience of Kosovar society showed cracks.

People waited for movement.

The young wanted action.

In the diaspora, pain translated into anger.

On to the stage came the KLA, born from the same wound, with its own undeniable logic in a particular set of circumstances.

Rugova could not control all these forces.

His pacifism was read, depending on the eye that watched, sometimes as greatness, sometimes as hesitation.

He accepted the risk of being misread, but he did not put his conscience up for auction in exchange for another round of applause.

The antidote he built did not heal every wound.

But it averted the greatest danger, that a wounded people might grow to resemble the hand that had struck it.

We can debate at length the relationship between peaceful and armed resistance.

History, however, has already sealed one verdict, without the moral ground he prepared, without the quiet conviction

that this people is not a band of avengers,

Kosova would have found it far harder to be understood as just in the eyes of the world.

Foundations do not solve everything.

But without foundations, no freedom stands for long.

When he gave me the “Mother Teresa” and “Skanderbeg” medals, there was no fanfare.

The medals sat quietly in a box on the table.

He handed them to me, leaned in, and almost in a low family voice, whispered a sentence I can no longer quote word for word, but whose core remains intact in me, this country needs people who do not use its name to build careers, but carry it in their conscience as a burden.

He was not speaking about himself.

He was speaking about us.

Those medals did not arrive as adornment for a CV.

They arrived as a debt.

As a call that from that moment on, “you are no longer only yours, you also belong to this name you carry.”

He treated me not as a supporter seeking a blessing, but as someone who had to ready himself for responsibility.

Since then, I read it this way, anyone who stands in front of people with words, decisions, initiatives enters an irreversible obligation not to humiliate the dignity of this people.

That is my true understanding of those two medals.

That is why I call them political sacraments.

Today, as we look at reality in Albania, in Kosova and in the diaspora, state capture, corruption, mass departures, tired souls, Rugova’s figure stands before us as an open exam.

He asks us simply:

Are we raising our people to a higher level of morality and freedom, or are we using them to protect ourselves and our circle?

We often see leaders competing for volume, who shouts louder, who promises more, who builds the bigger stage set.

Rugova stands to the side and reminds us, leadership is not measured by the voice that is heard, but by the straight line that runs through a life story, especially where there are no cameras.

Few words, much weight.

Few gestures, much meaning.

Beyond his tired body, beyond a biography of light and shadow, Rugova can be read as a concept.

“Rugova” as concept means:

• leadership that raises the moral level of society, not only the level of concrete gains;

• politics that does not turn into private business, but into public service;

• an Albanian who affirms his identity without trampling anyone else;

• a relationship with the West that is not imitation, but dialogue between equals;

• a silence that carries thought and responsibility, not fear;

• an outward dignity that springs from inner deeds, not from stage props.

If this becomes a criterion and not just a slogan, it can serve as the backbone of a different school of leadership in this country.

The risk with great figures is that, as the years go by, we leap too quickly from life to marble.

We are left only with the bust, without the risks they took, the exhaustion they bore, the dilemmas they lived through.

Only the halo remains.

Rugova does not need myth-making.

He needs to be read rightly.

Read as a President who spared his people the kind of rhetoric that would have destroyed their European path.

Read as an intellectual who made political language more just, more measured, more human.

Read as a simple man who sat in an ordinary chair, shook hands, handed out medals without fanfare, and spoke little, until you realised that those few words were placing a different kind of responsibility on our shoulders.

He did not only teach his people how to gain freedom.

He taught them how not to lose themselves the moment they had it.

Rugova leaves us a permanent exam.

Every time we choose convinced calm over empty noise, we move a little closer to him.

Every time we choose dignity over derision, we become a little more like him.

Every time we refuse to trade truth for comfort, we know we are not betraying his bequest.

In the end, Ibrahim Rugova is not only the first President of Kosova, nor only the leader of peaceful resistance.

He is a conscience that took a small people out of the shadow of history and placed them in the light without blinding them, a quiet force that told the Balkans that freedom can be built without a scream, a measured word that gave this nation a new tone, the tone of maturity.

That is our debt to him: to carry that tone forward.

To love Kosova, Albania and Albanians wherever they are not with shouting, but with work, not with big words, but with straight gestures, not with a wounded heart that seeks revenge, but with a wounded heart that chooses dignity.

Just as Ibrahim Rugova taught us.

Arian Galdini