Kosovo became a kind of magic word, after the war in former Yugoslavia. It was constantly on the news, but very few people understood what the complex issues really were. 2015 I met the first “real” people from Kosovo, MEPs from Vetëvendosje during a meeting Vienna. It was then that my interest in this tiny country grew more intense. When Ulrike Lunacek, presented her book „Frieden bauen, heißt weit bauen“ (Building peace, means building wider) in 2018, I simply knew I had to travel there. It took three more years until I set foot on Kosovo’s soil on a hot summer day in July 2021. Twenty years after Kosovo declared itself independant from Serbia it is not even recognized by all EU-memeber states, mainly those who have issues with minorities in their own countries, like Spain, Romania, Slovakia, Cyprus and Greece. The main problem: Serbia still sees Kosovo as a part of Serbia, especially in the north of the country the population is predominantly Serbian.
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