In his family, Kosovo will have a “special place”.
Joe Biden said this in February 2021, when he sent a letter to the then acting president of Kosovo, Vjosa Osmani, to congratulate her on Independence Day.
“Kosovo continues to hold a special place for the Biden family, in honor of the time our late son, Beau Biden, spent working to ensure peace, justice and the rule of law for all the people of Kosovo,” Biden wrote in that letter.
The 46th president of the United States withdrew on July 21 from this year’s presidential race.
The pressure on him to back down began at the end of June, after the first presidential debate with the Republican opponent, Donald Trump, in which Biden admitted that he had not performed well.
Biden, 81, was in politics for more than fifty years.
Over three decades senator from the state of Dellauer, two terms as vice president of Barack Obama and one term as president.
When he took the highest political post in the USA on January 20, 2021, Osmani said that “the head of the USA, from today, is the friend of Kosovo”.
Biden’s support for Kosovo started early, as a senator.
It was October 1998, when he, together with other senators, expressed support for NATO’s military actions against Serbia, to stop the violence in Kosovo.
NATO launched its bombing campaign on March 24, 1999.
Just two days before the first attacks were launched, the US Congress was still divided over the decision.
Then-Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison said that President Bill Clinton’s administration “has no plan for what to do after the bombings.”
In that session, Biden said the airstrikes “are in the interest of US security.”
He said that the war was threatening the credibility of NATO, while “the massive wave of refugees would destabilize the fragile democracies in Macedonia and Albania”.
“The national interests of the United States are directly threatened by the continued aggressive actions of the Yugoslav Government in Kosovo,” Biden said on March 22, 1999.
In a statement broadcast by VOA, Biden said his work to end the Yugoslav wars was one of the “proudest moments” of his long political career.
In an op-ed for the Washington Times in 2004, then-Senator Biden said that “no serious observer believes that Kosovo – sometime in the future – will be led by Belgrade” and added that “the resolution of Kosovo’s status is not makes you slang for a long time”.
When Kosovo declared independence on February 17, 2008, Biden was among the first in the US to greet it and invited his colleagues to express “the Senate’s support” for it.
In a March 2008 speech, Biden, as chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that “any attempt by Belgrade to foment chaos in northern Kosovo or the Republika Srpska of Bosnia and Herzegovina must be dealt with with speed and determination from the European Union and from NATO”.
In 2009, only after four months in the post of American vice president, Biden visited Kosovo.
“The United States has made it clear that the recognition of Kosovo’s independence is irreversible and this will not change,” said Biden on May 21, 2009, in Pristina.
A few months after Kosovo reached the first agreement on the normalization of relations with Serbia, in 2013, the then vice president, Biden, hosted the then prime minister of Kosovo, Hashim Thaçi, at the White House.
In that case, Biden emphasized the importance of full and swift implementation of that agreement.
As vice president, Biden also stayed in Kosovo in 2016, when he participated in the inauguration ceremony of the Ferizaj-Gjilan road named after his late son, Beau Biden.
Beau Biden — who served in Kosovo after the war ended in 1999 to help train local prosecutors and judges — died of brain cancer in 2015.
In February 2021, after one month in office, Biden wrote a letter to the then acting president of Kosovo, Vjosa Osmani, telling her that the US is ready to work with the new Government of Kosovo. which had emerged from that month’s elections.
Less than two months later, Biden wrote another letter to Osman, to congratulate him on his election to the position of president and to emphasize that the normalization of relations with Serbia requires “difficult compromises”.
That same year, in July, Biden accepted the Presidential Medal from Kosovo for his late son.
Thanking President Osmani through a video message, Biden said that his son has loved Kosovo and added that the USA will remain its “steadfast partner”.
During his presidency, Biden several times encouraged Kosovo, but also Serbia, to normalize relations with each other.
But, during this period, senior American officials also criticized Kosovo for, as they said, some unilateral and uncoordinated actions, which, according to them, questioned the partnership with the USA.
And Biden, during his last visit to Kosovo in 2016 – at that time as vice president – commissioned him: “Your success is extremely in the interest of my country. If you succeed, the region will succeed.” /REL
