War & Peace Quote by Ibrahim Rugova

“Activate the public enterprises” is bureaucratic phrasing with a tell: it treats whole sectors of an economy like dormant machines that simply need switching on. Coming from Ibrahim Rugova, the soft-spoken face of Kosovo’s political project, the sentence is less about managerial technique than about sovereignty under pressure. In the two and a half years “that have followed the war,” the urgent problem is framed not as justice, reconciliation, or even basic reconstruction, but as readiness for “international markets.” That choice of urgency is the context doing the talking: post-conflict Kosovo was being rebuilt under heavy international supervision, with aid money, legitimacy, and diplomatic support tethered to a familiar script of liberalization and market reform.

The subtext is a careful balancing act. Rugova is reassuring external stakeholders that Kosovo will be legible to them: disciplined, investment-ready, aligned with global economic norms. “The level that international markets demand” quietly shifts accountability away from local politics and toward an impersonal standard-setter. If factories close, jobs vanish, or assets are sold cheaply, it can be presented as compliance with necessity rather than a choice.

Then comes the loaded phrase: “prepared for privatization.” Preparation implies inevitability, as if privatization is the natural endpoint of competence rather than an ideological decision with winners and losers. The sentence functions as a pledge: we are modernizing, we are governable, we will convert wartime wreckage into a market-friendly state. It’s statecraft in the language of conditional acceptance.