On the 35th anniversary of the 1991 referendum, Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti recalled the developments of that period. He published a photograph of the ballot paper and said that, from September 26 to 30, people across Kosovo voted on declaring the country a sovereign and independent state.
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Kurti said that 1,051,357 citizens were eligible to vote, while 914,802 took part in the referendum, or 87.01 percent. A total of 913,705 people voted in favor, 164 against, while 933 ballots were declared invalid.
He described the referendum as a moment of historic importance because, according to him, for the first time the people of Kosovo expressed their position through a vote on the country’s political future.
“Through this referendum, the people of Kosovo communicated to Europe and the democratic world their political aspiration for Kosovo to be an independent and sovereign state, equal to other democratic states,” Kurti wrote.
The prime minister noted that the 1991 process came after the Constitutional Declaration of July 2, 1990, and the adoption of the Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo in Kaçanik on September 7, 1990.
Kurti linked the events of that year to the peaceful and armed resistance in the years that followed, as well as to NATO’s intervention in 1999.
He also mentioned the period he described as a time of “oppression and state violence,” “economic exploitation and political discrimination,” and “ethnic cleansing”—actions he attributed to Serbia’s regime.
In conclusion, Kurti expressed gratitude to generations of activists who, according to him, contributed to the path toward freedom, independence, democracy and the building of the state of Kosovo.
