By Enver Robelli
On the occasion of the death of the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner, Mario Vargas Llosa. He was a great supporter of the freedom of Kosovo. Coincidentally, the date of his death - April 13, 2025 - became a bridge with a major essay of his on Kosovo, published on April 13, 1999 in an Argentine newspaper.
Literature, wrote Mario Vargas Llosa, is created as a result of dissatisfaction with one's own life. Is this true? Llosa, the most famous Peruvian in the world, at least in the literary sense, did not have many personal reasons to be dissatisfied. To cope with unpleasant things, he found literature as a mechanism. He said so himself.
Sensitivity and imagination - these are prerequisites for being a writer. Sometimes imagination leads you down the wrong path. In his youth, Llosa was an admirer of the left, personified by Fidel Castro. A trip to the Soviet Union traumatized Llosa so much that he began to give up his leftist illusions. "Could I still defend a social model when I already knew that I myself could never live like that?"
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, another star of Latin American literature, remained loyal to Marxism. He paid dearly for this, as evidenced by a photograph showing bruises on his face - the result of a punch by Mario Vargas Llosa. The sceptics posed the dilemma of whether this fight was about politics or about a woman? “I will never talk about that,” Llosa said in an interview with the German newspaper “Süddeutsche Zeitung” in 2016.
He was aware that there are not only bright sides to a person's life. "If I am ever remembered, it would be nice if it was because of my books," he said. For his books he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, became a member of the French Academy, the first non-French author, and was decorated with many prizes, recognitions and literary decorations around the world, especially in the Spanish-speaking cultural landscape. "Writing novels is a rebellion against reality, against God, against God's creation, which is reality itself."
Mario Vargas Llosa was an opponent of Latin American autocrats. And he did not spare harsh words against them. “A complete disaster” - that's how he called the government of Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. How would he call her ultraliberal successor Javier Milei? There was no dilemma about left-wing populism in Venezuela: there Llosa saw only “demagogy, corruption and violence”. Perhaps he would also say something about Milei if Llosa had not announced in 2024 that he would no longer write columns in the newspaper “El País”. On that occasion he announced that he would no longer write novels.
About 20 novels are his legacy to readers. This is his message: “A society of readers is freer and more critical. The effect of literature is to make people critical creatures. A people that does not read is much more easily manipulated. Good readers are rebels, in the political, religious, sexual sense. Literature is not just entertainment. Obviously, reading Shakespeare is entertaining, Cervantes, Goethe, Thomas Mann, wonderful. But beyond the pleasure we benefit more: the idea that alongside our own life there are other lives, which are more intense, more prosperous. This creates within us a kind of rebellion against reality”.
Mario Vargas Llosa was a political author. He wrote: “When you systematically deceive everyone, you betray yourself and contribute to your own moral degradation. In an environment filled with corruption, of course you have to be a hero to go against the current. Most people are not born heroes, but if there is a single one who takes on this role, at least others learn that this possibility exists.” He tried to become a political hero, running for president in 1990 and losing to Alberto Fujimori, a descendant of Japanese exiles who ruled with a strong hand during the 1990s. Between 2009 and 2023 he remained in prison, convicted, among other things, of corruption and crimes against humanity. What would the Peruvian state look like with a great writer in the presidential palace? That remains a matter of imagination. Few writers feel comfortable in active politics.
Mario Vargas Llosa's main novels have also been translated into Albanian. Perhaps he has not been read as much as he deserves, but his name has become known, especially in the Albanian society of Kosovo, thanks to his essays in favor of Kosovo's freedom, in support of NATO intervention, and in opposition to the dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic.
In his essay “The Head of Milosevic”, published on April 13, 1999, exactly 26 years ago in the Argentine newspaper “La Nacion”, Llosa was farsighted about the dangers that could be threatened to Kosovo (and Bosnia) by propaganda. He underlined: “I am sure that if the community that experienced the suffering and plunder that the Bosnians experienced or that the Kosovars are experiencing now were Christian, the reaction of public opinion and Western governments would have been much faster and that in the West there would never have been parts of the general public opinion that would insist that their governments remain idle in the face of these crimes.
It is something that is not said or is said in a low voice and among trusted people: are we creating a Moloch among us, a fundamentalist Islamic regime allied with Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and the ayatollahs in the heart of Europe? Are we, in a way, Milosevic and the Serbs fighting now, as Prince Lazarus fought with his Serbs on June 28, 1389, precisely in this Kosovo, against the barbaric and fanatical crescent, the eternal enemy of Christian and civilized Europe?
These questions, meanwhile, receive affirmative answers from far-right parties in some Western countries. The world of 2025 seems so distant from the world of 1999. The West of that time is different from the West of today. Only the political class of Kosovo continues to stubbornly refuse to understand the major geopolitical changes. The self-sufficiency of Kosovar society, the behavior as if the West still has to pay off debts to Kosovo, is also noticeable in the neglect towards personalities who supported the liberation of Kosovo in the darkest moments of its history. One of them is Mario Vargas Llosa. Yes, his essays on Kosovo have been published in Albanian, but this was done thanks to private initiatives. The state, governments, ministries of culture and foreign affairs, academia, universities - everyone has remained indifferent. "An unforgettable evening with Mario Vargas Llosa in Pristina" - this could be the title of an article in a newspaper or digital platform. “Mario Vargas Llosa's Lecture in Prizren” - this would also be a nice title. These titles are now just figments of the imagination. Llosa will never come to Pristina, because Kosovars are free, but not liberated (from the shackles they constantly impose on themselves).
However, the famous Peruvian's monumental message remains: "NATO should not be criticized at all for its intervention in Yugoslavia; on the contrary, it should be criticized for doing so ten years late and for having ruled out any ground military intervention there, which gave the Belgrade dictatorship the green light to implement its plan for the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, one of the most terrible crimes against humanity of this century, comparable in nature, although not in number, to the Jewish Holocaust committed by Hitler or the displacement of peoples undertaken by Stalin during the Russification of the Soviet Union." (A2 Televizion)
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