Paris, 9 November 2026
Ahead of the official opening of the Paris Peace Forum, Prime Minister of the Republic of Kosovo Albin Kurti met with French figures who, in various ways, have ties to or have contributed to Kosovo.
Those attending the meeting included Alain Richard, former Minister of Defence and a supporter of NATO’s intervention to stop the war crimes and ethnic cleansing perpetrated against Kosovo Albanians by Serbia’s state apparatus in 1999; Gilles Pernet, an army officer and former senior administrator in the Department of Strategic Affairs at the Ministry of Defence, together with Sébastien Gricourt are co-authors of the book Kosovo: récits sur la construction d’un État. Sébastien Gricourt is a valued friend and staunch supporter of our Republic; Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, an anthropologist and researcher whose work focuses on sexual violence in wars and conflicts. She has been engaged with Kosovo since the 1990s and is the author of Kosovo: un drame annoncé. She is the daughter of the renowned philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin; Frédérique Duversin, Director of the Kosovo Cultural Centre in Paris, who has supported our people and state since the last decade of the twentieth century, while also promoting our culture and supporting our students and artists, as well as our art and culture; and Florence Hartmann, a journalist and former Le Monde correspondent, with extensive knowledge of international justice and the Western Balkans, who served as adviser and spokesperson to the former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. She is the author of several books, including Milosevic, la diagonale du fou.
“We discussed democratic progress and sustainable and continuous economic development, investment in security and defence, the unjust judgment of 16 September and efforts to have it overturned on appeal,” Prime Minister Kurti said.
Prime Minister Kurti also spoke about the plans for the new governing mandate and France’s important role in the Republic of Kosovo’s path towards Euro-Atlantic integration.
