DioGuardi Gets Kosovo Citizenship, Warns Over President

Kosovo’s acting president, Albulena Haxhiu, presented citizenship decrees in Pristina to former U.S. Congressman Joseph “Joe” DioGuardi and his wife, Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi. The ceremony took place on August 24 and marked the couple’s decades long advocacy for Albanian and Kosovo causes in the United States. Haxhiu, who continues to lead Kosovo’s parliament alongside her role as acting president, presented the decrees in person, along with a message of gratitude.

The ceremonial part of the event, however, gave way to a direct political message. DioGuardi reminded those gathered that Kosovo still has no elected president and that the duties are being carried out by the speaker of parliament. “I’m here with you to make sure you will have a president, and I hope that happens before I leave. If it doesn’t happen before I leave, you will be in big trouble,” the former congressman told those present at the ceremony.

The warning comes as the institutional vacancy in Pristina drags on for months now. Ever since the previous parliament failed to agree on a candidate for head of state, the constitutional function has been carried out by the speaker of parliament, in this case Haxhiu. Reporters asked her after the ceremony about the election of a new president. Her answer was brief. “We are working to find a new president,” Haxhiu said, without naming a date for a new round of voting or a possible candidate.

The citizenship award itself carries symbolism reaching back three and a half decades. In 1986, as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New York, DioGuardi became the first person in Washington to raise the issue of rights violations against Albanians in what was then Yugoslavia, at a time when Kosovo, as was repeatedly noted in Pristina that evening, was an almost unknown subject in the American capital. Three years later, in 1989, the couple founded the Albanian American Civic League and used it to keep lobbying Congress even after DioGuardi left public office.

Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi has since built her own role in that story, chiefly as a writer and foreign policy analyst. Her name is also tied to the trial of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic before the Hague tribunal, where she testified in 2002. Kosovo’s institutions had already honored the couple’s advocacy with a presidential medal, so the citizenship grant is more a continuation of that relationship than its start.

Haxhiu accompanied the presentation with words that left no ambiguity toward her guests. “Congratulations, Joe and Shirley, and thank you for everything you have done for Kosovo,” she told them, adding a line that was cited across Pristina as the most quoted of the day: “Welcome to your second country.”

Unlike the ceremonial part of the event, DioGuardi’s message about the presidency remains an open question of Kosovo’s domestic politics, not a diplomatic gesture toward two new citizens. He said there are, in his words, “enemies ready to upset the balance in the Balkans,” and that Kosovo’s lack of a president leaves it further exposed to that risk, though he named no concrete deadline beyond his own departure from Kosovo. Haxhiu, for her part, did not deny that the presidential election is stalled, nor did she offer a timeline. Until a candidate emerges in Kosovo’s parliament with the necessary majority, she will keep carrying out the role herself, leaving the former congressman’s warning on record with no answer yet to when it might be resolved.