In the midst of focused public attention on the horror of the pandemic and the uncertainty of the election results in the USA, last week the news arrived that the indictment against the three leaders of the former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) Hashim Thaci, Jakup Krasnići and Kadri Veselji was confirmed at the Special Court in The Hague (Netherlands) for acts in the field of war crimes.
On the same day that the news from the court in The Hague was published, on Thursday, November 5, 2020, Hashim Thaci resigned from the post of president with the argument that he had previously promised that "the president of Kosovo will not go to court". Thus, old comrades and until recently political leaders of Kosovo Albanians found themselves on the same plane on the way to the detention unit: the president, the president of the parliament and the former president of the parliament. In the 1998/99 war. were in different ways the leaders of the rebels gathered in the KLA: Tači as a political leader and military commander, Veselji as a "security guard" and Krasnići as a spokesman.
On Monday, November 9, the indictments were read to Krasnići and Thaci and they pleaded not guilty, with the request of their defense attorneys that the court let them defend themselves from liberty.
The Kossev portal from North Mitrovica reported some details from the indictment. These are war crimes of "illegal or arbitrary arrest and deprivation of liberty", "cruel treatment", "torture and murder", as well as crimes against humanity, such as "imprisonment, other inhumane acts, torture, murder, forced disappearances and persecutions". "; they took place from March 1998 to September 1999.
"In several locations throughout Kosovo, as well as in Kukesh and Cahan in northern Albania, members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) committed crimes from the indictment against hundreds of civilians and persons who did not participate in the hostilities," the Specialized Chamber announced on November 5 - the same on the day when the accused were arrested, that is, two days later in the case of Krasnići.
The victims are persons who were considered not to support the KLA and later the provisional government of Kosovo. These were Serbs, Roma and Ashkali, but also Albanians who were believed to cooperate with the Serbian authorities or communicate with the Serbs, support the Democratic League of Kosovo or were associated with that and other parties, those who did not join the KLA or did not support it , persons who, based on their current or former employment, were considered opponents of the KLA...
The confirmed indictment states that Hashim Thaci, Kadri Veselji, Redžep Seljimi and Jakup Krasnići are "individually criminally responsible under various forms of criminal responsibility for the criminal acts from the indictment, which were committed in the context of the armed conflict of a non-international character in Kosovo and which were part of a widespread and systematic attacks on persons who were considered to be opponents of the KLA".
Whatever the outcome of this procedure, one thing is certain: this trial of the leaders of the KLA puts an end to a bloody part of the history of that part of Serbia, in which it will be shown, or what the Serbian side has been claiming for decades now - that it was mostly a terrorist act , or will the stain be removed from the people who led the Albanian people in the struggle for liberation from Serbian apartheid, as is sometimes said in Kosovo about the period from 1990 to 1999.
Everyone who follows the political life in Kosovo and Serbia commented on this event as a good thing, and it seems that this is also the position of the accused: their voluntary departure seems to be a message that the "sanctity of the fight and heroism" of KLA members must not be tainted with stories about victims others because "the Republic of Kosovo was born out of the suffering of the Albanian people".
COURT FROM KOSOVO IN THE NETHERLANDS
Anyone who superficially follows the events in the Balkans and related to the wars in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, could think that the defendants from Kosovo went to the same court that existed in The Hague a decade and a half ago and where the trials of former Bosnian Serb leaders are still being completed. Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić. However, this court in The Hague is actually part of the Kosovo judicial system, in accordance with the Constitution and laws of the Republic of Kosovo. It is in The Hague and international judges and prosecutors work there because it was correctly assessed that it would be impossible to organize a trial of the KLA accused in Pristina.
Thači, Veselji and Krasnići are only the tip of the iceberg and, according to some analysts, they were chosen so that the court, the start of which was awaited for years, would immediately gain some kind of credibility by working on the most difficult and biggest cases.
Thus, twenty-one years after the end of the war in Kosovo, the question of the behavior of the KLA and its leaders in the war, who were recognized not only in Kosovo, but also in most Western countries, as freedom fighters against the "foreign invader" was opened. For years, only the atrocities and crimes of the Serbian side in the war were talked about, while other victims were neglected not only by international forces and the judiciary, but also by Serbia itself.
While in Kosovo the Kosovar identity was built based on the "liberation struggle" under the leadership of the KLA, Serbia tried to escape from that narrative, leaving numerous cases of war crimes documented by organizations such as the Humanitarian Law Fund or investigative journalists to institutional oblivion. It seemed as if everyone was doing well: the Albanians got what they wanted and are doing what they want to create their own state, and Serbia did not touch those responsible for war crimes except when it comes to cases before the Hague Tribunal.
This leveling lasted until 2008, when it was found out from the book of the former prosecutor Carla Del Ponte that there were traces of crimes against civilians in the Prokleti region on the Albanian side. Later, the American investigative journalist Michael Montgomery revealed that the knowledge about the existence of the camps organized by the KLA existed as early as 2003, but, as Montgomery himself later stated, no one could believe the story that the camps were used to extract organs from prisoners and sell them those bodies on the black market.
THE YELLOW HOUSE AND BLIND JUSTICE
The story of the "yellow house" discovered and documented by the investigators of the UN mission, and first mentioned by Carla Del Ponte and reported in detail by Montgomery, was the basis for the investigation conducted by Dick Marty, a Swiss politician and prosecutor for the Council of Europe.
His report on the "yellow house" in the hills of Albania will show all the cruelty and ferocity of the crimes organized by the KLA in the war in Kosovo; it combined war crimes and kidnapping and abuse and murder of civilians and organized crime - the sale of removed organs. It has been unequivocally proven that in the village of Burelj in Albania, the removal of organs from the bodies of prisoners was organized in order to then sell them through Kosovo and Turkey for the needs of various clinics.
This report was presented way back in 2010, and since then it has been said that the strongest leaders from Kosovo will someday have to answer for the crimes committed. The Dick Marty file, an official document of the Council of Europe, will serve as the basis for the creation of the Special Court in The Hague, which is currently conducting proceedings against Thaci and others.
In the meantime, all kinds of things happened in the relations between Kosovo and Serbia, not least in the field that is still discussed today as the basis of the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina: solving the issue of missing persons and property. If the Serbian regime carried out the so-called sanation of the terrain, which meant removing traces of the murdered victims and transporting their remains to mass graves around Belgrade and in other locations in central Serbia, the KLA also committed crimes during the war, especially in the period after the end of the bombing, when military structure established at the head of political institutions in Kosovo.
All this concerned the families of the victims more than the "state", which was preoccupied with some "bigger issues". The most drastic example is that in Belgrade, the memory of the missing Serbs was entrusted to an obscure figure, Simi Spasić, a "useful idiot" of the current government, who, with his bizarre actions, humiliated both the memory of the victims and the search for the truth about how those people died.
WHERE IS THE OTHER
In the days after the publication of the indictment and the departure of Thaci to The Hague, only the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, did not excessively deal with the subject. Namely, the two had joint plans on how to solve the "Kosovo issue" so that neither side feels defeated.
A cynic could say that just the day after Thaci's departure, he appeared furious on TV Pink and shouted at everyone because he was pained by Thaci's fall, which will surely keep him out of the political arena for a long time. Now that he and Veselji are gone, when Haradinaj is compromised - with whom will Belgrade negotiate? In Pristina, the successors of Thaci and Haradinaj are in power, but the strongest option is the one led by Aljbin Kurti, the leader of the Self-Determination movement; in his short tenure at the head of the Kosovo government, he refused to play to the tunes Thaci and Vučić were used to.
As it looks now - due to the corona virus epidemic, due to these turbulences in Pristina - there is nothing in the way of dialogue and attempts to "normalize relations". Pristina is waiting for a new reconstruction of the political scene, and during that time Belgrade will wait, as it has until now.
Those who will not wait are the people who will move out quietly, whether they are Serbs or Albanians. The war that ended 21 years ago has never brought peace, because there is neither justice nor law. And court decisions in the future will hardly bring reconciliation.
