A J'accuse for the language of the Prosecution that today attempted to judge the war, memory and the very meaning of liberation, before the Court has spoken.ur
Baton Haxhiu
There are moments when a person does not write to convince others. They write to not betray what they have seen with their own eyes. The KLA war.
I listened to the closing argument of the Prosecutor's Office in The Hague and for a few minutes I was no longer listening to an indictment. I was listening to a story about a war that I had seen with my own eyes, but that I no longer recognized from the way it was being described. In that hall, they were not just talking about four people. They were talking about an entire story with a language that sounded foreign, cold and dangerous at the same time. And when 45 years in prison were requested for each of them, I realized that what was happening was no longer a legal monologue. It was a clash with memory. An attempt to narrate freedom with a vocabulary that does not belong to it.
Today I am not speaking as a journalist. Nor as Baton. I am speaking as a man who saw that war with his own eyes. Who saw those people with mud on their shoes, with broken sleep, with faces that no longer belonged to ordinary life, but to a time that had neither name nor guarantee. And when I heard the Prosecutor's Office in The Hague asking for 45 years in prison for each of them, I did not feel anger. I felt a cold emptiness. Like when you realize that something is ending in the most wrong way possible.
It's not the years that shocked me. It's the language. It's the narrative. It's the way the war was talked about, the people, what happened. It didn't seem like an indictment of individuals. It seemed like a description of a story that I had lived, but that I no longer recognized from the way it was being told.
In that hall, for a few minutes, it seemed as if freedom was in the dock.
And there I realized something that I had written since 2018, but that today I felt to my bones. The danger was not legal. The danger was moral. Psychological. Historical. The danger was that a prosecutorial language would become the language of history.
That's why today I don't have a reaction. I have a call.
I accuse.
First, to the Prosecution. Not to the Court. Because the Court has not yet spoken. But the language of the Prosecution today was an act in itself. An act that transcended the file, that transcended the individual, that touched the war, touched memory, touched what for us is called liberation. A language that had no regard for the historical weight of what it was describing. A language that, instead of being sterile, legalistic, cold, became a narrative.
Second, to those who testified falsely. And to those Albanians who, out of hatred for the elites, out of frustration, out of a desire to see politicians in the dock, demanded this trial without understanding what they were putting on the table. They were not just putting names on the table. They were putting their history on the table. They were putting their struggle on the table. They were putting the very meaning of freedom on the table.
Third, towards Serbia. Because today in The Hague I didn't just hear a prosecutor. I heard language that was frighteningly consistent with the narrative that Belgrade has been repeating for 25 years. A language where the KLA is no longer a liberation movement, but a criminal structure. A language where war is no longer a reaction to oppression, but a source of crime. A language where history is overturned with legal caution.
And this coincidence is not a coincidence. It is an alarm.
I have known them. I have seen them in war. I have seen them up close, in moments that you cannot forget. I have seen them not as politicians, but as people caught in a vortex that they had not chosen, but that they had no way of avoiding. And today, when I heard that proposal, I no longer saw their faces. I saw the faces of those nameless boys, of those women who carried water, of those families who opened their doors to strangers. I saw all that time that was mentioned today in a tone that seemed foreign to me.
That's why I say it with painful cynicism.
Why don't you condemn freedom to death?
Because 45 years for each is not simply a sentence request. It is a sentence that sounds like a symbolic punishment of what was freedom for us. And if this is the language in which that time will be narrated, then you better say it bluntly. That there are not just four people in the dock. It is a story. A memory. An experienced truth.
The court has not yet spoken. And that is precisely why I still have hope. Because only a fair court can cleanse the shame of today's language. Only a fair decision can stop this slide where the prosecution begins to write history.
Today I'm not angry. I'm shocked. And that's worse.
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