Today, the March for Justice took place in Pristina, in support of former KLA leaders who are being tried in The Hague.
Thousands of protesters were present in the capital to show their support for Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniti and Rexhep Selimi.
Reuters also reported on this protest. The report notes that thousands of people participated and that closing statements in this trial are being held these days.
Reporting of Reuters:
Thousands in Kosovo protest war crimes trial of former KLA commanders
– Thousands of people gathered in Pristina on Tuesday, holding banners of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), to protest against the trial of former KLA leaders, including a former president, accused of war crimes during the 1998–99 war for independence.
Former President Hashim Thaçi, former Speakers of Parliament Jakup Krasniqi and Kadri Veseli, and former MP Rexhep Selimi were arrested in 2020 and sent to face trial at the special Kosovo war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
Thaçi and three other former KLA commanders are accused of persecution, murder, torture and enforced disappearance of persons during and immediately after the 1998–99 uprising, which ultimately brought independence for the Albanian-majority region from Serbia.
They deny all charges.
The court is hearing closing arguments in the trial this week, before judges issue a final verdict within three months. Prosecutors are seeking a sentence of 45 years for each.
“Those who deserve to be in The Hague are the occupiers, not the liberators,” said Miran Zeka, 49, who had come from Albania to protest in Pristina.
“We fought on our own land, we didn’t go to Serbia to fight,” said Bekim Muja, 53, a veteran of the 1998–99 Kosovo war.
Many protesters wore KLA uniforms, while others waved KLA, Kosovo and Albanian flags. Supporters held banners reading “Freedom has a name” and pictures of Thaçi and others with the words “Heroes of War and Peace.”
Thaçi, 57, served as prime minister, foreign minister and president of independent Kosovo between 2008 and 2020.
More than 13,000 people, most of them Kosovo Albanians, are believed to have lost their lives during the uprising in the late 1990s, when Kosovo was still a province of Serbia under then-nationalist president Slobodan Milošević, whose troops violently suppressed ethnic Albanians.
The Kosovo Specialist Chambers, made up of international judges and lawyers, were established in 2015 to handle war crimes cases under Kosovo law against former KLA fighters. The war crimes tribunal was set up outside the small Balkan country due to concerns about witness intimidation, as former KLA leaders are seen by many in Kosovo as heroes of national liberation.
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