It is deeply unbelievable that NATO would have intervened in this conflict in favor of the KLA if its well-informed intelligence services had labeled its leaders as members of a criminal organization.
Written by Daan Everts
In Scheveningen, The Hague, there is an infamous prison: the “Oranjehotel.” During World War II, Dutch resistance fighters were locked up here, often awaiting their execution.
Today, it has been turned into a museum honoring the heroes of the resistance. In this same complex of buildings – part of which no longer houses ordinary prisoners – four resistance fighters from Kosovo have been held in pretrial detention for five and a half years: two and a half of them in the pretrial phase. Not as heroes of the resistance, as they are widely regarded in Kosovo, but as defendants for “war crimes”, “crimes against humanity” and “participation in a joint criminal enterprise”.
What a poignant irony!
These four prisoners are not just anyone: they are a former Prime Minister and President, two former Speakers of Parliament, and a former MP/chairman of the parliamentary group. All four were leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which aimed to end the Serbian apartheid regime in Kosovo during the 90s.
They chose guerrilla warfare after negotiations for broad self-government – the autonomy that Milosevic had stripped Kosovo of – proved fruitless. Although they reluctantly accepted the Western-brokered Rambouillet Accords in March 1999, the war escalated into full-scale war when the Serbian government under Milosevic refused to sign it. As in other wars during the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Serbs once again missed the opportunity for a positive solution.
That bloody war had its legal epilogue in The Hague through the so-called Hague Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which tried war crimes. In Serbia, and not entirely without reason, this court was accused of anti-Serb bias. Thus, when the Swiss senator of the Council of Europe, Dick Marty, published a report in 2011 accusing the leaders of the KLA of nothing less than trafficking in the organs of Serbian prisoners, Russia and Serbia rushed to demand special legal proceedings against the Kosovo Albanians.
This accusation was first leveled by Carla del Ponte of the Yugoslav Tribunal and later repeated by Clint Williamson, without providing any concrete evidence. Under immense international pressure and with the insistence on the ground by then-Deputy Prime Minister Thaçi – now one of the four defendants – independent Kosovo agreed to the establishment of the Special Court in 2015.
Although it legally became part of the Kosovo legal system, it was established in The Hague as a fully independent international institution, with supremacy over all local justice institutions.
The court is funded mainly by the EU and associated countries, but surprisingly it is run almost entirely by Americans.
The chief prosecutor is always American, as is the presiding judge, as well as the defense lawyers of the defendants. American justice in action on the “Raamweg” street in The Hague!
When the final indictment was released in October 2020, it became clear that the original and primary reason for the creation of this court – the phantom allegation of organ trafficking – no longer existed. Other charges, such as those mentioned above, now had to justify its very existence.
There are also more banal reasons that contribute to the tribunal's longevity: hundreds of highly coveted and often tax-exempt jobs, millions of euros invested without accountability, and international indifference to this process and the fate of the four Kosovars – especially now that the world's attention is focused on much larger war crimes, in much more important global regions.
The prosecution has now announced its request for a sentence: 45 years in prison. For the defendants, this practically means life imprisonment, since they are all over the age of 50. What makes the situation even more absurd is the fact that the so-called KLA zone commanders, who were much closer to the acts of resistance in the war zones, have been declared innocent, in the past, of similar charges by the Tribunal for Yugoslavia.
As I have seen and experienced firsthand, the KLA was highly decentralized, not to mention a very fragmented and disorganized organization. Local resistance groups operated almost independently and did not obey the higher leadership very much.
It is difficult to understand how the central leadership can be accused of involvement in local guerrilla activities, which undoubtedly included acts of revenge with fatal consequences. Former President Thaçi, for example, spent almost the entire war abroad.
It is also deeply implausible that NATO would have intervened in this conflict on behalf of the KLA if its well-informed intelligence services had identified its leaders as members of a criminal organization. Various witnesses from the highest military and diplomatic circles, including the former NATO Supreme Commander at the time, have confirmed in recent weeks the lack of a genuine chain of command between the formal KLA leadership and local resistance groups.
Looking at this from a broader perspective, I fear that this dubious trial is doing no credit to international justice.
The author of this article, Daan Everts, served as Head of the OSCE Mission in Albania during the Kosovo war and Head of the OSCE Mission in Kosovo immediately after the war.
The opinion piece was first sent for publication to the editorial staff of VOX Kosova.
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