More than two years after acquitting the former prime minister of Kosovo of murder, rape and torture, appeals judges at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Wednesday ordered him to be retried because the intimidation of witnesses had invalidated his trial and produced “a miscarriage of justice.”
The ruling against Ramush Haradinaj threatened to aggravate already mounting tensions between Kosovo and Serbia on the eve of a separate advisory ruling yesterday by the International Court of Justice on Kosovo’s legal status.
It also drew an immediate reaction from Kosovo, where Haradinaj is seen as a hero as a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which fought with NATO support for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia. Blerim Shala, Haradinaj’s deputy in the opposition Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, said the decision to retry Haradinaj in The Hague was “very bad news” for Kosovo and its citizens.
In Serbia, where the acquittal of Haradinaj has often been cited with disdain, the judgment was welcomed by Serbian Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic. Serbs have complained that only one other trial at the tribunal has dealt with violence against Serbs by ethnic Albanians during the Kosovo war.
In April 2008, Haradinaj was acquitted for lack of evidence on a series of charges relating to crimes said to have been carried out by men under his command in 1998. But the appeals tribunal, in a decision that was two years in the making, said the original trial had failed “to take adequate measures to secure the testimony of certain witnesses,” a statement on the tribunal’s Web site said.
The appeals judges said that in light of “the serious witness intimidation that formed the context of the trial,” the tribunal erred in acquitting Haradinaj in 2008.
The ruling added that this “error undermined the fairness of the proceedings and resulted in a miscarriage of justice.”
Haradinaj was arrested in Kosovo on Tuesday and taken to The Hague. Two other former rebel commanders, Idriz Balaj and Lahi Brahimaj, who had stood trial with him, will also be retried.
Accounts of witness intimidation were heard at other trials at the tribunal, where Serbs, Croats, Kosovars and Bosnians have been prosecuted for crimes linked to the Balkan wars of the 1990s. But in no case was the threat to witnesses so deeply worrying to prosecutors than in the case of the three men from Kosovo.
The prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, warned the judges at the start of the trial that the intimidation of witnesses was so rampant that she might be obliged to withdraw the indictment.
“You know that many witnesses are reluctant to testify; some are even terrified,” she said.
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