As Kosovar President Hashim Thaci yesterday rushed home to face accusations of war crimes from the 1990s conflict with Serbia, Kosovars defended the “just war” that paved their path to independence.
Thaci was the political leader of an ethnic Albanian guerilla group, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which launched a rebellion against Belgrade more than 20 years ago when Kosovo was a southern province of Serbia.
On Wednesday, he and others were accused of crimes linked to the war in 1998 and 1999 in an indictment filed by special prosecutors at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutor’s Office in The Hague, Netherlands.
Photo: AFP
Their victims included “hundreds of known victims of Kosovo Albanian, Serb, Roma and other ethnicities, and include political opponents,” said the prosecutors, who still need a pre-trial judge to approve the charges.
The prosecutors said they published the charges early because Thaci and others have been trying to “obstruct the work” of the tribunal, which operates under Kosovar law, but has international judges.
Thaci, who was on his way home after cutting short a planned trip to the US to discuss lingering tensions with Serbia, has not yet responded to the charges.
The Washington meeting is not going to happen, independent analyst Agron Bajrami said, adding that the future of the entire Kosovo-Serbia dialogue is in doubt.
“It will be very difficult for him [Thaci] to continue acting acting as a president, if not for anything else but for the fact that he cannot be part of the dialogue now that this has occurred,” Bajrami said.
Kosovars have come to the defense of the former rebels who rose up against Belgrade in a war that cost about 13,000 lives, overwhelmingly Kosovar Albanians.
“This court is unfair because it only judges KLA soldiers... We know that Serbia is the one that has committed crimes in Kosovo,” said Qazim Fazlia, a pensioner in the capital, Pristina.
Skender Musa, a lawyer, said he hoped the court would “clean” the KLA’s record.
“It is extremely certain that no KLA soldier who has worn the uniform has committed crimes against Serb civilians,” he told reporters.
Additional reporting by AP
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