Criticism as EU justice mission leaves Kosovo
PRISTINA: As an EU judicial mission prepares to leave Kosovo, the assessments of its decade-long mandate are mixed - hailed by officials but criticized by the public. The EU’s rule of law mission (EULEX) that will cease its judicial operations on June 14 was set up in December 2008, 10 months after Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia. Spending several hundred million euros over the decade, hundreds of judges and police officers served with EULEX, the political bloc’s largest civilian mission ever.
They were dealing with some of the most serious crimes committed during and after Kosovo’s 19981999 war between ethnic Albanian guerillas and Serb forces, the fight against corruption and organized crime as well as boosting citizen confidence in the judiciary. “I have every reason to be dissatisfied with EULEX,” said 46-year-old Silvana Marinkovic, an ethnic Serb. Her husband Goran was abducted in the aftermath of the war and his fate, like those of about 1,600 other people, still remains unknown. “They did not even try to solve my problem,” she told AFP.
‘Visible legacy’
Alexandra Papadopoulou, a Greek diplomat tasked with winding up EULEX’s mandate, defended what she described as a “visible legacy in Kosovo with many achievements that are evident”. European judges delivered over 648 verdicts, including for corruption, organised crime, money laundering, war crimes and human trafficking, she said.
The authorities share her assessment of EULEX’s achievements. “It has been a worthy decade for Kosovo,” President Hashim Thaci said.
“Kosovo institutions have benefited greatly from cooperation with EULEX.” Even so, Kosovo is ranked only 85th out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s corruption perception index, above Albania and below Serbia, albeit up from 110 in 2014.
In its latest report the European Commission said “corruption is widespread and remains an issue of concern” for the country of 1.8 million people.
The Zeri newspaper referred sarcastically to EULEX’s initial pledge to tackle “big fish”, saying the mission eventually remained a “mission of small fishes”. Of three key ethnic Albanian rebel leaders who were put on trial, Sami Lushtaku and Fatmir Limaj were acquitted of war crimes charges, while Sylejman Selimi was sentenced to eight years in jail for torturing prisoners. Among unsolved cases is the assassination of prominent journalist Xhemail Mustafa, who was shot dead at his home in 2000.
In his columns, the former advisor to late president Ibrahim Rugova had denounced violence committed by Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas against opponents. For his daughter Beriane Mustafa, EULEX is “completely a failed mission”. “It is not clear to me how it is possible that an EU mission with all those resources has failed to solve any of these murders,” Mustafa, 36, told AFP, referring to a series of post-war political assassinations. Kosovo’s war claimed 13,000 lives. But EULEX eventually solved only 25 war crimes cases, according to the Humanitarian Law Centre rights watchdog.