Families hope war crimes court can bring justice
Kosovar president is among army leaders accused in atrocities committed in conflict with Serbia in the 1990s
When Beriane Mustafa returned home from school 16 years ago, she encountered a crowd outside her apartment and was shocked to learn that her father, a prominent journalist and political adviser, had been assassinated.
Xhemajl Mustafa’s death haunts her to this day. “You wake up in the morning with that question mark over your head that says, ‘Who did it and why?’ ” says Mustafa, 35. “That is what, on a daily basis, is killing you.”
Mustafa might finally see her father’s killers brought to justice. A court is set to convene in The Hague, Netherlands, in the coming months to prosecute war crimes allegedly committed by Kosovo Liberation Army commanders — including Kosovar President Hashim Thaci — during and after the country’s war for independence against Serbia in the late 1990s.
The European Union asked Kosovar officials to move the court to The Hague because of concerns over witness intimidation. The court, established in 2016, will operate under Kosovar law and will be financed by the EU and staffed by international judges and attorneys. Court officials could release a schedule of proceedings in a few weeks.
The court will focus on atrocities committed during a war after the breakup of Yugoslavia that required U.S.-led NATO airstrikes to drive Serbian forces out of Kosovo. The province, which declared independence in 2008, still isn’t recognized as an independent nation by Serbia or its ally Russia.
International prosecutors have successfully brought cases against Serbian leaders. Last year, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb, guilty of genocide in the Srebrenica massacre of mostly Bosnian Muslims in 1995. He is serving a 40-year prison sentence.
Mustafa’s father, Xhemajl, was a member of the Democratic League of Kosovo who advised Kosovo’s first president, Ibrahim Rugova. He was one of several Rugova associates murdered after the war.
“You cannot say the conflict ended in June 1999 when NATO entered Kosovo,” says Nora Ahmetaj, a human rights researcher at the Center for Research, Documentation and Publication in Pristina.
It’s not clear who will face charges.
A report in 2011 by the Council of Europe, an EU human rights agency, said President Thaci and other high-ranking members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) trafficked human organs and kidnapped, tortured and killed Kosovo Serbs, Roma and Albanians who were suspected of collaborating with Serbia.
Thaci has denied the allegations, and his office declined to provide a statement.
Tome Gashi, Thaci’s former legal adviser, says he expects the president and other politicians to resist prosecution and conviction.
“They are not willing to stay in a 6-square-meter cell in some foreign state 3,000 kilometers from here with nobody,” Gashi says. “They have such a good life here, and they were in power for 17 years, and they treat Kosovo as a monarchy. They live like kings. They are really, really afraid.”
Kosovo Serbs, the country’s largest ethnic minority, hope the perpetrators will finally have their day in court.
Says Nenad Maksimovic, executive director of the Center for Peace and Tolerance: “It is important, not only as a Serb but as a human being.”
“You wake up in the morning with that question mark over your head that says, ‘Who did it and why?’ That is what, on a daily basis, is killing you.” Beriane Mustafa