Serbians seek justice for Kosovo’s forgotten victims
Nineteen international judges will try crimes allegedly committed by the KLA
Calling their dead “secondclass victims”, Serbian families of civilians killed by Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian rebels in the late 1990s hope a new court at The Hague will finally bring them justice.
Nineteen international judges were appointed this month to the tribunal, which will try crimes allegedly committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in its fight for independence from Serbia, a conflict that left 13,000 dead. Global attention has long focused on the mass killings and atrocities by the Serbian forces of the late strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
An 11-week Nato bombing campaign pushed the troops out of predominantly ethnic Albanian territory in 1999, and Kosovo declared its independence a decade later.
But alleged crimes committed by the Kosovo rebels, against Serbians but also against Roma and fellow Albanians deemed to be collaborators, have attracted relatively little scrutiny. “No one has been adequately punished or justly condemned” over missing family members, said Natasa Scepanovic, who leads an association for families of Serbian victims.
“We have been discriminated against since the beginning of our sad story,” she told AFP.
Allegations
The claims were raised in a 2008 book by Carla del Ponte, the ex-pro secutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
A few years later, a Council of Europe report reiterated the allegations against several former KLA leaders, some of whom had become highranking Kosovo officials.
“There cannot and must not be one justice for the winners and another for the losers,” Dick Marty, a Swiss prosecutor who led the council’s inquiry, said in his report.
In particular, he accused Hashim Thaci — now the president of Kosovo — of leading a mafia-style network involved in assassinations and unlawful detentions.
Thaci has denied the accusations and said he is willing to cooperate with the tribunal, telling AFP last year that he had “nothing to hide”.
The Council of Europe report noted the disappearance of almost 500 people, including about 400 Serbs, after Milosevic’s forces withdrew from Kosovo in June 1999, when the KLA had “virtually exclusive control on the ground”.
Some of the possible indictees at the new court in The Hague, including former KLA commanders Ramush Haradinaj and Fatmir Limaj, have already been tried and acquitted by the ICTY.
The United Nations and Nato-led forces in Kosovo wanted “to promote short-term stability at any price, thereby sacrificing some important principles of justice”, the report said.