Kosovo: A president and a war criminal?
A “bombshell” has exploded in the Balkans, said Walter Mayr in Der Spiegel (Germany). Kosovar President Hashim Thaci was flying to Washington last week for talks with Serbian leaders when news broke that he had been indicted for war crimes allegedly committed during his country’s battle for independence from Serbia in the late 1990s. Thaci abruptly canceled his U.S. trip, and the White House–brokered summit—where it was hoped that Serbia would recognize its former province as an independent country—was postponed. Prosecutors with the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, a Hague-based court with international judges operating under Kosovar law, say Thaci and several unnamed defendants are criminally responsible for the murder of nearly
100 people and for committing torture and perpetrating disappearances. Thaci, a former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) who became Kosovo’s first prime minister in 2008, denies the allegations. But he said that if the pre-trial judge reviewing the indictment confirms the charges, he will step down as president.
Thaci might have been charged earlier if not for a relentless campaign of “witness intimidation,” said Marija Ristic in Balkan Insight.com (Serbia). Former Hague war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte wrote in her 2009 memoir that Kosovars were so terrified of KLA reprisals that they would not even confirm the presence of the guerrilla group in their towns, let alone actual crimes. Even international judges were afraid of KLA vengeance—so while Serbs were charged for war crimes, KLA fighters were not. Following the publication of del Ponte’s book, the Council of
Europe appointed Swiss politician Dick Marty to investigate, and in a damning report he accused Thaci of drug running, “organ trafficking, abductions, and mistreatment of detainees.” Thaci’s men, Marty said, killed Serbian prisoners of war and sold their organs to fund the war effort. That report prompted the creation of the Specialist Chambers.
That court has been a sword over Thaci’s head ever since, said Flaka Surroi in Koha Ditore (Kosovo), and it’s suspected he was about to use the Washington talks to kill it. The deal on the table, clumsily brokered by a Trump administration desperate for an international win, would have seen Serbia recognize Kosovo after a series of land swaps. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic would then have ordered Kosovo’s minority Serb party—which Vucic controls—to vote for “the destruction of the Specialist Chambers.” Thaci would have been free of the threat of prison. That’s why prosecutors took the unprecedented step of announcing their indictment before it had been reviewed by a judge.
“After 20 years, the monstrous truth has finally come to light,” said Tommaso Di Francesco in Il Manifesto (Italy). Where does that leave the Western leaders “who anointed the butcher Thaci as a statesman” all these years? Former U.S. Vice President
Joe Biden once called this brute the “George Washington of Kosovo.” President Donald Trump was about to shake hands with Thaci in the White House. They are all “de facto accomplices to his crimes.”