THE HAGUE: A special court in The Hague on Monday started the trial of the former president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, for alleged war crimes during the 1998-99 insurgency that eventually led to independence from Serbia and was hailed as a hero by his compatriots.
The Kosovo Specialist Chambers in 2020 indicted Thaci on ten counts of war crimes along with crimes against humanity including persecution, murder, forced disappearance of people, and torture, including after fighting ended.
Thaci and 3 co-defendants, all former close associates in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and later on in peacetime politics, have pleaded not guilty to all ten counts, according to a Reuters report.
Over 13,000 people, most of them belonging to the country’s 90% ethnic Albanian majority, are believed to have died during the conflict, at the time when it was still a province of Serbia under then-president Slobodan Milosevic.
At the trial, which will be conducted by global judges as well as prosecutors, will witness opening statements of the prosecution that will be followed by that of defense lawyers and a Kosovo War Victims Council’s representative’s over the next 3 days.
Shortly after his indictment Thaci, 54, resigned as president and afterwards was transferred to detention in The Hague.
The 4 defendants are charged with participating in a “joint criminal enterprise…that carried out systematic attacks”. The target were Kosovo’s minority Serb civilians along with Kosovo Albanian opponents of the KLA group.
Trial expected to be lengthy
The trial is expected to be lengthy as prosecutors said in procedural events that they would need 2 years to present all its evidence.
Thousands of KLA veterans gathered on Sunday in the Balkan country’s Pristina to express support for Thaci and his 3 associates. They chanted the slogan ‘Freedom’ and carried the national flags of Albania and Kosovo, along with flags with KLA’s symbol.
The Kosovo Specialist Chambers was established in 2015 to handle cases under Kosovo law against former KLA guerrillas.
A lot of Kosovars are of the view that the tribunal is impartial against the KLA and is interested in tainting its record in paving the way to the ethnic-Albanian majority region’s liberation from brutal Serbian rule.
The court was set up separately from the United Nations tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which also had been located in The Hague and it had tried and convicted mainly Serbian officials for war crimes in the conflicts of Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo.
Former Serbian president Milosevic had gone on trial before the ICTY, however, he died in 2006 before a verdict was reached.
