Transitional justice, a process that implies accountability, exposure of the truth, guarantees of non-repetition…, is a very complex exercise, and even more so in the conditions in which it is taking place in Kosovo, where the tension with Serbia it remains very high 23 years after the war and 15 since its declaration of independence.
Tomorrow, Monday, the trial against Hashim Thaçi, prime minister of independent Kosovo in 2008 and president in 2016, opens in The Hague. He is accompanied by three other figures from post-war Kosovar politics, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi. All of them are accused of “criminal association” to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity – which include persecution, torture, disappearances and 100 murders – perpetrated against the Kosovar Serb minority, against Kosovar Albanians and Roma between 1998 and 1999, when they were members of the Army. for the Liberation of Kosovo (ELK).
Hashim Thaçi, alias the Serpent, was its political boss, its financial director and the man who ended up negotiating the final status of the Kosovar territory, praised by Western leaders such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Angela Merkel or Nicolas Sarkozy.
The road has been long. In 2015, an ad hoc court was created under the name of the Chamber of Specialists in Kosovo, made up of international jurists and lawyers, to try former KLA members, separately from the Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia and, although based in La Haya, under Kosovar jurisdiction. Naturally, it was due to international pressure. The Kosovar authorities, and Hashim Thaçi the first, accepted in order to clean up his image.
Everyone could suspect that one day Thaçi himself would have his turn, and he, being president, tried to avoid it, but finally, in November 2020, he was charged. He resigned soon after and has been detained in The Hague ever since.
It all started in 2010 with a report by the Council of Europe’s human rights rapporteur, Swiss Senator Dick Marty, which provoked a reaction from the European Union. The crudest part of Marty’s allegations concerned the harvesting and subsequent trafficking of organs (kidneys) from Serb prisoners of war who were previously transferred to Albania. The report followed two investigations – the first one originating from press reports – launched in 2003 by the then prosecutor of the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla del Ponte, also Swiss.
After leaving office in 2007, Del Ponte published a book the following year, coinciding with the independence of Kosovo and the appointment of Thaçi as prime minister, in which he directly accused him of organ trafficking, of which 300 would have been victims. people. The fact that conclusive evidence was never found led to a new report after Dick Marty’s, and hence to the creation of the tribunal in August 2015.
An KLA commander, Salih Mustafa, was sentenced to 26 years in prison in December. In February the trial of another, Pjeter Shala, began. Outrage is raging in Pristina over the trial of individuals considered heroes who defended their homeland from alleged genocide at the hands of Serbia. Few seem to think like Ehat Miftaraj, from the NGO Legal Institute of Kosovo, who told the Reuters agency that it must be understood that it is a trial “against a few individuals from the KLA and not against the KLA or the values ​​that the people of Kosovo representsâ€.
