Former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi addressed the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague on Tuesday as defence lawyers began their opening statements in his trial, saying he anticipates that he will be cleared.

“I expect to be acquitted,” Thaçi told the court.

Thaci and his three co-defendants, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi – all former Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA leaders who later became senior politicians – are charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed between at least March 1998 and September 1999, during and just after the war with Serbian forces.

They are accused of having individual and command responsibility for crimes that were mainly committed against prisoners who were held at a series of detention facilities set up by the KLA in Kosovo and neighbouring Albania, including 102 murders.

The prosecution laid out its case in its opening statements on Monday, claiming that the KLA had a well-structured chain of command that allowed the accused, as leaders of the guerrilla force, to be aware of what was happening on the ground and have control over it.

But defence teams are arguing that the four men did not have control over members of what was a loosely-organised guerrilla force without a rigid military structure.

Thaçi’s lawyers, Gregory Kehoe and Luka Misetic, told media after the hearing on Tuesday that previous cases against former Kosovo guerrillas Fatmir Limaj and Ramush Haradinaj at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal have already proven that no crimes were committed as part of a ‘joint criminal enterprise’ as the indictment of Thaci and his co-defendants claims.

Misetic said in court that in the case against Limaj, the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal had ruled that the “KLA did not have control” over guerrillas’ actions on the ground.

Kehoe meanwhile told the court that the prosecution failed to explain that at the beginning of the war, “the KLA was a group of volunteers… a grassroots movement with loyalties to local commanders [rather than to leaders like Thaçi].”

He said that Thaci “does not deny some crimes were committed by ethnic Albanians”, but “rejects they were committed as a matter of policy… or that they were widespread” as the indictment alleges.

Kehoe that any violence “was a result of uncontrollable localised activity” driven by revenge for “crimes committed by the Serbian regime”.

Thaçi went on to tell the court that a “black cloud over Kosovo” was lifted after a European Union investigation found there was no basis for organ-trafficking charges against KLA guerrillas who were alleged to have removed human organs from prisoners at a so-called ‘yellow house’ in Albania.

“The world now knows there was no organ-trafficking… and the yellow house never existed,” he said, adding that he believes history will repeat itself when he is declared innocent.

“I feel remorse and pain for all victims of this war,” he said, but added that “victims do not find justice when the innocents are prosecuted”.

Kadri Veseli’s lawyer Ben Emmerson told the court that his client left Kosovo as soon as he was appointed head of KLA intelligence in November 1998 to liaise with intelligence services in neighbouring Albania and other NATO member states.

Veseli was outside Kosovo for a “six-month period” until March 1999, Emmerson said.

Emmerson also told the court that the prosecution does not have substantial evidence against his client because it has not been able to produce eyewitnesses or key documents that place Veseli at a crime scene or show he made criminal decisions.

“There was one witness who saw him” at an alleged KLA detention site in Kukes in Albania, but the prosecution notified the defence that it will not use the testimony because it turned out to be false, Emmerson said.

Rexhep Selimi then addressed the court, saying he is convinced that the indictment is “not based in evidence” and that “me and my comrades-in-arms will return [to Kosovo] innocent”.

The opening statements in the defence of Jakup Krasniqi, the fourth man on trial, will be heard on Wednesday.

Video: Kosovo Guerrilla Leaders’ Lawyers State Case for Defence

Ex-president Hashim Thaçi’s lawyers, Gregory Kehoe (right) and Luka Misetic (left), told BIRN outside the Kosovo war crimes court in The Hague that he and his co-defendants are innocent.