Former Kosovo Liberation Army General Staff Operational Directorate member Naim Maloku told the war crimes and crimes against humanity trial of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and three co-defendants at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague that the KLA was a “voluntary army”.

“It is difficult to understand the Kosovo Liberation Army. It is difficult to understand an army that rose from a captive people,” Maloku told the court, explaining that “from the first soldier to the last, the entire structure of the KLA was voluntary”.

The defence is seeking to prove that the KLA did not have a rigid command structure like a normal army, and so the defendants – who were senior KLA officers – were not responsible for any crimes committed by lower-ranking fighters.

According to Maloku, who also was part of the KLA’s Dukagjini Operational Zone during the war, the guerrilla force had a ground-up structure and was never turned into a real army.

Maloku recalled that “the first order that I received from an authority in the General Staff was … when I moved from the Operational Directorate of the General Staff to the Operational Directorate of the Dukagjin Zone. This happened in January 1999. So, it’s the only order that I received”.

He added: “The Kosovo Liberation Army was built from the bottom up. There were no orders. There were votes by raising fingers, proposals, agreements” that someone would become a commander, but “there were no orders”.

Thaci was charged in 2020 with war crimes and crimes against humanity alongside fellow former senior KLA guerrillas Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi. They have all pleaded not guilty.

In a separate case, in January, Thaci and four others were accused of obstruction of justice and witness intimidation. He has also pleaded not guilty to these charges.

The Specialist Chambers were established in 2015 by the Kosovo Assembly and investigate the alleged crimes of members of the KLA against ethnic minorities and political rivals in the years 1998-2000.

The Chambers are part of Kosovo’s judicial system but are located in the Netherlands and staffed by internationals, established under pressure from the country’s Western allies, who believe Kosovo’s own justice system is not robust enough to try KLA cases and protect witnesses from intimidation.

Many Kosovo Albanians believe the court is ethnically biased and denigrates the KLA’s just war against Serbian repression.