Albanians took to the streets to express fury as the trial of their Kosovo Liberation Army heroes began, while inside the court, the defendants’ emotions ran high. BIRN’s Xhorxhina Bami watched events unfold this week in The Hague.
U-Ç-K, U-Ç-K!” The chant resounded through the streets of The Hague as supporters of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi and his three co-defendants shouted out the Albanian-language acronym for the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The start of the four former guerrilla leaders’ trial at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers earlier this week sparked an outpouring of anger from Kosovo Albanians and their kin in the diaspora as they gathered to protest in Pristina and outside the war crimes court in The Hague.
Throughout the opening day on Monday, Albanians wearing the traditional plis cap or T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Liria ka emer” (“Freedom has a name”) made their voices heard in the Dutch city as opening statements were delivered in the trial of Thaçi and his wartime comrades turned politicians, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi.
“Here is where our heroes are, so here is where we will be,” Tahir Citaku, one of the first protesters to show up in front of the court early on Monday morning, told BIRN. Later that day, holding an Albanian flag, Citaku explained that he had come all the way from Basel in Switzerland to support the wartime KLA leaders.
As prosecutors read out the charges against them, accusing them of a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity, Citaku referred to how many Kosovo Albanians perceive Thaci, Veseli, Selimi and Krasniqi as liberators for their role in the resistance to Yugoslav military and Serbian police during the 1998-99 conflict. “We hope that justice will prevail,” he said.
It was a view echoed by other protesters in The Hague. “We have come to tell the Hague court that they are holding our liberators, who are not guilty,” said Nevaip Zyberi, another ethnic Albanian living in the Swiss city of Basel. “We hope that the truth will finally come out and our liberators will be released,” he added.
“It is similar to when we were under [Serbian] occupation, people are afraid that an injustice is being done, but I don’t believe this court will do an injustice because they are internationals,” said Ramadan Nikaj, a Kosovo Albanian who came from Germany to join the protest.
The previous day, thousands had rallied in Kosovo’s capital Pristina under the banner “Marshojme per drejtesi” (“We march for justice”). Protesters flew Kosovo and Albanian flags and also displayed the slogan “Liria ka emer” (“Freedom has a name”), which has been emblazoned on billboards around Kosovo ahead of the trial in an ongoing support campaign for the defendants in their home country.
Thaçi expresses ‘remorse and pain’
Inside the courtroom on the first couple of days of the trial, a mixture of emotions were expressed by the defendants or could be seen on their faces as two entirely different perspectives about their wartime experiences were aired in court.
All four men listened in disbelief to the prosecution listed the crime they are accused of committing, showing indifference towards the allegations and maintaining the postures of tough, serious, high-level politicians.
One of the moments that caused shock among the public in Kosovo was when prosecutor Alex Whiting told the court on Monday that Thaçi “came several times in secret to give interviews” during the investigation phase of the case, while he was still president.
While those listening were all eyes and ears, Thaçi remained calm, as if the claim did not affect his case.
Whiting went on to claim that Thaçi made several false statements during the investigation of the case, when he “denied much about his role and the role of the general staff [of the KLA in the war]”. Thaçi continued to maintain his calm.
On the second day, the defendants could be seen going through various emotions as their lawyers set out the case for the defence.
In one instance, Thaçi’s lawyer showed a clip from a BBC documentary on the Kosovo war where a former KLA commander with the nom de guerre Remi explained how the local-level commanders of the KLA’s ‘operational zones’ told Thaçi not to sign the Rambouillet peace agreement with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 1999.
Defence lawyer Gregory Kehoe was claiming that operational zone commanders had the control over the KLA and not the General Staff, arguing that Thaçi and the others had no control over guerrillas who may or may not have committed crimes.
“We will not use all our anti-aircraft rockets on the Serbs. If you sign, we will save one to bring down your plane,” Remi claimed to have told Thaci in the documentary. The video clip caused the defendants to burst into laughter.
Around an hour later, another of the defendants, Krasniqi, could not contain his emotions any longer and started to shed tears when Kehoe was talking about the atrocities committed by Serbian military and paramilitary forces and also showing clips of Kosovo Albanians being displaced.
Thaçi then gave a highly emotional and moving speech to the court, saying that he feels “remorse and pain for all the victims of this war, without prejudice”.
He also told the court that “victims do not find justice when the innocents are prosecuted”, and explained that Kosovo would not exist without both peaceful armed resistance against the repressive Yugoslav regime.
Back in Kosovo, the irony of Thaçi being tried in a court that he had once lobbied to establish is often discussed. On Tuesday in the courtroom, the former president sought to highlight how he believes the Specialist Chambers will actually exonerate him.
Explaining that he was the one who originally asked for an international investigation into allegations in a 2010 Council of Europe report that KLA fighters were involved in organ-trafficking, Thaçi argued that a “black cloud over Kosovo” was removed when the investigation found there wasn’t evidence to charge any Kosovo guerilla with harvesting prisoners’ organs in order to sell them.
“The world now knows there was no organ-trafficking,” Thaçi said, adding that he believes he will be cleared of war crimes allegations too. “I expect to be acquitted,” he declared.
Selimi’s speech was more heartfelt, explaining the everyday obstacles that ethnic Albanians faced under the Serbian regime.
“Albanians were being dismissed from their jobs, there were no longer Albanian police officers, there were no Albanian doctors, nor post officials… Albanian youngsters could not even play football in the stadium and sports halls, the only television station in the Albanian language was closed and all the newspapers were closed,” Selimi told the court.
Krasniqi’s speech to the court highlighted what he described as the absurdity of the charges against him. He argued that he could not have persecuted the KLA’s political opponents from the Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK party as the indictment claims, because he had been a member of the party himself and had relatives and friends among its ranks.
“It is absurd that I am being accused of persecuting LDK members. I myself was a member of the LDK. My family members, my comrades-in-arms were members of the LDK,” Krasniqi told the court on Wednesday, adding that “only a perverted mind could think that I am part of the persecution of myself, of my family members”.
‘Nobody is above the law’
Albanian diaspora protest in front of the Hague court. Photo: BIRN.
As senior figures in KLA during the war, the defendants are charged with crimes including persecution, unlawful arrest and imprisonment, cruel treatment, torture and murder between at least March 1998 and September 1999 in Kosovo and neighbouring Albania.
During the trial’s opening days, the prosecution repeated the Specialist Chambers’ insistence that the four defendants are being tried, not the KLA itself.
“This is not a prosecution of the KLA,” Whiting told the court. “Nobody is above the law even during the war… this case is for the victims and their families who waited 20 years for justice,” he added.
However, many Kosovo Albanians believe that even though the Specialist Chambers are part of Kosovo’s judicial system, the court is ethnically biased and denigrates the KLA’s just war for freedom.
This was a view that was expressed again by protesters in The Hague. Bajram Lushaku, an Albanian living in Frankfurt in Germany, said that “for me, this court is purely political, it’s against the KLA and against the people of Kosovo”.
Lushaku argued that “instead of bringing criminals from Belgrade here who committed terrible massacres in Kosovo, they have brought our liberators”.
But while hundreds of supporters of the defendants made their presence felt in The Hague, relatives of the victims and survivors of the alleged crimes were not to be seen around the court.
However, the victim’s counsel team, the lawyer appointed to represent the victims in court, was there to give them a voice. In his opening statement to the court on Monday, victims’ counsel Simon Laws told the court that the victims came from various ethnic backgrounds but were “united in what happened to them”.
He also pointed out something that the four wartime guerrilla leaders and those against whom they allegedly committed crimes had in common: “none of them would have thought they might meet one day in the courtroom”.