This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
Kosovo President Is Indicted for War Crimes for Role in War With Serbia
Kosovo’s President, Hashim Thaci, Is Indicted for Role in Serbia War
(about 3 hours later)
BERLIN — President Hashim Thaci of Kosovo, a guerrilla leader during Kosovo’s battle for independence from Serbia during the 1990s, was indicted on 10 counts of war crimes on Wednesday at a special court in the Netherlands. Prosecutors accused him and other former fighters of being “criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders.”
A war-crimes tribunal said on Wednesday that it had indicted President Hashim Thaci of Kosovo and nine others for their actions during the country’s conflict with Serbia in the 1990s, accusing them of being “criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders.”
The charges, long anticipated, have yet to be accepted by judges at the court, but their timing came as a shock, both in the Balkans and in Washington. Mr. Thaci was to meet on Saturday at the White House with his Serbian counterpart, President Aleksandar Vucic, to continue a Kosovar-Serbian dialogue mediated by American officials.
The special prosecutor’s office looking into the conflict announced the indictment against Mr. Thaci and the others on “a range of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, enforced disappearances of persons, persecution and torture.”
Mr. Thaci, 52, will no longer attend the meeting, dashing American hopes that the negotiations might finally lead to a settlement between Serbia and Kosovo. Kosovo won autonomy in 1999, aided by a NATO bombing campaign, but Serbia has never recognized Kosovo’s sovereignty, and negotiations to reach a final peace deal stalled in 2018. The United States is one of about 100 countries that recognize Kosovo’s independence.
Mr. Thaci is scheduled to visit the White House on Saturday along with President Aleksandar Vucic, the president of Serbia, a meeting that the United States hopes could lead to peace talks later in the year.
“This affects Kosovo in all possible ways,” said Agron Bajrami, the head of the Koha Media Group, Kosovo’s largest media conglomerate. “It affects the process of dialogue, in which the president was the main interlocutor for both the European Union and the United States, and it will have an enormous effect in the political scene in Kosovo.”
The charges by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers center on Kosovo’s 1998-99 war of independence with Serbia, and involve accusations of hundreds of crimes against Kosovo Albanians, Serbs, Roma and other ethnicities.
Though most of the more than 13,000 casualties in the Kosovo War were Kosovar Albanians killed by Serbian troops, more than 2,000 were Serbs, Roma and Kosovar Albanians killed mostly by NATO bombs or by guerrilla groups like the Kosovo Liberation Army, according to figures from the Humanitarian Law Center, a human rights group with offices in both Serbia and Kosovo.To investigate possible war crimes carried out by these guerrilla groups, the Kosovar Parliament founded a special judicial system in 2016, staffed by foreign jurists and based in the Netherlands to allow its officials to work more independently.
Mr. Thaci led Kosovo’s bloody guerrilla war as commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Western diplomats say he ordered arrests, assassinations and purges within the rebel army’s ranks to fend off potential rivals, accusations that Mr. Thaci has strongly denied.
Though investigators previously had summoned a sitting Kosovar prime minister to give evidence in The Hague, Mr. Thaci and his co-defendants were among the first to be indicted by the prosecutors.
Formerly part of Serbia, Kosovo won autonomy after a NATO bombing campaign in 1999 that aimed to protect its largely Muslim population from ethnic cleansing. The war left nearly 10,000 people dead. Serbia still does not recognize Kosovo’s independence.
The prosecutors accused Mr. Thaci, Kadri Veseli, a former spy chief, and several unnamed defendants of crimes against humanity, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution and torture.
“If the indictment is confirmed, it would be unprecedented,” said Vigan Qorrolli, a law professor at the University of Pristina in Kosovo’s capital. “Some people thought they’d go for the smaller fishes, but they started with the bigger fishes.”
Mr. Thaci began his public life as a leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, but turned to civilian politics after the war ended, serving as both prime minister and foreign minister. Since 2016, he has been Kosovo’s mainly ceremonial president.
Mr. Thaci remains one of the pillars of Kosovar political life, revered as a hero of the war by some while others accuse him of being the embodiment of the wayward political class that has ruled Kosovo since its independence from Serbia.
A 2008 report compiled by German intelligence officers accused him of rampant corruption. “People identify him with everything that went wrong after independence,” Mr. Bajrami said.
Still, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, once described Mr. Thaci as the “George Washington of Kosovo.”
Earlier his year, Mr. Thaci helped engineer the collapse of the government of Albin Kurti, a reformist prime minister and longtime political activist who had promised to clean up Kosovo’s judicial system, and whom many younger Kosovars viewed as a necessary break from former wartime leaders like Mr. Thaci.
Criticism of Mr. Thaci escalated after his support for a land swap with Serbia, including discussing it in a 2018 interview with The New York Times. Mr. Thaci said he hoped the move would help persuade Serbia to recognize Kosovo’s independence. Mr. Thaci now denies he discussed such a land swap with Serbian officials, but the claim remains central to Kosovar political discourse.
Prosecutors at the special court said they had been forced into announcing their indictment on Wednesday because of actions taken by Mr. Thaci and Mr. Veseli to undermine their work, accusing him of “a secret campaign to overturn the law creating the Court.”
A spokesman for the prosecutors declined to elaborate. A spokesman for Mr. Thaci also declined to comment.
Patrick Kingsley reported from Berlin, and Gerry Mullany from New York. Marlise Simons contributed reporting from Paris.
