Former Kosovo leader is war criminal rules EU-backed court, tearing open old Western Balkans wounds

Once an EU darling who was regularly invited to Brussels, Kosovo’s former prime minister and president, Hashim Thaçi, will spend the next 20 years in prison for war crimes, after a trial which tore open old wounds in the Western Balkans. Thaçi and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) he led during the 1998-1999 Kosovo War used to be seen as heroic defenders against Serb pogroms. But the Kosovo Specialist Chamber, an EU-funded court in The Hague, said on Wednesday (16 September) that he and three other KLA commanders were responsible for “torture against 303 individuals and murder against 96 individuals”. They murdered Albanians, Serbs, and Roma people in Kosovo whom they had claimed were Serb collaborators, based on “little more than unverified rumours”, most of whom were “innocent civilians”, the court said. Some victims were minors or elderly people, while others were forced to “witness the mistreatment or killing of their family members”, it added. Thaçi himself, who stayed silent on Wednesday in his suit and tie, “personally participated in crimes, including the arrest, arbitrary detention, and interrogation of 13 parliamentarians and the arrest, detention, transfer, and murder of Behajdin Allaqi [an Albanian intellectual and KLA member]”, said the court.