The Sunday Times for former KLA leaders: They are Kosovo heroes

Former British and American leaders are honoured as heroes in Pristina, Kosovo's capital -- a large Clinton bronze statue in “Bill Clinton Boulevard”. A whole generation of men are called Tonibler or Tony after Britain's former prime minister.

“We will never forget the particular role the United Kingdom had in NATO's intervention to stop the Serbian genocide,” Albin Kurti, prime minister, said, adding that he hoped Blair could come to a festival of “liberation” this summer.

Problems are being created, however, in the new state that broke out of Serbia, with the help of NATO military intervention in 1999 at the end of a brutal war. Now the violent past has returned to follow him.

The riots are sparked over a war crimes court set up to try, not Serbian atrocities, but those of the Albanian guerrilla army, whose commanders ended up running the country.

On trial at The Hague are four former Kosovo Liberation Army commanders (UÇK) accused of clearing their ranks and political rivals in a wave of murderous violence after the war. One is Hashim Thaci, former president of Kosovo. Many here regard it as the country's founding father and the issue against him as a slander to the legitimacy of the war for independence and its heroes.

These men helped win our freedom and independence, there are Serbs who should be tried for the massacres here, not them,” said Besian Marina, 38, owner of the Hillary culinary shop called after Clinton's wife, the first lady. Wesley Clark, the retired American general who ran NATO operations in Kosovo, is another foreign hero remembered, with a car bearing his name.

But with all their gratitude for it NATO, Kosovars, as the country's ethnic Albanian citizens are primarily known, are upset with their international allies for pushing them over the war crimes tribunal, their government agreed with it only under pressure from the EU and Americans. Many citizens have taken to the streets in protest.

Kurti, prime minister since 2021, told me in an interview that he had never backed the tribunal, which operates according to Kosovo law, but with headquarters at The Hague. He is concerned that he can help Serbia rewrite the history”, shifting the focus on Kosovo crimes.

I support responsibility for the war. However, it seems unfair that Kosovo is being placed in the spotlight, while Serbia has not only refused to take responsibility for its crimes but also denies them. ”

The court would also encourage Russia's “regional player to undermine Kosovo, which has been governed as a UN protectorate and, since 2008, as an independent state, as it has begun to make progress in fighting corruption and rampant crime, as well as expanding it. The economy.

Kurti believed that the Kremlin saw in Kosovo and the Balkans a second “rons” possible counter NATO after the invasion of Ukraine.

“Kosovo is a success story NATO, Russians want it to fail”.

In December, he recalled, a large group of members of Narodne Patrole, a Serbian nationalist organisation linked to the Russian paramilitary group Wangner, gathered on the Serbian side of the border with Kosovo, threatening they would face NATO troops.

“A hundred miles from the country where we are doing this interview in the prime minister's office is a Russian base,” added Kurti, referring to the so-called “Moscow humanitarian” in the Serbian town of Nis.

It's full of spies and agents engaged in hybrid warfare. ”

Aida Hehir, an expert on international relations at London's Westminster University, said the country's international rulers had hoped to try Kosovars in The Hague would “concerned” Serbia, an aspiring EU member, helping to keep it out of Russia's embrace.

“but instead will appoint three Serbian nationalists and anger Albanian Kosovars,” he added.

People feel like they're being betrayed by their allies, this could be the last point for many people. ”

But not all here are unhappy with Kosovo's Specialised Chambers, as the court is known. After watching with shock as international organs like the UN and the European Union failed earlier to provide justice for KLA crimes, Fetah Rudi, one of their ethnic Albanian victims, for the first time in years, feels optimistic.

All I want is justice,” told me the former geography teacher and political activist at his home in the small village of Rud, about an hour's drive from the capital.

He was returning there one afternoon in 2000 when an armed man shot him from a passing car. He's been in a wheelchair ever since.

I was very scared. What can you do?

He has long abandoned all hope of walking again. But he never ceased to imagine that one day he could see someone holding an accounting. The moment may have come.

This court is the only hope I have for justice”, Rudi said.

Thaci resigned as president in 2020 to defend against the charges. I remember meeting him years ago, in 2010, on an earlier visit to Pristina when he was prime minister. With a dark suit and pink tie, he was more a sense of an corporate executive than the former harsh leader of the guerrilla, who helped carry out the uprising against Serbia under the name of snake de guerre.

Cleaning up rivals he allegedly was performing did not prevent him from appearing as the Western favourite partner in Kosovo.

In 2010, Joe Biden, then deputy chairman of America, called it “George Washington of Kosovo”. But a European Commission report that same year presented a conflicting view, describing Thaci as the most dangerous “by KLA criminal bosses”.

He was authorised after claims that the KLA was involved in trafficking human organs were published in a book by a former war crimes prosecutor, Carla del Ponte.

This movement requires an account even if the KLA claims that it had killed Serb prisoners for their kidneys were never confirmed. The claims have no role in court cases.

At the opening of his trial on April 3rd, Thaci said: “I am not fully guilty”. But Alex Whiting, the prosecutor, said he would prove the KLA was responsible for hundreds of unlawful murders and detentions in Kosovo and northern Albania in 1998 and 1999. “Most of the victims of the rape were Kosovo Albanian countrymen. . . No one is above the law, even in times of war. ”

Serbian forces were responsible for the overwhelming majority of violence in Kosovo, and while some were tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, most of those responsible for ethnic cleansing, rape and other war crimes in Kosovo have never been convicted.

Saranda Bogujevci recalls she lined up with other family members and was shot against a garden wall under a nutsy tree in her town as a 13-year-old student.

She was left to die, collapsed amid a pile of bodies of women and children, including her mother and brother, after being hit with 16 bullets on her back, right leg and her arm.

This brutal act of ethnic cleansing was carried out by a special Serbian police unit known as the Scorpions. “The more you grow, the harder it is to deal with,” she said, describing how you were evacuated for medical treatment in Manchester, where she ended up settling. In 2016 she returned to Kosovo to become an MP at Kurti's party. She also believes that the special court can be counterproductive.

It's important that there's justice for all victims,” she told me. “But nobody is talking about crimes committed by Serbia. It disappoints me that it is not putting more pressure on Serbia to accept what they have done. Even today, Serbia continues to try to destabilise us. ”