a few seconds agoAustrian diplomat: We didn't know about the KLA structure in 1998, Americans described it as scattered
Periskopi(2 years ago)
(2 years ago)Diplomat Jan Kickert said they knew very little about the structure of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UÇK), while confirming that Americans had been told that this part was mysterious but that they were under the impression it was horizontal and distributed structure. This statement was made by witness Kickert after Hashim Thaci's lawyer, Luka Misethic, introduced one [...] to him.
This statement, witness Kickert did so after Hashim Thaci's lawyer, Luka Misethic, presented to a cablegram of June 27, 1998, which the witness himself had written, reports “Justice Vought”.
“You wrote: The KLA command structure remains as something mysterious according to the United States. Although, The KLA acts using name as General Staff and in view of the United States is a scattered horizontal structure and co-ordination structure, that would be problematic to include KLA in politics. Remember where this information came from?
But, the witness said it was said at the Contact Group meeting.
It came from the Americans. I don't know who was there during the meeting. If I can see the title of the report just above, it was a meeting of the mission contact group. Perhaps it was the American ambassador, the deputy ambassador who gave this information”, Kickert said.
According to him, it may also have been a military attaché, while stressing that European Union observers had different experiences with KLA members in different areas.
We didn't know much, little at all. We tried to figure out how it was organized and structured. The KLA. I remember that European Union observers had different experiences in different parts of Kosovo during their contacts with the KLA. Some were more aggressive, some addressed the observer's presence more calmly”, he said.
Kickert added he had the feeling that different KLA areas did not have the same structure.
At that time, my feeling was that it was a centre in the Drenica region, but not that the KLA in the western part of Kosovo in the Dukagjin area, for example, was in the same structure or centralised at the same” structure, Kickert said.
Prior to that, the witness said they were not very interested in the KLA structure in the summer of 1998, but that their interest was to find someone to include in political processes.
“We wanted to contact people who could speak on behalf of the KLA and get involved in the political process. Of course, to find someone who had competence and authority on behalf of the KLA and whom we could talk about should have had general information on KLA”, he said.
Diplomat Kickert confirmed that in the summer of 1998 he met with diplomat Richard Holbrooke and that one of these meetings said he didn't know that the NLA had any internal command chains.
I believe Americans had more intelligence than we did. Americans had a presence in Pristina, and they also had a United States Information Service. Meanwhile, we Europeans haven't had continued presence there. So, since we understood the situation then was that the presence or presence of the United States included the share of intelligent information or general information”, he said in the process.
