Judgment of Deliverance: When Decolonization Becomes a Charge

In a cool, wet Dutch city, thousands of miles from Pristina, there is a grim concrete building that has decided to determine Kosovo's political and historic destiny. It is not a diplomatic headquarters, nor any international United Nations body, but the Special Court for Kosovo, a structure built under international pressure, funded and controlled by the European Union, located in The Hague and, above all, far from Kosovo's sovereignty. The Special Court has become a symbol of isolation, closed sessions, excessive editing, bureaucratic communications that no one understands. This is not witness protection. It's hiding the process from the public. In Kosovo, ordinary citizens have no real idea what happens at The Hague. Transparency has been replaced with institutional secret. It all develops into a structure that doesn't respond to anyone. The Special Court has no accountability to either the Kosovo Assembly, which has formally approved it, nor to any European Union body that is politically supervised. It is an institutional island that operates on The Hague outside any democratic control, without any real mechanisms to force it to move at reasonable pace, be transparent and impartial. This facility in this way of functioning is unique, not for positive innovation, but for a total lack of accountability.

The court with this function is a tragic déja of the London Conference. Again, the fates of Kosovo are being placed away in the halls of a European capital, while the transparency and sovereignty of locals fade. The story of Kosovo is the story of a people who almost never had their fate in hand but who have never quietly accepted this imposed fate. Before the Great Powers gathered in London's halls in 1913, Kosovo had erupted several times in armed uprisings, raising the freedom flag against Ottoman rule and then against any project intended to break it. The uprising of the Prizren League (1878-1881), the uprising of 1893 of the Pec League (1899), the rebellion against JohnTurqes in 1910 to peak with the General Rebellion in 1912, were not isolated episodes but were signs of a people seeking to take over their fate before this fate was sealed by others. In the mountains of Kachanik, in Drenica, at Shala, Karadak, in the highlands of Rugova and Gjakova, Kosovo Albanians faced a despotic empire and then the intrigues of neighbours fed by great powers, rifles in hand, and a clear idea in their heart: to own their country.

But as Albanian rebels fought in the field, another game was played in imperial Europe. Far from the noise of the rifles and without any Albanian representatives on the table, a handful of ambassadors drew up the new Balkan borders with a cold indifference, as France and Britain shared the Middle East with the SykesyPicot Agreement. No referendum, no consultation, no fair word. A pencil on the map decided Kosovo's fate. A decision taken on foreign tables denied the rebel spirit of the Albanian people any rights it had won with sacrifice.

After that, the Serbian-Croatia-Slovenian Kingdom established a complete colonisation device co-ordinated by the Skopje Directorate of Colony with local commissions, loans for Serb and Montenegrin settlers, systematic deportation to Turkey and Albania. So a classic colonial policy aimed at changing the ethnic structure in Kosovo where Albanians autochthon were treated, not as citizens, but as populations to be “regulated”. In that sense, Kosovo was not just a province ʹ was a colonised territory.

But unlike 1913, today we are not in an international legal vacuum where great powers can draw the boundaries of a people on closed tables. A new global architecture was established after World War II, which recognises the right of peoples to self - determination as the fundamental principle of international order. The United Nations Charter (1945) included this right in Article 1.2) and articles 735874, turning colonised territories into the subject of international law. In 1960, Resolution 1514 declared that each people has the right to independence, and this principle was reinforced by Resolution 2625 (1970), which established self - determination at the level of the y'Obligative. It was also consolidated by the 1966 International Pact, which was placed in their first article.

These documents created a new world order where people are no longer seen as plunder to separate themselves from foreign powers, but as fair actors to decide for themselves their destiny. From “objective to external decisions, they became subject to international law, voice and legal status known. This principle was clearly confirmed by the International Court of Justice with the 2010 verdict, which found that Kosovo's declaration of independence was in line with international law.

In this light, the establishment of a mono-ethnic foreign court that is acting out of control of Kosovo institutions, which is being judged in a closed and independent manner by any democratic mechanism, and will decide on core issues of Kosovo's history and policy outside its territory. It is a turning back to the spirit of decolonization. It displaces judicial sovereignty from Pristina to The Hague, re-creating, modern and bureaucratic, what international decolonisation documents intended to wipe out forever.

But in addition to functioning as autonomous corporations, the Special Court has built an indictment dealing with Kosovo's liberation war as a “joint criminal enterprise” (Jint Criminal Enterprise) A foreign judicial framework that shifts focus from individual actions to the very character of the liberation movement. Ironically, this concept does not exist either in the Criminal Code of the Republic of Kosovo, which this court supposedly serves, nor in the criminal legislation of the former Yugoslavia, under whose formal jurisdiction Kosovo was located during the war. With this action, the court is no longer just a court of justice: it has also assumed legislative role, introducing new standards that have never been adopted by the Parliament of Kosovo and building its own jurisdiction, cut off from any local legal source. In practice, it turns the Special Court into an authority that not only judges, but also creates new judicial rules, outside of any democratic and institutional control of the state of Kosovo.

When discussing the charge, it is worth considering an essential element of the 1514th resolution mentioned, the document marking the historic turn of global decolonization. It clearly stated that the lack of institutional or economic development “cannot be used as a reason to delay independence”. So he clearly knows the right of peoples to self - determination, including the right to be freed from colonial rule with modest surroundings available to them. This is the principle upon which the legitimacy of most XX - century liberation movements has been built from South America or Africa to Asia, Belize, East Timor, Algeria. In all these cases, the international community, through the UN and the international law system, considered the armed resistance of colonised peoples as part of their legitimate right to liberation, even when these movements did not have classical state structures, fair armies or full territorial control. Kosovo is exactly in the same historical category of peoples who have fought to be freed from foreign rule, just as dozens of nations today are independent states, becoming an organic part of the global decolonisation process that has produced 2/3 of the states that are in the UN today.

But the logic of the Special Court prosecution goes directly against this principle. It starts with the artificial premiere that the KLA should be treated as if it had been a classic state army with clear command hierarchy, effective control in every corner of the territory, standardised military discipline and the perfect chain of command. In other words, as if it were a functional state in wartime similar to Croatia. But this is a legal and historical absurdity. The KLA was born as the popular armed movement under wild occupation conditions, without state institutions, without classical military structures and under the existential risk of a genocide on the road. It was an expression of the right of a oppressed people to rebel and use any possible means for survival and national liberation exactly what Resolution 1514 recognizes as legitimate.

If we follow the Special Prosecutor's logic to the end, then it turns out that oppressed or colonised people have no right to resist, unless they have a fair and perfect army according to NATO standards. Such an approach would rule out almost all the liberation wars of the XX century, because most of them were developed in poor conditions, with improvised tools and unconsolidated state structures. Instead of defending the universal principle of self - determination, this logic uses international law to criminalise the liberation process. It does not understand the nature of a resistance to a oppressed people, but artificially sets the pattern of a conventional state army, thus creating a dangerous precedent: that peoples who were enslaved without a state, regardless of being oppressed or threatened by extinction, would have no right to fight for survival and liberation.

In conclusion, a common criminal process is not under way at The Hague today, but a silent effort is under way to rewrite history, to put the act of liberation itself at the dock of the accused. If this precedent is accepted, it is not only Kosovo, but essentially it sends a very clear signal to each people or liberation movement: even if you can free your country, the former colonial powers will never forgive you for that courage. You will be persecuted, accused and delegated for decades after the war (as is happening today with former KLA members) a quarter century after the end of the conflict. This is a silent but brutal message: You can win a war with a rifle in your hand, but in the cold halls of their courts you will continue to pay the price of courage because old European powers never forget what challenged their previous decisions. So The Hague is not the end of a process, but the beginning of testing a universal principle acquired in blood, that of decolonization. And Kosovo has no reason to quietly accept this historical deformity of this principled violation.