Kosovo agrees to war crimes tribunal

By Antoine Sander

Court will be funded by the EU to prevent witness intimidation and corruption.

After a lengthy political fight, Kosovo has agreed to a special tribunal in a foreign country to try ex-Kosovo Liberation Army members accused of war crimes during the war against Serbia in the late 1990s.
The court is expected to be set up in the Netherlands next year and will be funded by the European Union to prevent witness intimidation or judicial corruption. All of the judges will be non-Kosovars but will apply Kosovar law.

“Finding the truth about some allegations from, during, and after the war is a challenge that we have to deal with,” Prime Minister Isa Mustafa told parliament before the vote.
Eighty-two of 120 parliament members supported the measure Monday, exceeding the two-thirds majority needed to amend the country’s constitution and reverse a vote in June on similar provisions.
A 2010 report by the Council of Europe accused the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) of abductions, murders and illegal organ sales. They allegedly targeted Serbian and Roma minorities, as well as defiant Kosovars.
“Today’s vote was difficult but necessary to establish a credible mechanism of separating the justness of our liberation from criminal acts,” tweeted Foreign Affairs minister and ex-prime minister Hashim Thaçi after the vote.
Thaçi had been criticized for his weak support of the tribunal. As a founding member of the KLA, he was named in a Council of Europe report as one of the heads of the criminal network.

By approving this court we are turning ourselves into a monster. — Ramush Haradinaj, leader of the opposition party Alliance for the Future of Kosovo.

“If this doesn’t pass, United States relations with this Kosovo government and future Kosovo governments will deteriorate,” one Western diplomat, referring to the legislative package on the court, told freelance reporter Chuck Sudetic in a POLITICO Forum piece. “The United States wants to demonstrate the depth of its commitment to have these allegations heard in a credible process.”
The decision to set up a court is still controversial within Kosovo. Some members of Parliament claim it will make the KLA look like a criminal group and not a liberation army.
“By approving this court we are turning ourselves into a monster,” said Ramush Haradinaj, leader of the opposition party Alliance for the Future of Kosovo. “During the war we were not monsters, we were victims.”
However, Kosovo’s allies in the West were quick to praise the vote.
This “is a crucial step in the provision of a necessary legal framework for addressing serious allegations,” EU High Representative Federica Mogherini said in a statement.
Western diplomats increasingly pressed Kosovo to adopt the amendment, noting the U.N. Security Council could take up the case. Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council, is a strong ally of Serbia and opposed to Kosovo’s independence.
The U.S. Ambassador to Kosovo, Greg Delawie, said last week that “a failure to set up the court, an obligation undertaken by Kosovo before the international community, would be a major setback.”
However, voices in Kosovo are already denouncing what they see as yet another tribunal that will ultimately fail to render justice.
“There were three expensive international justice organizations which failed to do exactly what the [the new tribunal] is trying to to do: the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and now EU Rule of Law Mission,” Besa Shahini, a policy analyst based in Pristina, told POLITICO.
“The same cases and allegations were passed from one institution to another, most of them never reaching court, because of lack of evidence,” she said.
Cost figures for the new tribunal were not available. However, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia established in 1993 still employed 569 staff and cost almost $180 million in 2014-2015.
Shahini also said she doubted that many KLA figures, including Thaçi, would be charged because the lack of evidence remains a challenge.