War crimes in Kosovo

Aug 9th 2014 | PRISTINA | From the print edition

THIS is Kosovo’s holiday-and-wedding season, but some in the small Balkan state don’t feel much like celebrating this year. On July 29th Clint Williamson, an American prosecutor leading a special European Union task-force investigating war crimes, came out with a damning report. His team was created to look into claims in a report for the Council of Europe, published in 2010, which accused senior members of the wartime Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) of heinous crimes. He came to very similar conclusions.

According to Mr Williamson, senior officials of the KLA led a campaign of murder and ethnic cleansing against Serbs and Roma in the wake of the war in 1999. Instead of dismissing claims that some of the disappeared were murdered for their organs, as had been widely expected in Kosovo, Mr Williamson says there are “compelling indications” that this did happen in a “handful” of cases, though he does not yet have enough evidence for indictments for that. Witness intimidation, he says, is the greatest single threat to the rule of law in Kosovo.

Mr Williamson knows whom he wants to indict for other crimes, but no court yet exists to try them. Plans are well advanced for the establishment of an extraterritorial tribunal in The Hague, along the lines of the Scottish court that prosecuted the Libyans accused of blowing up an airliner over Lockerbie. First, Kosovo’s parliament must pass a law allowing this to happen. “Horrible things happened and they need to be addressed,” says Petrit Selimi, the deputy foreign minister.

The trouble is that the party of Hashim Thaci, the outgoing prime minister, has been unable to cobble together a government since it came first in elections on June 8th. As parties squabble about who has the right to form a government, the country is paralysed. Meanwhile rumours are circulating about who will be indicted. Names mentioned include senior members of Mr Thaci’s party, and opposition politicians.

All of Kosovo is waiting, including minority Serbs in the north, who are supposed to join Kosovo’s administrative system under the terms of a recent agreement. In fact, says Branislav Nesovic, a civil-society activist, no one “has a clue what is going on”. In June Serbs removed an old barricade on the bridge that divides the town of Mitrovica between Serbs and Albanians, but they quickly became frightened and replaced it with a post-modern barricade made of turf and flowerpots.

Father Sava, the abbot of Decani, a Serbian Orthodox monastery, worries that the international community may be forgetting Kosovo. He is horrified by videos of Albanian jihadis in the Middle East. Kosovo, he says, is full of social tensions and unless the economy improves and the region moves closer to the EU, he fears “an explosion” in which politicians could easily “redirect their frustration at minorities”.