Former Kosovo president sentenced to 25 years in prison
Hashim Thaçi, the former president of Kosovo, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison by a tribunal in The Hague for war crimes committed during his time as a senior commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The European-backed Kosovo Specialist Chambers convicted Thaçi, 58, and three other former senior commanders of 96 murders, along with counts of torture, cruel treatment, and arbitrary detention directed at political opponents and civilians. Thaçi resigned from office nearly six years ago to face these charges and stood in silence as the presiding judge read out the sentence.
Charges and Sentences
Thaçi faced multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity alongside the three other former leaders of the KLA. Prosecutors had asked for a maximum 45-year prison sentence for Thaçi and the other defendants: Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi, and Jakup Krasniqi. The panel sentenced Krasniqi to 25 years, Selimi to 13 years, and Veseli to 18 years. The court dismissed six charges of crimes against humanity, ruling that prosecutors failed to show these happened as part of widespread or systematic attacks against the civilian population as a whole.
In addition to the murders, Thaçi was convicted for the illegal detention of 385 people, the torture of 303 people, and cruel treatment of about 50. Thaçi also faces separate charges of intimidating witnesses, with the judgment in that case still to come. The former president has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him.
The Trial and Defence
At the heart of the prosecution’s case was the degree to which the convicted men had senior operational command over the KLA as a centrally-led armed force and whether the crimes amounted to a pattern of abuse. The court ruled that Thaçi had “actively participated in and encouraged crimes.” Judge Charles Smith said the scale and nature of the crimes committed were very serious. Smith added that the so-called intelligence on which many victims were arrested, detained, and killed was little more than unverified rumours. Based on that information, victims were called and described as spies and collaborators and violently treated.
Thaçi’s defence partly rested on the notion that while serious abuses did occur, the KLA was not a strictly centralized organization. They claimed that Thaçi’s senior position in the rebel group did not indicate culpability for crimes committed by local units. Thaçi told judges in February that throughout his life he stood with the people of Kosovo defending freedom, life, and dignity. He said he was always guided by western ideals of democracy, equality, and justice.
Known by the nom de guerre of Commander Snake during the war, Thaçi stood out among the KLA leadership as an intelligent and articulate figure who would later charm diplomats. He was instrumental in Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence. The trial was opposed by many in Kosovo, with the country’s foreign minister calling the judgment “a terrible judgment for Kosovo, for our liberation war” and “a sad, unjust, undeserved decision.” Thaçi’s PDK party called the verdict “a great injustice, because it is based on claims and materials that we consider fabricated and nurtured over the years by the state apparatus and Serbian propaganda to criminalise the just war of the Kosovo Liberation Army.”
Thousands of people watched the reading of the verdict live on a huge screen in the capital, Pristina. Some started shouting “UCK,” the Albanian-language acronym for the KLA. Thaçi was born in Kosovo’s rugged Drenica mountains—the KLA heartland—and was a philosophy student who rose through the ranks, returning from what he described as political exile in Switzerland to join Kosovo’s struggle for independence. Most of the 13,000 people who died in the war in Kosovo were ethnic Albanians. A 78-day campaign of NATO airstrikes against Serbian forces ended the fighting. About 1 million ethnic Albanian Kosovars were driven from their homes.
