Hashim Thaçi, former Kosovo president, sentenced to 25 years for war crimes

Relevance to the sub: International justice, accountability for national leaders, Balkan politics

A court in the Hague has convicted former Kosovan president Hashim Thaçi for "illegal arrests, torture, murder and cruel treatments" for acts he committed during the Yugoslav Wars as a high-ranking officer of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, or UÇK in Albanian) and sentenced him to 25 years of imprisonment.

The Kosovo War, which raged in 1998-99, killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands, and was ended by NATO bombings on Serbian forces after humanitarian warnings about the fate of Kosovan Albanians, who had increasingly been targeted by violent repression and mass displacement from Serbian forces, mere years after the Bosnian genocide. NATO's intervention resulted in the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo and the deployment of peacekeepers to prevent new massacres.

Over the course of the war, the KLA carried out murders and assaults against Serb and Roma civilians, but also Kosovan Albanians who opposed the group, and engaged in human, drug and organ trafficking to fund their activities.

As part of the proceedings to judge perpetrators of human rights abuses and war crimes in Yugoslavia, international prosecutors had set up a special tribunal for Kosovo in The Hague, considering that Kosovo's judicial authorities were unable to properly render justice due to the power and influence of former members of the KLA, notably through witness intimidation. Hashim Thaçi, who had served as Kosovo's PM following its declaration of independence in 2008, then as its president since 2016, had stepped down after its indictment and surrendered to the court in 2020.

The sentence was met with shock and dismay in Kosovo by Thaçi's supporters, who had gathered in Pristina to follow the trial in a show of support for their former president. Kosovo's foreign minister, Glauk Konjufca, lamented "a terrible judgment for Kosovo and our war of liberation. It's a sad, unfair, undeserved decision." Aside from Thaçi, three other officials of the KLA were judged and convicted: Kadri Veseli, head of the KLA's intelligence branch, to 18 years of imprisonment, Jakup Krasniqi, KLA's spokesman, to 25 years, and Rexhep Selimi, head of operations, to 13 years.

Hashim Thaçi's conviction, nearly 30 years after his crimes, is a rare victory for international justice, but the reaction in Kosovo highlights the unresolved tensions in the Balkans, recently evidenced by the shameful tributes paid to the Serb war criminal Ratko Mladic, deceased in August after decades of imprisonment in the Hague for his role in the Bosnian genocide.