The Kosovo Special Tribunal in The Hague sentenced former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi to 25 years in prison on Wednesday.
Excerpts from the verdict read by American judge Charles Smith III stated that Thaçi was personally involved in some of the crimes he was accused of. He at least knew about others, but did nothing to prevent them, investigate them or punish the guilty. Instead, he was involved in attempts to cover up traces of the crimes.
The court considered the charge of torturing prisoners to be proven in more than 300 cases. The charge of murder was also proven in 96 cases. Thaçi and his three co-defendants sought an independent state of Kosovo and accepted violence to achieve this. The court emphasized that it was not the defendants' goals that were illegal, but rather some of the methods used to achieve these goals. The court rejected the defense's argument that the crimes Thaçi and his co-defendants were accused of were individual acts of revenge in a chaotic situation.
The court went into detail about the particular brutality with which prisoners were treated in 1998 and 1999 in the camps of the Kosovo-Albanian “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA), which Thaçi co-founded. Victims' arms, ribs or legs were broken. Others had their fingernails torn out. Many were beaten until they lost consciousness. Some succumbed to the abuse. Survivors would have struggled with lifelong physical and psychological problems.
The three judges Charles Smith III as well as Christoph Barthe (Germany) and Guénaël Mettraux (Switzerland) viewed the fact that Thaçi had originally supported the establishment of the special tribunal and had immediately surrendered to the court voluntarily after the indictment had been confirmed as mitigating circumstances.
Born in 1968, Thaçi was politically active at an early age. At the beginning of the 1990s he lived as a refugee in Switzerland and enrolled to study political science at the University of Zurich. From this time he also understands German. In the mid-1990s, Thaçi was one of the founders of the KLA, where he was given the code name “Snake”. From August 1998 he was the political leader of the KLA.
In 1999, Thaçi agreed to disarm the Kosovar rebels
The KLA defended itself against Serbian state terror in Kosovo using terrorist means, such as assassinations of Serbian police officers and soldiers. This ultimately succeeded in persuading NATO to intervene. From March to June 1999, the alliance bombed Serbia as part of “Operation Allied Force”. The bombing ended after Belgrade agreed to withdraw all security forces from Kosovo. In June 1999, the NATO-led Kosovo Protection Force (KFOR) invaded the area with around 50,000 soldiers. At the same time, Thaçi signed a declaration on the disarmament and demobilization of the KLA. Formally, Kosovo remained part of Serbia, but was placed under United Nations administration.
After the end of the war, Thaçi founded the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) - as a refuge for KLA veterans and a vehicle for his political plans. Thaçi, whom future American President Joe Biden once called the “George Washington of Kosovo,” permanently became one of the West's most important contacts in the region. When Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, he was Kosovo's head of government and held this office until 2014. From 2016 to November 2020, Thaçi was President of Kosovo.
More than 270 witnesses were questioned in court
He immediately resigned after war crimes charges against him and three other Kosovo Albanian veterans were confirmed and surrendered to the tribunal in The Hague. The prosecution accused Thaçi of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The crimes mentioned include torture, kidnapping, arbitrary arrest, illegal detention and murder in more than a hundred cases. During the course of the proceedings, 273 witnesses were heard on 234 trial days. After taking evidence, the prosecution demanded 45 years in prison for each of the defendants.
The high-profile allegations made by the now deceased Swiss politician Dick Marty were not part of the proceedings. Marty had claimed that Thaçi led a gang that harvested organs from Serbian prisoners and sold them on the black market. However, the allegations were never even remotely proven.
