THE HAGUE, (Reuters) – Former Kosovo president Hashim Thaci yesterday pleaded innocent to charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity as his trial began at a special court in The Hague, with protesters rallying outside in support of a leader once feted by the West.
Thaci and three co-defendants face 10 charges of persecution, murder, torture and forced disappearance of people during and shortly after the 1998-99 insurgency that eventually brought Kosovo independence from Serbia and made him a hero among many compatriots at home and abroad.
Prosecutor Alex Whiting said the four had targeted political opponents, as well as minority ethnic Serbs and Roma, imprisoning hundreds across Kosovo in terrible conditions and murdering 102 of them. Most victims were members of Kosovo’s 90% ethnic Albanian majority.
The four defendants, all principal leaders of the former guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and later in peacetime politics of the small Balkan country, all pleaded not guilty shortly after hearings got underway.
“I understand the indictment and I am fully not guilty,” Thaci, 54, said in court. Dressed in a dark pinstripe suit, the tall, strapping Thaci looked pale and brayer after two years in detention.
More than 13,000 people, the majority of them Kosovo Albanians, are believed to have died during the insurgency, when Kosovo was still a province of Serbia under then-strongman president Slobodan Milosevic.
Thousands of Kosovars gathered in the capital Pristina on Sunday in protest at the trial, and hundreds rallied outside the court in The Hague on Monday, holding banners with Thaci’s image and chanting “KLA” in support of the independence movement.
In Pristina, resident Nazmi Kelmendi said on Monday that “not only is the just war of the KLA being judged, the state of Kosovo is also on trial”. Another, Martin Cuni, said: “They are not only condemning only these people but they are condemning the effort, the war that the whole world supported.”
Thaci resigned as president shortly after his indictment in November 2020 and was transferred to detention in The Hague.
