It’s not just the verdict that is unjust

The Kosovo Specialist Chambers’ has convicted former President Hashim Thaci and three other Kosovo Liberation Army leaders of war crimes but acquitted them of crimes against humanity. The sentence for Thaci is 25 years.

This is happening while Aleksandar Vucic is resigning from the Serbian presidency to outmaneuver protests and avoid a term limit. He has called an election he will ensure his party will win, making him prime minister instead. Vucic was Information Minister to Slobodan Milosevic’s government during the time in which the court says Thaci committed his crimes. Vucic’s Serbia last week buried Ratko Mladic, convicted of genocide at the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), with high honors.

The contrast is hard to miss. A Kosovo president who had tried to defend fellow citizens from Serbian oppression is in prison. Serbia is empowering a politician who served the government that attacked civilians in Kosovo and honoring the perpetrator of even worse crimes in Bosnia.

How did this happen?

This happened because Kosovo, and Thaci in particular, gave in to strong American and European pressure to create the court by constitutional amendment. It is a Kosovo court in law, but not in substance. Its staff is international. Created to focus on organ trafficking allegations in a Council of Europe report, it found no evidence to support them. So it turned its attention instead to Serbian intelligence allegations.

Some of the allegations against KLA fighters are no doubt true. But I do not believe that Thaci had command authority over the forces that committed the crimes. I know this not only because Americans in a position to know testified to it at his trial. But also because in conversation with him after the war, in front of a KLA fighter, he told me that his role was limited to political spokesman of the KLA. He was not a fighter or a commander.

Acquittals were never in the cards however. The Europeans spent 200 million euros on the Specialist Chambers. Serbia had pressured the Americans and Europeans, claiming it was unfair that ICTY had convicted mostly Serbs for crimes in Bosnia and Kosovo (where they had indeed committed most of the crimes).

The Americans might once upon a time have tried to save the KLA leaders from injustice, or at least prevented the burial of Mladic with honors. But now they have forgotten human rights. They focus entirely on their own, narrow interests. Ironically, Thaci, as prime minister and president, was far more friendly to those than the current prime minister.

What happens now?

Thaci and the other KLA leaders will appeal. That will take years, during which the court will keep them incarcerated, as it did in the five years before the verdict. With some luck, the sentences may eventually be reduced. But no country in the future will make the mistake of creating an international court of this sort without retaining the ability to abolish it. That isn’t possible for Kosovo because constitutional amendment would require Serb cooperation, which won’t be forthcoming.

The more immediate question is what happens in Kosovo. Many Albanians there will find the outcome unjust. They will protest angrily, but I hope peacefully. Violence will gain nothing. The verdicts will please, but not satisfy, many Serbs. Some may celebrate. There too violence will gain nothing.

The Americans and Europeans should be chagrined. They have criminalized a liberation movement that they supported and reduced international justice to political revenge. But they have moved on and won’t pay much heed. This is one more lesson in why you shouldn’t be too friendly to Washington and Brussels.

It’s not just the verdict that is unjust. It’s the court.