From Bllaca’s Disc to the Cells of The Hague

By Baton Haxhiu

On 16 March 2014 I wrote “A Treaty Against the Tribunal”. I wish I had been wrong and that my concern back then had been nothing more than an emotional reaction to a court that did not yet exist.

I wish I could say today that justice had managed to separate individual responsibility from the history of a people who fought for freedom.

The 16 September verdict proved the opposite. The court declared it was not judging the Kosovo Liberation Army. Formally, it convicted four individuals.

Yet to convict them, it built a broad political narrative about the war, the structure of the KLA, its aims and the people who led it.

This story did not begin in The Hague. It began, by chance or by design, in Pristina, in my office at Klan Kosova, at the end of 2009.

The disc that warned of the storm

One day, Gani Geci came to my office with a computer disc.

On it was recorded a private interview, in a dark room. Three people were there: Gani Geci, Adem Salihu and Nazim Bllaca.

It was Bllaca who spoke.

“I killed Ibush Kllokoqi,” Bllaca declared — and yet he remained free and unpunished.

I listened to the interview to the end.

Bllaca spoke of post-war killings. He mentioned names, spoke of orders and of a mechanism which, according to his account, was broader than a single case.

It was not an ordinary interview. It was the construction of a narrative that was expected to explode publicly.

When the viewing ended, I understood that a grave story was coming to Kosovo.

A few days later, Nazim Bllaca appeared in Skanderbeg Square in Pristina. Surrounded by citizens and journalists, with a demeanour shifting between testimony, fear and a dose of public madness, he began to speak of the post-war killings. That is where the hysteria began.

The media picked up the narrative. Politics split between those who proclaimed Bllaca a witness to the truth and those who proclaimed him a tool of a conspiracy.

The internationals took him under protection, while the prosecution turned him into a collaborator and witness in several trials. I am not saying the killings Bllaca spoke of should not have been investigated.

Every killing had to be investigated. Every victim deserved justice. Every person who had committed a crime had to answer by name and surname.

The problem began when a narrative about individual crimes was turned into the key to explaining an entire war.

Dick Marty’s report called the Bllaca case “emblematic”.

And it truly became emblematic. Not only for justice. It became emblematic of how a testimony emerging from the darkness of a room could be transformed into international political material.

The accusation that trapped Kosovo in a moral snare

Before Dick Marty came Carla Del Ponte. In her 2008 memoirs she circulated claims of organ trafficking by members of the KLA.

It was the gravest accusation that could be levelled at a liberation movement. It was no longer just about revenge, individual killings or unlawful detentions.

It was about the taking and selling of human organs. This accusation trapped Kosovo and Albania in a moral snare.

If they opposed it, they could be accused of obstructing justice. If they accepted the mechanism demanded for investigating it, they accepted that the most monstrous post-war suspicion would hang over the KLA and over the two Albanian states.

Dick Marty expanded the narrative. His report no longer presented the matter as a series of isolated suspicions. He built a tableau of detention centres, killings, organised crime, organ trafficking and the responsibility of KLA leaders.

Then the unthinkable happened.

The claim that had created the greatest shock did not become part of the indictment against Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi.

There was no charge of organ trafficking. Yet the court that had been politically imposed under the weight of that accusation remained.

The accusation vanished.

The mechanism created by it lived on.

This was the first historical deception.

Kosovo was persuaded to create a court to remove from itself the stain of organ trafficking. Then the organs disappeared from the case, while Kosovo was left with the court.

What I wrote in 2014

When I wrote “A Treaty Against the Tribunal” in March 2014, the court had not yet been voted.

Back then I wrote that post-war crimes had to be judged individually. I wrote that UNMIK and EULEX had had sufficient mandate, time, money and power to do this job.

If they had failed, their failure could not be turned into Kosovo’s fault.

I warned that a tribunal created for only one side would no longer judge only individuals.

It would change the historical position of the victim and put Kosovo in the dock. That is why I called it a treaty against the tribunal.

It was not a call against justice. It was a call against the use of justice to build a new political history.

In 2014 I could not know which people would be indicted. I could not know the years of the sentences. I could not know the language with which, twelve years later, a trial panel would describe the war.

But the direction could be seen. The court was being built on a collective accusation, while it was promised it would judge only individual responsibility.

This was the contradiction many people refused to see.

America withdrew and Europe took the lead

At that time American policy toward Kosovo was also changing.

Chris Dell had warned us that Washington was withdrawing from direct influence and leaving political direction in Kosovo and the Balkans to the European Union.

In many respects, Dell was the last American ambassador to have real, day-to-day influence over Kosovo’s politics.

After him, the American presence did not disappear. But it became more limited, more controlled by Washington and more willing to delegate Kosovo matters to Brussels.

This was not only a matter of persons. It was a change of doctrine during the Obama administration.

The world, meanwhile, had been turned upside down by far greater events. The Arab Spring shook Egypt and the Middle East. The war in Syria produced millions of refugees. The migration crisis hit Germany and Europe.

Euromaidan and the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine were followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas.

These developments slowed the visible pace of the court project, but did not erase it.

The file waited. Behind the scenes, it continued to be prepared.

Jason Steinbaum, a former senior aide to Congressman Eliot Engel and a close observer of American policy on Kosovo, has given an even graver explanation.

According to him, the Obama administration accepted the court as part of the political concessions made to keep Russia inside the international coalition for the nuclear deal with Iran.

There is no public document proving a direct Obama–Putin deal on the Specialist Court.

Therefore this cannot be presented as a closed fact. Yet Steinbaum’s testimony helps to understand the sudden turn in American policy.

An accusation initially treated with scepticism turned almost overnight into a non-negotiable condition for Kosovo.

Kosovo was no longer America’s central matter. It had become a small part in a much larger geopolitical game.

The embrace that turned into pressure

Hashim Thaçi had spent years being treated as a partner of the West.

Hillary Clinton came to Kosovo. Joe Biden received him and treated him as an important American collaborator.

Western presidents, prime ministers and diplomats embraced him as the man who had emerged from the war and accepted peace.

These visits cannot be presented as missions to create the Specialist Court, but they built the capital of trust on which pressure was later exerted.

Thaçi and Kosovo’s other leaders were led to believe that cooperation with the West would protect the state and secure their place in history. Then precisely that relationship was used as leverage.

The message was simple. If Kosovo did not create the court itself, it would be created by the United Nations Security Council.

There Russia and Serbia would enter. Kosovo would lose even formal control. Relations with the United States and the main European powers would be damaged.

The deputies were not asked to vote for the court because they were convinced by its legal model. They were asked to vote out of fear of the alternative.

This was not a sovereign choice.

It was submission under the threat of isolation.

Kosovo, weary from crises. When the 2015 vote came, Kosovo was weak and divided.

The Association agreement and the demarcation with Montenegro created a crisis that paralysed the country.

The Assembly filled with tear gas. A terrorist group shelled the Assembly and Presidency buildings with mortars and the opposition took to the streets. Institutions lost political energy and public trust.

The court and the constitutional changes passed in this atmosphere. Not as the project of a state sure of itself, but as an international demand to be fulfilled while the country was busy fighting with itself.

Most of civil society supported it.

Many journalists, analysts and organisations presented it as proof of state maturity.

The argument was repeated to exhaustion. If we are innocent, why should we fear the court?

But states are judged not only by the innocence of their people, but also by the mechanisms they accept, the powers they hand over and the history they allow to be written in their name.

Kosovo gained nothing tangible for this handover. It received no new recognitions as a reward. It did not receive membership in the United Nations.

It did not even receive a guarantee that Serbia would face the same standard for the thousands killed, disappeared, raped and expelled.

Kosovo gave the court. The West got Kosovo’s conviction.

The night of the stab in the back

In December 2017 there was an attempt to repeal the law. Then it became clear how voluntary the creation of the court had been.

The ambassadors of the United States, Britain and Germany put themselves at the forefront of the pressure.

The repeal attempt was called treason and a stab in the back against Western allies.

Isolation was warned of. Damage to relations was mentioned. It was implied that Kosovo could lose the support that had brought it to independence.

At that moment, the legal debate ended.

Only Western power remained.

A small state like Kosovo was told it had the right to change its own law, but that it would be punished if it used that right.

Kosovo withdrew. And again it gained nothing.

In February 2018, according to information circulating at the highest political levels and conveyed to me as well, Hashim Thaçi and Kadri Veseli had been warned they would face indictments and detention.

This information was not made public as an official decision, but it shows the direction of the process was understood much earlier than 2020.

What the public would learn later, high politics had long sensed.

The end of the illusion

In June 2020, the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office published the announcement of the indictment against Hashim Thaçi and Kadri Veseli.

The publication came as Thaçi was on his way to Washington. It was the moment the illusion ended that political cooperation with the West would secure political treatment from the West.

In November the indictment was confirmed.

Thaçi resigned from the presidency. Together with Veseli, Krasniqi and Selimi he was sent to detention in The Hague.

Nearly six years of imprisonment, trial and waiting followed.

Then came 16 September 2026.

The court found all four guilty. Hashim Thaçi and Jakup Krasniqi were sentenced to 25 years in prison each. Kadri Veseli to 18 years. Rexhep Selimi to 13 years.

And here lies the greatest paradox of the verdict.

The court dismissed the six charges of crimes against humanity, because the prosecution did not prove there had been a widespread or systematic attack against the civilian population.

The biggest thesis of an organised campaign against civilians fell. Yet the joint criminal enterprise remained.

Legally, this can be explained by the distinction between the elements of crimes against humanity and the mode of responsibility for war crimes.

Politically, the paradox is devastating. The court said the widespread or systematic attack was not proven.

Then it built a joint criminal plan stretching over territories, structures, detention centres and political and military leaders.

The crime against humanity fell. The narrative of a criminal enterprise remained.

The gravest legal label was removed, but the most humiliating political description was kept.

Precisely here the court exceeded its duty.

It was not content with determining individual responsibility for concrete events.

It built a general narrative about how the war had been organised and led.

Therefore the decision may be legally against four men, but politically it has struck a joint liberation enterprise.

What must be appealed

The appeal must not be a political scream written in legal language.

It must be a precise strike against the foundations of the verdict.

It must challenge the way the court derived a joint criminal plan from unclear structures, from political authority and from the circumstances of a guerrilla war.

It must challenge the individual link between each convict and every concrete crime.

It must examine whether the court replaced proof of order, knowledge and contribution with the political position each held.

It must strike at the credibility of the evidence, the way it was used and the conclusions built on indirect evidence.

It must challenge the geographic and temporal scope of the alleged plan.

It must appeal the proportionality of the sentences and the way the nearly six-year detention has been turned into part of a punishment that began long before the verdict.

Above all, individual crime must be separated from the war itself.

No serious appeal should deny the victims.

But no serious justice can use the existence of victims to replace proof against a specific accused.

Kosovo and Albania cannot intervene in the judicial process.

They cannot write to the judges what decision to take. Nor should the undoing of the court be proposed or discussed, nor amnesty by a presidential decision. Too late. When it should have been undone, everyone — absolutely everyone — was against it.

There is also a legal reason why the Specialist Court cannot be undone now. Its repeal would not annul the verdicts or the prison years, because it would not act retroactively on decisions already rendered. On the contrary, the risk would be that the defence’s path of appeal — the only path that can overturn guilt or change the sentences — would be made difficult or impossible.

Equally wrong is the claim that Kosovo’s president can pardon the convicts. The decisions of the Specialist Chambers are not subject to Kosovo presidential pardon or amnesty. For war crimes and crimes against humanity there is no political salvation through a decree. Therefore the court should not be defended because of its verdict, but must be kept functional until the convicts have used their right of appeal to the end.

But they have the right and the duty to oppose the political and historical consequence of this narrative.

The two assemblies must approve a joint resolution. It must not declare the court invalid nor prejudge the appeal.

It must state clearly that the KLA’s war was a liberation war against a regime that committed mass killings, expulsions, rapes and ethnic cleansing.

It must demand that criminal responsibility remain individual and that no decision be used to criminalise the KLA, NATO’s intervention or Kosovo’s right to freedom.

It must document that the organ-trafficking accusation, which served as the moral detonator for the creation of the court, did not become part of the final process.

And it must demand an international political review of how this court was created, of the pressure applied to Kosovo and of the historical inequality it produced.

The piece I wish had been wrong

Twelve years ago I wrote that this tribunal would shift Kosovo from the position of victim to the position of the accused.

Today the court says it convicted only four individuals. But the word “only” does not stand.

When the four main political and military leaders of a war are described as part of a joint criminal enterprise, the verdict no longer stays within their biographies.

It enters the history of the war. That is why it is not enough to wait for the appeal.

The decision must be appealed, but history must also be defended. Victims must be respected, but the use of them to build collective guilt must be opposed.

Justice must be demanded for every crime, but justice that uses individual crime to rewrite a liberation war must be refused.

The story began with a disc in a dark room. It continued with a man shouting in the square, with an organ-trafficking accusation, with an international report and with a court imposed under the threat of isolation.

Then the organ accusation vanished. The crimes against humanity fell.

The joint criminal enterprise remained.

Therefore the appeal must be made. Not only for the prison years, but for the boundary between justice and the rewriting of history.