From Bllaca’s disk to the cells of The Hague

By Baton Haxhiu

On 16 March 2014 I wrote "A Treaty Against the Tribunal" (read it in full by clicking here). I wish I had been wrong and that my concern at the time had been merely 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 that fought for freedom.

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

But in order to convict them, it built a broad political narrative about the war, the structure of the KLA, its goals and the people who led it.

This story did not begin in The Hague. It began, accidentally or deliberately, in Prishtina, in my office at Klan Kosova, at the end of 2009.

The disk that forewarned the storm

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

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 Skënderbeu Square in Prishtina. Surrounded by citizens and journalists, with a demeanor shifting between testimony, fear and a dose of public madness, he began to speak of the post-war killings. That’s where the hysteria began.

The media picked up the narrative. Politics split between those who proclaimed Bllaca a witness of 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 for 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 testimony coming 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 put into circulation the allegations of organ trafficking by KLA members.

It was the gravest accusation that could be made against a liberation movement. It was no longer just about revenge, individual killings or unlawful imprisonments.

It was about the harvesting and sale 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. It built a tableau of detention centers, killings, organized crime, organ trafficking and the responsibility of KLA leaders.

Then the unbelievable happened.

The allegation 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. But the court that had been politically imposed under the weight of that charge remained.

The charge disappeared.

The mechanism created by it continued to live.

This was the first historic deception.

Kosovo was persuaded to create a court in order 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 on.

At the time I wrote that post-war crimes had to be tried 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 try only individuals.

It would change the historical position of the victim and place Kosovo in the dock. That was 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 sentencing. 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 try only individual responsibility.

This was the contradiction that many people refused to see.

America withdrew and Europe took the lead

In that period, American policy toward Kosovo was also changing.

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

In many ways, 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 from Washington and more ready to delegate Kosovo’s issues to Brussels.

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

The world meanwhile had been overturned 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 extinguish it.

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

Jason Steinbaum, former senior associate of Congressman Eliot Engel and 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. Nevertheless, Steinbaum’s testimony helps explain the sudden turn in American policy.

An accusation that had initially been treated with skepticism turned almost overnight into a non-negotiable condition for Kosovo.

Kosovo was no longer America’s central issue. 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 war and embraced peace.

These visits cannot be presented as missions for the creation of 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.

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 surrender under the threat of isolation.

Kosovo exhausted by crises

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

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

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

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

Most of civil society supported it.

Many journalists, analysts and organizations 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 gain membership in the United Nations.

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

Kosovo gave the court. The West took 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 led 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 gained nothing.

In February 2018, according to information circulating at the highest political levels and also conveyed to me, 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 happened 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 as president. 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 threw out 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 organized 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 centers 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 degrading political description was kept.

It is precisely here that the court exceeded its duty.

It did not content itself with determining individual responsibility for concrete events.

It built a general narrative about how the war was organized and led.

Therefore the verdict may be legally against four people, 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.

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

The individual link between each convict and every concrete crime must be contested.

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

The credibility of the testimonies, the way they were used and the conclusions built on indirect evidence must be struck at.

The geographical and temporal scope of the alleged plan must be challenged.

The proportionality of the sentences must be appealed, and the way the nearly six-year detention was 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 spoken of, 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 nor the years of prison, because it would not act retroactively on decisions already rendered. On the contrary, the risk would be that the defense’s path of appeal — the only path that can overturn guilt or change sentences — would be made harder 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’s 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 fully use their right of appeal.

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 affirm 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 criminalize the KLA, NATO’s intervention or Kosovo’s right to freedom.

It must document that the organ-trafficking charge, which served as the moral detonator for the court’s creation, 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 exerted on Kosovo and of the historical inequality it produced.

The article I wish had been wrong

Twelve years ago I wrote that this tribunal would move 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. This is why it is not enough to wait for the appeal.

The verdict must be appealed, but history must also be defended. Victims must be respected, but their use to build collective guilt must be opposed.

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

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

Then the organ charge disappeared. The crimes against humanity fell.

The joint criminal enterprise remained.

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