From U.S. Allies to Defendants: Why Washington Backed Kosovo’s Specialist Court

The September 16 guilty verdict against the four former leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army and the lengthy prison sentences handed down by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague have shaken many Kosovars — not only because of the verdict itself, but because their former ally, the United States, did not come to their defense.

The verdict raises a question: why did the U.S. support the creation of a court that would prosecute leaders who had once been among Washington’s closest allies in the Balkans? After leading NATO’s intervention against Serbia and backing the KLA’s role in postwar Kosovo, what changed?

The answer does not necessarily lie in a single issue or moment. There was no event or person that suddenly changed course. Instead, a series of developments over the years led to a significant shift in American policy and exposed a fundamental reality that many Kosovars do not want to accept: U.S. support has been and will always be rooted in its own interest.

Allegations of grave crimes committed by KLA members, including claims of organ trafficking, had circulated since 1999. But they remained in the shadow of the scale and intensity of the systematic crimes committed by Serbian and Yugoslav forces — from Prekaz to Račak and the long list of atrocities during the period of NATO’s bombing.

War crimes attributed to the Kosovar side received more attention after the war ended, when tens of thousands of Serbs and Roma left or were forced to leave Kosovo, while some Kosovo Albanians were also killed. Importantly, all of this happened under the watch of the United States and European governments, as well as NATO, the UN and the OSCE.

The issue returned forcefully in 2008, after the publication of the memoirs of former International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, The Hunt: Me and the War Criminals. In the book she presented accusations of grave crimes committed by KLA members after the war.

Del Ponte described the difficulties her investigators had faced in trying to investigate these allegations, including the lack of evidence and difficulties securing witnesses. But there was another major obstacle: the temporal jurisdiction of the Hague Tribunal for the Kosovo conflict ended in June 1999, when the armed conflict ended and NATO troops entered Kosovo.

That raised the question of who should investigate and prosecute the alleged crimes that fell outside the Tribunal’s jurisdiction.

In 2011, the report by Swiss senator Dick Marty for the Council of Europe prompted calls for a deeper investigation into the organ-trafficking allegations. Organ trafficking took the lion’s share of media attention, but the report also dealt with war crimes and organized crime linked to a sector of the KLA known as the “Drenica Group.”

Marty’s report received the support of the EU and the U.S., which declared they would take further steps. One concern was that Russia might take the issue to the UN Security Council, as it had threatened to do.

The European Union then created the Special Investigative Task Force, SITF, based in Brussels and composed entirely of international staff. The U.S. directly supported SITF, notably by providing its chief prosecutor, former U.S. ambassador for war crimes Clint Williamson, who had worked on the indictment against Slobodan Milošević at the Hague Tribunal and had led UNMIK’s justice department.

In 2014, Williamson made public SITF’s findings, declaring that they largely confirmed what Marty had reported and that there was sufficient evidence to bring charges against certain individuals.

According to him, the crimes had been committed against Serbs, Roma and Albanians. He also highlighted the climate of witness intimidation.

As for the organ-trafficking allegations, Williamson said investigators had found evidence of a limited number of cases consistent with Marty’s report, but not sufficient to bring charges.

What made the situation unusual was that SITF announced there was sufficient basis for indictments before the institution that would try these cases existed. But that soon changed, as the EU, with U.S. support, began the process of creating the Kosovo Specialist Chambers.

By 2015, the political and bureaucratic momentum had become hard to stop. Kosovo was placed under strong pressure to accept this fait accompli.

The international community had concluded that Kosovo’s judicial institutions were not the right place to try accusations against former senior KLA figures. This was largely linked to witness intimidation in two previous trials against KLA leaders Ramush Haradinaj and Fatmir Limaj, accused of war crimes before the Hague Tribunal, where pressure on witnesses contributed to the failure or collapse of the cases.

This stance was particularly significant given that for more than two decades the U.S. and Europe had spent billions building Kosovo’s institutions, including the police, courts and justice system.

EULEX, the European Union’s rule-of-law mission, sent international judges, prosecutors and police officers to Kosovo and, until 2018, had direct executive powers in the justice system.

As part of its mandate, EULEX gathered evidence of war crimes during its years of operation in Kosovo, but the number of indictments and prosecutions remained relatively small.

Both among Kosovo’s citizens and among some international officials who had worked with EULEX and the UN, there was a widespread belief that American pressure had discouraged or blocked the advancement of these cases.

Ultimately, Western governments often cooperate with problematic partners when they believe these relationships serve broader strategic objectives.

The United States helped create a political order in which former KLA leaders became essential partners for building the new state.

Washington cooperated with them across successive U.S. administrations — Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump — and consistently relied on Kosovo’s political leadership to advance broader American objectives in the Balkans.

From Washington’s perspective, Hashim Thaçi was the ideal partner. He had shown willingness to negotiate with Belgrade and had become a regional political actor supporting the integration of neighboring countries and their Albanian communities into the Western political order.

In North Macedonia, the 2001 Ohrid Agreement ended the armed conflict between the government and Albanian rebels, among whom were many former KLA members.

In Montenegro, Thaçi supported independence in the 2006 referendum, in which 55.5 percent of voters voted in favor — just barely above the threshold set by the European Union. Montenegrin Albanians voted overwhelmingly for independence, becoming an important component of the pro-independence coalition.

In 2020, Thaçi was also closely involved in the U.S.-led effort to broker an economic agreement between Kosovo and Serbia.

Critics argued the initiative was motivated as much by the Trump administration’s desire to score a foreign-policy success ahead of the elections as by the aim of a genuine normalization of relations.

In a world driven as much by realpolitik as by moral principles, the natural question is: why did U.S. policy change?

Washington made it clear to Kosovo’s leaders that they had few alternatives but to support the court, otherwise they risked losing American support and opening the way for Moscow and the UN Security Council to take charge of the issue.

The U.S. engaged a long list of American and regional figures to convey this message. From Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama to Congressman Eliot L. Engel, a powerful supporter of Kosovo and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, various figures helped convey Washington’s stance.

But after indictments were raised against former KLA leaders, both Rama and Engel became strong critics of the court.

In 2015, Kosovo’s Assembly amended the Constitution and approved a new law enabling the creation of the special court outside Kosovo’s territory, with international staff, but operating under Kosovo’s laws.

As a U.S. official was reported to have said privately at the time: “The turkeys voted for Thanksgiving.”

So why did Washington exert so much pressure to create the court?

There is the direct answer: justice, accountability and the need for Kosovo to show it was ready to confront accusations of grave crimes committed during the war.

But there were also shifts in political influence that cannot be ignored.

The court gave Washington and its European allies a way to manage a politically explosive issue, to show Belgrade that accusations against former KLA leaders would not be ignored and to keep the issue away from a broader international forum where Russia and the UN Security Council could play a decisive role.

Moreover, the court offered a way to respond to growing concerns in Europe about organized crime linked to Albanian networks and their alleged ties to Kosovo’s political leadership, as well as growing corruption in Kosovo, particularly during Hashim Thaçi’s rule.

There was also a personal dimension.

For years, Washington had cultivated extraordinarily close relations with the former KLA leadership in Kosovo and particularly with Hashim Thaçi.

These relations may have led Kosovar leaders to believe that American political support would ultimately shield them from the consequences of the accusations.

None of this diminishes the crimes or the victims’ suffering.

The question is whether the accountability effort reflected the consistent application of a principle of justice, or whether justice became intertwined with the geopolitical interests of the powers that created and supported the court.

And perhaps the answer is a combination of both.

Kosovars were reminded of this again recently, when the Trump administration expressed support for the court’s verdict, despite its broader efforts to attack the International Criminal Court and weaken international justice institutions.

Seen in the context of the administration’s transactional approach to relations with Serbia and Russia, the absence of American criticism of the court was not unexpected.

The question is not whether the victims of crimes deserve justice. They do.

Nor should the suffering of Albanians, Serbs, Roma or other victims be weighed against one another.

The harder question is whether the Kosovo Specialist Chambers were first and foremost an instrument of justice, or whether justice became intertwined with the shifting political interests that defined the court’s creation — and what that tells us about American policy in the region.

If the answer is the first, then the same standards of accountability must be applied consistently, even when it is inconvenient for powerful governments and their allies.

If the answer is the second, then Kosovo has learned a hard lesson about realpolitik: international friendships are rarely unconditional and, when strategic interests change, yesterday’s indispensable partner can become today’s defendant.

Fron Nahzi is the author of “Ethnic Interest Groups and U.S. Foreign Policy: The Albanian-American Movements,” published by Routledge.