Hashim, Today I Write to You as a Friend

By Baton Haxhiu

I am not equating these two courts or these two processes. It would be unfair and legally inaccurate. But I cannot escape the weight of this paradox. Serbia sentenced you then because it considered you part of a movement fighting against it. Today’s court says it is not judging the purpose of Kosovo’s independence, but the crimes that, according to it, were committed on the road toward that purpose. However, the way the verdict was pronounced today left me with a much heavier feeling. By formally separating freedom from crimes, the narrative brought the liberation war so close to the concept of a criminal enterprise that at some moments it seemed as if the very road to freedom was being put in the dock.

Today the Court sentenced you to 25 years in prison for war crimes. It found you guilty of murder, torture, cruel treatment and unlawful detention, while it did not find you guilty of the six counts of crimes against humanity. The decision is of the first instance and the legal battle continues with the right of appeal.

I don’t want to discuss the sentence today. I don’t want to become the lawyer, prosecutor or judge of a process that has lasted for years. There are people who were killed, tortured and detained, there are families that have sought justice, and every victim deserves a name, dignity and their truth. Responsibility for a crime must be proven and must remain individual responsibility.

But after what I heard today, I cannot be silent about something else. I was troubled by the language in which the war was told, the way the narrative was constructed and the way the responsibility of individuals was placed within a much broader portrait of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

At one moment of the pronouncement of the decision the court made, in essence, a distinction that is very important to me. It did not take it upon itself to judge whether the purpose of Kosovo’s independence was good or bad, but said that on the road toward that purpose crimes, torture and detentions had been committed, and that the accused had acted within the framework of a joint criminal enterprise that targeted political opponents and people perceived as collaborators. The court at the same time did not find proven the legal threshold for the six counts of crimes against humanity.

Here is my problem with the narrative I heard today. Legally it can be said that the political purpose of independence is separated from the crimes committed on the road. But when then the communiqués, the security structures, the political organization, the prisons, the leaders, the opponents and the activity of a movement are placed for hours on end within a criminal story, the boundary between individual responsibility and the description of the character of the war becomes very thin.

I do not oppose a court’s right to say that during a war for independence a crime was committed. A crime remains a crime even when the political purpose is just. But I cannot accept that the crime becomes the main explanation of Kosovo’s road to freedom.

The KLA was not born to imprison Albanians, it was not born to torture people and it was not born as a criminal project. It was born after years of Serbian state repression, the removal of autonomy, the expulsion of Albanians from institutions, political imprisonments and violence used as a state instrument. When the war became open, that violence turned into killings, expulsions and great destruction. International tribunals later established the responsibility of senior Serbian officials for violent expulsions, killings and other crimes against the Albanian population of Kosovo.

NATO did not intervene because the KLA was building a criminal enterprise. The intervention came after the failure of diplomacy and in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe that the West linked to the policy of repression and violence of the Belgrade forces. This context does not absolve any crime committed by the Albanian side. But without this context the history of the war cannot be written honestly.

This is what troubled me today. Not the fact that the court described crimes it said it had proven. What troubled me was the way those crimes were placed in a narrative that, in many moments, gave the entire war a criminal context and left out almost entirely the reason why that war had begun.

I did not learn that war thirty years later. I lived it. I was inside it as a journalist and as a witness. I knew the protagonists, I saw mistakes, conflicts, arbitrariness, bad decisions and people who should not have been touched. I don’t need anyone to teach me that war also produces crimes.

But I also saw a people trying to get out of Serbia. I saw people who didn’t know if they would live to see the next day. I saw villages emptying and people leaving their homes. I saw an armed movement that was created because a large part of a generation had lost faith that freedom could come only by waiting.

This is part of the truth and cannot be removed from history just because it is not part of the indictment.

That is why today I do not oppose the court for the fact that it tried individuals for crimes. I oppose the language when it moves from individual responsibility to a historical portrait of an entire war.

Four people can be convicted. The history of Kosovo’s liberation should not be convicted along with them.

And here begins my part with you.

I have known you long before your name was tied to the Presidency, the Prime Ministry or The Hague. I knew you when you were part of a generation that had lost faith that Kosovo could wait endlessly. You had come from Drenica, from a family where the history of resistance was part of life and where political prison and exile were not abstract notions. Your parents had wanted you to become a doctor. You chose history.

Later you became part of it in the most direct way. You crossed borders, organized people, weapons and supplies at a time when every crossing was a real risk. You have recounted caravans of fighters, horses loaded with armaments and supplies brought into Kosovo through the mountains.

At that time no one had guarantees about the end. NATO was not a certain promise. The survival of the KLA was not certain. Serbia’s departure was not certain and independence was still a goal for which one had to fight politically and militarily. The people who entered that war did not know how it would end.

Rambouillet was one of the moments when your life changed forever. Within days the Americans and the international mediators understood that without your answer the agreement could not proceed. James Rubin and Christopher Hill saw you as the key person of the delegation and the pressure on you became extraordinary.

Madeleine Albright spoke to you about peace, about the transformation of the KLA and about the passage from war to politics. On one side was America and on the other were the people with whom you had entered the war and who were not ready to easily accept disarmament and transformation. The documents of that time show the weight that had fallen on a man around thirty, who had to make a decision that could change the direction of the war.

You asked for two weeks. You wanted to return, to speak to the people of the war and to explain to them that signing was not necessarily the end of the purpose for which they had fought. The Rambouillet document recorded acceptance in principle, consultation with political and military structures and return for signing.

Then you returned to Kosovo through the mountains. Two attempts failed and only on the third did you manage to cross the border. As you were returning, you were no longer just one of the KLA people. You were returning as a political leader, on whom a large part of the responsibility for what was to come already weighed.

When the NATO bombings began, Wesley Clark had asked you how long the KLA could survive. You had answered that it would survive in any circumstances. But what came next was the most difficult period of the war, with exodus, killings, displacements and a military structure trying to survive under the pressure of Serbian forces.

On June 17, 1999 you returned toward Kosovo by helicopter. In our book there is a scene that has stayed in my mind. You were sitting and looking out the window at the land beneath you. Only a few years had passed since the day you had left Switzerland to return to the war, while now you were entering a Kosovo from which Serbian forces were departing. Many of those who had started that road had not lived to see that day.

Then came politics. It had victories, defeats, mistakes and compromises. You created a party, lost elections, won elections, became Prime Minister and on February 17, 2008 you read in the Assembly the declaration by which Kosovo was proclaimed an independent and sovereign state.

Hashim, our friendship has never been a relationship of servility. We have been very close friends and we have had many disagreements. We have often thought the same about the purpose and have had differences about strategy, about people, about power and about how Kosovo should be defended politically. This has not diminished our friendship. It has made it real.

One of the most difficult days of this friendship did not happen during the war. It happened many years later, on a morning when I took upon myself a responsibility I did not want to have.

I had to tell you and Kadri that the indictment was coming.

I could have waited and could have left it to someone else. I didn’t. I thought that such news had to be said directly and that a friend had the duty to look his friend in the eye when saying it.

I came to meet you and said what I did not want to say. The Special Court was approaching you and the indictment would be raised. A mechanism that Kosovo had created and which you had supported in the name of the state’s obligations was coming to one of the people who had been at the head of that state.

I remember how hard it was to look you in the eye. But more than my difficulty, what has remained in my memory is the way you experienced the news.

It was a heavy and dignified experience. There was no theater and no attempt to deny reality. There was a calm that made that morning even heavier for me.

I did not ask you what you were thinking in those minutes. Perhaps because in some moments between friends there is no need for questions. Your face that morning I have not forgotten.

Today, when I saw you listening to the verdict, that very face came to my mind.

Long before that morning something else had happened that has not left my mind. In 2017, in a conversation at a very high international level, about which I still have the duty to preserve the confidentiality of the people who trusted me, the question had been raised of what would happen in Kosovo if its President and one of the main leaders of the institutions were accused and ended up in prison.

At that time there was no public indictment and no arrests. I did not take that question as proof that someone had decided the verdict in advance and I do not present it as such today. I have no such proof and I don’t want to give a conversation a meaning it cannot prove.

But that question shook me, because it made me understand that the scenario of arresting the people who were at the top of the state was being seriously discussed at levels to which the public had no access.

That day I did not know the end. But for the first time I understood the direction.

From that moment I no longer saw the Special Court only as a legal institution that had been created and that one day would investigate certain cases. I understood that it could reach the political top of Kosovo.

Then it fell to me to tell you.

This is one of the heaviest ironies of your political life.

The Court had been created through the constitutional amendment and the law adopted by Kosovo in 2015, based on international agreements and under strong support and pressure from Western allies. American institutions publicly supported the continuation of its mandate when in 2017 an attempt was made to repeal it.

You were one of the people who supported that process.

I know the conviction you had. For you the relationship with the United States and the West was Kosovo’s interest and should not be broken even when the political price was high. It can be debated whether every decision made on this conviction was right. But it cannot be denied that this was one of the convictions that directed an important part of your political life.

And today the mechanism that Kosovo agreed to create, and which you supported as part of the state’s international responsibilities, sentenced you to 25 years in prison.

This is a paradox that needs no embellishment.

You left the post of President in November 2020 and went to The Hague. Since then almost six years have passed. You have been away from Kosovo, away from family and away from the life you had built. The process has included 134 witnesses and whole years of evidence, defense and arguments.

Today the decision came.

I am not using our friendship to say that the court has no right to convict a man when it proves criminal responsibility. Nor can I use the court’s decision to forget thirty years of history that happened before it.

A verdict can decide on the criminal responsibility of Hashim Thaçi. It cannot erase Rambouillet. It cannot erase the return to Kosovo. It cannot erase the transformation of the KLA. It cannot erase February 17 and it cannot pretend that an entire era did not exist.

The court has its mandate. History has another mandate.

And here I have one more word for Kosovo.

There was a time when far fewer people stood publicly by you when the Special Court was approaching. Today there are far more. It is good that there are more. People have the right to change their minds and have the right to feel pain when a former President of their country receives a heavy sentence.

But I have a memory.

I have seen people who demanded the Court. I have seen people who demanded your departure. I have heard people who treated the indictment as a final decision long before the court spoke. I have seen people who politically had pronounced your sentence long before today.

Today some of them speak with pain about your history.

I am sorry when I see this.

Not because an opponent has no right to change his mind. He does. Not because someone who supported the Court cannot be shaken by the language of the verdict. They can.

But a change of mind also requires responsibility toward what you said yesterday.

You cannot demand for years that Hashim Thaçi go to The Hague, politically use his departure, declare him morally convicted before the trial and then today behave as if this story came from nowhere.

There is much hypocrisy here.

And this worries me more for Kosovo than for you.

Because a society does not become more honest when it changes memory according to the need of the day. A person can say that then he believed something and today he sees it differently. This is honesty. But to forget that yesterday you wanted a man’s departure and today to come out in the first row to mourn his history is something else.

There was a time when there were far fewer people by your side.

Today there are many.

I am not bothered that there are many. On the contrary, I would like Kosovo to understand that defending the history of the war does not require denying any victim nor opposing justice.

But I don’t want memory to turn into spectacle.

I don’t need to change my biography today.

We have been very close friends. We have had strong agreements and disagreements. We have thought the same about many things and differently about their strategy. We have come closer and moved apart. We have debated about people, power and decisions. None of this has changed what we have been through together.

No post you received made you my friend.

Therefore the loss of any post cannot take that friendship away.

The Prime Ministry did not create it.

The Presidency did not strengthen it.

The Hague cannot destroy it.

Today a court gave its verdict on your criminal responsibility. The process will continue and history will continue as well.

I am not giving another verdict.

I am only saying what I know from my life.

You remain my friend.

No post you had, no post you lost, no decision and not even history itself can change what we have been through together.

Batoni