Justice or Shame? Albanians Sentenced to 150 More Years in Prison for the War Than Serbs

By Ardit Rada

There is a question that can no longer be avoided after the Hague verdicts: how is it possible that, nearly three decades after the Kosovo war, the balance of justice creates the impression that such a heavy weight has fallen on the leaders of the KLA, who fought for liberation against the forces of Slobodan Milošević?

This is not about denying individual crimes or the criminal responsibility of anyone proven to have committed them. But justice is also measured by proportionality, context, and the way the burden of responsibility is distributed among the parties to a conflict. And it is precisely here that the great debate over Kosovo arises.

The 1998–1999 war was not a conflict between two armies and two states of equal power. On one side was the Yugoslav and Serbian state apparatus, with an army, police, security structures and a state chain of command. On the other side was the KLA, an Albanian guerrilla force fighting against Belgrade.

The International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia itself convicted senior Serbian and Yugoslav political, military and police leaders for the crimes in Kosovo.

Nikola Šainović was finally sentenced to 18 years in prison, Nebojša Pavković to 22 years, Sreten Lukić to 20 years, Vladimir Lazarević to 14 years and Dragoljub Ojdanić to 15 years.

These five senior officials alone received a total of 89 years in prison.

Adding up approximately the sentences for Kosovo war-related crimes handed down by the ICTY, the courts of Serbia, UNMIK/EULEX and the courts of Kosovo, and adding the Specialist Chambers’ decisions to date, a frightening and shameful balance emerges. In total, approximately 480 years of imprisonment have been handed down for the war to Albanians, compared to 330 years for Serbs. The 2019 balance counted 38 convicted Albanians against 25 Serbs for war crimes in Kosovo, combining the ICTY, Serbian courts and UNMIK/EULEX. To this are added the later decisions and especially the Specialist Chambers.

But at the center of this story stands another name: Slobodan Milošević, who was never convicted. He was transferred to The Hague in June 2001 and died in detention on March 11, 2006. Three days later, the criminal proceedings against him were closed without a final verdict. So he spent nearly five years in detention, but legally he did not serve a single day of a prison sentence, because there was never a guilty verdict. Likewise Milan Milutinović, the former president of Serbia, responsible for some 150,000 killed, was acquitted by the Hague Tribunal on all counts of the indictment. And these are the shames of The Hague, which failed to reach a verdict, mainly for Milošević, the greatest criminal Europe has known since World War II.

Today, the verdicts against the former KLA leaders make the contrast even stronger. How will history record the fact that Slobodan Milošević, the Yugoslav president during the war, died without ever being convicted, while the KLA leaders are receiving sentences measured in decades?

If The Hague aims not only to convict individuals, but also to leave a legal truth that history can understand, then it must be able to explain to the victims and to future generations that its justice was proportionate.

Today, among other things, the Specialist Chambers owe Kosovo a much bigger answer than the 81 years of imprisonment unjustly handed down. Indeed, they owe the whole world an answer for the bad example they set: that those who defend themselves are punished more than the aggressor.