The Hague, Between Nightmares and Paranoia

An indictment to defend the indictment. Ahead of September 16, when the court’s verdict is to be announced, the prosecutor has raised a new indictment. The feeling conveyed by the indictment raised yesterday in The Hague against the former KLA leaders seems like nightmare and paranoia at once. The nightmare is the fear that what you have built for years and years could collapse the moment you open your eyes. And the paranoia? The fear that every voice, every memory, every shadow is conspiring against you. And it seems that both — nightmare and paranoia — meet in the same courtroom: in The Hague.

Meanwhile, this is not a trial of cold case files. For Albanians, it is the trial of the century. In the dock sit four men, but behind them stand a war, a resistance, and a part of our history. That is why the question is not only what is happening in The Hague, but also: what comes after The Hague?

After years of investigations, thousands of pages and hundreds of testimonies, the accused are once again being cast as a threat. Not only as the party against whom the Prosecution must prove its case, but now also as the nightmare from which the indictment itself must be defended. Here irony does not knock; it walks in uninvited.

The indictment that denounces itself… The new indictment is being raised next to the old one like a crutch to hold up a swaying wall, like a ditch to guard the wall and, perhaps tomorrow, like another wall to guard the ditch. If the indictment is so strong, why does it need so many walls? For years we heard about protected witnesses, hidden identities, closed sessions, security measures, checks and protocols. An entire fortress was built around them. Now we are told the accused somehow got past those walls. If that thesis holds, the question arises on its own: whose responsibility was it?

The paradox no longer whispers; it self-incriminates. If those in isolation were not truly isolated and the witnesses were not sufficiently protected, what were all those years of isolation for, if today The Hague itself tells us the isolation was not enough? Even if this indictment were to find a legal alibi, it would require two defendants: those isolated in the courtroom and The Hague itself. By claiming that the prison barriers were breached, the institution simultaneously raises questions about the protocols with which it justified years of pre-trial detention on the grounds of witness protection. The indictment aims to weigh on the prisoners, but its shadow also falls on the institution whose duty it was to guard those barriers.

The nightmare behind the cracked walls. The basic indictment, amended several times, took years of investigations, thousands of documents and the reconstruction of a scenario for a war that happened decades ago. Belgrade’s help was even sought, and Belgrade did not hesitate to come forward with whatever it had in hand. The new indictment, by contrast, was raised with a different haste. Could it be that The Hague runs faster when the nightmare knocks on its own door?

And what is the nightmare? That the walls of the basic indictment have begun to crack and the foundations to shake? That the stones laid since the “Yellow House” narrative are falling one after another — from the “joint criminal enterprise” thesis to the attempt to place the occupier and the resistance on the same scale?

The paradox remains the indictment’s fortress, against which the trial has opened more and more questions. When a wall starts to crack, the craftsman has two options: check the foundations or build another one in front of it. And here the question arises: has The Hague chosen the wall? Is the new indictment being raised as a defensive wall for the old one?

When the indictment calls witnesses to order. If they remember what supports the indictment, memory becomes a stone in its wall; when they remember differently, the cracking starts to be heard. Attorney Sophie Menegon placed on the table precisely the stone that does not fit easily into the wall: Mustafa, Bislim Zyrapi and “Witness 4”, according to the defense’s argument, told the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office itself that no one had interfered with them. So where is the influence hiding? Is a witness credible only when his memory marches in the Prosecution’s direction, and becomes suspicious the moment it stops at its gate?

If so, then we have underestimated the power of a cell in The Hague. An isolated, surveilled, controlled man supposedly managed to get past walls, cameras and protocols, enter people’s memories and rearrange their history. Even Franz Kafka would envy such a script. The Hague seems to need a way out of this dead end.

Here the nightmare merges with paranoia. If the accused stay silent, they are hiding; if they speak, they are influencing; if they remember, they are manipulating. And when someone remembers like them, he must have been influenced. If history does not match the indictment, is history to blame? The ideal accused thus remain those without voice, without memory and, if possible, without shadow.

The power of testimony. Facing witnesses shrouded in anonymity, with codes and hidden identities, the defense brought into the courtroom names of international weight: Wesley Clark, James Rubin, Christopher Hill, Jock Covey, John Duncan and Michael Durkee. They did not know the war from The Hague’s cold corridors. They saw it up close, met the KLA leaders and acted in the centers of world power where decisions were made about the fate of the war and of Kosovo. Their testimony was not a whisper from behind a curtain; it was a piece of history entering the courtroom with a name, a face and accountability.

When the first indictment needs a second one to defend itself, which is keeping which afloat? Menegon, the attorney of one of the accused, stripped the paradox of its legal garb and left it facing its own question: according to the defense’s argument, a heavy sentence is sought for conversations held in pre-trial detention, while outside the walls the consequence allegedly intended was never proven. So what is being weighed: the consequence that happened, or the fear that it might have happened? Is The Hague clutching, like a drowning man at a straw, to keep the old indictment alive? Because a straw, however tightly you grip it, does not become a rope.

The trial of the century. There are trials that weigh the fates of individuals, and there are trials burdened with the weight of an era. This is one of them. In The Hague, it is not only the guilt or innocence of four men being measured; for Albanians, it touches the memory of a people that fought to emerge from bondage and enter history under its own name. That is why every testimony, every silence and every decision will reach far beyond the walls of that courtroom. Because in The Hague today it is not only the fate of four men that echoes; a century of Albanian struggle for freedom is knocking there, with its wounds, its sacrifices and its memory.

But history cannot be held in pre-trial detention. One day the walls fall. The cameras switch off. The files close. And then no one asks anymore how high the walls were. The question is what they held inside.

And after all this remains the question that, for Albanians, is greater than the trial itself: What comes after The Hague?

Lecturer of International Relations at UET (Prof. Dr. / Colonel, ret.)