The Hague sentences: between human solidarity with the accused and Albanian-style misunderstandings of justice

I call the former KLA leaders — Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi — the accused, as long as they have not been convicted by a final judgment. They have a second chance at the Court of Appeals.

Their conviction at first instance was foreshadowed by many signs throughout the marathon investigation process. Just as it was by the calls for calm from Brussels and Washington on the eve of the first verdict, reminding us that it is not the final one.

The surprise at this stage of the trial was the severity of the sentences. Very heavy for the amount of concrete evidence the prosecution has presented. Disproportionate in relation to some of the sentences (not all) that the Hague International Court has handed down to Serbian criminals convicted of crimes against humanity against Kosovar citizens of Albanian nationality.

The anger of Thaçi’s supporters is legitimate. The solidarity of hundreds of thousands of Albanians in Kosovo, Albania and the diaspora toward them is natural. Everyone awaits with eagerness and hope the word of the Court of Appeals — the only remaining instance that can give the process a turn, delivering at best an acquittal for the accused, or milder sentences equal to the years of detention, which would mean their release.

The battle is now at the Appeals Court. The last one. A legal battle. There is no other chance outside the legal framework in the democratic world, from Washington to Brussels, where the democratic separation of powers — legislative, executive, judiciary — and their independence has ruled for centuries and decades. This is the foundation of the free world.

It is not a facade, as those who misunderstand liberal democracy think, making irrelevant connections to autocratic regimes, where heads of government or state are de facto chief prosecutors and chief judges.

We see this misunderstanding displayed loudly these days in Albania, in the “race” of who can deliver the biggest blow against the Hague Court, as if it had been politically captured by Russia, Serbia, or other anti-Albanian centers in the US and Europe! And likewise in the other “race” over what should be done and has not been done so far to save the four former fighters. Words, words, words. Hypocrisy and crocodile tears to look like great patriots.

All the “proposals” to show force, without being clear where and how, return like a wave crashing against a rock; wherever they turn, they are reduced to one thing: powerful awareness-raising and lobbying. Where? With allied and friendly countries, bearing in mind the US and the powerful EU countries. With what? With pleas for intervention with the court, or with the distraction that all hell might break loose. There are those who understand lobbying as buying the second-instance verdict, since the conviction is gaining ground that something that cannot be bought with money can be bought with a lot of money! (For those who think the Court has been captured by Russia and Serbia, that means buying Putin and Vučić)!

Ignorance or ill intent in this case is revealing a large-scale self-unmasking of the anti-democratic relationship with justice, thinking of it as a tool and notary of politics. This is an attitude that comes as an extension of the old relationship of our politicians with justice inside Albania, of their hostility toward SPAK and GJKKO.

It should be recalled that this attempt at intervention in favor of Thaçi and the other three was consumed by Prime Minister Rama at the highest political instance in the world, which is President Trump. At the first meeting of the Board of Peace in February this year, Rama spent part of the minutes of his intervention to raise the issue of the four. He used as bait the name of the “devil” Jack Smith — the prosecutor who indicted Thaçi — with the aim of lighting the lamp of fury in the American President, given that Smith “enjoys” his extreme global enmity, since he had criminally indicted him on the charge of trying to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election.

A bold intervention this by our prime minister, outside the agenda, which produced news in Albania and Kosovo. Nothing else positive, if it did not harm Thaçi and his friends. And it could not have produced anything else. From the way he raised the issue and where he raised it, Rama betrayed his distorted vision of justice, prejudging even the President as such. I am not saying he did not have Thaçi’s case at heart, but politicians show their skill by finding the right path to help.

In fact, the heroes of spectacles and noises unrelated to the specific organization of justice as an independent power do not help; they do harm. The US and the EU have nothing to learn from Tirana on this topic. They are head and shoulders above in the history of Kosovo. Trying to lecture them is like the folk saying: “Come, father, let me show you the fields.”

They liberated and made Kosovo independent. They are the first name of its freedom. The KLA comes second with the seal of honor and the blood shed for freedom. The LDK and Rugova come meanwhile with the decade-long peaceful resistance that internationalized Kosovo’s cause, built and cemented the framework of its Western aspirations, and justified the KLA’s emergence and international acceptance as a political and military factor. No force can undo these realities.

The US and the EU are also the creators and lobbyists of the approval by the Parliament of Kosovo of the Special Court based in The Hague, with international prosecutors and judges. This sui generis decision had a sui generis context: the new justice of independent Kosovo, where former KLA commanders became leaders of state institutions, failed to investigate hundreds of killings, disappearances and abductions of Albanian civilians and MPs, carried out mostly at the time when NATO’s bombings of Serbia were underway and after Kosovo’s liberation.

We heard some of the names of these victims in the prosecution’s indictment and the court’s verdict.

Kosovo cannot find peace without doing justice for these victims, for these crimes, whoever committed them. The verdict of justice, with real culprits and not scapegoats, is this peace itself.

*This article is part of the ‘PRODEMOCRATIA’ project, a partnership between the PASHKO INSTITUTE and MAPO media, to analyze developments in Albanian democracy.