Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Former Kosovo president Thaci pleads not guilty to war crimes

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"Criminal Kosovo: America’s Gift to Europe" .
[...]U.S. media have given more attention to hearsay allegations of Julian Assange’s sexual encounters with two talkative Swedish women than to an official report accusing Kosovo prime minister Hashim Thaci of running a criminal enterprise which, among almost every other crime in the book, has murdered prisoners in order to sell their vital organs on the world market.

The report by Swiss liberal Dick Marty was mandated two years ago by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). Not to be confused with the European Union, the Council of Europe was founded in 1949 to promote human rights, the rule of law and democracy and has 47 member states (compared to 27 in the EU).

While U.S. legal experts feverishly try to trump up charges they can use to demand extradition of Assange to the United States, to be duly punished for discomfiting the empire, U.S. State Department spokesman Phillip Crowley piously reacted to the Council of Europe allegations by declaring that the United States will continue to work with Thaci since “any individual anywhere in the world is innocent until proven otherwise”.

Everyone, that is, except, among others, Bradley Manning who is in solitary confinement although he has not been found guilty of anything. All the Guantanamo prisoners have been considered guilty, period. The United States is applying the death penalty on a daily basis to men, women and children in Afghanistan and Pakistan who are innocent until proven dead.

Embarrassed supporters of Thaci’s little self-proclaimed state dismiss the accusations by saying that the Marty Report does not prove Thaci’s guilt.

Of course it doesn’t. It can’t. It is a report, not a trial. The report was mandated by the PACE precisely because judicial authorities were ignoring evidence of serious crimes. In her 2008 memoir in Italian La caccia. Io e i criminali di guerra (The Hunt. Me and the War Criminals), the former prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Carla del Ponte, complained that she had been prevented from carrying out a thorough investigation of reports of organ extraction from Serb and other prisoners carried out by the “Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)” in Albania. Indeed, rumors and reports of those atrocities, carried out in the months following the occupation of Kosovo by NATO-led occupation forces, have been studiously ignored by all relevant judicial authorities.

The Marty report claims to have uncovered corroborating evidence, including testimony by witnesses whose lives would be in danger if their names were revealed. The conclusion of the report is not and could not be a verdict, but a demand to competent authorities to undertake judicial proceedings capable of hearing all the evidence and issuing a verdict.

Skepticism about atrocities

It is always prudent to be skeptical about atrocity stories circulating in wartime. History shows many examples of totally invented atrocity stories that serve to stir up hatred of the enemy during wartime, such as the widely circulated World War I reports of the Germans “cutting off the hands of Belgian babies”. Western journalists and politicians abandoned all prudent skepticism regarding the wild tales that were spread of Serb atrocities used to justify the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. Personally, my skepticism extends to all such stories, regardless of the identity of the alleged perpetrators, and I have refrained for years from writing about the Albanian organ transplant stories for that reason. I never considered Carla del Ponte a reliable source, but rather a gullible and self-aggrandizing woman who had been selected by the U.S. sponsors of the ICTY because they thought they could manipulate her. No doubt the sponsors of the Tribunal she was working for, which was set up by and for the United States and NATO allies in order to justify their choice of sides in the Yugoslav civil wars, would have called a halt before she could stray from her assigned path to stick her nose into crimes committed by America’s Albanian protégés. But that does not prove that the alleged crimes actually were committed.

However, the Marty report goes beyond vague rumors to make specific allegations against the KLA’s “Drenica group” led by Hashim Thaci. Despite refusal of Albanian authorities to cooperate, there is ample proof that the KLA operated a chain of “safe houses” on Albanian territory during and after the 1999 NATO war against Serbia, using them to hold, interrogate, torture and sometimes murder prisoners. One of these safe houses, belonging to a family identified by the initial “K”, was cited by Carla del Ponte and media reports as “the yellow house” (since painted white). To quote the Marty Report (paragraph 147):

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“There are substantial elements of proof that a small number of KLA captives, including some of the abducted ethnic Serbs, met their death in Rripe, at or in the vicinity of the K. house. We have learned about these deaths not only through the testimonies of former KLA soldiers who said they had participated in detaining and transporting the captives while they were alive, but also through the testimonies of persons who independently witnessed the burial, disinterment, movement and reburial of the captives’ corpses (…)”
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An undetermined but apparently small number of prisoners were transferred in vans and trucks to an
operating site near Tirana international airport, from which fresh organs could be flown rapidly to recipients.
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Yet another good example of how dirty and unjust world politics can be. At the very highest levels too. That said it is heartening there are still people working hard to see justice take it's responsible course. Even if it takes some 5 years, or longer, to extend it's arm to arrest some vicious perpetrators of past heinous crimes.

Aside: Old news for y'all but i'm just seeing now, on tv, Trump's motorcade headed, i think, to Trump
Tower in New York. No, I'm not placing Trump in Thaci's league. Trump is a relative clean-skin.

Related: Thaci refuses to apologize for KLA crimes
19 January 2008
CAGLAVICA -- Hashim Thaci has refused to apologize to the
Serbs for the crimes committed while he was the leader of the KLA.
Foreign Correspondence - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=26900976

By Ivana Sekularac

April 4, 202312:43 AM GMT+10 Last Updated 5 hours ago

VIDEO

Summary

* Ten counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity
* Trial of ex-guerrilla chief, statesman seen lasting years
* Accused of murder, persecution related to 1998-99 uprising
* Thaci once lauded as 'George Washington of Kosovo' by U.S.
* Four former Kosovo Liberation Army leaders in Hague dock

THE HAGUE, April 3 (Reuters) - Former Kosovo president Hashim Thaci on Monday pleaded innocent to charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity as his trial began at a special court in The Hague, with protesters rallying outside in support of a leader once feted by the West.

Thaci and three co-defendants face 10 charges of persecution, murder, torture and forced disappearance of people during and shortly after the 1998-99 insurgency that eventually brought Kosovo independence from Serbia and made him a hero among many compatriots at home and abroad.

Prosecutor Alex Whiting said the four had targeted political opponents, as well as minority ethnic Serbs and Roma, imprisoning hundreds across Kosovo in terrible conditions and murdering 102 of them. Most victims were members of Kosovo's 90% ethnic Albanian majority, he said.

"There can be no justification...for arbitrarily detaining civilians and persons out of combat and subjecting them to abuse, torture, and murder...That is why the prosecution brought this case, to vindicate the rule of law and the principle that nobody is above the law, even during wartime," Whiting said.

The four defendants, all principal leaders of the former guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and later in peacetime politics of the small Balkan country, all pleaded not guilty shortly after hearings got underway.

"I understand the indictment and I am fully not guilty," Thaci, 54, said in court. Dressed in a dark pinstripe suit, the tall, strapping Thaci looked pale and grayer after two years in detention.

More than 13,000 people, the majority of them Kosovo Albanians, are believed to have died during the insurgency, when Kosovo was still a province of Serbia under then-strongman president Slobodan Milosevic.

Thousands of Kosovars gathered in the capital Pristina on Sunday in protest at the trial, and hundreds rallied outside the court in The Hague on Monday, holding banners with Thaci's image and chanting "KLA" in support of the independence movement.

In Pristina, resident Nazmi Kelmendi said on Monday that "not only is the just war of the KLA being judged, the state of Kosovo is also on trial".

Lawyers for the alleged victims of the four co-defendants told the court that the people they represent were a diverse cross-section of Kosovo society - "teachers, policemen, farmers, builders who were abducted at gunpoint...

"For each of them there was one day that changed their lives forever, or in too many cases, ended their lives," the victims' legal representative Simon Laws said.


[1/5] Former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci attends his war crimes trial in The Hague, Netherlands April 3, 2023.
Koen van Weel/Pool via REUTERS

TRIAL COULD LAST YEARS

Judges adjourned the hearing later in the afternoon after the statement from victims' lawyers. Before leaving the courtroom, Thaci waved to the leadership of his political party seated in the public gallery above.

Proceedings will resume on Tuesday with the opening statement of Thaci's lawyer.

The trial is likely to be lengthy as prosecutors said they would need two years to present their evidence.

Thaci resigned as president shortly after his indictment in November 2020 and was transferred to detention in The Hague.

During his time as a KLA leader and prominent politician, Thaci worked closely with many Western leaders. Joe Biden, when he was U.S. vice president, called him "the George Washington of Kosovo" and Thaci was en route to a meeting at Donald Trump's White House when his indictment was announced.

"Your allies are being put on trial!" read one protest banner in the rally outside the Hague court.

Proceedings began two weeks after the world's permanent war crimes tribunal, the International Criminal Court, also based in The Hague, issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for the alleged crime of deporting Ukrainian children.

The Kosovo Specialist Chambers, seated in the Netherlands and staffed by international judges and lawyers, was set up in 2015 to handle cases under Kosovo law against ex-KLA guerrillas.

Many Kosovars believe the tribunal is biased against the KLA and fear the court will denigrate its record in paving the way to liberation of Kosovo from repressive Serbian rule.

The court was created separately from the U.N. tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), also held in the Hague, which tried and convicted mainly Serbian officials for war crimes in the Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts.

Milosevic went on trial before the ICTY but he died in 2006 before a verdict was reached.

Additional reporting by Stephanie van den Berg and Andrew Gray; Writing by Anthony Deutsch; editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Mark Heinrich

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kosovos-former-president-pleads-not-guilty-war-crimes-charges-2023-04-03/