THE HAGUE (Reuters) – Former Kosovo president Hashim Thaci, considered a hero by compatriots for leading the 1998-99 insurgency against Serbian rule that led to independence, will go on trial on Monday for suspected war crimes during the conflict.
He is one of just a small number of heads of state who have faced justice in international and hybrid war crimes tribunals. Following is a look at sitting and former heads of state who have appeared as defendants since World War Two.
NAZI GERMANY – KARL DOENITZ
At the Nuremberg trials in 1945, seen as the forerunners of international war crimes tribunals, Nazi Germany’s political, military, and economic leaders were prosecuted. Among them was Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, the first former German president to be put on trial. Doenitz, who was only a head of state for a few months after the suicide of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, was convicted in 1946 and spent 10 years in a West Berlin jail.
YUGOSLAVIA – SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC
Former Yugoslav and Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic became the first ex-head of state to stand trial before an international court since World War Two when his trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) started in The Hague in 2002.
Milosevic was charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide for his leading role in the 1990s Balkan wars that followed the break-up of federal Yugoslavia. Before a judgment could be rendered, Milosevic died in his cell in a Hague detention centre in 2006.
LIBERIA – CHARLES TAYLOR
The first ex-head of state to be convicted of war crimes by an international court since the Nuremberg trials was former Liberian president Charles Taylor. His trial before the U.N.-backed Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone started in 2006. In 2012 he was convicted of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the notoriously brutal militias he backed in nearby Sierra Leone. Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in prison that he is now serving in Britain.
KENYA – UHURU KENYATTA
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has seen two heads of state appear before it in proceedings against them. In 2014 then-Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta became the first sitting head of state to appear before the ICC in a pre-trial hearing.
The charges against him were related to alleged stoking of ethnic tensions before the 2007 presidential election and committed before be became head of state. Later in 2014, the prosecution withdrew the charges and blamed the decision on political interference with witnesses, especially after Kenyatta was elected president. In 2015 the ICC dropped the case.
IVORY COAST – LAURENT GBAGBO
In 2016 former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo became the first former head of state to go on trial before the ICC. Gbagbo faced charges of crimes against humanity related to post-election violence over his refusal to accept defeat at the polls in 2010 following a decade in power.
After a three-year trial, Gbagbo was acquitted in 2019. Judges ruled the prosecution’s case linking him to the post-election bloodshed that killed some 3,000 people was “exceptionally weak”. Gbagbo returned to Ivory Coast in 2021 and vowed to remain involved in politics until his death.
CAMBODIA – KHIEU SAMPHAN
The former head of state of Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia, Khieu Samphan, faced trial in two separate cases before the U.N.-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). He first went on trial in 2011 and was convicted in 2014 for crimes against humanity over atrocities committed under the Khmer Rouge “killing fields” regime and got a life sentence.
Most of the estimated 1.7 million victims of the 1975-79 ultra-Maoist rule of the Khmer Rouge died of starvation, torture, exhaustion or disease in labour camps, or were bludgeoned to death during mass executions.
After his second trial from 2014 to 2018, Samphan was convicted of additional crimes against humanity and genocide against the Vietnamese people.
Genocide is the gravest of international crimes and the hardest to prove as prosecutors need to show perpetrators had a special intent to destroy a national, religious, racial or ethnic group.
Khieu, 91, is serving his life sentence in Cambodia.
CHAD – HISSENE HABRE
Former president Hissene Habre, who ruled Chad with an iron fist from 1982 to 1990, went on trial in Senegal before the African Union-backed Extraordinary African Chambers in 2015. His trial came after 17-year campaign by his victims and rights groups to bring Habre, who lived in exile in Senegal, to justice.
Habre’s rule, which began with a coup, saw widespread killings by his infamous political police who rounded up suspects and held them in secret detention centres. In eight years, tens of thousands were raped, tortured and killed.
In 2016 he was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in 2021 after contracting COVID-19 in prison.
(Reporting by Stephanie van den Berg; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
