THE HAGUE, Feb 11 (Reuters) – Lawyers for Kosovo’s former President Hashim Thaci said on Wednesday that he should be acquitted of war crimes charges that allege he masterminded a violent political power grab by the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army in the late 1990s.
Thaci and three other former KLA commanders are charged with persecution, murder, torture and forced disappearances of people during and shortly after the 1998-99 uprising that eventually brought independence for the Albanian majority region from Serbia.
Lawyer Luka Misetic told judges at the special Kosovo war crimes court in The Hague that the prosecutors’ allegations that Thaci and the three other commanders waged a violent campaign to get political control over all of Kosovo were an unfounded attempt to rewrite the country’s history.
“There is ample reasonable doubt for you to enter a judgment of acquittal on all counts,” Misetic said.
NO DIRECT EVIDENCE, SAYS DEFENCE
Thaci’s defence team said there was no evidence to directly link Thaci to any of the alleged crimes and said there was not enough evidence to say Thaci controlled other KLA commanders.
“There are no orders in the record from Thaci to perpetrators of crimes. There are no reports from perpetrators of crimes to Thaci,” Misetic said.
“There is no credible evidence that he was personally involved in the commission of war crimes,” he added.
Thaci, 57, who served as prime minister, foreign minister and president of independent Kosovo between 2008 and 2020, and his co-accused deny all the charges.
On Monday, prosecutors sought a 45-year prison sentence for Thaci and his co-accused at the end of a nearly three-year trial. They say that in 1998 and 1999 more than 100 political opponents and perceived collaborators with Serbian security forces were killed and hundreds abused in and around 50 detention camps run by the KLA.
More than 13,000 people, the majority of them Kosovo Albanians, are believed to have died during the late 1990s insurgency, when Kosovo was still a province of Serbia under then-nationalist strongman President Slobodan Milosevic, whose troops violently cracked down on ethnic Albanians.
The Kosovo Specialist Chambers, staffed by international judges and lawyers, was set up in 2015 to handle war crimes cases under Kosovo law against ex-KLA guerrillas. The war crimes tribunal was set up outside the small Balkan country because of worries about witness intimidation as former KLA leaders are seen by many in Kosovo as national liberation heroes.
A ruling is expected within three months.
(Reporting by Stephanie van den Berg; Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Alex Richardson)
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