ET @Shum_Emir - Twitter Profile

about 1 month ago

Today’s judgment against the former Kosova Liberation Army leaders, Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi, is a travesty of justice that must be corrected on appeal as soon as possible. The entire saga of the so-called Specialist Chambers began in 2008, with far-fetched allegations of organ trafficking brought before the Council of Europe by Russian parliamentarian Konstantin Kosachev and Serbian parliamentarian Miloš Aligrudić. These allegations were so absurd that they did not even make it into the Prosecution’s indictment due to lack of evidence. Crucially, today's judgment also rejected the most serious allegation remaining in the Prosecution’s outlandish litany of charges: that the KLA had launched a widespread, systematic attack against a civilian population. This basic prerequisite for establishing crimes against humanity was therefore unfulfilled. The Court also made clear that it did not pass judgment on the legitimacy or justice of our war of liberation. Instead, the convictions relate to specific charges of war crimes, including the detention of persons considered collaborators of the Serbian regime. These findings are unjust and offensive, but they are not final. The gross injustice of the Prosecution's charges has been repeatedly noted not only in Kosova, but also by renowned international figures who witnessed the conflict first hand and testified before the court: the KLA and its leaders were a bulwark against brutal repression against Albanians — not the perpetrators of criminal acts. These first-hand accounts underscore that today's judgment rests on fundamentally flawed foundations, both historically and legally. This judgment cannot be separated from the history that gave rise to the KLA. The people of Kosova endured the loss autonomy, expulsion from institutions, imprisonment, torture, killings, ethnic cleansing, and ultimately, genocide. For over a century, numerous Serbian state programs and policies aimed at the elimination of ethnic Albanians. This brutal repression was not a backdrop to the war, it was the reality that made resistance a matter of survival. And yet, the Specialist Chambers’ work has focused on only one side of the war. When members of a single ethnic group sit in the docket, while the state apparatus that perpetrated massacres, expulsions and genocidal crimes remains untouched, the inevitable result is both the fact and the appearance of mono-ethnic justice. This has only been reinforced by the lack of transparency of a trial, significant parts of which took place completely out of public view and thus without public scrutiny. As we have done since the start of this process, Kosova’s Government will continue, with all the means at its disposal, to support the accused in the appeal proceedings, where we expect this injustice to be fully corrected.

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