U.N. Court Frees Former Leader of Kosovo
Valdrin Xhemaj/European Pressphoto Agency
Kosovar Albanians in Pristina celebrated after the decision on Thursday.
By MARLISE SIMONS
Published: November 29, 2012
PARIS — A United Nations war crimes tribunal on Thursday acquitted the former prime minister of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, for the second time of torturing and killing Serb civilians while he was a commander of the NATO-backed Kosovo Liberation Army during its fight for independence in 1999.
Pool photo by Reuters
The former prime minister of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, in The Hague courtroom on Thursday.
Two of his comrades, Idriz Balaj and Lahi Brahimaj, were also acquitted, although Mr. Brahimaj has already served a six-year sentence for torture handed down in an earlier trial. The judges ordered the three men released immediately.
Supporters cheered and applauded in the courtroom's public gallery in The Hague, where proceedings were broadcast via video stream.
The men were expected to return later in the day to Kosovo, where Mr. Haradinaj's supporters — even before the verdict — said they hoped he would return to politics. In Serbia, which is involved in crucial talks with Kosovo, a former Serbian province before the war, the decision was expected to provoke a wave of angry reactions.
Earlier this month, the tribunal enraged the Belgrade government and many Serbs, when an appeals chamber threw out the convictions of two Croatian generals, Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac. They led a 1995 military campaign that recaptured Serb-occupied Croatian land and drove more than 150,000 Serbs from Croatia.
While the acquittal of Mr. Haradinaj was greeted with celebration in Pristina, where he is seen as a hero, in Belgrade Serbs reacted with anger and disappointment.
President Tomislav Nikolic of Serbia, a nationalist who has long been skeptical of the Hague process, said in a statement that the ruling showed that the United Nations tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was "apparently contrary to international law" and had been "formed to try the Serbian people" for the wars of the 1990s. He said that now "nobody will be convicted for the horrible crimes against Kosovo Serbs." He said the ruling would undermine reconciliation in the region, stoke an anti-European Union backlash in Serbia and hinder progress in the already fraught talks between Belgrade and Pristina over Kosovo.
Progress in the talks is seen in Brussels as an important step for Serbia to advance in its aspirations to join the European Union. Prime minister Ivica Dacic said the acquittal was just the latest in the tribunal's politically motivated verdicts, but that continuing talks with Kosovo would be in Serbia's "best interest."
The decisions of the Croatian and now the Kosovo convictions are seen as serious setbacks for the prosecution. It has said in recent days that it will seek a review of the Croatian appeals ruling, in which two of the five judges wrote unusually sharp dissents.
One judge bluntly called the acquittal of the Croatian generals "grotesque" and wrote that the findings of the majority "contradict any sense of justice."
Inevitably, the acquittals of the Croatian generals and now the Kosovo fighters have provoked criticism that the verdicts were politically inspired, because the military men from both countries were backed by the West.
The Croatian campaign of 1995 was planned with the help of active and retired American military advisers.
The Kosovo Liberation Army was openly backed by NATO, which led the Kosovo war.
But lawyers working for the tribunal have said that the case against the Kosovo fighters was fraught from the start.
Before Mr. Haradinaj's indictment in 2005, lawyers in the prosecution office cautioned repeatedly that there was not enough evidence to build a case against him. But some prosecutors argued that the tribunal needed to try hard to include suspects from other ethnic groups in the list of overwhelmingly Serbian suspects.
Mr. Haradinaj, at the time prime minister of United Nations administered Kosovo, became the most senior Kosovo Albanian to be criminally charged. Carla del Ponte, the tribunal's chief prosecutor who indicted him in 2005, called him a "gangster in uniform" and accused him and two of his lieutenants of crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, rape and expulsion of civilians, including Serbs, Albanians and Gypsies.
Mr. Haradinaj, who had just served 100 days in office and was popular as a freedom fighter at home, agreed to step down and surrendered to The Hague to face his first trial.
It seemed like an abrupt end to a wide-ranging career that had included a stint in the Yugoslav Army and almost a decade as an immigrant in Switzerland where he worked as a nightclub bouncer, carpenter and martial arts teacher. By the time he joined the Kosovo separatist rebellion against Serbia, he had taught himself English and German, read books on guerrilla tactics, and soon established himself as a zone commander in the rebel army.
Before traveling to face trial The Hague, Mr. Haradinaj said he was innocent of the charges and his indictment was "a result of the trade-off that some have made with the Serbian government" to make sure that Belgrade would extradite high-ranking Serbian war crimes suspects. Tribunal officials declined to comment.
Mr. Haradinaj was cleared of the charges in 2008, after prosecutors had called for a 20-year sentence. But an appeals court overturned the verdict and ordered a retrial in 2010, saying that extensive intimidation witnesses had led to a miscarriage of justice.
It was the tribunal's first retrial, and it concluded with Thursday's acquittal.
Judges said they found that crimes had indeed occurred, that 16 civilians had been abducted and mistreated in the rebels' Jablanica prison camp and eight civilians had been killed in captivity. But the judges said they had not found sufficient evidence that the accused had directly participated in the crimes or could otherwise be held criminally responsible.
Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/world/europe/un-court-frees-former-leader-of-kosovo.html
