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UN WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL FREES SERB GENERAL:
PARIS A United Nations war crimes tribunal on Thursday acquitted
the former prime
minister ofKosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, for the second time of
charges of torturing andkilling Serb civilians while he was a
commander of the NATO-backedKosovo Liberation
Army during its fight for independence in 1999.
Kosovar Albanians in Pristina celebrated after the decision on
Thursday.
Two of his associates, Idriz Balaj and Lahi Brahimaj, were also
acquitted, although Mr.
Brahimaj has already served a six-year sentence for torture
handed down in an earliertrial. The judges ordered the three men
released immediately and by evening Mr.
Haradinaj, who spent almost four years in jail, had already
returned to Kosovo, retrieved
by a government plane. He was welcomed by the prime minister,
Hashim Thaci, alongtime rival, and cheered by large crowds on the
streets of Pristina, the capital.
I have mixed feelings, because an injustice was done to me and
my people, Mr.Haradinaj said in a telephone interview after his
arrival. It took a long time and I am
looking forward to helping to build Kosovo society.
People close to Mr. Haradinaj said that with his reputation as a
freedom fighter intact, he
would soon return to politics.
The acquittal was bitterly denounced by Serbians, who have long
believed that the Hague
tribunal is biased against them.
The decision came after the court released two Croatian
generals, Ante Gotovina and
Mladen Markac, this month after an appeals chamber threw out
their convictions. Thegenerals had led a 1995 military campaign
that recaptured Serb-occupied Croatian land,
killed several hundred Serbian civilians and drove more than
150,000 Serbs from Croatia.
President Tomislav Nikolic ofSerbia, a nationalist long
skeptical of the Hague process,said in a statement that Thursdays
ruling showed that the tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia had evidently been formed to try the Serbian people
for the wars of the
1990s. Now, he said, nobody will be convicted for the horrible
crimes against KosovoSerbs.
Amnesty International has estimated that 800 non-Albanians were
abducted and killed by
Kosovo rebels, and it said that few people suspected of such
crimes had been prosecutedin Kosovo.
The overturning of the Croatian and the Kosovo convictions are
seen as serious setbacks
for the tribunals ability to prosecute cases. The court has said
recently that it will seek a
review of the Croatian appeals ruling, in which two of the five
judges wrote unusually
sharp dissenting opinions. One judge bluntly called the
acquittal of the Croatian generalsgrotesque, saying that the
findings of the majority contradict any sense of justice.
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Inevitably, the acquittals have provoked criticism beyond Serbia
that the verdicts were
politically inspired, because the militaries of both countries
were backed by the West.
The Croatian campaign of 1995 was planned with the help of
active and retired Americanmilitary advisers, and the Kosovo
Liberation Army was backed by NATO in the war that
established Kosovo, a former Serbian province, as an independent
state.
But lawyers who formerly worked for the tribunal have said that
the case against the
Kosovo fighters was weak from the start.
Geoffrey Nice, a former senior trial attorney at the tribunal,
questioned why Mr.
Haradinaj was indicted at all. Mr. Nice and others said that
before Mr. Haradinaj was
charged, lawyers in the prosecution office cautioned on several
occasions that there wasnot enough evidence to build a case against
him.
But Mr. Haradinaj, at the time prime minister of a United
Nations-administered Kosovo,
became the most senior Kosovo Albanian to be charged when Carla
del Ponte, the
tribunals chief prosecutor, indicted him in 2005. She called him
a gangster in uniformand accused him and two of his lieutenants of
crimes against humanity, including murder,
torture, rape and expulsion of civilians.
Mr. Haradinaj, who had just served 100 days in office, agreed to
step down and surrender
to The Hague to face his first trial. Before leaving, he said
that he was innocent and thathis 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.
It seemed like an abrupt end to a career for the man who had
done a stint in the Yugoslav
Army and spent almost a decade as an immigrant in Switzerland,
where he worked as anightclub bouncer, carpenter and martial arts
teacher. By the time he joined the Kosovo
separatist rebellion against Serbia, he had taught himself
English and French and readbooks on guerrilla tactics. He soon
established himself as a zone commander in the rebel
army.
Mr. Haradinaj was cleared of those 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 of
witnesses had led to a miscarriage of justice.
It was the tribunals first retrial, and it concluded with
Thursdays acquittal. The judges
said they found that crimes had occurred, including 16 civilians
abducted and mistreatedin the rebels Jablanica prison camp and
eight civilians killed there in captivity. But theysaid they found
no evidence that Mr. Haradinaj had directly participated in the
crimes or
could be held criminally responsible. Rather, they said, there
was evidence he had tried to
prevent crimes by his underlings.
