Defence Lawyers Say Thaci Did Not Control KLA Guerillas

Lawyers for Kosovo's former president Hashim Thaci said on Tuesday he did not control the guerilla Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) at the time of the war crimes charges against him, and said any such crimes were the result of uncontrolled local activity.

Thaci and three co-defendants face 10 charges of persecution, murder, torture and forced disappearance of people during and shortly after the 1998-99 insurgency that eventually brought Kosovo independence from Serbia and made him a hero among many compatriots at home and abroad.

"Hashim Thaci did not control the KLA, the zone commanders did," lawyer Gregory Kehoe said on the second day of Thaci's trial at a special court in The Hague.

On Monday prosecutors said Thaci and the other three principal leaders of the KLA waged a violent campaign targeting political opponents, as well as minority ethnic Serbs and Roma to gain full control.

Hundreds of their alleged victims were imprisoned across Kosovo in terrible conditions and 102 were killed, according to the indictment. Most victims were members of Kosovo's 90% ethnic Albanian majority, prosecutors said.

According to his defence team Thaci, in court in a dark suit and a red tie, does not deny some crimes were committed by ethnic Albanians during and after the conflict.

"But he rejects... the claim of the special office of the prosecutor that the crimes where committed as a matter of policy of the leadership," Kehoe said.

The defence also argued that besides having no control over the KLA, Thaci had no motive to commit war crimes because he knew he would lose the support of his Western allies, especially the United States, if he did so.

The KLA started as a guerilla organisation but in peacetime its leaders largely took over politics in the Balkan country. All four men on trial deny the charges against them.

More than 13,000 people, the majority of them Kosovo Albanians, are believed to have died during the insurgency, when Kosovo was still a province of Serbia under then-strongman President Slobodan Milosevic.

Thaci resigned as president shortly after his indictment in November 2020 and has spend the last two years in detention in The Hague.

During his time as a KLA leader and prominent politician, Thaci worked closely with many Western leaders. Joe Biden, when he was U.S. vice president, called him "the George Washington of Kosovo".

The Kosovo Specialist Chambers, seated in the Netherlands and staffed by international judges and lawyers, was set up in 2015 to handle cases under Kosovo law against ex-KLA guerrillas.

Many Kosovars believe the tribunal is biased against the KLA and fear the court will denigrate its record in paving the way to liberation of Kosovo from Serbian rule.

The court was created separately from the U.N. tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), also held in the Hague, which tried and convicted mainly Serbian officials for war crimes in the Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts.

Milosevic went on trial before the ICTY but he died in 2006 before a verdict was reached.