Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani today criticized the request of the Special Prosecutor's Office in The Hague to sentence each of the former senior officers of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to 45 years in prison, saying that "the KLA war was just and clean."
Closing arguments from the prosecution and defense in the trial of former KLA leader Hashim Thaci and three co-defendants for war crimes in Kosovo and Albania during 1998-99 began today before the Special Court in The Hague, with Chief Prosecutor Kimberly West asking the court to impose sentences of 45 years in prison on all defendants.
Osmani assessed that any attempt to equate the KLA's war of liberation with the "crimes of the genocidal Serbian aggressor" undermines trust in justice and threatens peace.
She wrote on Facebook that Kosovo's independence was "the will of the Kosovo people" and that "thousands of martyrs and innocent civilians" sacrificed their lives for that cause.
"Genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes are acts committed by Serbia against the people of Kosovo over the centuries. During the last war in Kosovo, Serbia aimed to destroy the Albanian people, a goal it achieved by murdering and massacring thousands of children, women, men and the elderly, raping thousands of women and men, destroying hundreds of thousands of homes, expelling more than 80 percent of Kosovo's citizens from their homes, ethnic cleansing, the forced disappearance of thousands of people and other terrible crimes," the post reads.
The Self-Determination Movement: A Political Act, Not a Search for Justice
The Self-Determination Movement (PS) assessed today that the request of the Special Prosecutor's Office in The Hague for maximum sentences for former officers of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) represents "a political act, not a search for justice."
Self-Determination claims that the demand represents "a political intervention in the interpretation of history and an attempt to shift attention from the aggressor to the victim."
It was assessed that Yugoslavia and Serbia under the leadership of Slobodan Milošević "committed genocide in Kosovo and that the KLA fought against genocidal plans and actions, defending the Albanian people."
"Attempts to portray the KLA as a criminal organization aim to criminalize the liberation struggle and depoliticize it, reducing it to individual criminal acts (...) Crimes against humanity require a state apparatus and systematic mechanisms of violence, which the KLA never had," the statement reads.
The party also criticized the Special Court, stating that it is a product of political pressures and geopolitical interests and that justice cannot be selective and one-sided.
"Liberation is not a crime, Kosovo's history cannot be rewritten through indictments that serve the narrative of the aggressor. True justice requires recognition of the legitimacy of the struggle for freedom and identification of the government of genocidal violence (...) Equating the liberation struggle with the crimes of genocidal regimes represents a distortion of history and a relativization of Serbian aggression," Self-Determination stated.
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