Hague court gives Hashim Thaci 25 years for Kosovo war crimes

Presiding judge Charles Smith sentenced Hashim Thaci to 25 years in prison on Wednesday at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague. Thaci, 58, stood in a suit and said nothing while the sentence was read. He has been in detention in the Netherlands for almost six years. He resigned as president of Kosovo in November 2020, the month he was indicted, saying then that he expected to be acquitted of every charge.

The three-judge panel found him guilty of four war crimes committed while he was a senior commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1998 and 1999: arbitrary detention of 385 people, cruel treatment of 49, torture of 303 and murder of 96. The court said most of the dead were civilians, often labelled as spies or collaborators. It described Thaci as a "key member" in setting up detention sites and in choosing who was arrested. Judge Smith said he had shown "a ruthless ability to remove and eliminate political impediments" to his own leadership and that of other commanders.

Three other former KLA figures were sentenced the same day. Jakup Krasniqi, once the movement's spokesman, also received 25 years. Kadri Veseli, former head of intelligence, received 18 years, with time already served counted. Rexhep Selimi, former head of operations, received 13 years, also with time served counted. Prosecutors had asked for up to 45 years. All four men denied the charges. Appeals are expected.

Six counts of crimes against humanity were dismissed. The judges said prosecutors had not shown that the crimes formed part of a widespread or systematic attack on the civilian population as a whole. That distinction will matter on appeal. It already matters in Pristina, where Thaci and the KLA are still treated by large parts of the public as the authors of independence.

Crowds gathered outside the court. There were scuffles with Dutch police. In Pristina, demonstrators held banners reading "In the name of the people, declare them innocent." Prime minister Albin Kurti said the verdicts must be "corrected" on appeal. The Specialist Chambers themselves were created under Kosovo law at the insistence of European and American sponsors, after a Council of Europe report alleged KLA crimes including organ trafficking. The organ-trafficking claims were not part of this judgment.

Thaci still faces a separate case on witness intimidation. Judgment in that file has not been delivered. He pleaded not guilty there as well.

The 1998-99 war killed more than 13,000 people. Serbian forces and the KLA both committed crimes. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia tried Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbian officials. This court was built later, and only for Kosovo Albanian defendants. That origin is why every verdict lands as politics as well as law. Serbia welcomed Wednesday's result. Kosovo's governing class treated it as an insult to the independence generation.

Thaci led the political wing of the KLA, then served as prime minister and president of the state that the war produced. For a generation of Kosovars he was the face of the deal with NATO. For the judges in The Hague he was a commander who used detention sites to police rivals. Both descriptions now sit in the same record. The 25-year term, minus time served, would keep him in custody into the 2040s unless an appeal cuts it down.

The immediate test is whether Pristina treats the court as its own institution or as a foreign one. Kurti's language on Thursday pointed to the second. The statute points to the first. Appeals will decide how far the trial chamber's fact-finding survives. They will not decide how Kosovo tells the story of 1999. That argument started before the indictment and did not end when the judge sat down.