The Thaci verdict exposes the West’s unresolved Kosovo double standard - opinion

Why has the judgment come as a surprise to many within the Albanian community, but also around the world?

Previous judgments handed down by international courts dealing with the former Yugoslavia, along with one-sided and highly partisan reporting by the mass media during the ethnic and religious wars fought in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, created an oversimplified picture of good guys and bad guys. Despite the fact that serious war crimes were committed on all sides, biased and lopsided global media based in the West portrayed Serbia as a regional Israel and the Serbs as aggressors and intruders on someone else’s territory, much as Jews are portrayed in Palestine, as though they had absolutely no historical or spiritual ties to the land. Add to this the fact that they came into conflict with peoples of the Islamic faith, and Western powers at the time could hardly have found easier or more expedient collateral victims than the Serbs, as they sought an opportunity to demonstrate their balanced approach towards the Muslim world.

Consequently, 27 years after the armed conflict, the question inevitably arises: how can the leaders of the side that fought against the Serbs, who were invariably portrayed as liberators, victims of the gravest war crimes and favorites of the West, be convicted at all?

If anyone in the world has the capacity to understand what it means to be assigned the status of the eternal, a priori culprit, against whom an avalanche of hostility from much of the Islamic world and from Western circles, now caught up in “woke” self-negation, has descended, it is Israel, Israelis and most of the Jewish Diaspora.

However, the problem goes deeper than the observation that the impact of this judgment is too little and too late. The key issue is that this judgment does not call into question the activities of the terrorist KLA during the conflict in Kosovo and NATO’s aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The KLA’s political and military leaders were precisely the men now convicted: Hashim Thaci, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi, and Rexhep Selimi. In this way, the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, commonly known as the Kosovo Special Court, effectively absolves the KLA.

The judgment against Thaci and the others thus presents a kind of trap for the international community and public opinion. In practice, it defines the convicted group as a criminal organization found guilty at first instance of individual murders. In other words, they were not convicted of systematic persecution and killings, or crimes against humanity committed on ethnic and religious grounds. Although the KLA’s official political platform did not, of course, formally proclaim ethnic or religious persecution, its military strategy and activities on the ground did in practice involve large-scale ethnically motivated violence and the expulsion of the non-Albanian population. Although the sentences imposed are quite severe, the legal classification of the crimes continues the practice of previous courts, under which only war crimes against Serbs are not treated as crimes against humanity.

Today’s geopolitical upheavals, and President Trump’s administration in particular, create conditions in which this narrative could change. We hope that the “autopilot” policy pursued for decades will not be repeated as a reflex in this case. We expect a position grounded in the facts. Serbia expects the same from Israel, a country that has faced terrorist threats and attacks for decades to an extent unmatched by any other. These culminated in the massacre of October 7, 2023, the most devastating loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, marked by bestial, pathological killings, sexual violence and the captivity of babies, children, pregnant women and civilians of every other category.

Serbia seeks nothing other than equal treatment and for what happened during the conflict in Kosovo and Metohija (KiM) to be called by its proper name. Belated justice, however, brings no comfort to the families of KLA victims or to the hundreds of thousands of Serbs who fled KiM after the war ended.

The nature of the organization is also illustrated by the fact that, of the 220,000 Serbs who fled KiM because of persecution, threats and intolerable living conditions, only 2% returned after the war and the establishment of civilian rule by former KLA commanders who had exchanged their military uniforms for civilian clothes.

The result of the KLA’s activities under Thaci and his associates was 2,187 Serbs killed, most of them civilians, including the harvesters in Staro Gracko, as well as people abducted and killed in post-war reprisals, attacks and kidnappings after 12 June 1999. The fate of another 570 non-Albanians remains unknown.

During the three-day pogrom against Serbs, from March 17 to 19 in 2004, 10 Serbs were killed, 35 churches and monasteries were demolished or set on fire, along with 935 Serbian buildings, including 738 houses and 10 public buildings, such as schools, post offices and health centers. A total of 4,012 Serbs were expelled from six towns and nine villages. Two villages, Slatina and Svinjare, were wiped out.

The religious dimension must also be taken into account, particularly given that today it is precisely the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) that remains one of the key institutions to have survived under almost impossible conditions in KiM. It represents a bulwark that neither the KLA nor the current extremist authorities in KiM have yet managed to eliminate. We are witnessing almost daily attempts by representatives of the provisional institutions in Priština to make the SOC’s continued presence in Serbia’s southern province impossible through various forms of pressure.

During 2021, the authorities in Priština intensified their diplomatic efforts to appropriate Serbian cultural heritage. These efforts were spearheaded by Albin Kurti, prime minister of the provisional institutions in Priština, who sent official letters to 54 world leaders and to UNESCO. In these letters and in public appearances, “arguments” were put forward that the Orthodox monasteries and churches in KiM constitute “Kosovo heritage,” accompanied by demands to change their formal status and remove Serbia’s responsibility for these monuments.

The four Serbian Orthodox religious sites: Visoki Dečani, the Patriarchate of Peć, Gračanica and Our Lady of Ljeviš would thereby be removed from the List of World Heritage in Danger, on the grounds that security conditions had changed and Kosovo’s institutions were capable of protecting them. The authorities particularly objected to the term “Serbian cultural heritage” in official documents, insisting that these cultural monuments and Orthodox churches belong to all citizens and the “state of Kosovo”, regardless of ethnicity. Kosovo is the cradle of Serbian nationhood, given its exceptional historical, spiritual and cultural importance in the collective identity and national mythology of the Serbs, particularly its association with the Middle Ages and the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, against the invading army of the Ottoman Empire under the command of Sultan Murad I, as well as its monasteries and churches dating from the 13th and 14th centuries.

Kosovo is the Serbian Jerusalem and, in formal legal terms, the Serbian Galilee: sovereign territory of the Republic of Serbia where the demographic battle has gradually been lost on several occasions.

Most EU countries have looked the other way for years in the face of this attempt to promote such radical historical revisionism and undermine religious and human rights.

The radical religious component, so often overlooked when discussing the activities of the KLA, whose ideology underpinned the attempt to secede from Serbia, is shown in its true light by the participation of a significant number of Albanians from KiM in Islamic State operations, some of whom even served as military commanders. One of the Islamic State’s most wanted members was an Albanian from Kosovo and Metohija, a jihadist Lavdrim Muhaxheri, also known as Abu Abdullah al-Kosovi. He appeared on the US list of most-wanted terrorists and played a key role in recruiting Albanians for terrorist operations in the Middle East.

In stark contrast to the systematic, organized propaganda conducted over several decades, portraying the Serbian side as solely responsible for everything that happened in Kosovo in the 1990s, Serbs and other non-Albanians have virtually disappeared from the territory. The commitments made to establish the Community of Serb Municipalities have not been honored. As in certain countries in the Middle East, the oppression and disappearance of Christian communities continue, with little concern shown by much of the international community.

What is particularly discouraging is that, following the first-instance judgment against the former KLA leaders on 16 September, demonstrators in KiM reacted violently, while protests by their supporters in The Hague descended into riots in which Dutch police had to use water cannons, pepper spray and batons. Unlike in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, where representatives of the authorities, intellectual elites and civil society organizations have emerged to condemn crimes committed in the names of their peoples, there is no such response in KiM today. Ultimately, it remains to be seen what the second-instance judgment on appeal will bring.

For Jewish readers, this inevitably brings to mind the skillful manipulation of historical facts from the Second World War and the Holocaust.

While Albanians in Albania played a noble and exceptional role in protecting the country’s small Jewish community and Jewish refugees, making Albania the only country in Europe where the Jewish population at the end of the war was larger than it had been before the Holocaust, the situation in the dismembered territory of Kosovo and Metohija was entirely different. Members of Balli Kombëtar, an Albanian nationalist and anti-communist organisation founded in 1942 with the aim of creating a Greater Albania, worked closely with Italian and later German forces during the Second World War, despite declaring themselves opposed to the occupiers.

In KiM, as well as parts of now days North Macedonia and Montenegro, they committed numerous crimes and mass killings against non-Albanians, particularly Serbs. The 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS “Skanderbeg” (1st Albanian) bears direct responsibility for the arrest and deportation of Jews from Kosovo and Metohija during the Second World War. Composed predominantly of Kosovo Albanians under German command, the unit was formed in the spring of 1944. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, acted as a religious recruiter and propagandist for Heinrich Himmler's Muslim Waffen-SS units, helping lay the groundwork for Balkan divisions that included the core nucleus of the 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS “Skanderbeg.”

Immediately after its formation, it became a key instrument in the implementation of the Holocaust in the area. On 14 May 1944, members of the Skanderbeg Division carried out a mass raid on Jewish homes in Priština. They arrested 281 members of the community, looted their property and handed them over to the Gestapo. The arrested Jews were first taken to a temporary holding camp in Priština and then deported via the Staro Sajmište camp in Belgrade to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Of particular note is Xhafer Deva, interior minister in the collaborationist government, who actively recruited personnel and cooperated with German intelligence agencies. The respected Jerusalem Post also reported on initiatives to renovate his house in Kosovska Mitrovica.