Prime Minister of Albania remarkably spoke at the Council of Europe in October 2022, among others, also on the allegations that Council of Europe’s Report made against former Kosovo Liberation Army leadership. In a comparative perspective, Edi Rama of Albania also said that one should not be surprised if this council will similarly accuse Zelenskyy, ten years in the future of crimes for defending his country. The anomaly of the EC report prepared by Dick Marty and the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Prosecutors Office is that this court was established to investigate allegations of illegal human trafficking, illegal organ harvesting during the war in 1999, but the court investigates none of that. Instead, the court investigates, in a bizarre justice format, one of the ethnic side of conflict in 1999, Kosovar Albanians only for crimes against humanity, war crimes and other wrongdoings.
The former President of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, and three of the most important figures of the Kosovo Liberation Army are being held in custody since November 2020, in the Special Court based in The Hague. In a 68-page indictment confirmed on October 26, 2020, by the Specialized Chambers and the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office, it is alleged that from March 1998 to September 1999, Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi, Jakup Krasniqi and others member of the “joint criminal enterprise have shared the same goal to take and exercise control over all of Kosovo by all means, including intimidation, ill-treatment, violence and the elimination of those they considered opponents”.
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Although almost two years have passed since Thaçi and the others were detained, the allegations in the indictment have been investigated several times by different teams and lately, the information from the defense is that prosecution has prepared a file of about one million pages. Prosecution, in this case seem to focus on prolonging the time of trial instead of providing evidence for alleged crimes. In particular, no evidence has been found for illegal organ transplantation, for which purpose this court was created, the indictment of the accused has been changed twice so far, and consequently their detention continued. In an effort to find evidence against four former senior officials of the KLA, sometimes excluding witnesses and sometimes adding others, the prosecution has made a labyrinth of a prosecution using Serbian Secret Service and prosecution documentations, public political charades of post-war Kosovo and loose accusations against KLA leaders after the war in Kosovo when they demilitarized in an agreement with UN and NATO, to create political institutions.
Edi Rama, in his speech in front of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, among other things, considered the approval of Dick Marti’s report by PACE as ‘undeserved smearing of those who have been unjustly accused and a disgrace to international politics. ‘, also from PACE through the resolution approved in the Parliament of Albania, Prime Minister Rama requested ‘the initiation of the procedure that will lead to a follow-up report, as an honest and necessary correction of a tragic mistake, the consequences of which continue to haunt us’. His main line of argumentation was that “who would have thought that after 23 years of liberation from Serbia, the leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who put the freedom of Kosovo before their lives, would later be accused of war crimes and organ trafficking by an International Court of Justice?
All this started from the book named “Lady Prosecutor”, published in 2008 by former ICTY chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, who, among other things, claims through this book that the former members of the KLA have committed organ trafficking during wartime.
This book was used as starting point for the initiation of the investigation by former Swiss senator and controversial politician, Dick Marty, who drew up a 60 page report. The investgation of this report was initiated by Konstandin Kosachev, at the time, Member of the European Parliament, allegedly former KGB and Putin’s man, now embargoed to enter EU. Inevitably, other co-sponsors were MEPs of similar backgrounds including the British MEP who was later found to collaborate with Russian intelligence services and formally apologized for his Russian ties at the House of Commons in the UK.
Later, Dick Marty himself, the man on whose report the Special Court was set up, to accuse the former leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, would accuse the Serbian secret service of planning his murder, for which murder later the institutions of Kosovo would be blamed. According to a research published on Swiss public television, the former reporter at the Council of Europe Dick Marty, is under the protection of the Swiss police, due to the great danger from the Serbian secret service. The accusations against the Serbian secret service that they were planning the murder of Dick Marty, shows that things did not go as planned by the participants. It is known that Marti’s report was built in cooperation with the Serbian secret service and the committee for war crimes in Serbia, which offered a report of more than 100 pages to Marty.
However, a court that was created in 2015 by the Assembly of Kosovo, under heavy pressure of international diplomacy to judge only the Kosovar side, from the very beginning seems frivolous. The indictment for organ trafficking in the period 2008-2000, for someone who knows Kosovo and the region and knows well the infrastructure of that time, would be ridiculous. In this period and long after this period, even the emergency centers in hospitals were not even supplied with basic material for work, let alone the mountainous areas, where there were no basic conditions for life, such as water and electricity supply. The team that was created by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, based on the report of Dick Marty, in 2011, has also proven that at that time, the alleged crimes could not have been committed in those areas. The investigations in Albania in 2004, carried out by the Special Investigative Task Force, turned out to be unfounded, but nevertheless the Special Court continued its work, alluding that they had enough evidence to file indictments for other cases, all of which, of course, were collected by the office for war crimes in Serbia.
The accusations started after the publication of Del Ponte’s book, but the fundamental question of why Lady Prosecutor did not prosecute the former KLA leaders from the ICTY remains unanswered. Why were these information withheld at the time and why, above all, after the Dick Marty report, the court did not include them in the prosecution? Such questions are not easy to answer in justice terms but when politics enters equation, things clear up. Vucic of Serbia is a dedicated historical revisionist by denying even court established genocide in Bosnia and by using every chance to try to rewrite Serbian crimes in Kosovo. So, with the little help from Russian MEPs and other Russian proxies, the Special Court based in The Hague was created to relativize the Serbian crimes in Kosovo, and it is directed exclusively against one ethnic side. Justice, especially justice of this kind is not blind after all and does serve political and financial interests of the strongmen like Putin and his proxies.
Whether Rama’s prediction about Zelenskyy makes sense, remains to be seen. But, do not underestimate Russian influence in EU institutions.
