Hazir Reka/Reuters
Ramush Haradinaj, center, being greeted by Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of Kosovo at the airport in Pristina on Thursday.
PARIS — A United Nations war crimes tribunal on Thursday acquitted the former prime minister of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, for the second time of charges of torturing and killing Serb civilians while he was a commander of the NATO-backed Kosovo Liberation Army during its fight for independence in 1999.
Two of his associates, Idriz Balaj and Lahi Brahimaj, were also acquitted, although Mr. Brahimaj has already served a six-year sentence for torture handed down in an earlier trial. The judges ordered the three men released immediately and by evening Mr. Haradinaj, who spent almost four years in jail, had already returned to Kosovo, retrieved by a government plane. He was welcomed by the prime minister, Hashim Thaci, a longtime rival, and cheered by large crowds on the streets of Pristina, the capital.
“I have mixed feelings, because an injustice was done to me and my people,” Mr. Haradinaj said in a telephone interview after his arrival. “It took a long time and I am looking forward to helping to build Kosovo society.”
People close to Mr. Haradinaj said that with his reputation as a freedom fighter intact, he would soon return to politics.
The acquittal was bitterly denounced by Serbians, who have long believed that the Hague tribunal is biased against them.
The decision came after the court released two Croatian generals, Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac, this month after an appeals chamber threw out their convictions. The generals had led a 1995 military campaign that recaptured Serb-occupied Croatian land, killed several hundred Serbian civilians and drove more than 150,000 Serbs from Croatia.
President Tomislav Nikolic of Serbia, a nationalist long skeptical of the Hague process, said in a statement that Thursday’s ruling showed that the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had evidently been “formed to try the Serbian people” for the wars of the 1990s. Now, he said, “nobody will be convicted for the horrible crimes against Kosovo Serbs.”
Amnesty International has estimated that 800 non-Albanians were abducted and killed by Kosovo rebels, and it said that few people suspected of such crimes had been prosecuted in Kosovo.
The overturning of the Croatian and the Kosovo convictions are seen as serious setbacks for the tribunal’s ability to prosecute cases. The court has said recently that it will seek a review of the Croatian appeals ruling, in which two of the five judges wrote unusually sharp dissenting opinions. One judge bluntly called the acquittal of the Croatian generals “grotesque,” saying that the findings of the majority “contradict any sense of justice.”
Inevitably, the acquittals have provoked criticism beyond Serbia that the verdicts were politically inspired, because the militaries of both countries were backed by the West. The Croatian campaign of 1995 was planned with the help of active and retired American military advisers, and the Kosovo Liberation Army was backed by NATO in the war that established Kosovo, a former Serbian province, as an independent state.
But lawyers who formerly worked for the tribunal have said that the case against the Kosovo fighters was weak from the start.
Geoffrey Nice, a former senior trial attorney at the tribunal, questioned why Mr. Haradinaj was indicted at all. Mr. Nice and others said that before Mr. Haradinaj was charged, lawyers in the prosecution office cautioned on several occasions that there was not enough evidence to build a case against him.
But Mr. Haradinaj, at the time prime minister of a United Nations-administered Kosovo, became the most senior Kosovo Albanian to be charged when Carla del Ponte, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, indicted him in 2005. She called him a “gangster in uniform” and accused him and two of his lieutenants of crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, rape and expulsion of civilians.
Mr. Haradinaj, who had just served 100 days in office, agreed to step down and surrender to The Hague to face his first trial. Before leaving, he said that he was innocent and that his indictment was “a result of the trade-off that some have made with the Serbian government” to make sure that Belgrade would extradite high-ranking Serbian war crimes suspects. Tribunal officials declined to comment.
It seemed like an abrupt end to a career for the man who had done a stint in the Yugoslav Army and spent almost a decade as an immigrant in Switzerland, where he worked as a nightclub bouncer, carpenter and martial arts teacher. By the time he joined the Kosovo separatist rebellion against Serbia, he had taught himself English and French and read books on guerrilla tactics. He soon established himself as a zone commander in the rebel army.
Mr. Haradinaj was cleared of those charges in 2008, after prosecutors had called for a 20-year sentence. But an appeals court overturned the verdict and ordered a retrial in 2010, saying that extensive intimidation of witnesses had led to a miscarriage of justice.
It was the tribunal’s first retrial, and it concluded with Thursday’s acquittal. The judges said they found that crimes had occurred, including 16 civilians abducted and mistreated in the rebels’ Jablanica prison camp and eight civilians killed there in captivity. But they said they found no evidence that Mr. Haradinaj had directly participated in the crimes or could be held criminally responsible. Rather, they said, there was evidence he had tried to prevent crimes by his underlings.
U.N. Court Frees Former Leader of Kosovo Ramush Haradinaj
This article
U.N. Court Frees Former Leader of Kosovo Ramush Haradinaj
can be opened in url
http://newsrepugnant.blogspot.com/2012/11/un-court-frees-former-leader-of-kosovo.html
U.N. Court Frees Former Leader of Kosovo Ramush Haradinaj
