Kosovo’s war crimes trial shows the need for preparation in Ukraine

The writer, who headed the economics unit of the International Civilian Office in Kosovo, is author of ‘State-Building in Kosovo’

As international investigators collect evidence of wartime atrocities in Ukraine, a war crimes trial dealing with grim events in another part of Europe is due to begin on Monday. Former Kosovo president Hashim Thaçi and three of his associates are all accused of having committed war crimes and crimes against humanity between 1998 and 1999, when Kosovo’s mostly ethnic Albanian population fought their Serbian rulers, eventually gaining independence (under the west’s auspices) in 2008.

It remains doubtful that either Kosovars or Serbs will view the trial as meting out even-handed justice, let alone contributing to regional reconciliation. As such, the proceedings may hold lessons for future attempts to deal with war crimes cases arising out of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

One problem concerns the unusual status of the court trying the case. Known as the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, it is nominally part of Kosovo’s judicial system, but it is located in the Netherlands. In practice it is run entirely by the EU. Its prosecutors and judges, handpicked by EU diplomats, have no secure tenure, making them vulnerable to political influence.

Predictably, Kosovars view the KSC as a biased EU imposition which focuses on their fighters rather than the Serbs who, in Kosovo’s eyes, committed the most war crimes. True, the court’s first ever verdict — a stiff sentence against a lesser figure than Thaçi — provoked only fleeting protests. But more credible international or hybrid tribunals that handled war crimes in the former Yugoslavia failed to fully satisfy the local population’s desire for justice, or to settle profound differences among former adversaries about their past. In some Balkan states, elites and citizens alike still revere their “war heroes”.

The background to the trial lies in the doctrine of liberal interventionism once favoured by the west. In 1999, Nato launched air strikes against Serbia to halt massive repressions against Kosovars by Slobodan Milošević’s regime. By 2008, western powers concluded that the best solution to a problem rooted in early 20th-century Balkan history was to accede to Kosovo’s desire for independence.

But, thanks mainly to Russian and Chinese opposition, the UN Security Council authorised neither Nato’s intervention nor Kosovo’s independence. To this day, five EU countries with restive or secessionist minorities of their own — Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain — do not recognise Kosovo. Nor do China, India, Russia and dozens of other countries. That precludes the country from acquiring UN membership.

Kosovo’s authorities lack control over Serbian communities in the northern areas of the young state, where tensions run high. EU pressure for a compromise has yielded various patchily implemented agreements and, lately, a verbal pact on whose interpretation Serbia and Kosovo immediately diverged.

Kosovo’s economy is the weakest in the Balkans despite large flows of foreign aid. The country also boasts Europe’s youngest population, but one in two youths are unemployed. Corruption and organised crime remain a problem. For all this, some responsibility lies with Thaçi, who served as Kosovo’s prime minister, foreign minister and president.

The court that will judge him was set up because the UN and the EU — which administered justice in Kosovo in 1999-2008 and 2008-2014, respectively — had been ignoring serious crime. But in 2011, a Council of Europe report, written by Swiss senator Dick Marty, summarised evidence of the KLA’s alleged war crimes and the violent methods by which its leaders had acquired political and economic power.

Bowing to pressure, the EU, with US support, set up the KSC. Thaçi and his associates maintain their innocence of the charges against them.

The switch in western policy — from tolerating the misrule of Kosovo’s elite to putting Thaçi and others on trial — speaks to the inconsistencies of EU and US intervention in this corner of Europe. The west changed Serbia’s borders in 2008, then declared Kosovo’s borders inviolable. They rescued Kosovo from Milošević, then watched their docile local partners plunder the new state.

The priority now for western powers should be to support the programme for clean government and inclusive economic growth embraced by the reformers for whom Kosovars voted in 2021. Instead, the west is supervising a trial conducted by a flawed court. We must hope that anyone dealing with similar trials and institution-building efforts in Ukraine will be better prepared.