When Beriane Mustafa returned home from school 16 years ago, she encountered a crowd outside her apartment and was shocked to learn that her father, a prominent journalist and political adviser, had been assassinated.
Xhemajl Mustafa’s death haunts her to this day. “You wake up in the morning with that question mark over your head that says ‘Who did it and why?’” said Mustafa, 35. “That is what, on a daily basis, is killing you.”
Mustafa might finally see her father’s killers brought to justice. A court is slated to convene in the Dutch city The Hague in the coming months to prosecute war crimes allegedly committed by Kosovo Liberation Army commanders — including current Kosovo President Hashim Thaci — during and after the country’s war for independence against Serbia in the late 1990s.
The European Union asked Kosovo officials to move the court to The Hague because of concerns over witness intimidation. The court, established in 2016, will operate under Kosovo law and will be funded by the EU and staffed by international judges and attorneys. Court officials could release a schedule of proceedings in a few weeks.
The court will focus on atrocities committed during a brutal war following the breakup of Yugoslavia that required U.S.-led NATO airstrikes to drive Serbian forces out of Kosovo. The former province that declared independence in 2008 still isn’t recognized as an independent nation by Serbia and its ally Russia.
International prosecutors have successfully brought cases against Serbian leaders. Last year, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb, guilty of genocide in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of mostly Bosnian Muslims. He is now serving a 40-year prison sentence.
Mustafa’s father, Xhemajl, was a member of the Democratic League of Kosovo who advised Kosovo’s first president, Ibrahim Rugova. He was one of several Rugova associates murdered after the war.
“You cannot say the conflict ended in June 1999 when NATO entered Kosovo,” said Nora Ahmetaj, a human rights researcher at the Center for Research, Documentation and Publication in Pristina.
It’s not clear who will face charges. A 2011 report by the Council of Europe, an EU human rights agency, found that President Thaci and other high-ranking members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) trafficked organs, kidnapped, tortured and killed Kosovo Serbs, Roma and Albanians who were suspected of collaborating with Serbia.
Thaci has denied the allegations, and his office declined to provide a statement.
Tome Gashi, who is Thaci’s former legal adviser, said he expected the president and other politicians to resist prosecution and conviction.
“They are not willing to stay in a six-square-meter cell in some foreign state 3,000 kilometers from here with nobody,” he said. “They have such a good life here and they were in power for 17 years and they treat Kosovo as a monarchy. They live like kings. They are really, really afraid.”
Kosovo Serbs, the country’s largest ethnic minority, are hoping the perpetrators will finally have their day in court.
“It is important, not only as a Serb, but as a human being,” said Nenad Maksimovic, executive director of the Center for Peace and Tolerance.
Faton Klinaku, secretary of the KLA veterans organization, said the court should have stayed in Kosovo to deal with the crimes. He also does not believe Serbia has ever answered for its crimes in Kosovo.
“The worst part of all of this is that no one is tracking the crimes caused by Serbia in Kosovo,” said Klinaku.
Mustafa hopes the new war crimes court will solve her father’s murder, and bring justice, “not just in the matter of my father’s case, but in all the war crimes that happened here.”
Source: USA Today