Eurasia Press & News
The Special Court verdict has exposed the imbalance between the justice demanded of Kosovo and Serbia’s refusal to confront its own wartime crimes.
On the day Hashim Thaçi was convicted, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić went before the cameras to attack reactions from Prishtina and Tirana. “And here I thought they were criminals, at least in the first instance,” he said. “But no, they are all liberators and heroes and champions.” Then he added: “Just imagine if we had said something like that.”
That is how Belgrade lectured Kosovo’s society on how to behave after the Thaçi verdict, when, on September 16, the Specialist Chambers found Thaçi and his three co-defendants guilty of war crimes.
The lecture is out of place because it leaves out an essential distinction: facing the past is not the same for the side with the tanks as for the people those tanks drove out of their own country or sent into basements and mass graves.
Serbia has no right to preach to Kosovo.
Over three months of 1999, Serbian forces in Kosovo killed nearly 7,000 civilians and expelled more than 800,000 people. There is no comparison with the case against Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi –– all former KLA leaders –– in which the four men were found individually criminally responsible for the murder of 96 people. Both crimes are crimes. But only Serbia’s crimes committed against Kosovo were state policy, backed by the media, the church, intellectual and other elites, generals, and the state budget. And only Serbia was judged to have aimed to wipe out a people from its own land.
The same holds for Bosnia and Croatia. When Belgrade asks Sarajevo to “face” the crimes of the Bosnian Army, it asks as a state that the International Court of Justice found responsible, in 2007, for failing to prevent the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica, when Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. When it asks Zagreb to “face” Operation Storm, it asks as a state whose officers, Mile Mrkšić and Veselin Sljivanćanin, were convicted for crimes at Ovčara.
Operation Storm: In August 1995, Croatian military and police forces launched Operation Storm, retaking territory held by Serb forces. An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Serbs fled or were displaced, and widespread crimes against Serb civilians and their property.
Ovčara: After the fall of Vukovar on November 18, 1991, some 260 prisoners taken from Vukovar hospital were brought to the Ovčara farm, where at least 194 were killed on November 20. The ICTY sentenced two Yugoslav People’s Army officers for crimes connected to Ovčara: Colonel Mile Mrkšić to 20 years and Major Veselin Šljivančanin to 10 years. Mrkšić died in prison in 2015. Šljivančanin was released in 2011 and, at the time, sat on the Main Board of Vučić’s party, often speaking at its events, and is celebrated in Serbia as a national war hero.
All of these men, and many other war criminals, are heroes and respected public figures in Serbia. That is why the false symmetry Serbia insists on does not hold: your crime, our crime, now let us cancel them out. The crime of a state, its army and police, is not canceled by the crime of those the state oppressed, expelled and killed.
Serbia is the last country on earth with the standing to teach anyone how to conduct itself after a verdict like the one handed to Thaçi. Just two weeks ago, with military honors and six government ministers in attendance, Serbia buried the war criminal Ratko Mladić, convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. The patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church led the funeral service and spoke over the coffin.
The president of a state that glorifies crime and genocide, and that spent the 1990s systematically destroying Kosovo and its people, is today lecturing Kosovo’s society on how to behave after the Thaçi verdict.
No senior Yugoslav Army or Serbian police commander has ever been prosecuted in a Serbian court for crimes committed in Kosovo; the only investigation of a high-ranking officer of the Yugoslav Army, General Dragan Živanović, was dropped in 2017 without an indictment.
In 2005, Serbian prosecutors promised indictments over crimes against Kosovo Albanians whose bodies were later found in mass graves at Batajnica, outside Belgrade, where 744 Kosovar Albanians were identified. Some prosecutions followed for the killings themselves, but no one has been prosecuted in Serbia for the operation that transported and concealed the bodies in those mass graves. We are still waiting.
“No recognition, no state-to-state contact.” It is the most successful protection program Serbia has ever run: to keep its own people from being indicted.
The perpetrators who committed the vile murder of the Bytyqi brothers –– three Albanian-American citizens killed in July 1999 and dumped in a mass grave at a police training ground in Petrovo Selo –– are still unknown. The two police officers tried in connection with their detention and transfer were ultimately acquitted in 2013. Goran Radosavljević, known as Guri, who commanded that training ground, was barred from entering the U.S. in 2018 after the State Department said he was credibly implicated in the murders. Vučić promised justice in 2014 and again in 2015, and then in 2019 declared that there was no evidence.
Since establishing a War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office in 2003, Serbia has established a clear trend: although Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor has brought more indictments in recent years, most have been filed against Kosovo Albanians and reflect political pressure from the government and pro-government media in Serbia.
Serbia refuses cooperation with Kosovo even where justice for its own victims is at stake. In the absence of any exchange, the prosecutor’s record has been marked by protracted proceedings, inadequate sentences for those convicted, and a failure to prosecute high-ranking members of Serbian forces. At the same time, the glorification of convicted Serbian war criminals and their presence in public life grows with each passing year.
Meanwhile, Kosovo-based courts have convicted dozens of Kosovo Albanians for war crimes, including many for crimes against fellow Kosovo Albanians. Why against Albanians? Because they were the only ones left. The Serbian Army, the police, and the paramilitaries went home in June 1999, after losing the war, to a Serbia that does not recognize the state that would summon them to court. Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor has said as much in writing to the Humanitarian Law Center: no recognition, no state-to-state contact. It is the most successful protection program Serbia has ever run: to keep its own people from being indicted.
Ivica Dačić, Slobodan Milošević’s spokesman and now Serbia’s interior minister and president of Milošević’s party, welcomes the Thaçi verdict as proof that the KLA was a “terrorist organization.” Neither Dačić nor Vučić cares about the fact that the court found all four defendants not guilty on every count of crimes against humanity, which means it was not proved that their attacks were directed against a civilian population.
Kosovo has been an independent state since 2008 but is still not a member of the United Nations, and Serbia works to strip it even of the recognitions it has. The court in The Hague that tried Thaçi was written into Kosovo’s constitution, and it can be abolished only by a constitutional majority that includes the votes of Serb deputies in Kosovo’s Assembly. Belgrade controls those votes. Whether that court exists at all depends on the state that sent Mladic off like a saint and celebrates him as a hero.
Thaçi was convicted at first instance and was sentenced to 25 years for participating in a joint criminal enterprise in which at least 385 people were unlawfully detained, 303 tortured and 96 murdered, at detention sites in 14 municipalities of Kosovo and two in northern Albania. Thaçi has been found guilty in the first instance. That has been adjudicated.
But Serbia is guilty too. The ICTY –– the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, a U.N.-established court –– found that senior Serbian and Yugoslav political, military and police officials participated in a joint criminal enterprise whose purpose was to change the ethnic balance of Kosovo so that Serbia could maintain control. That purpose was carried out through a campaign of terror and violence by army and police forces.
Many of Serbia’s celebrated heroes were convicted; some are free today, some sit in the leadership of the governing parties, and some, this September, are speaking at campaign rallies for Vučić. Among them:
Nikola Šainović, deputy prime minister of Yugoslavia; Nebojša Pavković, commander of the Third Army; Sreten Lukić, head of the Interior Ministry staff for Kosovo; Vladimir Lazarević, commander of the Pristina Corps; Dragoljub Ojdanić, chief of the General Staff; Vlastimir Đorđević, head of public security. The ICTY sentenced these men to prison terms ranging from 14 to 22 years.
During the period in which these and other Serbian and Yugoslav officials exercised authority, Serbian forces killed 6,872 Albanians between March 20 and June 14, 1999. So far, it is known that the bodies of civilian victims were transported in trucks, including refrigerated trucks, and concealed in mass graves at Batajnica, Petrovo Selo and Perucac. At the border with Albania, Serbian police officers confiscated the documents of the Kosovo Albanians they were expelling, and civil registries were destroyed or taken to Serbia, in an operation to erase the identity of those people.
Vučić recognizes none of this as facts established by courts. Serbia is led by a man who does not recognize verdicts against members of his own people, regardless of the court. Serbia does not recognize the state of Kosovo. Serbia does not recognize that it fought a war at all, or that it lost it.
And the war in Kosovo was not a civil war. A civil war is fought between two sides within the same state. In Kosovo, one side was the state of Serbia, with its army, police, courts, constitution, and television, and the other was a population that Serbia, over 10 years, stripped of its jobs, its media, its schools and its assembly, and, at the end, of its identity cards and, in 1999, the roofs over its heads.
The Kosovo resistance was the most patient nonviolent movement in Europe, and Europe did not notice it until it stopped being nonviolent.
On July 5, 1990, the police entered Radio Television Pristina; 1,300 people lost their jobs. That same summer, the Serbian Parliament dissolved the Assembly of Kosovo. By 1996, Kosovo’s Independent trade unions said that 123,000 people had been dismissed for their ethnicity or their politics since 1990. In 1991, schools in the Albanian language were closed, and for much of the decade, school children and university students were taught in secret: in houses, basements, garages and other improvised spaces. In 1996, Human Rights Watch called Kosovo “a police state run by Belgrade.”
Despite that terror, instead of taking up rifles, Kosovo Albanians under Ibrahim Rugova built a parallel state: they held a referendum and elections, kept a government in exile, ran schools and a university in abandoned buildings and private homes. The Kosovo resistance was the most patient nonviolent movement in Europe, and Europe did not notice it until it stopped being nonviolent.
In response to Serbia’s ever harsher oppression and destruction of Kosovo and its people, the KLA emerged in the mid-1990s and carried out its first attacks on the Serbian police in 1996. We in Serbia have called it “terrorism” ever since, and we do not ask ourselves what we would have done after years of oppression under a boot like the one Serbia planted in Kosovo.
The war in Kosovo ended with Serbia’s defeat on June 9, 1999, when the Kumanovo agreement on the withdrawal of the Serbian Army and police from Kosovo was signed.
Until that moment, Serbia had waged war on Kosovo by military and other means for a full decade; that war culminated in 1998 and 1999, when Serbia finally lost it. These are the sentences about Kosovo that no one in Serbia says.
Thaçi has been found guilty. Aleksandar Vučić, the minister of information in the government that waged that war, has not even been indicted. Nor has Ivica Dačić, the spokesman of Milošević’s party through all those years. Nor has anyone else who sat in Belgrade in 1999 and today sits in Serbia’s government, parliament or public institutions, or is on the ballot for the parliamentary election to be held in Serbia on October 25, 2026.
Thaçi is in prison because crimes against civilians were committed during the rebellion he led against Serbian forces. Vučić and Dačić are still in power in the same Serbia that is responsible for a decade of repression, for ethnic cleansing, and for thousands of deaths in Kosovo.
Thaçi is in a prison cell in The Hague. The 744 bodies of Kosovo Albanians dug out in Batajnica had been transported to the site in trucks. For the men who organized and carried out their transport and concealment, Vučić’s Serbia has prosecuted no one. That, too, is not justice. It is yet another of the war’s consequences: Serbia’s cruelty toward Kosovo Albanian victims continues, while its president scolds the victims and celebrates its own convicted war criminals.
