Sokol Bashota hails suspension of prosecution investigations into him after his testimony at trial of ex-president Hashim Thaci as a victory for him – and for the 'purity' of the Kosovo Liberation Army's war.
Xhorxhina Bami, December 5, 2024
Sokol Bashota testifying in court on December 4, 2024. Photo: Kosovo Specialist Chambers/Livestream.
Sokol Bashota, a former member of the General Staff of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, welcomed a halt to Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office investigations into him after he finished a week of testimony in the war crimes trial of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and three others in The Hague on Thursday.
Bashota, also a former mayor of Kline/Klina and a former MP for the opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK, recalled that the Hague-based Specialist Prosecutor’s Office started questioning him in 2019.
“After five years of investigations, on November 19, 2024, I was officially notified that all the investigations against me have been halted,” Bashota wrote on Facebook after he finished his testimony.
“The suspension of the investigations against me is not only my victory but also a triumph of the purity of the war of the Kosovo Liberation Army,” he added.
During his testimony, which started on November 28, 2024, Bashota told the court that even after the KLA was structured and the General Staff was formed, the KLA’s Operational Zones elected their own commanders and had much control over their areas. “After the structuring, the General Staff only confirmed their names as zone commanders,” Bashota told the court.
The defence in the Thaci trial is seeking to prove that the KLA did not have a rigid command structure like a normal army, and so the defendants were not responsible for crimes were committed by lower-ranking fighters.
According to Bashota, before the General Staff was formed, another structure operated, of which Thaci was not a member. Bashota told the court that former KLA commander Bislim Zyrapi and other career military officers decided to start structuring the KLA because groups were operating separately and without “control”.
But he said problems with fighters on the ground continued nonetheless, and one such case was the July 1998 attack on Rahovec/Orohovac.
The indictment against Thaci and three others claims that, “in mid-July 1998, KLA units attacked Rahovec/Orahovac and its surrounding villages, during which Serb civilians were abducted and later detained, mistreated, and killed.”
But Bashota told the court that the Operational Zones, not the General Staff, decided on the attack on Rahovec/Orohovac. “It was a very big mistake,” he said.
“We were not prepared to enter and attack a place where civilians reside because of the high scale of risk to the citizens, and we did not dare to take such a decision in urban areas,” he added.
“It had its own consequences. We had big losses there and it was a miscoordination of the soldiers in that area,” he continued.
Thaci and three other defendants, Jakup Krasniqi, Rexhep Selimi and Kadri Veseli, are accused of having individual and command responsibility for crimes committed against prisoners held at KLA detention facilities in Kosovo and Albania, including 102 murders.
The crimes were allegedly committed between at least March 1998 and September 1999, during and just after the war in Kosovo. The defendants have pleaded not guilty.
The Specialist Chambers are part of Kosovo’s judicial system but are located in The Hague and staffed by internationals, established under pressure from the country’s Western allies who believed Kosovo’s own justice system was not robust enough to try KLA cases and protect witnesses from intimidation.
However, many Kosovo Albanians believe the court is ethnically biased and denigrates the KLA’s just war against Serbian repression.
Copyright BIRN 2015