A former KLA unit commander told the Hashim Thaci trial that certain KLA members considered everyone who did not follow them or even met with ethnic Serbs, collaborators of Serbia’s regime, bolstering the prosecution case.
Xhorxhina Bami, October 31, 2024
Haxhi Mazreku, testifying at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in the Hague on Thursday. Photo: Livestream/Kosovo Specialist Chambers
If you were not part of the Kosovo Liberation Army’s (KLA) inner circle you were viewed as a traitor who should be punished, revealed a witness at the war crime trial of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci.
Haxhi Mazreku, a former KLA unit commander told the trial against Thaci and three others at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in the Hague, that the KLA considered that anyone not close to key members of ethnic Albanian militia would be considered a traitor.
“If you were not close to them [certain KLA members] or were unsuitable [someone who did not fit in], then you were either a traitor, a spy, or a collaborator [working for the Serbian regime or Yugoslavian forces]. This is what the KLA did,” said Mazreku, the 102nd witness at the trial, where the defendants are also accused of crimes against humanity.
Mazreku said that someone would be considered a traitor even if they met an ethnic Serb.
According to the indictment, Thaci and his three co-defendants, as members of a joint criminal enterprise, “shared the common purpose to gain and exercise control over all of Kosovo by means including unlawfully intimidating, mistreating, committing violence against, and removing those deemed to be opponents”.
Opponents included people who were collaborators or were perceived as collaborating with Yugoslavian forces or Serbian authorities, or who did not support the goals of the KLA. This included members of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), alongside ethnic Serbs, Roma and other ethnic minorities.
“Every victim was said [by the KLA] to be a collaborator,” Mazreku told the court, He explained the case of a forest guard allegedly “killed and exposed” by the KLA in the village of Opterushe in Rahovec/Orahovac, in order to induce fear in the local population.
Mazreku told the court that members of the KLA thought his cousin, Nezir Mazreku was a collaborator, because he was the head of the Socialist Party of Serbia in their local village.
According to Mazreku, his cousin tried wholeheartedly to help the village. “This was some type of propaganda, a type of threat and I tried, together with my group, not to go to the point of conflict, to the point of bloodshed.” This led to him also to be seen negatively by other members of the KLA, he told the court.
Mazreku told the court that after the killing by the Yugoslav army of 59 family members of KLA founder Adem Jashari in March 1998, he formed his own KLA unit and had appointed himself a commander. However, the difference between him and the rest of the KLA was that he tried to save people rather than create more victims.
“As KLA, we were against the Serbian regime, the Serbian uniform, not against civilians,” he said.
Thaci, alongside 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 with Serbian forces. The defendants have pleaded not guilty.
In the trial so far, the defence has been trying to prove the KLA did not have a proper army command structure, so the defendants could not have been responsible for any crimes committed by lower-ranking fighters.
Copyright BIRN 2015