Fetoshi: The Hague ruling, a historic turning point for Kosovo

A day before the verdict in the case against Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi, Arben Fetoshi, director of the “Octopus” Institute, described the judicial process in The Hague not only as a potential injustice against the accused individuals, but also as a lengthy legal confrontation over the truth about Kosovo.

Fetoshi said that September 16 represents a date of historic significance for Kosovo and the Euro-Atlantic order in the Western Balkans. According to him, the testimony of former senior international officials has weakened the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office’s claim that a joint criminal enterprise existed.

He presented these views in an analysis titled “The Hague Verdict – The KLA and the Geopolitical Battle for the Republic of Kosovo,” in which he distinguished between crimes that may have been committed during the war and the claim that the KLA leadership had created a joint criminal project.

Describing the testimony of former international officials as one of the most important developments in the proceedings, Fetoshi said that the prosecution had been unable to prove either the defendants’ connection to the common criminal purpose or their involvement in carrying it out.

Nevertheless, he stressed that the significance of September 16 is determined not only by the decision the trial panel will make.

“Serbia and Russia have prepared to exploit every scenario in their revisionist strategy. The narrative war over the ‘criminal KLA’ and ‘NATO aggression’ in 1999 will continue with rhetoric about the ‘unjust West,’ intensifying the ‘victimization’ narrative with claims of ‘Kosovo’s repression of Serbs’ in the event of an acquittal, while otherwise everything would be interpreted as confirmation of their theses, with the claim that history should be corrected,” his analysis says.

In this context, Fetoshi also interpreted the changing statements of Serbian President Vučić, who initially spoke of a “largely acquitting” verdict, then of a “warning of violence,” and finally of a “harsh sentence.”

“The first [statement] was intended to prepare the attack on international justice as ‘biased,’ by refusing to accept an acquittal, while the second was intended to generalize any potential conviction of the KLA as confirmation from The Hague of their ‘truth’ about the ‘persecution and terror’ of Serbs.

The KLA’s ‘criminal leadership’ would be framed as a ‘criminal war’ in order to ‘prove’ NATO’s ‘unjust’ intervention,” Fetoshi argues, linking this geopolitical risk to Serbian-Russian aims to revise the history of the wars in the former Yugoslavia.