Haradinaj: Leader, criminal, or both

Haradinaj: Leader, criminal, or both

"Mr. Haradinaj and two other men began to stand trial at the United Nations tribunal in The Hague in March, charged with killing 40 people in 1998, during the conflict between the Kosovo Liberation Army guerrilla group and Serbian-dominated security forces," the paper reports, and continues:

But the prosecution’s leading witness, Tahir Zemaj, and his son and nephew were shot dead during the investigation. Another witness, Kjutim Berisha, died two weeks before the trial when he was hit by a car in Podgorica, Montenegro."

More than a third of those giving evidence for the prosecution are allowed to conceal their identities, more than in any other case at the tribunal, according to the prosecution.

The case has created a stark divide between prosecutors at the tribunal and in Kosovo and diplomats from the United Nations and Western governments.

Mr. Haradinaj was a crucial partner in Western efforts to bring peace to the province, so much so that they tried to prevent the case from going to trial, according to a former head of the United Nations mission in Kosovo and the court’s chief prosecutor.

Once he was indicted, the mission supported his provisional release, which has lasted almost two years; he is the only indicted person that the court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, has released in order to return to active politics.

“He moved this process forward in a way that nobody else has,” said Soren Jessen-Petersen, who was the head of the mission in Kosovo at the time of Mr. Haradinaj’s indictment, in March 2005, just four months after he became prime minister.

Prosecutors in Kosovo and The Hague say the United Nations and Western governments bent over backward to prevent his prosecution.

The tribunal’s top prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, has referred to the trial in The Hague as “a prosecution that some did not want to see brought, and that few supported by their cooperation at both the international and local level.”

In Kosovo, the former guerrilla commander is seen as one of the most charismatic leaders to emerge from the fighting, from 1997 to 1999. While the Serbian government vilified him as a terrorist, senior United Nations officials said he was instrumental in promoting reconciliation.

“He clearly understood that Serbs could and should be part of the society,” said Mr. Jessen-Petersen, who led the mission in Kosovo from June 2004 to June 2006. “And he had the credentials. Because of his background nobody could accuse him of betraying Kosovo.”

In March 2004, during rioting across Kosovo, he was credited with preventing hundreds of rioters from attacking Kosovo’s best-known Serbian Orthodox monastery. United Nations officials say he also helped ensure that a January 2005 visit by Serbia’s president, Boris Tadic, passed without incident.

International officials have tried to shield him in the name of stability. For instance, the United Nations administration in Kosovo repeatedly blocked the prosecution of Mr. Haradinaj on charges that he had attacked a group of former fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

The effect of the relationship between the United Nations and Mr. Haradinaj, according to the prosecution, was to create a sense of impunity around him, and to scare away witnesses.

“There was a general atmosphere of intimidation; they did nothing to change this atmosphere,” said Jean-Daniel Ruche, political adviser to the chief prosecutor in The Hague.

He said that senior United Nations officials had met with Mr. Haradinaj before his departure to the Netherlands at the time of his indictment in 2005 and when he returned there to stand trial. “This has had a chilling impact on our witnesses,” he said in a telephone interview.

The mission denies any detrimental effect on the tribunal.

“In decision after decision,” wrote a United Nations spokeswoman, Myriam Dessables, in an e-mail message, the tribunal’s judges have “made it clear that the United Nations mission in Kosovo is in the best position to determine what is in the interest of promoting peace and reconciliation in Kosovo.”

The indictment contains details that are among the most gruesome brought before the tribunal: of prisoners being seized by men under Mr. Haradinaj’s command, bound in barbed wire and dragged behind vehicles, and of women raped repeatedly.

Mr. Haradinaj’s supporters say that there is no evidence linking him directly to the crimes and suggest that the court charged him simply to appear evenhanded.

As Mr. Haradinaj’s indictment loomed in early 2005, Mr. Jessen-Petersen said he was aware that Western diplomats were trying to block the case. But he emphasized the mission in Kosovo had made no approaches to the court.

The mission, however, stopped at least one prosecution of Mr. Haradinaj within Kosovo, according to two former members of the Kosovo Justice Department.

On July 7, 2000, Mr. Haradinaj led a group of men to a rival family’s house in the village of Strelc in western Kosovo. A battle broke out, according to police investigators, and Mr. Haradinaj was wounded by a grenade. He was evacuated by American personnel operating out of the main United States Army base in Kosovo, and they removed evidence of the shootout from the walls, according to Frederick Pascoe, a former American police officer serving with the United Nations who investigated the shooting.

Kamudoni Nyasulu, an international prosecutor in Peć, in northwestern Kosovo, said that between 2001 and 2004 he repeatedly tried to bring the case to court.

“What I had was sufficient for a case,” said Mr. Nyasulu said, but he said he was rebuffed by senior United Nations officials because the case was “politically sensitive.”