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The last sacrifice for Kosovo

2026-09-16 21:24:15Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA LUTFI DERVISHI
The last sacrifice for Kosovo
A citizen in tears after the Hague decision

The justice of the political magnifying glass and the hand of history

When Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi took up arms to liberate Kosovo, hardly any of them were sure they would return home alive.

At that time, no one in Kosovo thought about what would happen in 25 or thirty years because the question of the day was: will we be alive tomorrow?

Today, almost three decades later, four of the leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army heard in The Hague the verdict of a political-allegedly legal court created specifically for the alleged crimes of KLA members.

Hashim Thaçi was sentenced to 25 years in prison. For a 58-year-old man, it's almost the rest of his life.

War is not a film where a director determines the good and the bad, the scenes, the dialogues and the ending. War is not clinically pure, especially when it is an imposed war and the Albanians only fought in self-defense. I do not believe that there is a war where every action is legal.

Of course, every victim deserves justice, and no war, no matter how just its cause, gives you immunity for crimes.

But justice, like nothing else, does not take place in a vacuum. It has a context. The context is called Yugoslavia and its bloody dissolution. The context is called Bosnia, Srebrenica, ethnic cleansing, murder and mass expulsion of Kosovo Albanians from their lands. The context is the refugee columns, the burned villages, the mass graves, the victims still unburied.

The KLA did not enter Serbian territory to occupy Belgrade, it fought in Kosovo, for Kosovo and for its people. The democratic world of that time did not remain neutral to the ethnic cleansing that was happening before its eyes. NATO intervened militarily in 1999 by bombing Belgrade and after the war, Kosovo passed under international administration. In 2008, Hashi Thaci, sentenced today to 25 years in prison (the Serbian justice itself had sentenced him to 10 years in absentia in 2005), announced the decision of the Kosovo parliament for independence. Kosovo is today the youngest state on the continent. This is the context that no court decision can erase.

Today's decision can and should be debated, but historically and in context it paints an ugly picture. Political-legal justice has stabbed historical justice in the back. When leaders of a liberation movement receive sentences that could practically keep them in prison for life, the question arises whether justice is judging only individual responsibility or, in the perception of an entire people, is placing the war itself in the dock.

This is why in Kosovo, and not only in Kosovo, today's hearing was not experienced as a criminal trial, but is being experienced as a historical political wound.

A journalist who was in the hall described the atmosphere after the verdict was pronounced with just one word: “Funeral.” It is perhaps the most accurate word for that moment.

For the family members, the sentences are life sentences. Today, the comrades-in-arms did not just see four convicts in the courtroom, they saw four people with whom, once, they had entered into a fight without knowing what tomorrow would bring.

Kosovo today did not see four defendants in the dock, but saw four names from its history being punished for fighting in self-defense!

Fate brought that all four survived the war, saw Kosovo liberated, saw its flag, saw the declaration of Independence. Hashim Thaçi read the declaration of independence as Prime Minister of Kosovo and later became President of the Republic until one day in November 2020, when he left for The Hague. He was not arrested in some basement, he was not caught on the run, but resigned from the post of President and appeared before the court.

Since then, almost six years of detention have passed and today the verdict came.

We can discuss endlessly about everything, about the standards of proof, command responsibility, joint criminal enterprise, witnesses and every paragraph of the decision, the veracity of the information that was sent to the prosecutors, but one thing no judging body can decide: it cannot decide what the KLA was for the history of Kosovo. History has given this verdict earlier. Kosovo is free and today Kosovo is a state. And those four fought for this state.

You can't separate 1998 from what came before and what came after. You can't take one piece of the war, put it under a microscope, and act like the rest of the story doesn't exist.

Hold the magnifying glass up to your hand. The more you magnify it, the more you will see wrinkles, blemishes, pores, marks, and imperfections. If you only look at it through the magnifying glass, you might conclude that you have an ugly hand and that it would be better to have another one.

But take off the magnifying glass and you see it's your hand.

If you put just a fragment of a war under a magnifying glass, you will definitely find wounds, mistakes, injustices, even crimes. They must be investigated and judged. But the magnifying glass cannot replace the whole picture. A war is not understood only by counting the magnified spots. You must put away the magnifying glass and also ask: why did it start, who imposed it, what was happening to a people and what did that war bring in the end. The magnifying glass can show you every sign of a hand, but it cannot tell you what that hand has done.

Perhaps one of the four, after today's sentences, risks never returning alive to the house from which he once left for war. But a court decision can keep someone in prison, but it cannot imprison their contribution.

The mission for which the four of them took up arms has been accomplished. Kosovo is a state today.

Today's four convicts may be seen by many as the final sacrifice of a war that began with people willing to give their lives for a state that everyone dreamed of.


Në përputhje me standarded JTI

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