Kosovo’s former president denies guilt
Former Kosovo president Hashim Thaci led a violent campaign of murder and torture against opponents during the 1998-1999 independence war with Serbia, prosecutors told the start of his war crimes trial yesterday.
Thaci and three other leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rebel group all pleaded not guilty to crimes against humanity and war crimes as the trial got underway at a special tribunal in The Hague.
Protesters rallied in The Hague to support Thaci, who resigned in 2020 and has been detained by the court ever since, while thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Pristina on the eve of the trial.
Thaci is widely seen as a guerilla hero in Kosovo, but prosecutors said he openly oversaw a brutal reign of violence as the ethnic Albanian KLA tried to tighten their grip on the during and after the war.
"Why did they do it? The evidence will show that it was to gain power," prosecutor Alex Whiting told the EU-funded Kosovo Specialist Chambers Court.
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