ICTY opens war crimes retrial of former Kosovo premier

Aug 18, 2011, 13:56 GMT

Tha Hague - A former Kosovo premier and rebel leader, Ramush Haradinaj, started a partial retrial of his war crimes case on Thursday, three years after he was cleared amid widespread accusations of intimidation of witnesses.

The United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) also said that it has detained a crucial witness who refused to testify in the first trial against Haradinaj.

The court cleared Haradinaj, a prominent commander of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) during the 1998-99 conflict in the former Serbian province, of all war crime accusations in 2008.

But the ICTY appeals chamber in 2010 overturned the acquittal on the basis of widespread intimidation and harassment of witnesses in Kosovo and ordered a re-trial on six counts of murder, torture and inhumane treatment of KLA prisoners.

Two other KLA members, Lahi Brahimaj und Idriz Balaj, are also to be retried. Balaj was acquitted in the first trial, while Brahimaj was sentenced to six years in prison.

They were charged as members of a joint criminal enterprise that had resorted to violations of customs of war in order to establish the KLA authority in southern Kosovo.

Shortly after Haradinaj's trial began Thursday, ICTY said that it had custody Shefqet Kabashi, one of the witnesses who refused to testify in the first trial.

Kabashi, a former KLA member, was charged with contempt of court in June 2007 after he failed to show up in The Hague to answer the prosecutor's questions.

He fled to the United States, his country of residence. In November that year, he refused to answer questions from the prosecution in a video-link.

'Kabashi's testimony is relevant to the re-trial of the Ramush Haradinaj ... case as it relates to the defendants' alleged responsibility for crimes,' ICTY said. 'Kabashi will be detained on remand until further order.'

Kabashi was taken into custody by Dutch authorities. No further information on his detention was provided.

The Haradinaj case is the first the ICTY, established by the UN in the 1990s to prosecute the most important war crime cases in former Yugoslavia, has partially re-tried. In spite of being a reduced trial, proceedings are expected to take months until the verdict.

The decision was made when the chamber decided that the prosecution was hampered by intimidation of important witnesses.

After the war, Haradinaj turned to politics, founded the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo party and briefly served as prime minister in 2005, just before he turned himself in to the ICTY for the trial.

Many among the majority Kosovo Albanians still regard Haradinaj and other KLA commanders as heroes of the liberation fight against Serbia's rule.

In Serbia, which continues to fight Kosovo's independence even after it was declared in 2008 and recognized by leading Western powers, the authorities view Haradinaj and other KLA leaders, including the present Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, as terrorists.

Read more about Kosovo