War Crimes in Kosovo: A Country Awaits

THIS is Kosovo’s holiday-and-wedding season, but some in the small Balkan state don’t feel much like celebrating this year. On July 29th Clint Williamson, an American prosecutor leading a special European Union task-force investigating war crimes, came out with a damning report. His team was created to look into claims in a report for the Council of Europe, published in 2010, which accused senior members of the wartime Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) of heinous crimes. He came to very similar conclusions.According to Mr Williamson, senior officials of the KLA led a campaign of murder and ethnic cleansing against Serbs and Roma in the wake of the war in 1999. Instead of dismissing claims that some of the disappeared were murdered for their organs, as had been widely expected in Kosovo, Mr Williamson says there are “compelling indications” that this did happen in a “handful” of cases, though he does not yet have enough evidence for indictments for that. Witness intimidation, he says, is the greatest single threat to the rule of law in Kosovo.Mr Williamson knows whom he wants to indict for other crimes, but no court yet exists to try them. Plans are well advanced for the establishment of an extraterritorial tribunal in The Hague, along the lines of the Scottish court that prosecuted the Libyans accused of blowing up an airliner over Lockerbie. First, Kosovo’s parliament must pass…

The Economist: Europe