SOME 16 years after NATO’s air campaign ended Serbian rule in Kosovo, the law may at last be catching up with high-ranking Kosovar politicians who allegedly committed crimes at the time. After long delay and years of witness intimidation, a special court may soon be formed to try some ten men, including a few said to be Kosovo’s organised-crime bosses.
In December 2010 Dick Marty, a Swiss prosecutor, reported to the Council of Europe his claims that former commanders of the wartime Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) were criminals who had ordered murders and overseen torture. His report focused on the “Drenica Group”, led by Hashim Thaci, then Kosovo’s prime minister and now foreign minister. Most sensationally the report alleged that some victims had been murdered for their organs. Mr Thaci denied the claims. Many Kosovars thought Mr Marty had been fed fake stories by Serbian intelligence.
Following the Marty report a branch of EULEX, the European Union’s law and justice mission in Kosovo, was set up in Brussels. Its findings were “largely consistent” with the Marty report, and it concluded that there was enough evidence to charge “certain senior officials” of the former KLA. But there was no court. The UN Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal in The Hague did not have jurisdiction because most of the crimes took place outside the former Yugoslavia (in Albania) or…