Hashim Thaci, Kosovo’s former President and ex-commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, sentenced to 25 years by a European Union-backed Special Court in The Hague, marks a watershed in Balkan justice.
The charge sheet is brutal: war crimes including murder, arbitrary detention, torture during the late 1990s conflict. Thaci, once seen by the West as a freedom fighter against Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian nationalist state that stripped Kosovo of autonomy, led the KLA insurgency that triggered NATO’s 1998-99 air war. After Kosovo declared independence in 2008 — recognised by the US and several Europeans but not Serbia, Russia, India, and still not a UN member — Thaci became its political face.
The court itself was born of a Council of Europe report by Dick Marty in 2010, alleging KLA secret detention centres and even organ harvesting. That imagery coloured the KLA from champions to alleged perpetrators of abuses against Serbs and Albanians.
The verdict’s reception exposes the divide. In Pristina, crowds poured into streets shocked, shouting slogans for Thaci and the KLA, seeing it as a betrayal of the liberation narrative. In Belgrade, President Ivica Dacic welcomed it as proof that a fake state cannot be built on mass graves.
Legally, judge Charles Smith stressed the trial was not about the legitimacy of Kosovo’s independence or the KLA, but about command responsibility and a pattern of crimes. Three other former KLA commanders were also convicted.
The significance is threefold: it ends impunity for victors, it complicates Kosovo’s heroic national myth, and it shows international justice can pursue its own former allies. Thaci can appeal, but the message endures — liberation does not grant immunity