Balkan politics / Kanye lyrics: Ramush Walks!

The bad news about Ramush Haradinaj being acquitted at ICTY: Serbia is naturally outraged, I tell you, outraged, and it seems likely that there was a fair amount of witness intimidation going on, which doesn’t speak too well for the wheels of justice at the Hague. The judgement summary is explicit:

During the trial the Chamber received evidence from almost 100 witnesses. Nevertheless, the Chamber encountered significant difficulties in securing the testimony of a large number of these witnesses. Many cited fear as a prominent reason for not wishing to appear before the Chamber to give evidence. In this regard, the Chamber gained a strong impression that the trial was being held in an atmosphere where witnesses felt unsafe, due to a number of factors set out in the Judgement. The parties furthermore agreed that an unstable security situation existed in Kosovo that was particularly unfavourable to witnesses.

No surprises there. Although Haradinaj (and Balaj) walked, the evidence shows that the KLA was involved in some distinctly unsavoury activities; Brahimaj went down for “cruel treatment and torture”, but the full description of KLA soldier misdeeds includes rape and murder as well. No surprises there either - the standard defense for the KLA offered by Kosovars is “Look what the Serbs did to us”, but if you read through the trial papers, most of the murders that these three were indicted for were of Kosovar Albanian civilians.

The good news about Ramush Haradinaj being acquitted at ICTY: by all accounts, he wasn’t a bad politician for Kosovo, and it’s not as if they have a particularly wide range to choose from. The international community should be happy - Haradinaj was very popular, and a conviction would have stirred up even more distrust between locals and internationals, particularly following Human Rights Watch’s damning report on the state of Kosovo’s own legal system and the international community’s tragicomic failure to rebuild it.

Hopefully this will inject a little bit of life back into Kosovar politics - now that they’re independent they need as much help as they can get. Ramush always seemed to get on better with the internationals than (for example) Hashim Thaci, and the fact that he turned himself in voluntarily to ICTY in the first place will give him major political capital to spend. The problem is that Thaci is now the first prime minister of independent Kosova, so I’m looking forward to some really dirty political combat very soon.