By Andrew Rettman
euobserver 9th Jan 2018
• Leading EU countries and the US have warned Kosovo of “severe consequences” if it walked away from a war crimes tribunal.
“We urge all Kosovo’s leaders … [to] honestly inform Kosovo’s citizens of the severe negative consequences, including for Kosovo’s international and Euro-Atlantic integration, if Kosovo continues on this path,” France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the US said on Thursday (4 January).
The EU set up the Kosovo Relocated Specialist Judicial Institution (KRSJI) in The Hague to treat allegations that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) were involved in harvesting and selling the organs of Serb prisoners during Serbia’s war with Kosovo in 1998 and 1999.
It started work in early 2017 and is to shortly issue its first indictments.
It did not get enough votes, even though two other parties, the PDK and Nisma, were on its side, but the EU and US fear Haradinaj will renew the initiative in January.
The prime minister told press after a visit to the municipality of Gjakove in Kosovo on Thursday: “I was against it [the KSRJI] while in opposition and I’m against it now”…
Jan Oberg comments
Well, 18 years later truth will out about who the guys were that the US Clinton/Albright administration fell in love with and colluded with at Rambouillet to create a pretext for the 78 days of relentless bombing of Serbia, including main buildings in Belgrade.
Some of us who met KLA leaders at the time – Haradinaj, Ceku, Thaci and their colleagues – at the time them had our dubts, to say the least. But nobody listened, presumably because media and Western political circles – who understood none of Yugoslavia’s complexities, also not Kosovo’s – for years had been riding on a false black-and-white narrative in which anybody who was not a Serb (Orthodox) was a good guy worthy of US/NATO and other Western support.
PS “Serbia’s war with Kosovo” is an involuntarily funny expression.
Kosovo’s EU future at risk in war crimes dispute added by JO on
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