Former Kosovo Guerrilla Officer Bolsters Defence Case in Hague Trial

Hajrush Kurtaj in court on Thursday. Photo: Kosovo Specialist Chambers/Livestream.

Former KLA officer Hajrush Kurtaj told the war crimes and crimes against humanity trial of Hashim Thaci and his three co-defendants at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers this week that he exaggerated the descriptions in his books and made assumptions about the KLA’s structure.

Showing that the KLA had a strong command structure, with the defendants at the top and therefore responsible for crimes committed by lower-level-fighters, is key to the prosecution’s case.

The defence has been seeking to prove that the KLA was a more loosely-structured force without a strong command structure.

Kurtaj said that “during the war I did not have the information” about who an operational zone commander reported to, and that his observations in his books about the war “could have been an assumption”.

“As brigade deputy commander I could not know what relations the operational zone commander had with the General Staff,” he said.

Kurtaj is the 45th defence witness in the trial and had started his testimony on February 1. He served with the KLA’s Kacanik Brigade and was its commander from May 15 to June 11, 1999.

Judge Guenael Mettraux confronted Kurtaj with excepts from one of his books, but Kurtaj repeated that his writing consists of “my assumptions and exaggerations, because I could not know what happened in March 1998 [between KLA members mentioned in the book] when I joined on June 1, 1998”.

Asked by judge Mettraux about a document from the KLA General Staff about how the guerrillas should make arrests, Kurtaj denied having seen the document during the war and said he had not witnessed it being implemented. “I cannot agree with a document that I have not seen nor practised in my [wartime operational] zone,” he said.

On Thursday, during questioning by a lawyer for defendant Jakup Krasniqi, Kurtaj admitted that he did not confirm the references in his book with the accused.

On Wednesday, during questioning by Thaci’s defence, the witness explained that he had included a photo of the accused during an alleged visit in Kacanik in his book so it “would be read more”, but denied having met or talked to Thaci during the war.

On Tuesday, during questioning by the prosecution, Kurtaj also emphasised that “in my book I wrote as I wanted, not as things were”. He added that even if the facts were correct, they were “enlarged, embellished”.

Thaci, Krasniqi, Kadri Veseli and Rexhep Selimi are accused of having individual and command responsibility for crimes committed against prisoners held at KLA detention facilities in Kosovo and neighbouring Albania, including 102 murders.

The crimes were allegedly committed between at least March 1998 and September 1999, during and just after the war with Serbian forces. The defendants have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The Kosovo Specialist Chambers were set up in 2015 to try former KLA guerrillas for wartime and post-war crimes. The court was established in The Hague by the Kosovo parliament, acting under pressure from Kosovo’s Western allies, who believed that Kosovo’s own justice system was not robust enough to try KLA cases and protect witnesses from intimidation.