Hashim Thaci belongs to the charismatics of European politics. Some people praise him in the highest terms. Others want to see him behind bars as a war criminal. His way leads via Zurich to the top of the young state of Kosovo. Who is the controversial Kosovar President?
By Tim Judah*
Hashim Thaci, the president of Kosovo, erstwhile resident of Dietikon, is relaxed and friendly. It is 2018 and I have just interviewed him about whether Kosovo and Serbia, from which it declared independence in 2008, might exchange territories. Allegations that Mr Thaci, is a mafia-kingpin and murderer, which have ebbed and flowed over the years, are not on the agenda today. As I get up to go, he asks: “Have you seen Aleksandar?”
Aleksandar? I am confused. Then he clarifies. He is talking about Aleksandar Vucic, the president of Serbia. When Hashim was in the hills fighting for independence for Albanian-majority Kosovo from Serbia in 1999, Aleksandar was Serbia’s minister for information. Now, it appears that Hashim and Aleks play it cool and unsmiling for the cameras when they are together but are on first name terms otherwise.
As the smoke cleared in the wake of NATO’s 78-day bombing of Serbia in 1999, the idea that Hashim and not Aleksandar would one day be charged with war crimes and murder would have seemed absurd. Vucic had, after all, played a key role in a Serbian extreme nationalist party whose men had already murdered and pillaged their way across Bosnia and Croatia. So, times have changed, but the charges made by the special Kosovo tribunal and revealed on June 24, have been in the works for more than twenty years.
In the meantime, if Thaci has a love-hate relationship with Switzerland, who can blame him? He read Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008 but, if it had not been for Swiss generosity, this country boy made good, would never have fulfilled this dream.
But Switzerland is also home to the two people who have done everything in their power to destroy him.
Madeleine Albright was impressed
Thaci is tall, handsome and smiles a lot. At least he does when he meets foreigners. Every politician has a public and a private side but in Thaci’s remarkable story, there is certainly a lot more that remains in the shadows than that of the average European president. As I leave his office he hands me a copy of his biography written by two journalists of the The Times of London. For them there is no doubt. He is the Winston Churchill, Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa of the Balkans.
It is a mirror image of the picture painted by Dick Marty, the prosecutor from Ticino, who following the cue of fellow Ticinesi Carla Del Ponte, implicated him in a plot to murder prisoners to sell their organs. He made this charge in a 2010 report for the Council of Europe. Thaci was, he said, a mafia “boss” named in intelligence reports as “having exerted violent control over the trade in heroin and other narcotics”.
Del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor of the UN’s Yugoslav war crimes tribunal had written about some of these allegations in a book in 2008. At that time she said, former KLA leaders were protected by western powers who wanted stability, potential witnesses were too terrified to talk and so there was not the evidence to proceed with such cases.
When he emerged from the shadows to head the Kosovo delegation to the French chateau of Rambouillet in 1999, at which a last-ditch attempt was made to find a solution to the problem before NATO launched its bombing campaign, Thaci charmed Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State. She was struck by his “youth and inexperience”. He was “more like a student with brilliant potential and a penchant for turning in his assignments late.” At one point she says, he was “almost tearful”.
He shunted trains in Zurich
He was only 30 but she was wrong about his inexperience. It was just that his experience was very different from hers. He was one of nine kids and grew up sharing a room with his six brothers in the village of Buroje in the Drenica Valley. This has always been the heartland of Kosovo Albanian resistance to the Serbs.
Thaci’s biography has it that he was a student activist. But no one in Kosovo had ever heard of him before the war. There is a good reason for that. What he was really active in were tiny and secretive groups which opposed the peaceful resistance policies of Ibrahim Rugova, the then undisputed leader of the Kosovo Albanians. They wanted armed rebellion. In 1994 Thaci took the route to Switzerland, taken by so many Kosovars before him. He enrolled to study in Zurich and shunted trains to earn some money.
But how serious a student was he? He applied successfully for political asylum which gave him a travel document. With his new wife left at home in Dietikon, Thaci was often away on business. But it was not SBB business.
Walking over the mountains from Albania Thaci was organising sleepers in Kosovo who were being readied and hopefully armed for when war came. This recalled James Pettifer, a British academic required “the political and organisational skills of the French Resistance or the pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks, the comrades known only by a false name, the rendez-vous in the back room of a bar announced by an anonymous call made from a Zurich telephone kiosk by someone you never met.”
At first his nickname was “Student” but now it was “Snake”. Perhaps it was a tribute to his ability to slither away quietly. Maybe it was something else.
In 1997 Albania collapsed. The result was that vast amounts of weaponry were suddenly available at prices that the diaspora in Switzerland and elsewhere could suddenly afford. Thaci’s main role in the emerging Kosovo Liberation Army was political, but it is always been left unclear to what extent he took up guns too. Certainly the Serbs thought he did. In 1997 they convicted him in absentia for participating “in several terrorist attacks” on policemen.
In 1999 in the wake of the Serbian capitulation and the withdrawal its army and police from Kosovo all hell was to break loose. Reports came to the incoming American troops and the UN that up to 400 people, mostly but not only Serbs, had disappeared and had been imprisoned in Albania. Thaci, says a source who has followed this story but cannot be named, denied his men were involved. Then the mysterious disappearances stopped.
My heart is hurt
“You never heard it from me but…” Journalists asking about Thaci hear this a lot. Ever since 1999 Thaci has towered over Kosovo’s politics. But he has always said the right things. He wants reconciliation with Serbs and often says that no one is above the law.
The charges laid by the prosecutor have been a long time coming. In 2000 Del Ponte told Thaci she was looking into crimes committed by Kosovo Albanians and that he inferred that she meant him because “his face turned to marble”. When Marty’s devastating report was published Thaci said that it was a collection of “fantasies, science fiction and false reports”.
One source familiar with the brief suggests that some charges may concern not having exercised orders to stop crimes, rather than giving orders or pulling the trigger himself. Another disagrees. What also remains to be seen is how many concern the murders of Albanians after the war who were political opponents rather than collaborators with the Serbs. It is “an open secret,” says Daut Dauti, a Kosovar journalist. “Everybody believes that the orders came from the top and this was reported in the media.”
Thaci has always maintained that all these accusations are untrue. On June 29th he reiterated that. In an emotional broadcast he said: “My heart is hurt but not broken,” adding that he would resign only if the prosecution’s charges were confirmed by a pre-trial judge, something which could take until October.
Pronto Clan led by Thaci
“Pronto,” says Thaci as he answers the phone. Taped in 2016 as part of an anti-corruption investigation Thaci and colleagues appear to discuss state jobs for party members. Thaci was never charged with what would be abuse of power but three of his party colleagues were convicted on appeal on July 1st.
This February Albin Kurti, the leader of an opposition party came to power. His aim was to “liberate Kosovo from within” meaning he said, from the grip of what has now become known as the Pronto Clan led by Thaci. Kurti only lasted 51 days before he was deposed from office. The Americans also wanted him gone. He was obstructing their plans too.
On June 24th Thaci was heading to Washington to meet Vucic and maybe even strike some sort of historical deal. Suddenly the prosecutor unveiled the charges. Could it be that the price of the deal might include the closure of the court or an assurance that Thaci would somehow never be charged? Now we wait to see if the court confirms the charges and if so if he will emerge to vindicate Joe Biden who once called him the “George Washington of Kosovo” – or someone else entirely.
https://www.weltwoche.ch/ausgaben/2020-27/weltwoche-international/wi-winston-churchill-of-the-balkans-die-weltwoche-ausgabe-25-2020.html
*Tim Judah is a British journalist (BBC, Times, Economist) and expert on the Balkans. He has published several books on Serbia and Kosovo.
