Kosovo War Crimes Tribunal Arrests First Suspect

Mustafa is accused of arbitrarily detaining and torturing prisoners during the Kosovo War. (Wikimedia Commons)

Salih Mustafa, the former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), was arrested on September 25 and charged with four counts of war crimes during the Kosovo War. He was transferred to the Kosovo war crimes tribunal’s detention center in the Netherlands, where he awaits trial.

This was the first arrest in the Kosovo Specialist Chamber’s investigations of war crimes since its creation in 2015, signifying a major breakthrough in their efforts to prosecute war criminals from the conflict in the 1990s. Christopher Bennett, spokesperson for the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office, stated that Mustafa had a “warrant, transfer order and confirmed indictment issued by a pre-trial judge.” 

In a document confirming Mustafa’s indictment, Specialist Prosecutor Jack Smith described how Mustafa “physically committed, ordered and/or instigated the crimes of arbitrary detention, cruel treatment and torture.” Mustafa ran a detention compound where detainees allegedly faced torture, including physical and psychological assaults, such as being beaten and urinated on in front of other inmates.

While this is the Chamber’s first successful arrest, it has also attempted to charge several other high-profile Kosovans for war crimes, including Kosovan President Hashim Thaçi this summer. Thaçi denied the charges, which included murder, enforced disappearances, persecution, and torture; he remains in Kosovo. A judge has not yet confirmed his indictment, precluding a trial from occurring.

The KLA was composed of ethnic Albanians who sought Kosovo’s independence from Serbia. The Kosovo conflict, fought over Serbian persecution of ethnic Albanians, left more than 10,000 dead in the late 1990s, with most of the casualties being ethnic Albanians. Although the war ended in June 1999, it was not until February 2008 that Kosovo officially declared its independence from Serbia in a unanimous vote during an assembly attended by 109 of its 120 members. This was its second proclamation of independence, the first of which had been crushed by Serbian police in 1990.

Serbia called into question the legality of the 2008 proclamation and requested an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ ultimately decided that the proclamation did not violate international law.

The Serbian Prime Minister at the time, Vojislav Koštunica, branded Kosovo as a “false state.” As such, Kosovo remains a territory disputed between the Republic of Kosovo and the Republic of Serbia. It is currently recognized by 98 out of 193 countries within the UN.