Justice on Hold: War Trial Delays Jeopardise Serbia’s Progress to EU

They ordered over 200 ethnic Albanian villagers to give them their money, jewellery and documents, and then to get into their cars or tractors and leave.

Among them were Hajrije Demaku, with her daughter Esma and son Faton. "In [the village of] Cuska, they took my daughter, they told her to get off the tractor, I thought they were going to ask her something, but they put her in a car and went away. What happened to her, I do not know," Demaku told Belgrade Higher Court in June 2019.

Esma Demaku is still on list of missing persons from the Kosovo war.

Twelve former members of the 177th Yugoslav Army Unit are on trial for committing war crimes in the western Kosovo villages of Zahac/Zahaq, Cuska/Qushk, Pavlan and Ljubenic that day in May 1999. The indictment alleges that they killed at least 118 ethnic Albanians.

Members of the Demaku family are the most recent witnesses to be heard in the trial. After the hearing at which they testified in June 2019, the next one was supposed to happen in September 2019, but was postponed. In November 2019, there was a hearing at which the Prosecutor's Office added one more defendant to the case, but in 2020, no hearings were held in the trial at all.

Delays to war crime trials have become commonplace in Serbia, to the dismay of victims and human rights campaigners. Over the past two years, 30 per cent of all hearings in war crime cases were postponed at Belgrade Higher Court - the only court that deals with such trials in Serbia.

As well as the Kosovo village massacre case, these delays have slowed the only trial in Serbia for the 1995 Srebrenica mass killings, as well as the trial of Bosnian Serb fighters accused of kidnapping passengers from a train at Strpci railway station in Bosnia in...