Kosovo War

The leader of the KLA War Veterans' Association, Hysni Gucati, and his deputy Nasim Haradinaj insisted on Monday that they are innocent of obstruction of justice and witness intimidation, and denounced the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, which was set up to prosecute crimes committed during the Kosovo war.

Tahiri-Sylejmani is one of the few Kosovo Albanian survivors of wartime sexual violence to have spoken out publicly about her ordeal. She followed the example of Vasfije Krasniqi-Goodman, who gave a televised interview in 2018 about how she was raped by Serbian policemen when she was 16 years old.

The appeals chamber at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague on Wednesday rejected ex-President Hashim Thaci's plea for conditional release from pre-trial detention because there is still a risk that he might abscond.

The Serbian authorities are using memorialisation of the 1990s wars to manufacture a populist narrative of national pride and victimhood for political advantage, says a new report by the Humanitarian Law Centre which was launched on Tuesday evening in Belgrade.

Halil Berisha, a journalist from Pristina, told the trial of Kosovo Liberation Army War Veterans' Organisation leaders Hysni Gucati and Nasim Haradinaj at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague on Tuesday how he received the allegedly leaked war crimes case files from the defendants.

Montenegrin Special State Prosecutor Lidija Vukcevic. Photo: PR Centar.

"Bosnia and Herzegovina's Prosecutor's Office transferred this case to the relevant judicial authorities of Montenegro. There is a suspicion that Pekovic was involved in killing two Bonsiaks and raping and sexually abusing civilians in Foca," Vukcevic said.

US President Joe Biden has nominated retired diplomat Christopher Hill, a veteran of American involvement in the Balkans in the 1990s war years, as his country's new ambassador to Belgrade, the White House announced on Friday.

Hill, whose appointment must be confirmed by the US Senate, has previously been an ambassador in Albania, North Macedonia, Poland, South Korea and Iraq.

Christopher Hill is an expert on the region, and he also served as the US special envoy for Kosovo, playing a very important role in the negotiations that preceded the 1999 Rambouillet Conference.
Ambassador Hill will replace Anthony Godfrey, who has served as U.S. Ambassador to Serbia since November 2019.

After UN officials repeatedly expressed concerns that freed war criminals have used media appearances after their release to deny atrocities, the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals has barred Serbian police general Sreten Lukic from denying any crimes committed during the Yugoslav wars as a condition of his release.

Hysni Gucati and Nasim Haradinaj went on trial at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague on Thursday, charged with obstruction of justice and witness intimidation after they received leaked documents from war crimes case files and urged media to publish confidential information from the documents in September 2020.