Vucic Rejects Kosovo War Crimes Verdict, Claims Court Shielded KLA

A tribunal in The Hague delivered its verdict on Wednesday: four former leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army were guilty of war crimes during the 1998–99 conflict that tore through the Balkans as Yugoslavia fractured. Hashim Thaci, the former president of Kosovo, and three other KLA commanders—Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi, and Jakup Krasniqi—were sentenced to a combined 81 years in prison. Thaci and Krasniqi each received 25 years. Veseli got 18. Selimi got 13. The charges were specific and grave: they had orchestrated the arbitrary detention of 385 people, the torture of 303, the cruel treatment of 49 more, and the murder of 96.

But the verdict split the region along familiar fault lines. In Belgrade, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic held a press conference that evening and rejected the court's findings as incomplete. The Kosovo Specialist Chambers, he argued, had deliberately avoided convicting the four men of crimes against humanity—the most serious charge—because doing so would have damaged the credibility of the KLA itself. He suggested the court had shielded the organization from full accountability. He also pointed out a gap in the tribunal's scope: it had not addressed crimes committed against Serbs after June 20, 1999, when NATO-led peacekeeping forces arrived and the armed conflict officially ended.

Vucic's language grew sharper when he turned to reactions from neighboring states. Kosovo's Prime Minister Albin Kurti had called the verdict an "unacceptable injustice." Vucic responded with a rhetorical jab: if Serbia had made such a statement about any convicted defendant, he said, European and world parliaments would have passed resolutions condemning the country. He was alluding to the international outcry over the funeral of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general and convicted war criminal, which had taken place in Belgrade the previous week with large crowds and several Serbian government ministers in attendance. Then Vucic broadened his critique to the entire region. "There are no Serbs as victims," he said. "In every statement, Serbs have to be the perpetrators. All of them in the region are united in hatred against Serbs."

Yet the verdict also drew support from those who saw it as a step forward in international criminal law. Aleksandar Olenik, a Serbian lawyer who specializes in war crimes cases across the former Yugoslavia, told Deutsche Welle that the ruling represented genuine progress. For the first time, he explained, individual criminal responsibility had been clearly established. He also highlighted a shift in how victims were treated: at this tribunal, unlike earlier international courts, victims had their own legal representatives and could seek compensation. They were no longer merely witnesses used to prove guilt.

Olenik noted that the Kosovo Specialist Chambers had a narrow mandate—it could only prosecute the founders of the KLA. Other members suspected of crimes would be tried in Kosovo's domestic courts. The judgment itself had identified individuals not formally charged but found to have committed offenses, opening the door for further prosecutions. Olenik said this included crimes committed after the armed conflict ended, the very gap Vucic had highlighted.

Stasa Zajovic, who leads Women in Black, a Belgrade-based anti-war organization founded in the early 1990s, offered a different critique. Neither the Serbian government nor Kosovo's authorities, she said, were using war crimes verdicts to examine their own responsibility. Instead, both sides weaponized the judgments to inflame tensions. She was careful to note that the scale of atrocities committed by the Serbian regime far exceeded those of the KLA, particularly in Kosovo. But she warned that the verdict had created new friction. International forces, she said, needed to remain present to monitor the situation. "It is clear that the conditions do not exist for armed conflict," she told DW, "but there is a danger that the war could continue by other means."

When asked whether the verdict might improve relations between Serbia and Kosovo, Olenik was cautious. Previous international court judgments had done little to bridge the gap between the two countries. Everything depended on the political will of leaders in both places. He noted that Kosovo society had shifted considerably to the right over the past four years. "I am not optimistic that the verdict will have a positive effect in the near future," he said. But he held out a longer view: in 10 or 15 years, he suggested, people might look back at what these judgments had established with less emotion and more clarity.