What, precisely, is on trial in The Hague?
The prosecution does not criminalise the KLA or Kosovo's independence struggle. It asks whether Hashim Thaçi bears personal responsibility for crimes allegedly committed during wartime.
That question has lingered over Kosovo since the first indictments were announced by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. It has divided families, fractured political discourse and fuelled a debate that too often mistakes emotion for law. For many Kosovars, the prosecution of Hashim Thaçi is inseparable from the story of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the armed struggle that emerged after nearly a decade of systematic repression under Serbian rule. To others, the proceedings represent an overdue attempt to establish whether crimes were committed against civilians by individuals who, despite fighting for a cause widely regarded as just, remained bound by the laws of war.
These are not the same question.
Whether Kosovo’s war for liberation was legitimate is one matter. Whether individual members of the KLA committed crimes during that conflict, and whether particular commanders bear criminal responsibility for those crimes, is another entirely. International humanitarian law has long drawn a deliberate distinction between the legitimacy of a political cause and the legality of the conduct employed in its pursuit. Wars may arise from oppression. Resistance may emerge against persecution. Yet neither circumstance grants immunity from the obligations imposed by the laws governing armed conflict.
That distinction lies at the heart of one of Europe’s most consequential war crimes trials since the conflicts that accompanied the collapse of Yugoslavia. Before examining what the Specialist Prosecutor alleges against Hashim Thaçi and his co-accused, it is necessary to return to the beginning, not to the courtroom in The Hague, but to Kosovo itself, where the conditions that produced armed resistance did not emerge overnight. They were built deliberately, over years, through the steady dismantling of political rights, civil liberties and human dignity.
The Kosovo of the late 1980s bore little resemblance to the territory that would soon dominate international headlines. Under the 1974 Constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Kosovo enjoyed extensive autonomy within Serbia. Although not a republic, it possessed many of the institutional characteristics of one. Its Assembly exercised legislative authority over local affairs. Its judiciary functioned independently within its constitutional competence. Albanian-language education expanded, the University of Prishtina became a centre of intellectual life, and Kosovo Albanians occupied positions across public administration, policing and local government.
That constitutional settlement unravelled rapidly after the political ascent of Slobodan Milosevic.
On 28 June 1989, speaking1 before hundreds of thousands gathered at Gazimestan to commemorate Vidovdan, Milosevic delivered what has since become one of the defining political speeches preceding the Yugoslav wars. While presented publicly as a celebration of Serbian history, the speech coincided with a far more consequential constitutional transformation. Earlier that year, Serbia had effectively stripped Kosovo of the autonomy guaranteed under the 1974 Constitution. What followed was not merely an administrative reform. It marked the beginning of a systematic reassertion of Serbian state control over every institution that had previously reflected Kosovo’s autonomous status.
For Kosovo Albanians, constitutional change was experienced not as an abstract legal adjustment but as an immediate transformation of daily life.
Over the months and years that followed, tens of thousands of Albanian employees were dismissed from public institutions. Teachers lost their classrooms. Doctors were removed from hospitals. Judges, prosecutors and civil servants were replaced. Albanian police officers disappeared from the security apparatus. State-owned enterprises underwent political restructuring that overwhelmingly favoured Serbian control. Independent Albanian-language media faced increasing restrictions before many were ultimately shut down altogether.
Education became one of the earliest casualties.
Thousands of Albanian pupils and university students found themselves excluded from schools and lecture halls. In response, an extraordinary parallel education system emerged. Families opened their homes as improvised classrooms. Private houses became primary schools. Garages, basements and village rooms were converted into lecture theatres where volunteer teachers continued educating an entire generation without recognition or state support. It became one of the largest underground education systems established anywhere in Europe during the twentieth century.
Healthcare followed a similar path.
Medical professionals who had lost their positions established parallel clinics, relying on donations, volunteers and improvised facilities. The objective was no longer simply preserving institutions but preserving society itself.
The political response during those years remained overwhelmingly peaceful.
Under the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova, Kosovo Albanians embraced a strategy that rejected armed confrontation. The Democratic League of Kosovo sought international recognition through civil resistance, parallel institutions and democratic organisation. Elections were organised outside Serbian control. A self-declared Republic of Kosovo maintained symbolic governmental structures despite lacking international recognition. For much of the international community, Rugova became the face of non-violent resistance.
His strategy was neither passive nor insignificant.
For nearly a decade, hundreds of thousands of Kosovars accepted extraordinary personal sacrifice in pursuit of peaceful political change. They endured unemployment, discrimination, surveillance and repeated police intimidation while largely avoiding organised armed confrontation. Few modern societies have sustained such disciplined civil resistance for so long under comparable political pressure.
Yet peaceful resistance alone failed to alter the trajectory of Serbian policy.
Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Kosovo received comparatively little international attention. The wars in Croatia and Bosnia dominated diplomatic priorities. Western governments repeatedly urged restraint while offering few concrete mechanisms capable of reversing the institutional dismantling taking place inside Kosovo. As atrocities elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia consumed international diplomacy, Kosovo remained, for many policymakers, a crisis postponed rather than resolved.
That postponement carried consequences.
Among younger Albanians especially, confidence in exclusively peaceful resistance began to erode. Many questioned whether constitutional appeals could succeed against a government that had already dismantled the constitutional order itself. Others looked across the region and concluded that international intervention appeared to follow violence rather than prevent it.
By the mid-1990s, scattered armed attacks attributed to what became known as the Kosovo Liberation Army had begun attracting increasing attention. Initially small, fragmented and poorly equipped, the organisation remained largely unknown outside Kosovo. Serbian authorities characterised it as a terrorist organisation. Many international governments adopted similar descriptions during its earliest phase, reflecting uncertainty regarding both its structure and objectives.
Inside Kosovo, however, perceptions evolved rapidly.
For supporters, the KLA represented the conclusion that peaceful resistance had exhausted its possibilities. Its emergence reflected not simply ideological militancy but profound frustration accumulated over nearly a decade of institutional exclusion, political marginalisation and escalating state repression. Many of its earliest recruits came from communities that believed constitutional mechanisms no longer existed through which their rights could realistically be restored.
Everything changed in March 1998.
The Serbian police assault on the Jashari family compound in Prekaz transformed Kosovo’s political landscape almost overnight. The operation, directed against Adem Jashari and his relatives, resulted in the deaths of dozens of members of the extended family, including women and children. For many Kosovo Albanians, Prekaz became more than a military operation. It became a symbol that peaceful coexistence with Serbian state authority had effectively collapsed.
Recruitment into the KLA accelerated dramatically.
Villages previously reluctant to support armed resistance began providing recruits, shelter and logistical assistance. Diaspora communities increased financial support. The conflict rapidly evolved beyond isolated security operations into sustained armed confrontation between Serbian military and police forces and the expanding KLA.
International humanitarian law would later recognise precisely this transformation.
In its final trial brief, the Specialist Prosecutor argues that by at least March 1998 the violence had reached the threshold of a non-international armed conflict, citing the organisation of both Serbian forces and the KLA, the increasing frequency and intensity of hostilities, the weapons employed, casualty levels and the broader humanitarian impact. The prosecution also contends that this armed conflict continued through September 1999.
Recognising the existence of an armed conflict carries important legal consequences.
It does not determine who fought for the more just cause. It does not allocate moral superiority. Instead, it establishes that all organised parties became bound by the rules governing warfare. Those rules prohibit torture, murder, arbitrary detention and the targeting of civilians irrespective of the political objectives pursued by either side.
Meanwhile, events on the ground continued deteriorating.
Throughout 1998 and into 1999, Serbian military, police and paramilitary forces conducted increasingly large operations across Kosovo. Entire villages were shelled. Civilian populations fled advancing forces. Reports of summary executions, arbitrary detention, widespread destruction of homes and forced displacement accumulated with alarming consistency. International monitors documented a rapidly worsening humanitarian crisis as hundreds of thousands of civilians were driven from their homes.
The violence reached its most devastating phase following the collapse of negotiations at Rambouillet Agreement and the commencement of NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in March 1999.
Over the following weeks, Serbian forces carried out a campaign that international tribunals, historians and human rights organisations have extensively documented. Entire communities were expelled. Civilians were separated from their families. Mass killings occurred in towns and villages across Kosovo. Hundreds of thousands crossed into Albania, North Macedonia and Montenegro. Many never returned to find the homes they had left. Others returned only to discover mass graves, burned villages and missing relatives whose fate remains unresolved decades later.
Subsequent proceedings before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia established that Serbian political, military and police leaders participated in a widespread campaign of deportation, persecution and other crimes committed against Kosovo Albanian civilians. Those judicial findings stand independently of the proceedings now unfolding before the Kosovo Specialist Chambers.
That distinction matters profoundly.
Acknowledging the crimes committed by Serbian forces does not determine whether crimes may also have been committed by members of the KLA. Equally, investigating allegations against former KLA leaders does not erase the overwhelming historical record documenting Serbia’s campaign against Kosovo’s Albanian population. One truth neither cancels nor diminishes the other. International justice was never intended to produce collective innocence or collective guilt. It exists to determine individual criminal responsibility.
That principle now confronts Kosovo with one of the most difficult questions any society emerging from war must eventually face.
Can a movement born from legitimate resistance contain individuals who later violated the very principles for which that resistance claimed to fight?
The prosecution before the Kosovo Specialist Chambers answers that question in the affirmative. It does not allege that Kosovo’s struggle for liberation was itself criminal. Rather, it alleges that certain senior figures within that struggle pursued objectives and employed methods that crossed the boundary separating lawful resistance from criminal conduct.
Whether those allegations have been proved beyond reasonable doubt remains for the judges alone to determine.
It is there, inside that distinction between a nation’s fight for freedom and the individual accountability of those who led parts of that fight, that the trial of Hashim Thaçi truly begins. Part II examines precisely what the prosecution alleges, how it constructs its case, and why understanding those allegations requires reading the indictment not as political history, but as a legal argument built upon specific evidence, defined legal standards and individual responsibility.
