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The justification of the four KLA leaders accused of “fighting for freedom” cannot be legitimate, because most of the crimes were committed against civilians, unarmed people who did not represent a military threat or a military threat, he said in an interview with FoNet lawyer Aleksandar Olenik, legal representative of the victims. trial before the Special Court of The Hague.
He said in the Kvaka 23 series that defendants Hashim Thaci, Kadri Veselji, Redzep Seljimi and Jakup Krasniqi, “in the digital age, with information available on what we can and cannot know, they knew very well how to commit a war crime.” .
However, he noted that this is one of the rare cases in the history of hybrid war crimes courts in which defendants have been virtually detained.
“Typically, defendants go to court when they resign and when the levers of power are removed, as was the case with Serbia and the Hague court, and now the highest in the command structure, they voluntarily surrendered while still in power. ” Olenik explained.
In his opinion, the four defendants mean that “they respect the State and its institutions that are being built or have been built, as who interprets”, unlike ours, which we had to force to go to court, to persecute them and pass the law, we pay them and we bribe them. “
Olenik reproaches the Ministry of Justice and other Serbian state institutions for not “doing anything since 2016 to help the victims who will be part of this process and who live on the territory of Serbia.”
He assessed that the institutions focus on “convicting the accused in the most efficient way possible”, while the victims of the crimes are left alone, uninformed and unprepared.
“There is no flyer, no information, no publicity that the Ministry of Justice sends to those people with the information that they can apply, that they can have representatives, where and how to apply,” said Olenik, noting that “the state does not do nothing because it contradicts the policy that everything in the West is bad. “
It is difficult for the victims to agree to participate in the process, because they survived terrible moments and torture, he noted, noting that it would take a long time “to start talking about it, especially in public, with an additional security problem.”
For the first time, the victims became part of the process
Olenik is “satisfied at the moment with the protection of witnesses and victims”, especially since it is the first time that victims have become part of the process, and not just as evidence for the prosecution, unlike the court proceedings in the Hague Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
He is convinced that the victims and their destinations will not only continue to be “protected numbers”, but that the prosecution and the court will agree on the dynamics of publication of the parts of the accusation that for now are hidden. We only have the first publication of the accusation against these four, in which most of the information is hidden, and it will not be published all at once in its entirety, but, according to the defense and the prosecution, they will be given to know the data of victims, places and witnesses. Olenik explained.
It is important not to publish information about a person, place or street before the court begins to treat it, he stressed and predicted that eventually, when the verdict is handed down, everything will be available to the public and the media and can be used for reconciliation purposes and confrontation.
Noting that “there is no victim of me and my criminal, because all criminals are criminals, regardless of their surname, religion or what army or organization they belong to,” said Olenik, adding that the confrontation could occur in Kosovo.
“There will be the majority of Albanian victims in this court, in addition to Serbs, Roma and other nationalities,” he said, noting that it is forgotten or not known that “in 1998 and in the early part of 1999, there were various Albanian armed factions. in Albania. Kosovo “.
There were up to two governments and several opposing parties, and “the first crimes against the civilian population were directed against disloyal Albanians, that is, political opponents, especially LDK and Fark de Rugova,” Olenik said.
A bad example of the Hague trials: everyone hid their crimes
He also recalled a bad example after the trial in The Hague Court, when “our Croatian and Bosnian media published only those facts that support them.”
“They all hid their crimes” and disparaged them in the media and in other ways, and, on the contrary, “glorified each verdict against the others,” said Olenik, adding that in that way the confrontation was avoided, because it prevented citizens understood what and how. done in his name.
He believes that the trials against the accused KLA commanders further oblige Serbia to “confront their actions in the past in Kosovo, as well as to uncover the graves.”
An effort must be made and that the information coming from The Hague this time “is transmitted to the public in a credible way, that they are not manipulated and that the message is not sent that they are criminals, we are not,” emphasized Olenik.
As he warned, “if this time we report in the way the Court for the former Yugoslavia reported, we will again lose the most important things.”
However, taking into account “who is currently in power and what is their policy, I rather believe that messages will be sent that everything from the West is bad and that they committed crimes, while we did not,” Olenik estimated.
He does not agree with the view that these processes have been waiting for a long time and that one of the main culprits is the international community, which, in its own interests, has turned a blind eye to the KLA crimes.
In order to prosecute war crimes, Olenik said, conditions must be met, evidence must be found, a prosecution must be brought and a competent court to deal with it.
As he specified, “the reason why war crimes do not have a statute of limitations is precisely because it is very difficult to prepare a procedure, because even when there is political will, it takes years for that accusation to be supported by evidence.”
All evidence, “not only that coming from Serbian security institutions”, will be subject to scrutiny, announced Olenik, who believes that comments in the Kosovo press about tampering with Serbian evidence are “just defense tactics. “.
Without the evidence gathered by KFOR and NATO, which entered Kosovo after the withdrawal of our forces, in his view, “none of these accusations would exist, especially in the case of the camps.”
During the rescue of the camp victims, they took photographs, documented and recorded, Olenik said and recalled the evidence Dick Marty found, which is being preserved.
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