Factbox-Tribunal of Kosovo: the suspects, the allegations and the history | World news

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THE HAGUE (Reuters) – The first trial opened on Wednesday before a special tribunal for crimes committed during the 1998-1999 Kosovo conflict. Here are some highlights about the court:

* The Kosovo Special Chambers Tribunal was established in 2015 to deal with crimes not tried by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which prosecuted individuals for atrocities committed during the wars of the Balkans of the 1990s, and closed in 2017.

* The Tribunal sits in The Hague and is made up of international judges and lawyers, but it is formally a Kosovo court anchored in Kosovo law, rather than an international tribunal such as the ICTY.

* The first case concerns Salih Mustafa, 50, a former independence commander who pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to war crimes. He faces murder charges, accused of running a prison unit where inmates were beaten and tortured on a daily basis. Prosecutors said the victims were other Kosovo Albanians who disagreed politically with Kosovo Liberation Army fighters.

* The KSC has indicted eight suspects, all held in a detention center in the Dutch seaside town of Scheveningen. Among them is former Kosovar President Hashim Thaci, who resigned and surrendered last year on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

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* Prosecutors hold Thaci responsible for nearly 100 wartime killings of civilians while he was a KLA commander who fought the Serbian police and army.

* Thaci, a US-backed national hero, embarked on his political career after leading the KLA battle against Milosevic’s forces. He has been the dominant political figure in the country since gaining independence 13 years ago.

* At least 13,000 people died during the 1998-99 war in Kosovo, then a province of Serbia under the late Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

(Reporting by Stephanie van den Berg and Anthony Deutsch; editing by Peter Graff)

Copyright 2021 Thomson Reuters.

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