Slow and imperfect, but still important

Clint Williamson, the American chief prosecutor of the European Union Special Investigative Task Force (SITF) yesterday issued a progress report on its criminal investigation into the allegations contained in Dick Marty’s Council of Europe report, issued in 2010. This is out of the ordinary: prosecutors don’t often announce an intention to indict unnamed individuals, but Clint is leaving his position and seems to have felt a need to report on what has, and has not, been achieved.

Once a special court staffed by internationals is established outside Kosovo, he said, SITF will file indictments against still unnamed senior officials of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) for a campaign of persecution against Serbs, Roma and other minorities as well as fellow Kosovo Albanians, who were intentionally targeted by top levels of the KLA leadership with acts of persecution, including

…unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, other forms of inhumane treatment, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites….

Clint also said that there is still insufficient evidence to bring indictments against individuals for murders committed for the purpose of harvesting and trafficking human organs, as alleged in the Marty report. He nevertheless concludes that

…this practice did occur on a very limited scale and that a small number of individuals were killed for the purpose of extracting and trafficking their organs.

While at pains to emphasize his agreement with the Marty report, Clint’s refusal to promise indictments for these offenses is an implicit rejection of some of the allegations made in it, or at least an indication that the standards of proof for indictment could not be met.

Clint also registered his concerns about witness intimidation, which hindered his investigation. He regards it as the greatest single greatest “threat to rule of law in Kosovo and of its progress toward a European future.”

While I assume this is all headline news in Kosovo and Serbia today, none of it is surprising. The campaign of violence against non-Albanians and some Albanians immediately following the 1999 NATO/Yugoslavia war was well known at the time. I warned more than one KLA member in the summer and fall of 1999 that accountability would come some day. Those who wish Kosovo well can only be pleased if individuals are at last to be held responsible. Witness intimidation is also a well-known problem in Kosovo’s tight-knit society, though proving it in court has been difficult.

The allegations of organ trafficking were not well known at the time. I became aware of them a couple years after the war, but I was also aware that Michael Montgomery, the journalist who uncovered them, felt he had insufficient documentation to publish the story, never mind accuse anyone in court. Three years of proper criminal investigation more than ten years after the fact have still failed to assign specific responsibility but have nevertheless ascertained that there were no more than a “handful” of such outrages.

So what does all this prove? Some KLA members committed atrocities. A few included killing people for their organs. Such savagery is disgraceful. The people who do these things also intimidate witnesses. As Clint says,

In the end, this was solely about certain individuals in the KLA leadership using elements of that organization to perpetrate violence in order to obtain political power and personal wealth for themselves, not about their larger cause. And, it is as individuals that they must bear responsibility for their crimes.

Would that it be so. Instead, we’ll be inundated with media reports denouncing Albanians as a group or the KLA as an organization, with replies denouncing Serbs as a group. What the others did will be claimed as justification. The acts of a few will be assumed to reflect the morality of many. Specific individuals will be assumed responsible even though the prosecutor has not yet named anyone. Charges and counter-charges will be mounted for political purposes–to prevent this person or that political party from gaining power. The numbers of deaths involved will be exaggerated.

None of that media circus has anything to do with justice, which is agonizingly slow and disappointingly imperfect. But it is nevertheless important.