Eurasia Press & News
Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi were senior figures in the Kosovo Liberation Army who ended up on opposite political sides in peacetime, but this week both men were reunited in The Hague to face war crimes charges
Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi both pleaded not guilty at pre-trial hearings at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague this week, denying involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during and just after the 1998-99 Kosovo war.
Back then, both were senior figures in the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA. Krasniqi was the KLA’s spokesperson during the guerrilla force’s armed struggle to resist Serbian rule, while Selimi was the director of operations of the KLA’s General Staff.
They were indicted alongside two other major figures in the KLA – Hashim Thaci and Kadri Veseli, both co-founders of the organisation.
Like Thaci and Veseli, more than two decades after the conflict ended with Serbian forces’ withdrawal, Krasniqi and Selimi are both prominent politicians in Kosovo, where ex-KLA men have largely dominated the post-war political scene.
Krasniqi is chairman of the national council of one of the junior parties in the governing coalition, the Social Democratic Initiative, NISMA, while Selimi is head of the parliamentary group of the biggest opposition party, the Vetevendosje Movement.
Krasniqi and Selimi are accused, alongside Thaci and Veseli, of a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity including illegal detentions, torture, murder, enforced disappearances and persecution from March 1998 to September 1999. All four men insist they are innocent.
The prosecution claims they were part of a “joint criminal enterprise” that aimed to take control over Kosovo “by means including unlawfully intimidating, mistreating, committing violence against, and removing those deemed to be opponents”.
Addressing the court on Monday, Krasniqi rejected the accusation: “It was a joint liberation enterprise and state-forming enterprise,” he declared.
Selimi was also defiant, telling the court on Wednesday that he “fought against the Serbian occupier who only brought evil to my country – murder, displacement, humiliation and genocide”.
‘Central figures in the KLA’
Political analyst Fitim Salihu told BIRN that Selimi and Krasniqi were “two central figures in the KLA”.
Selimi was one of the three soldiers who made the “first public appearance in the name of the KLA in 1997”, while Krasniqi, as the spokeperson, was the “the most public face, especially in communicating with domestic and international public opinion through the media”, he explained.
Both men are well-known in Kosovo for their roles in the war, but also for taking different political directions in peacetime.
Krasniqi’s political career started long before his involvement in the KLA, while Kosovo was a province of Yugoslavia.
A well-known history teacher, Krasniqi was active in groups that eventually came together to become the People’s Movement of Kosovo, an ethnic Albanian nationalist organisation established amid protests in the early 1980s for more autonomy for Kosovo within the federal Yugoslav state. Krasniqi’s involvement led to a long spell in prison from 1981 to 1991.
After his imprisonment, he became a member of the presidency of the Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK party, which was banned by the Yugoslav authorities for alleged separatism and nationalism, and then an MP in the shadow Kosovo parliament that was set up in opposition to the official Yugoslav provincial legislature for Kosovo.
In the late 1990s, as armed conflict began, Krasniqi became an important figure in the KLA, the spokesperson for its General Staff, and a member of its Political Directorate, and since November 1998 the Deputy Commander for Support.
Salihu explained that Krasniqi had a significant role on three levels.
“As a professor, he was a connecting bridge among the intellectuals… as a former political prisoner, he served as a link between former political prisoners and the KLA, and third, being a former LDK official, he has served as an attractive role model for other LDK members who joined the KLA,” he said.
Krasniqi’s importance increased when he became part of a delegation representing Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians at the Rambouillet conference in France in 1999, when Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic refused to accept a proposed peace agreement to end the Kosovo war, a refusal which led to a military intervention by NATO.
After the war, Krasniqi left the LDK and joined the Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK – the party of Thaci and Veseli, which grew out of the KLA’s political wing.
He held a series of important positions within PDK and was the country’s parliamentary speaker in 2008, when Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. He remained in this position until 2014 and also held the position of acting president briefly in 2010.
In 2014, together with another guerrilla turned politician, Fatmir Limaj, who was also tried but acquitted by the Yugoslav war crimes court in The Hague, formed a new party, NISMA.
Rexhep Selimi’s path to becoming an important figure in Kosovo started mainly with his role as director of operations of the KLA General Staff. Together with two other guerrillas, he publicly declared the establishment of the KLA on November 28, 1997, the anniversary of Albania’s declaration of independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912.
After the war, Selimi became a founder member of the PDK and defence minister of the Provisional Government of Kosovo. During the years 2000 to 2003, Selimi, who by this point had the rank of major-general, was commander of Kosovo’s Defence Academy and commander of the Kosovo Protection Corps’ Training and Doctrine Command.
He was close to former KLA commander, Ramush Haradinaj, another guerrilla turned politician who has been tried and acquitted by the Yugoslav war crimes court in The Hague, and his brother Daut Haradinaj.
Selimi joined Ramush Haradinaj’s Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, AAK party, but quit over political differences in 2010, joined the Vetevendosje Movement and became a MP in the Kosovo Assembly.
