"On the table are photos from another time: young men in uniform, barely older than 20, with serious expressions on their faces. Haxhimusa runs his fingers over one of the pictures. "That was us," he says quietly. The 58-year-old ethnic Albanian was once a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, an ethnic Albanian separatist militia that fought against the Serbian police and the Yugoslav Army in the Kosovo War at the end of the 1990s."
"Kosovo declared its independence on February 17 in 2008 and this was what Haxhimusa fought for, but this year everything is different. This month, the closing arguments in a war crimes case against several KLA leaders were heard at a special court in The Hague. The Kosovo Specialist Chambers were set up in the Netherlands in 2015 under pressure from the European Union but in Kosovo, the court is widely criticized by many Kosovars as a form of colonial justice."
Haxhimusa lives in Doganaj, southeast Kosovo, in a two-story family home with a garden and fruit trees. He is 58, an ethnic Albanian who served in the Kosovo Liberation Army and was jailed under Slobodan Milosevic. He joined the KLA in 1998 after mass killings of ethnic Albanians and fought for Kosovo's independence. Closing arguments in a war crimes case against several KLA leaders were heard this month at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague. The chambers were created in 2015 under EU pressure and are widely criticized in Kosovo as colonial justice, while prosecutors have requested 45-year sentences for several former KLA leaders on persecution charges.
Read at www.dw.com
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