Hashim Thaci just went from war hero to convicted war criminal via a single sentence doled out in The Hague. The 58-year-old former Kosovo president was handed a 25-year prison term on Thursday after a specialist tribunal found him and three other ex-Kosovo Liberation Army leaders responsible for 96 murders, as well as torture, cruel treatment, and illegal detention during the 1998-99 war with Serbia, reports the Guardian. Judges said Thaci, who resigned from office six years ago, "actively participated in and encouraged crimes," using his leadership position to spur abuses against political rivals and civilians, often on the basis of "little more than unverified rumors."
Prosecutors had sought up to 45 years, but the court dismissed several charges for crimes against humanity, ruling they weren't proven as part of a broad, systematic attack on civilians overall. Thaci, once known by the nom de guerre "Commander Snake," was later courted by Western diplomats; the AP calls the sentence "a crushing blow for a man who was once embraced by the West." He has long denied wrongdoing and can appeal.
The verdict has landed hard in Kosovo, where many view KLA leaders as liberators. Officials blasted the ruling as a "terrible judgment" and "great injustice," and crowds in Pristina responded by chanting the KLA's Albanian acronym. Meanwhile, a former deputy prosecutor in Kosovo's Specialist Prosecutor's Office says that the judgment is "a sign of the enduring strength of international law at a time when the United States and other countries have dismissed or attacked the International Criminal Court," per the New York Times. Thaci faces a separate witness-intimidation trial this month, per the Guardian.
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