Albanian lawmakers backed a resolution condemning a 2011 Council of Europe report that accused senior Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas of war crimes, after a debate marred by bitter wrangling between governing and opposition MPs.

Albanian MPs Adopt Resolution Condemning Kosovo War Crimes Report

The Albanian parliament in September 2021. Photo: LSA.

MPs in Tirana voted late on Thursday to adopt a resolution proposed by the ruling Socialist Party condemning Swiss senator Dick Marty’s 2011 report for the Council of Europe, which made allegations of war crimes against senior Kosovo Liberation Army officers.

The resolution was approved with 125 votes in favour and none against after a long and heated parliamentary debate, during which governing and opposition parties verbally clashed with each other. Each side accused the other of not supporting Kosovo strongly enough.

The resolution says that the claims raised in Marty’s report for the Council of Europe were unfounded. As well as allegations of war crimes, the report said there were suspicions that human organs were trafficked by senior Kosovo Liberation Army figures.

Marty’s claims were probed by a European Union investigative task force. The task force’s report found there were grounds for war crimes charges, although it could not substantiate the organ-trafficking claims. Its findings led to the establishment of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague in 2015 to try former guerrillas for war crimes.

Taulent Balla from the Socialist Party said “we have come to the conclusion that after ten years of in-depth investigations by the EU’s Special Investigative Task Force and then the Specialist Prosecutor’s Office [in The Hague]” that Marty’s allegations “remain unargued, unproven and not based on evidence and facts, so they should be considered as such by all national and international institutions”.

Socialist Party Prime Minister Edi Rama has promised that Albania will ask the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe for Marty’s report to be reviewed.

“This resolution is the beginning of a road that will go to Strasbourg,” he said in parliament.

Rama also accused the opposition Democratic Party, when it was in power in Albania, of voting for a resolution at the Council of Europe that backed the Marty report when it was published in 2011.

But Democratic Party leader Sali Berisha said that the 2011 resolution was not in support of the Marty report, but called for an investigation into its findings in Serbia, Kosovo and Albania.

Two separate factions in the Democratic Party initially put forward their own, more strongly-worded parliamentary resolutions on the Kosovo war, accusing Serbia of committing genocide, but neither was put to a vote in parliament.

Berisha accused Rama’s government of being anti-Albanian for not supporting the resolution that his faction of the Democratic Party put forward.

“I condemn with the greatest force the anti-Albanian stance of this pseudo-majority, whose power rests on vote-stealing, theft and drugs, and its attitude towards the resolution condemning the Serbian genocide in Kosovo, which is an inhuman attitude,” he said.

The first case against a wartime KLA guerrilla at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers began in 2021.

The Specialist Chambers are part of Kosovo’s judicial system but located in the Netherlands and staffed by internationals. They were set up under pressure from Kosovo’s Western allies, who feared that Kosovo’s justice system was not robust enough to try KLA cases and protect witnesses from interference.

But the so-called ‘special court’ is deeply resented by many Kosovo Albanians, who see it as an insult to the KLA’s war for liberation from Serbian rule.

Source link: balkaninsight.com