War crimes in Kosovo: who is the ex-commander Salih Mustafa, on trial in The Hague?
Salih Mustafa, ex-commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, on September 15, 2021 in The Hague (Netherlands) in front of the Special Tribunal for Kosovo.
AP - Robin van Lonkhuijsen
Text by: Jean-Arnault Dérens Follow |
Laurent Geslin Follow
4 min
It was to him that the dubious honor of wiping the casts, in The Hague, of the new specialized chambers charged with judging the crimes attributed to the former guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) went to him.
However, on the eve of his arrest and transfer to Scheveningen prison on September 20, 2020, Salih Mustafa was largely unknown to public opinion.
His trial opened on Wednesday.
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From our correspondents in the Balkans,
During the war, under the name of Commander Cali, Salih Mustafa led a special unit of the KLA, 500 to 600 fighters strong, which operated in the area of Llap, in the north-eastern part of Kosovo, between Pristina and the Serbian border. .
The
Special Court for Kosovo
accuses him of "
arbitrary detention, inhuman treatment, acts of torture and killings
" committed during the month of April 1999, as part of a "
joint criminal operation
" which aimed to "
d 'interrogate and
mistreat prisoners
'.
The prosecution claims that the prisoners, held in the village of Zllash, were deprived of water, food and basic hygiene services, subjected to various tortures, including burns and electric shocks.
They are also said to have suffered "
death threats, fear and humiliation
", with a view to extracting forced confessions from them.
The prosecution specifies that Salih Mustafa would have ordered the members of his unit to practice these tortures and would have carried out himself.
Prosecutor Jack Smith confirmed that all the victims were indeed "
Albanian civilians, not spies or enemies of Kosovo
".
For his part, Salih Mustafa confirmed at the opening of the hearing that he intended to plead not guilty, before describing the court as a "
Gestapo office
".
A nationalist very quickly asserted
Born in 1972 in Pristina, Salih Mustafa got involved in the Albanian nationalist turmoil of the 1980s from his studies, before the leaden cover of the repression of the
Slobodan Milosevic
regime
fell on Kosovo.
Nebih Fazliu, one of his former college friends cited by the Balkan Insight website, explains that he had created a group called “Justice”, which organized concerts and cultural activities on the Pristina campus.
Salih Mustafa was not long in joining the underground nationalist groups of Marxist-Leninist inspiration.
In 1993, he was one of the co-founders of the Popular Movement for the National Liberation of Kosovo (LKÇK), a dissidence from the Kosovo Popular Movement (LPK), also underground, from which most of the leaders of the future KLA came, such as
Hashim Thaçi
.
This engagement resulted in Salih Mustafa being arrested for "
anti-Yugoslav activities
" and spending three and a half years behind bars in the sinister Dubrava prison.
While the various clandestine Albanian groups competed without mercy, fearing traitors and undercover agents, the LPK and the LKÇK found common ground: from the start of the fighting, in 1998, the maquis in the Llap region were placed under the political and organizational responsibility of this last group, which retained until the end its ideological stiffness and its admiration for the Albanian Stalinist regime of
Enver Hoxha
.
An arrest that surprised
After the war, the cadres of the LPK and the KLA created the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), which was to dominate the political life of the small country for two decades.
They also hastened to put the economy of Kosovo in order, for their greater personal profit.
Former LKÇK activists have always remained more discreet, and Salih Mustafa had chosen to remain faithful to a shadow career.
In 2006-2007, he advised Agim Çeku when he briefly became Prime Minister.
This career soldier, former operational leader of the guerrilla, had in common with him that he did not come from the underground LPK.
For the rest, Salih Mustafa was in charge of intelligence with the Kosovo Protection Corps (TMK), a civil-military unit responsible for "resettling" the former guerrillas, then the Kosovo Ministry of Defense.
The Kosovo ministry and security forces have confirmed that he has passed all the security tests required by NATO to hold such office.
His arrest
had even surprised those who know the matter well, because the Specialized Chambers were created following the resounding report by Swiss deputy Dick Marty on the crimes of the KLA, which focuses on the atrocities attributed to the "central core" of the former guerrillas - those close to Hashim Thaçi, all of whom came out of the LPK mold - and never evokes those attributable to the maquis in the Llap area.
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