Kosovo’s Proposed War Tribunal for Serbs ‘Unrealistic’: Experts

Kosovo is planning to call on the international community to establish a special international tribunal that would judge crimes committed by Serbs during the war in Kosovo - but experts told BIRN that it is almost impossible that such a proposal will be successful.

The initiative is set to be discussed by MPs at the Kosovo Assembly on Thursday, as well as a plan to set up a state commission to establish facts about crimes committed by Serbian forces during the war.

"Two decades have passed and little or nothing has been done about this issue," Kosovo's parliamentary speaker Kadri Veseli, who launched the initiative in April, wrote on Facebook on Saturday.

"The Hague Tribunal has left judicial processes against the leaders [in power] during [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic's regime unfinished. International justice in Kosovo has not done the job it was supposed to do," Veseli argued.

His initiative was launched as international prosecutors continue to interview suspects and potential witnesses for the new Hague-based Kosovo Specialist Chambers, which are expected to try former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters for wartime crimes including killings, abductions, illegal detentions and sexual violence.

The so-called 'Special Court' is part of Kosovo's justice system and was approved by Kosovo MPs under pressure from the country's Western backers, but remains highly unpopular among Kosovo Albanians, who believe that the KLA's war was righteous and that Serbs have evaded prosecution for serious crimes.

But experts argued that Veseli's proposal for another new international court to try Serbs was highly impractical.

"The creation of an international tribunal is a complicated procedure," Ismet Salihu, a former professor of...