Kosovo PM Sacks Adviser for Criticising Wartime Guerrillas

Albin Kurti said on Saturday that he has dismissed Shkelzen Gashi, a history and politics expert, as his prime ministerial adviser amid an ongoing backlash about Gashi's comments about crimes committed by Kosovo Liberation Army fighters.

"Today I met then fired my political adviser Shkelzen Gashi. Some of his statements have had a kind of distracting effect from the good work of the government," Kurti wrote on Facebook.

Gashi's comments during an interview with Kosovo television station K7 on Friday sparked angry reactions and threats against him on social media.

Gashi said in the interview that individuals within the Kosovo Liberation Army committed crimes against civilians, including ethnic Albanians.

"I have said several times that individuals, including those in the senior hierarchy of the KLA, committed war crimes," Gashi said.

He said that the facts had been reported by international watchdogs including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and cited in trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia as well as in domestic cases prosecuted by the UN's Kosovo mission UNMIK and the EU's rule-of-law mission EULEX.

"I think the perpetrators must be punished," Gashi said.

Gashi also said that the Council of Europe rapporteur Dick Marty who wrote an explosive report in 2010 report about crimes committed by guerrillas during the Kosovo war cannot in general be regarded as anti-Albanian.

Marty's report was the basis for the establishment of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, the so-called 'Special Court' that is expected to try senior KLA ex-guerrillas for wartime and post-war crimes, although no one has yet been indicted.

Gazmend Bytyqi, an MP from the opposition Democratic Party of...