On Judicial Accountability, the KLA, and Kosovo’s Historical Memory
On 16 September 2026, the Kosovo Specialist Chambers found Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi, and Jakup Krasniqi guilty at trial of war crimes, including unlawful or arbitrary detention, cruel treatment, torture, and murder. The Trial Panel found them not guilty of crimes against humanity. The judgment concerns the criminal responsibility of four men. Its meaning in Kosovo, however, reaches into a larger argument about the history of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
Behind those findings are people who were detained, mistreated, tortured, or killed, and families for whom the judgment concerns what happened to someone they knew, not only what the verdict means for the KLA’s place in history.
Protests following the verdict included demands for greater support for the defendants’ appeal and for the removal of Justice Minister Donika Gërvalla. Protest organizers accused her of providing evidence to the Specialist Chambers. Gërvalla has denied cooperating with the court. The allegation should therefore be understood as part of the political dispute, not as an established account of what she did.
Why would an alleged act of providing evidence provoke such a response? For a court, evidence is assessed to establish what particular defendants did and whether the charges against them have been proved. For protesters who identify the convicted leaders with Kosovo’s struggle for independence, the same alleged act may signify something else: participation by their own government in a process they fear will redefine that struggle.
These meanings need to be examined separately. A finding that individuals committed war crimes does not, by itself, settle the historical character of the movement to which they belonged. Nor does the movement’s role in Kosovo’s struggle establish the innocence of its leaders. The KLA is understood by many Kosovo Albanians as central to their liberation, while the court’s task is to judge particular defendants and acts. The public argument concerns what those judgments will come to mean for the movement’s place in collective memory.
This helps explain why a question such as “Do you support the prosecutions?” may conceal more than it reveals. A person may accept the need to investigate crimes while disputing the court’s findings, its procedures, or the way a verdict is used to describe the KLA as a whole. Another may regard public defense of the movement as an attempt to shield its leaders from responsibility. Those positions cannot be understood simply by sorting people into supporters and opponents of accountability.
The dispute over Gërvalla makes this tension especially visible. Even while she denies supplying evidence, the accusation against her carries a claim about allegiance: that a Kosovo official should not help construct a criminal record against figures associated with the state’s founding struggle. That claim raises its own question. What obligations does a state owe to a court examining crimes alleged against people who helped bring that state into being?
A judicial record can also become a historical archive. Testimony and findings assembled to determine individual responsibility may later shape how a wider public remembers an organization and a war. Protesters can fear that effect without disproving the crimes; supporters of prosecution can insist on accountability without treating every member of the KLA as guilty.
The distinction must survive pressure from both directions. A movement’s role in a struggle for independence cannot confer innocence on everyone who acted in its name. A criminal judgment against its leaders cannot, on its own, settle how that movement is remembered. The difficult public task is to allow evidence about particular acts to be judged without requiring either the court or collective memory to do the other’s work.