Fred Abrahams from the campaign group Human Rights Watch, who worked on reports about Kosovo during the conflict, told the war crimes and crimes against humanity trial of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and three co-defendants at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague on Wednesday that the organisation wasn’t able to conduct a detailed probe of alleged crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA in 1998 due to a lack of access to crime scenes and to witnesses.
“We did not conduct an in-depth investigation,” Abrahams told the court in response to a question from defendant Kadri Veseli’s defence lawyer, Ben Emmerson.
Emmerson was asking about a Human Rights Watch report that claimed the KLA had murdered people in Glogjan in September 1998, although it was later that the bodies of victims murdered elsewhere were dumped in Lake Radoniq in Glogjan.
“We attempted to visit the site,” Abrahams said, but added that Human Rights Watch investigators did not manage to get there in time because when they arrived, the bodies had been removed and taken to a “hotel, as a makeshift morgue”, which the NGO visited.
Abrahams said that the information in the report had been received by “Serbian officials” and was not supported by other first-hand sources, admitting that he would have changed the wording.
However, Abrahams insisted that the KLA’s operational zone commanders could have taken steps to stop any alleged crime committed by their guerrillas due to their effective control on the ground.
During questioning by the prosecution on Tuesday, Abrahams said Human Rights Watch investigators’ methodology involved interviewing first-hand witnesses of family members, and they had tried to back up the testimonies with supporting material such as autopsy reports, medical reports or court decisions. However, he admitted that interviewing witnesses for alleged crimes committed by KLA fighters had proven hard.
His testimony will continue on Thursday.
Thaci, Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi are accused of bearing individual and command responsibility for crimes that were mainly committed against prisoners held at KLA detention facilities in Kosovo and neighbouring Albania, including 102 murders.
The defendants allegedly committed the crimes between at least March 1998 and September 1999, during and just after the war with Serbian forces. They have pleaded not guilty to all charges.
