Kosovo guerrilla chief surrenders to UN police
Christian Jennings on the Kosovo- Macedonia border
WHEN Daut Haradinaj, once a commander in the Kosovo Liberation Army,
walked into a UN police station in Pristina on Wednesday and gave himself up to face war crimes charges, it was final proof that NATO and the UN had come full circle in their relationship with former KLA guerrillas .
Haradinaj’s surrender had been negotiated by his brother, Ramush, also a former KLA commander and now leader of one of Kosovo’s Albanian political parties, the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, or AAK.
Both brothers led KLA units that fought against Serb forces in the western Kosovo region of Dukajin, close to the border with Montenegro, between 1998 and 1999. International judicial officials hinted this week that Daut Haradinaj may have given himself up rather than face possible transfer to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.
After the war ended, Ramush Haradinaj went into politics and founded the AAK in April 2000. Daut Haradinaj became a commander in the new Kosovo Protection Corps, the civil defence organisation that sprung out of the KLA. In summer 2001, he was suspended from the corps after the US government published a so- called black list of Albanian former guerrillas.
The charges he now has to answer relate to the period following the arrival of NATO troops in Kosovo in June 1999, when KLA guerilla fighters embarked on a camapign of revenge killings of Albanians thought to have collaborated with the Serb regime or to have belonged to rival Albanian factions.
Derek Chappell, spokesman for the UN police in Kosovo, said that six former Kosova Albanian guerrillas also suspected of war crimes had been arrested on Tuesday to face a Kosovo-based UN court. International officials say these arrests may be a prelude to a NATO operation this summer to snatch high-level Kosovo Albanian war crimes suspects and hand them over to The Hague.
Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor of The Hague tribunal, has made no secret of the fact that Kosovo Albanians are on her list of indictees for crimes committed against Serbs and Albanians between 1998 and 1999, when a NATO and UN force entered Kosovo.
Fearing an Albanian backlash if men regarded by many Kosovars as war heroes are arrested, British troops in Pristina have planned contingency operations to contain outbreaks of violence.
Senior NATO commanders say that if the operation to make the arrests takes place, soldiers from Britain’s SAS, along with US and German forces, would be flown to Kosovo to carry them out. Ironically, the SAS was one of several western forces that trained and supported the Kosovo Liberation Army.
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