1990s killings
\nProsecutors said they decided to make the accusations public because Thaci and Veseli had made \u201crepeated attempts\u201d to obstruct the KSC
\nnews agency
\nTHE HAGUE
\nKosovo President Hashim Thaci has been charged with 10 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the country\u2019s conflict in the 1990s, a tribunal in The Hague said on Wednesday.
\nWartime intelligence chief and former parliamentary speaker Kadri Veseli is also accused of war crimes, the Kosovo Specialist Chambers (KSC) said, adding that the charges against both men were brought on April 24 but not revealed publicly.
\n\u201cThe indictment alleges that Hashim Thaci, Kadri Veseli and the other charged suspects are criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders,\u201d the KSC said in a statement.
\nThe accused are also facing other charges such as enforced disappearance of persons, persecution and torture, the tribunal said.
\nThe crimes alleged in the indictment \u201cinvolved hundreds of known victims of Kosovo Albanian, Serb, Roma, and other ethnicities and include political opponents,\u201d it added.
\nProsecutors said they decided to make the accusations public because Thaci and Veseli had made \u201crepeated attempts\u201d to obstruct the KSC.
\nThaci is currently preparing for a summit at the White House on Saturday with Serbian counterpart Aleksandar Vucic, and local media reports suggested he had already left for the US. His officials could not be reached to confirm the report.
\nThe White House meeting was organized by the US special envoy to Serbia and Kosovo Richard Grenell, who has ruffled European feathers by launching a diplomatic process between the two sides parallel to decade-long talks mediated by the EU.
\nGrenell has denied trying to overshadow the EU-led process, saying his meeting will focus on boosting economic ties.Trump was not expected to attend the meeting.
\nThe EU-backed tribunal was established in 2015 to investigate crimes by independence-seeking ethnic Albanian guerrillas against mainly Serb civilians during the 1998-1999 war.
\nThe conflict pitted Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas seeking independence for the southern Serbian province of Kosovo against Serbia\u2019s forces, who withdrew from the territory after an 11-week NATO bombing campaign.
\nThe tribunal was created after a Council of Europe report tied former guerrilla leaders including Thaci to atrocities.
\nThe court announced in April that it had filed charges against high-ranking Kosovo officials without naming them, but speculation was already rife that the indictment included Thaci.
\nAsked in April whether he would resign if he was charged, Thaci told local media he was not even thinking about it and would \u201crespond positively\u201d if he was asked to appear at the tribunal.
\nKosovo\u2019s outgoing prime minister, Ramush Haradinaj, resigned last July after being summoned by the prosecutor for interrogation as a suspect.
\nVeseli said in November he had been summoned by the court to be questioned.
\nThe KSC opened its doors in The Hague as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was winding down after almost 25 years of prosecuting crimes committed in the Balkans after Yugoslavia\u2019s break-up in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1990s killings Prosecutors said they decided to make the accusations public because Thaci and Veseli had made \u201crepeated attempts\u201d to obstruct the KSC news agency THE HAGUE Kosovo President Hashim Thaci has been charged with 10 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the country\u2019s conflict in the 1990s, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128412,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world"],"yoast_head":"\n