Pristina – Prime Minister Isa Mustafa said that the soon-to-be-established EU-backed special court for Kosovo should probe post-war murder cases that are suspected to have been politically motivated.
Mustafa said on Sunday that his government will lobby for the new special court to investigate the post-war murders of dozens of politicians from his Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) party after the 1998-99 war.
“We will try to get this matter dealt with and investigated by the special court, which will be functionalised soon,” Mustafa told media at a tribute to LDK activist Enver Maloku, who was shot in 1999 outside his home by an unidentified gunman.
The new court, which is expected to operate at least partly in the Netherlands, is being set up to deal with allegations of post-war abductions and murders raised in last year’s report by the EU’s Special Investigative Task Force and is expected to try former Kosovo Liberation Army officials.
Mustafa said that the killings had gone too long unpunished.
“Other actions which are not within the competence of the special court, we will try to get local courts to deal with, because it is in the interest of the state, and not only the families of the activists, but the whole of Kosovo, that these matters are solved once and for all, and that the perpetrators receive their deserved sentences,” he said.
Enver Maloku was an LDK activist who worked as a journalist and established the Kosovo Information Centre, which served as the main source of information during the 1990s when Kosovo was under Belgrade’s control.
Other prominent LDK activists murdered after the war include Xhemajl Mustafa, a founder of the party and a close associate of Kosovo’s first president, Ibrahim Rugova, who was shot as he was entering his apartment in Pristina in November 2000.
In January 2003, Tahir Zemaj, the commander of the LDK’s military wing, which was allegedly in conflict with the Kosovo Liberation Army, was ambushed and murdered together with his son and nephew.
The LDK has in the past accused Kosovo’s former Secret Service Agency, SHIK, of being behind the assassinations of its members, but these claims have rejected by SHIK’s former boss, Kadri Veseli, who is now Kosovo’s parliamentary speaker.
In 2009, Kosovo was shaken by the claims of a former self-styled SHIK agent, Nazim Bllaca, who said that the agency had targeted and killed members of the LDK.
The SHIK emerged from the ranks of the KLA following the end of the war with Serbian forces in 1999, and then became the intelligence arm of the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) of current Foreign Minister Hashim Thaci.
SHIK claimed in 2008 that it had officially disbanded. Its former director Veseli has said that the agency never killed anyone, and also denied that Bllaca had ever been part of SHIK.
The new EU-backed special court was supposed to have begun work this month but has been delayed because of the political dispute that left Kosovo without a government for six month after national elections in June 2014.
Mustafa’s recently-formed government has vowed to expedite a vote in parliament on new legislation that would set in motion the creation of the special court. The vote is expected next month./BalkanInsight/