Ramush Haradinaj, UCK thug and war criminal freed by the Hague
The West has once again demonstrated a double standard in relation to Serbs and Kosovo Albanians. To comment on this situation, we asked Pyotr Kandel, the head of the department of ethno-political conflicts at the Institute of European Countries of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to give his opinion.
“There have been two events of late, both related to the work of the Hague Tribunal for former Yugoslavia. On the one hand, the Tribunal has acquitted Kosovo’s ex-Premier Ramush Haradinaj, one of the leaders of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army. On the other hand, the ex-Chief Prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal, Carla del Ponte, has published a book in which she reveals that many top leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, including the incumbent premier Hashim Tachi and Ramush Haradinaj, were implicated in the torture of Serbs seized during the armed conflict in Kosovo. After being murdered, the captives’ bodies were used to supply organs for the black-market transplant trade. Ms del Ponte says the revelations were made post factum, because her attempt to launch an inquiry into crimes by Kosovo Liberation Army leaders received no backing from the Court at the Hague. All this serves as yet another confirmation that the Hague Tribunal is nothing but a tool in the hands of western policy-makers to serve their crooked policies.
As Ms del Ponte admitted in an interview with the Italian journal La Stampa, prosecution of war criminals in the present-day world is a purely political affair. Had the crimes committed by Albanians been disclosed, Kosovo’s independence would have been out of the question. Quite naturally, it’s only after the proclamation of Kosovo’s independence that the publication by Ms del Ponte saw light. In this regard, the events mentioned fit nicely into the West’s one-sided anti-Serbian position on crisis settlement in the Balkan region”.
6 April 2008
Voice of Russia World Service
http://www.ruvr.ru/main.php?lng=eng&q=25286&cid=56&p=06.04.2008 (in Russian and English)
