THE HAGUE, Netherlands (CN) — Appeals court judges at a special tribunal heard arguments Thursday from a former Kosovo military officer who claims he was wrongly convicted of war crimes.
The Kosovo Specialist Chambers found Salih Mustafa guilty of war crimes on Oct. 20 and sentenced him to 26 years in prison last year, but his lawyers say his conviction was based on faulty evidence.
[The trial chamber] “failed to apply fair and impartial standards when weighing the evidence of witnesses of the prosecution and the defense,” Julius von Boné told the three-judge panel.
The 48-year-old Mustafa wore a dark suit to court and listened to the translation of the hearing, conducted mostly in English, through headphones.
In the late 1990s, Mustafa belonged to a military force called the Kosovo Liberation Army, made of ethnic Albanians like himself who were fighting for Kosovo's independence from Serbia. Mustafa commanded a unit of fighters near Pristina, the capital.
The charges stemmed from the treatment of prisoners at the Zllash detention compound, which held mostly fellow Kosovar Albanians suspected of collaborating with Serbian forces. Those detained in the compound's agricultural building were refused food and medical treatment, kept in filthy conditions, and beaten.
“You were just waiting for death, when it will come," one witness said during the trial. "Today, tomorrow, you were waiting for you to be killed." Most testified anonymously out of fear for their safety.
Defense lawyers focused on the detention compound itself, claiming prosecutors abruptly switched gears during the trial to say abuse of prisoners happened in multiple buildings rather than just one.
“It’s a compound a group of buildings?” Judge Nicolas Guillou asked von Boné at one point during the hearing.
Mustafa denied his involvement in any of the crimes when the trial opened. “I am not guilty of any of the counts of this Gestapo office,” he told the court in September 2021, speaking in his native Albanian.
The court is not an international tribunal but rather operates under Kosovo law, created by an amendment to the country’s constitution following a 2011 report from human rights organization, the Council of Europe, which claimed the KLA had engaged in widespread atrocities, including organ harvesting. The court has been moved to The Hague and employs international judges to minimize political interference.
The hearings will continue on Friday with lawyers from the prosecution and those representing victims presenting arguments.
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