By Sylë Ukshini
Tirana Times, Sept. 15, 2026 – The September 16 judgment at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in the trial of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi, former Assembly Speaker Kadri Veseli, former head of the Vetëvendosje parliamentary group Rexhep Selimi and former Assembly Speaker Jakup Krasniqi will not merely determine the judicial fate of four former leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Its significance extends far beyond the individual responsibility of the accused and beyond the walls of the courtroom in The Hague. It touches upon how the Kosovo War will be interpreted internationally, how the relationship between Serbian state violence and armed Albanian resistance will be understood, and, in the longer term, how Kosovo’s statehood will continue to consolidate internationally.
This is precisely where the fundamental issue lies.
Criminal responsibility is, and must remain, individual. No liberation struggle and no political cause can exempt an individual from responsibility for crimes proven beyond a reasonable doubt. But it would be equally unacceptable if, through the attribution of individual responsibility, a historical judgment were to be produced, directly or indirectly, against the KLA, against the character of Albanian resistance, or against the political legitimacy of the process that led to Kosovo’s liberation and independence.
In this sense, September 16 represents a test not only for the Specialist Chambers, but also for the capacity of international justice to distinguish between individual crime and historical context, between the responsibility of a person and that of a movement, and between violence exercised by a state apparatus and acts committed by individuals within an armed resistance movement.
That distinction is crucial because the proceedings in The Hague have unfolded in a space in which history and justice have remained in constant tension. There is a risk, both in the indictment and in the broader procedural narrative, that Serbian state repression, which preceded the emergence of the KLA, will recede into the background, while the actions of the KLA are examined through a legal microscope detached from the political process that began with the abolition of Kosovo’s autonomy, continued through the systematic repression of the 1990s and the 1998–1999 war, and culminated in NATO’s intervention.
Such legal abstraction risks shifting the interpretive centre of gravity away from state repression toward an ambiguous narrative of a conflict between two essentially equal sides.
A reversal of historical roles
To make this paradox more visible, one may use a counterfactual analogy — not as a legal or moral equivalence, but as a historical thought experiment.
Imagine that, a quarter of a century after the Second World War, a leader of the anti-fascist coalition were sitting in the dock for acts committed during the war, while figures emerging from the establishment of the Nazi regime continued to dominate political life in Germany. Such a configuration would, in itself, create the impression of a reversal of historical roles.
The analogy does not equate the Kosovo War with the Second World War, nor the KLA with the anti-fascist coalition. Its purpose is simply to illustrate that a criminal trial, even when based on individual responsibility, can produce historical, political and symbolic consequences that extend well beyond the guilt or innocence of those standing trial.
There is also another dimension to September 16.
The international environment of 2026 is no longer that of 1998–1999. The political constellation that made NATO’s intervention against Slobodan Milošević’s regime possible, and which in the years that followed supported the political process leading Kosovo toward independence, has changed significantly.
Power relations have shifted. The Western consensus surrounding Kosovo no longer possesses the same degree of cohesion that existed at the time of the intervention. Meanwhile, the history of the Yugoslav wars remains the subject of an intense political and diplomatic struggle over interpretation.
The distance between the international context of 1999 and that of today becomes particularly clear in Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev’s retrospective reflections on NATO’s intervention in Kosovo.
More than a quarter of a century later, Krastev recalls the period following the intervention as a moment of international “euphoria” and describes the Kosovo War as a conflict of a particular kind: not a war over oil or direct geopolitical interests, but, in his words, a “classical humanitarian war.”
It was precisely the exceptional circumstances that made intervention in Kosovo possible, Krastev argues, that also explain why this model proved so difficult to reproduce elsewhere.
His observation is relevant to the significance of September 16. The judgment will be delivered in an international order markedly different from that of 1999, when intervention in Kosovo represented one of the clearest expressions of the post-Cold War debate and practice surrounding humanitarian intervention.
It is within this transformed international environment that the judgment will not remain confined to the courtroom.
It will be read and interpreted in Belgrade, Moscow, Brussels and Washington, but also in the capitals of countries that have still not recognised Kosovo.
For years, Serbia has sought to reformulate the relationship between its own state responsibility for the wars of the 1990s and alleged or proven crimes committed by individuals on the Albanian side.
The danger, therefore, is not that a criminal judgment could legally rewrite history — it cannot. The danger is that the judgment may be politically instrumentalised to influence how that history is interpreted and communicated internationally.
This is why September 16 cannot be understood simply as the date on which a court delivers its judgment.
It comes at a moment when the international order and political relationships that were once more favourable to Kosovo have been transformed. In this sense, the struggle is no longer only about what happened, but also about who will define the political and historical meaning of what happened.
It is precisely here that justice, history and Kosovo’s statehood intersect — but they must not be conflated.
The danger of historical symmetry
On the eve of the September 16 judgment, a similar warning has been articulated by Nevenka Tromp, a scholar of the Hague Tribunal and the author of a study on the unfinished trial of Slobodan Milošević.
In her critical assessment, the problem surrounding the Specialist Chambers does not concern only the individual fate of the accused. It also concerns the possibility that the outcome of the proceedings could produce what she describes as a “false historical symmetry” between the parties to the wars of the 1990s.
According to Tromp, any interpretation of the judgment must preserve at its centre the historical reality that Serbia was the state actor responsible for large-scale violence during the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, including the Kosovo War.
From this perspective, the conclusion of the trial carries significance far beyond the conviction or acquittal of the four defendants.
The central question is whether a criminal judgment, which legally should determine only the individual responsibility of the accused, might nevertheless produce a much broader public and historiographical reading of the war.
An interpretation portraying the KLA, beyond the responsibility of specific individuals, as an essentially criminal enterprise would risk producing precisely the “false historical symmetry” against which Tromp warns: on one side, the Serbian state apparatus, with its army, police and security structures; on the other, the armed resistance of a population that had for years been deprived of its autonomy, institutions and political and national rights.
Tromp also sees this narrative struggle in Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić’s advance statements about the possible outcome of the proceedings.
In her view, such statements should be read more as political calculation than as evidence of inside knowledge about the judgment.
The logic is twofold. An acquittal could be used by Belgrade to delegitimise the Court as an institution that, according to the Serbian narrative, failed to convict the KLA leadership. A conviction, on the other hand, could be presented as international confirmation of claims Serbia has promoted for years.
In either scenario, the battle moves away from the precise legal substance of the judgment and toward its political use.
This is why an assessment of the political consequences of the judgment requires a return to the historical context that preceded the war and to the profoundly asymmetric nature of the relationship between the Serbian state and Kosovo Albanians.
This rejection of an artificial equivalence between the two sides is not merely a contemporary interpretation of the Kosovo War.
It was articulated during the war itself by the French intellectuals Alain Brossat and Jean-Yves Potel, who argued against opponents of Western intervention.
Criticising the argument that military intervention against Milošević’s regime simply amounted to confronting “one evil” with “another evil,” Brossat and Potel noted that such reasoning artificially created equality between forces that did not occupy the same historical and political position.
From this perspective, the violence of a state apparatus engaged in ethnic cleansing could not simply be placed on the same plane as violence exercised within resistance against that apparatus.
The fundamental error of such an approach, they argued, lay precisely in losing the ability to distinguish between different forms of violence and between the contexts that produced them.
Brossat and Potel took the argument further. The fact that every war produces victims, destruction and human suffering does not, in itself, settle the question of its justice or necessity.
For historical judgment, the distinction between state violence, crime and resistance remains decisive.
In Kosovo’s case, that distinction is essential if one is to avoid an interpretation in which proven crimes are rightly individualised and punished, but the state machinery of repression and the resistance developed against it ultimately end up being placed on the same historical plane.
This distinction, articulated theoretically by Brossat and Potel, is also supported by the testimony of Western diplomats who observed Kosovo directly as the new Serbian regime was being imposed following the abolition of its autonomy.
Warren Zimmermann, the last U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, recalling his visit to Kosovo in July 1989, wrote in Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers that “the province had a colonial air about it.”
He described Serbian officials as arrogant and often abusive, while Albanians appeared fearful, lowering their voices as though they believed they were under surveillance.
The timing is important.
Zimmermann was describing Kosovo in 1989, almost a decade before the open phase of the Kosovo War and long before the KLA became an important military force.
At the same time, Zimmermann identified a fundamental contradiction in Milošević’s policies.
Where Serbs constituted a minority, as in Kosovo, Belgrade claimed a historical right to rule. Where Serbs could invoke the argument of majority status, as in parts of Croatia, self-determination was demanded.
Significantly, Zimmermann wrote, Milošević was unwilling to grant Kosovo Albanians the same right to self-determination that he demanded for Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia.
This contradiction makes it difficult to interpret the Kosovo conflict simply as a confrontation between two nationalisms operating from equivalent political and institutional positions.
Even more revealing is Zimmermann’s distinction between different forms of nationalism in Yugoslavia.
He did not regard Albanian nationalism in Kosovo as typically Balkan. Instead, he compared it with the independence struggles of African and Asian peoples against colonial rule in the 1950s and 1960s. He associated the Albanian strategy of passive resistance to Serbian domination with Gandhian inspiration.
In his descriptions of Ibrahim Rugova and the parallel Albanian education and health systems, Zimmermann documented a society constructing mechanisms of institutional survival after being excluded from state structures.
By 1990, he had already concluded that Milošević’s policy of force was pushing Kosovo Albanians onto a “path of no return toward complete independence from Serbia.” The psychological separation, in his assessment, had become complete.
Zimmermann’s testimony is essential to the debate over historical symmetry precisely because it demonstrates that a profoundly asymmetric relationship between the Serbian state and Kosovo’s Albanian majority already existed before the KLA emerged as a major military force.
If the years 1998–1999 are isolated from the process that began with the abolition of autonomy in 1989, continued with institutional exclusion and systematic repression throughout the 1990s, there is a danger that consequence will be separated from cause and the war presented as a clash between two sides that entered the conflict from comparable positions.
This is precisely why criminal responsibility must be individualised, while history must not be decontextualised.
The battle over the meaning of the war
If Zimmermann’s testimony helps explain the asymmetry that preceded the war, the experience of Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the first interim United Nations administrator in Kosovo, illuminates another aspect of the problem: how the violence of the immediate post-war period should be interpreted.
Here too, the distinction between criminal responsibility and historical context remains essential.
An important counterargument to interpreting post-war violence as proof of immutable Albanian-Serbian hostility was offered by Vieira de Mello in the first months after the war.
His position did not rest on minimising crimes committed against Serbs and other minorities.
Quite the opposite.
In his final public statement as administrator, he unequivocally described killings, abductions, forced expulsions, house burnings and looting as “criminal acts,” insisting that they could not be justified by suffering inflicted earlier.
His normative conclusion was equally clear: “Kosovo’s future must be built on justice, not vengeance.”
This approach is directly relevant to an assessment of the jurisdiction of the Specialist Chambers, which also covers the post-war period.
Crimes committed after June 1999 must be investigated, and responsibility for them must be individualised. But their inclusion in criminal proceedings should not detach that period from the institutional vacuum, the mass return of refugees, the consequences of repression and the trauma of a society emerging from war.
Contextualisation is not justification.
It is necessary precisely to prevent individual criminal responsibility from being transformed into a general historical interpretation of the conflict.
A similar warning, more directly focused on the struggle over the meaning of the war, was issued by Ismail Kadare only six months after the conflict had ended.
In his article “Gagner la guerre, perdre la paix,” published in Le Monde on December 14, 1999, Kadare did not deny acts of Albanian revenge against Serbs. On the contrary, he unequivocally called for such acts to be condemned and stopped.
At the same time, however, he warned against another process: the use of post-war crimes to relativise or rewrite what had happened in Kosovo before and during the war.
According to Kadare, Serbian propaganda had already launched a campaign aimed at relativising crimes and challenging the truth about Kosovo, including by disputing the number of Albanian victims and claiming that some of them had been killed by the KLA itself.
In this sense, the end of the military conflict did not bring an end to the conflict over the past.
The battle was shifting from the military field to the terrain of memory, information and historical interpretation.
Seen from the perspective of subsequent developments, Kadare’s intervention acquires particular significance.
Already at the end of 1999, he was warning that Milošević’s military defeat did not necessarily mean defeat in the battle over the interpretation of the war.
That is one of the central paradoxes of post-war Kosovo.
Serbia lost control of Kosovo. Milošević ended up in The Hague. His political and military project for Kosovo failed. But the struggle to define the historical meaning of the conflict had only just begun.
In this sense, Milošević may have left the locomotive, but the ideological train of the Greater Serbia project did not stop with him.
It continued in adapted forms: through the politics of memory, denial and relativisation of crimes, through the reversal of the relationship between cause and consequence, and through attempts to present Serbia with a cleaner historical record than that documented by the wars of the 1990s.
From this perspective, some elements of this ideological continuity have acquired a new articulation in the concept of the “Serbian World.”
Unlike the overt territorial expansionism of the 1990s, this concept projects Belgrade’s influence through political, cultural, religious, media and economic instruments across areas inhabited by Serbian communities.
In relation to Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia’s other neighbours, this logic seeks to preserve and strengthen Belgrade as the central political, cultural and national reference point, maintaining a sphere of influence that reaches beyond Serbia’s state borders.
The September 16 judgment will therefore not enter a political vacuum.
It will become part of an already existing struggle over the interpretation of the past, the legitimacy of Kosovo’s statehood and the relationship between individual responsibility and the history of an unequal conflict.
This is where justice, history and Kosovo’s statehood meet once again — not to be conflated, but to be distinguished with care.
