Belgrade spent the week calling judicial process terror. Terror, persecution and ethnic cleansing are terms of art with settled legal definitions, and every one of them received its content from courts adjudicating what Serbian forces did in Kosovo. I have spent a career with these definitions. It is time someone read them aloud.
By Kadri Kryeziu | 3 August 2026
"Politika uslovljavanja, pritisaka i jezivog terora." A policy of conditioning, of pressure, and of horrifying terror. That was the chair of the Serbian Assembly's committee for Kosovo, on the state broadcaster this weekend, describing the Republic's war crimes investigations. Horrifying terror, "jeziv teror." The adjective was new to her vocabulary; her president had introduced it at a monastery in Bosnia twenty-four hours before. She continued: the arrests are creeping ethnic cleansing, "puzajuće etničko čišćenje." The chair of the defense committee had offered quiet ethnic cleansing, "tiho etničko čišćenje," days earlier, the two chairs still workshopping the adjective. Belgrade's Kosovo office filed terror, reprisal, and intimidation in a single statement. Persecution, "progon," runs through all of it like a watermark.
First, the conduct the words describe, because the record is public. On the twenty-eighth of July, police acting on orders of the Special Prosecution detained five men in the Zubin Potok area. Three gave statements and went home the same day. Two were brought before a judge in a public hearing, represented by counsel, and remanded by an order their lawyers immediately contested on television. A European Union rule of law mission is monitoring the cases; a deputy ombudsperson opened an inquiry into a separate grievance on his own initiative the same week. And on the order of a court, forensic teams opened the ground at Kalludra e Vogël (Mala Kaludra), with a second judicial authorization now sought for a site at Jabukë (Jabuka), ten kilometers away. The full inventory: warrants, statements, releases, hearings, counsel, monitors, an ombudsperson, and two holes in the ground that a judge signed for.
Now the words.
Persecution, in law, is a crime against humanity with elements, and the elements are settled: the severe deprivation of fundamental rights, committed against an identifiable group, on discriminatory grounds, as part of a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population. I did not draft that definition. It was applied, count by count, by the tribunal in The Hague that convicted the deputy prime minister of Yugoslavia, the chief of the Yugoslav Army's general staff, and the commander of the Pristina Corps for what was done to Albanian civilians in Kosovo in 1999, and applied again to convict the head of the Serbian police's public security department. Deportation and persecution, as crimes against humanity. Those judgments are final. When a Belgrade official reaches for "progon," she is reaching for a word whose modern content was written in judgments against her own state's chain of command.
Terror is a term of art too, and its provenance is worse. The tribunal convicted General Stanislav Galić of the war crime of terror, defined as acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread fear among a civilian population, for the campaign of shelling and sniping that held Sarajevo hostage for forty-four months. That is what terror means when a lawyer says it. It has a mens rea. Its exemplar in the case law is a Serbian general, and its victims were civilians at market stalls and water queues. The word now describes, from a television studio, a detention hearing at which the detainee had a lawyer.
So the question the week raises, and the question I intend to answer, is the one nobody in Brussels has thought to ask aloud: since when does the investigation of murder amount to terror, and the prosecution of war crimes to persecution?
The answer of every legal order I know is: never, and the opposite is the law. The European Convention does not merely permit states to investigate suspicious deaths on their territory; its second article obliges them to, and the Strasbourg court has held for decades that where people were disappeared, the obligation continues for as long as their fate is concealed and their families are left without answers. Serbia has been a party to the convention on the disappeared since 2011 and endorsed, in May 2023, a Declaration on Missing Persons committing both parties to exactly the cooperation now under way at Kalludra. The exhumation Belgrade calls terror is conduct these instruments command; a state that declined to open that ground, with a 2003 witness statement in the file naming the shooter, would be the one in breach. If a warrant, a hearing, and a court-ordered excavation constitute horrifying terror, then the European Convention on Human Rights is an instrument of horrifying terror, and someone should inform the Council of Europe, which Serbia joined voluntarily.
The test for telling persecution from prosecution is not complicated. Persecution selects its targets by identity and dispenses with process. Prosecution selects by evidence and is made of process. Apply it. The committee chair says ninety percent of those tried are Serbs and calls the number proof of a campaign. The number has a simpler explanation, which I have set out before in this newspaper: the composition of a war crimes docket follows the composition of the graves, and the graves of 1998 and 1999 were not filled proportionally. Persecution, moreover, does not release three of five detainees after a statement, and it does not hand its critics a monitoring mission, an ombudsperson, and a courtroom in which to complain.
Above all, a persecuting state does not do what this Republic did to itself: amend its own constitution, under international pressure, to create a court of foreign judges in The Hague with jurisdiction over the Republic's own founders. That court was demanded on the strength of a 2010 allegation of organ trafficking so grave that it moved parliaments. Fifteen years and several hundred million euros of investigation later, the confirmed indictment against Kosovo's former president contains counts of murder, torture, and persecution, and not one count of the allegation that built the courtroom. He awaits the verdict in a cell in the Netherlands all the same. Whatever this Republic's faults, and I have catalogued them for a living, an aversion to war crimes justice is not among them. Kosovo accepted the category even when the category was aimed, on unproven premises, at its head of state.
The test is direction-neutral, and I intend to apply it that way. Belgrade's Kosovo office stated this week that Serbia has for years requested searches of eight locations in Kosovo which it believes hold the remains of Serbs missing from 1999, and that 562 people, Serbs and other non-Albanians, remain unaccounted for. If those requests are pending, the law's answer is the one I have given throughout: search them. The continuing obligation does not check the nationality of the dead, and the families of the 562 are owed exactly what the families waiting on DNA results from Kalludra are owed. Let every one of the eight sites be opened under judicial authorization, with monitors present, this year. I will defend each warrant in these terms. But notice what the request concedes. The office demands exhumations in one direction while filing the word terror against exhumations in the other, in the same week. An exhumation cannot be a family's right or a people's torment according to the ethnicity of the bones. The office that wrote both statements has supplied the discriminatory selector itself, and it sits nowhere in Kosovo's docket. It sits in Belgrade's vocabulary.
I will concede what should be conceded, because the concession matters to the argument. Defense counsel in the Zubin Potok cases allege they were denied access to their clients overnight. If true, that is a violation, it should be established and remedied, and the lawyers were right to say it loudly. The statement from Belgrade's Kosovo office leads with the same grievance, the right to counsel and a fair proceeding, and I take the office at its word about what it considers the standard, because a fair-trial complaint can only be lodged against a system that has trials. Note where the lawyers raised it: to the press, to the monitors, to the court itself at the detention hearing. A remedy sought inside the process is the signature of a system that has one. The men whose remains may lie at Kalludra were afforded no hearing and no counsel. Their process consisted, according to the witness statement in the file since 2003, of a promise of safe passage and an order preserved in the police record of the time, published now by Nataša Kandić's organization: "Zakopajte te koje ste ubili." Bury those you killed. That sentence is what the absence of law looks like. It should not be difficult to distinguish from a detention hearing.
Belgrade does not actually believe that war crimes prosecution is terror. Serbia maintains a war crimes prosecutor of its own, and has tried Kosovo Albanians in its own courtrooms, including in absentia, for decades, without any official in Belgrade describing those proceedings as the persecution of a people. And on the thirtieth of July, with the Kalludra site open, the Serbian state showed how energetic its prosecutors can be about 1999 when the direction suits: it arrested a man from Istog, in Kraljevo, for espionage, the alleged damage to Serbia consisting of information connected to the arrests in the grave case. I wrote about that charge sheet in this newspaper last week. A state cannot simultaneously prosecute the disclosure of a mass grave as an injury to itself and describe the excavation of that grave as terror against the innocent. The two positions have only one point of intersection, and it is the pit.
So the vocabulary performs a transfer. The words that courts attached, with judgments now final, to the conduct of Serbian generals and police commanders in Kosovo are being lifted from those judgments and fastened onto the investigators and the forensic teams, in the apparent hope that terms of art, spoken often enough on television, will migrate from the men who earned them to the men who are doing what the European Convention requires. On Sunday the prosecution asked a judge for permission to open the ground at Jabukë. Somewhere in Belgrade there is an archive that could tell the families of more than one thousand five hundred people what a DNA laboratory will now have to tell them instead, slowly, bone by bone. The law has words for all of this. They are just not the ones Belgrade is using.
Prof. Kadri Kryeziu is a constitutional law expert and co-drafter of the Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo. He served as First Vice President of Kosovo’s Constitutional Court (2009–2015) and is the publisher of The Kosovo Dispatch
