The Hague convicted four KLA leaders for 96 murders. Belgrade called it an acquittal, because the verdict it wanted was against a state.
by Fatos Kabashi | 21 September 2026
On 29 August in Užice, Aleksandar Vučić told his audience what 16 September would bring: "for all crimes against Serbs they will say: acquittal." On 5 September he said the day would show that "Serbs must be the only culprits," and that the court might find "there were no crimes there."
On 16 September the Trial Panel of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers convicted Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi of war crimes: arbitrary detention of 385 people, cruel treatment of 49, torture of 303, murder of 96. Thaçi and Krasniqi received 25 years, Veseli 18, Selimi 13. Six counts of crimes against humanity failed because the prosecution did not prove a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population. The victims the panel accepted were Kosovo Albanians, Serbs, Roma and others, singled out as perceived opponents of the KLA. Organ trafficking was not charged. The Yellow House was not in the indictment.
Belgrade had asked for two decades that KLA leaders be tried. Four of the most senior surviving ones were convicted, for 96 killings, and sentenced to between 13 and 25 years after prosecutors had sought 45 for each. By the evening the verdict had a new name.
Vučić spoke at 18:30, carried live by the national-frequency broadcasters. He said the panel found the attacks were aimed at individuals, not a wider population, and that the six counts for crimes against humanity were rejected on that basis. He said organ trafficking was absent from the indictment "because of the impossibility of obtaining evidence, again because of the impossibility of forensically examining transplanted organs." He said there was "no responsibility for the gravest crimes committed against Serbs" after 20 June 1999. Each sentence is accurate. Together they relocate the crime from what the court tried to what the court could not try.
Thursday's front pages completed the move. Večernje novosti: "Acquitted for mass persecution of Serbs." Informer: "Shameful sentences for Šiptar butchers." Kurir: "Verdict or farce." Kurir had already published the organ story at 11:47 on 16 September, before the sentence was read: the Marty evidence pointed to "serious surgical procedures, not the slaughter of animals." The Republika Srpska Veterans' Organisation asked the prosecution to seek an organ-trafficking conviction on appeal. An appeal can only review counts that were charged.
Petar Petković, on TV Pink on 17 September, said what the president left to the tabloids: "They don't want to say that so-called Kosovo arose on crimes against Serbs and other non-Albanians with the help of their mentors." The court, in his reading, dealt only with the KLA's "special war" against political opponents, "not the general one whose aim was the creation of so-called independence."
Historian Stefan Radojković of the Institute for Political Studies told Mondo on 18 September that a conviction for crimes against humanity after June 1999 "would have called into question the justification of the UN and NATO missions," and that it was "no accident" the panel characterised the conflict as non-international, since that "sidesteps the unpleasant questions about NATO's aggression." That is the argument stated without the tabloid vocabulary: the judgment is deficient because it did not also put NATO on trial.
Belgrade needed a different verdict. The victims had to be Serbs, and the panel found Serbs among them, and more Albanians. The perpetrator had to be the KLA, and the panel convicted four men for a joint criminal enterprise against people it treated as opponents, with no finding about the KLA as an army. The state had to be the product of the crime, a question the panel was never asked. A judgment that holds Thaçi criminally responsible for crimes against Kosovo Albanians identified as political opponents is worse for Belgrade's account of 1999 than an acquittal would have been. An acquittal could be blamed on Western bias. This cannot.
So the defendant changed. Four men were not enough, so the KLA was put on trial. The KLA was not enough, so NATO was. NATO was not enough, so the founding of the state was. Everything cited against the verdict is something the verdict did not say.
On 3 May 2006 the European Commission called off Stabilisation and Association talks with Serbia because Mladić had not been transferred to The Hague. Olli Rehn said negotiations would resume "as soon as Serbia achieves full cooperation." They resumed in June 2007 after Serbia committed to full cooperation. Mladić himself was not arrested until 2011. He was convicted in 2017 and buried this month with a Gendarmerie salute on the apron and three volleys at Topčider.
The Commission's Serbia report of November 2025 recorded that "a number of Serbian political parties, politicians and media outlets continued to provide support to, and public space for, convicted war criminals and to deny war crimes, including the Srebrenica genocide, without repercussions." The phrase is the Commission's. It is a description of its own policy as much as of Serbia's.
On 15 September the European Parliament held a plenary debate on the glorification of war crimes in Serbia. Marta Kos told the chamber that Serbia's progress on the EU path was "in the hands of the next government," and that citizens would decide which path to take at the election. The following morning, hours before Belgrade began rewriting another Hague judgment, Ursula von der Leyen told the same chamber: "I was horrified by the pictures from Ratko Mladić's funeral in Belgrade last week. He committed the most atrocious crimes against humanity. Glorifying war criminals simply has no place in the European Union." The election is on 25 October. Vučić has announced that he will resign the presidency and run for prime minister. He is the man who forecast the acquittal.
Ten days after the burial Kurir called an international judgment a farce, the director of the Office for Kosovo said the court had "abolished" the KLA for crimes against Serbs, and Moscow's ambassador in Belgrade told Informer the sentence was "very light." The Commission's next enlargement report is due on 28 October. In 2006 the record had a consequence.
Belgrade took less than a day to decide what the judgment meant. Europe has had twenty years to decide what "no place in the European Union" means.
The sentence was announced at 10:00. The forecast of an acquittal was published eighteen days earlier. The headline calling it an acquittal was printed the morning after.
