Hashim Thaci, the former president and prime minister of Kosovo, is seen as a war hero in many parts of his homeland, where he led the Balkan country in its fight for independence from Serbia that started nearly a quarter of a century ago.
But Mr. Thaci has a different reputation in some quarters: As the political leader of rebels who are accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed after the Muslim majority of ethic Albanians in Kosovo demanded independence following the Bosnian war.
Those two competing visions collided in The Hague on Monday, when Mr. Thaci went on trial, along with three other senior members of the since-disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army, or K.L.A., at a special tribunal funded by the European Union.
Appearing at the tribunal, known as the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, Mr. Thaci pleaded not guilty to 10 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, as did the three others.
“I am fully not guilty,” Mr. Thaci told judges at the. tribunal.
In his opening statement, the chief prosecutor, Alex Whiting, said that the case was about holding accountable four men accused of involvement in the torture and deaths of fellow Kosovo Albanians perceived as collaborators or traitors. The trial is focused on the individuals, and not the role of the Kosovo Liberation Army as an organization, he emphasized.
“This is a case about the rule of law during wartime,” Mr. Whiting said. “Nobody is above the law, even during wartime.”
Mr. Thaci was still in office as president when the news of his indictment in June 2020 took him by surprise in Vienna, where he was on his way to the White House for peace talks with Serbia. He resigned from the presidency in November of that year and surrendered to the tribunal in The Hague, where he has been in detention for more than two years.
He had come to power after the end of the conflict in Kosovo, a tiny country and the poorest part of the former Yugoslavia, where early peaceful efforts to gain independence gave way to actions by armed rebels.
Serbian police and military, under orders from President Slobodan Milosevic, responded with a campaign of ethnic cleansing to empty Kosovo of its ethnic Albanians, who made up almost 90 percent of the population.
The brutal attacks that began in 1998 drove thousands into neighboring countries until a NATO air campaign led by the United States forced Serbia to end its aggression in the summer of 1999. By then, nearly 850,000 people had been expelled or fled from Kosovo, and more than 12,000 had been killed.
Kosovo declared its independence in 2008, and it was immediately recognized by the United States and part of Europe, but there was by no means global consensus on the issue, and Serbia and Russia are among that many countries that have refused to do so.
Prosecutors are seeking to hold Mr. Thaci and three of his former comrades in arms — the head of intelligence, Kadri Veseli; the rebels’ spokesman, Jakup Krasniqi; and the head of operations, Rexhep Selimi — accountable for their actions as commanders or accomplices to the crimes of their subordinates during and after the war.
The men have been charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes, including illegal detentions and torture, persecuting and killing people they considered to be collaborators or opponents, including from the Serb and Roma communities.
Defense lawyers have said they will argue that the prosecution cannot prove that the defendants were top commanders personally responsible for crimes against civilians, because the insurgents operated in groups of volunteers with local and regional leaders.
“No one disputes if crimes occurred, but the K.L.A. was a ragtag army, even NATO said there was no vertical command and control,” said Pierre-Richard Prosper, a former U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues and a member of Mr. Thaci’s defense team. “The prosecution is rewriting political and legal history.”
In Kosovo, demonstrations and billboards have proclaimed support for the “freedom fighters” in the dock in The Hague, and demonstrations have been held as recently as Sunday in support of Mr. Thaci and the others and against the special tribunal because it focuses only on crimes committed by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
But the United Nations tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had already found years earlier that most of Kosovo’s wartime violence was committed by Serbian forces, and it has convicted six senior Serb political and military leaders and handed down long prison sentences. Mr. Milosevic was also charged, but he died before the end of his trial.
When the same court tried six defendants linked to the Kosovo rebels, four were found not guilty by judges who said that witnesses in the cases had been intimidated and retracted their accounts, or had failed to appear.
But supporters of the tribunal in Kosovo have argued that the tribunal is necessary to end a culture of impunity, even if it puts a harsh spotlight on some of the country’s most prominent figures, and welcomed the trial as the end of an era.
They say that senior war veterans have run the newly independent nation with the same entrenched bad habits of the past, including poor governance, corruption and nepotism.
“This spells the end of 20 years of political domination by the war veterans,” said Wolfgang Petritsch, an Austrian diplomat who served as the wartime representative of the European Union in Kosovo. “They are still heroes and resistance fighters, but they are corrupt heroes.”
Although it is not unusual for former leaders to be charged with crimes committed in while in power, Mr. Thaci’s case stands out because he was in office and had not been defeated at the polls or on the battlefield.
Mr. Thaci was a leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army when he began his public life, and he turned to civilian politics after the war ended, serving as both prime minister and foreign minister. Starting in 2016, he was Kosovo’s mainly ceremonial president.
Long after the war, he remained a prominent figure in Kosovo. In 2020, he helped to engineer the collapse of the government of Albin Kurti, a political rival.
The tribunal was established in 2015 by the Kosovo Parliament, under heavy pressure from the United States and the European Union. Kosovo itself is not participating, and the tribunal’s staff, from guards to prosecutors and judges, are international.
The formulation of the tribunal, along with the decision to base it in the Netherlands, is intended to safeguard the court from undue political influence and witness intimidation that plagued earlier trials.
The budget for the court is paid by the European Union, while the Kosovo government has said it pays for the defense of its citizens.
The first of several hundred witnesses in the case are scheduled to appear next week, and the trial is expected to last several years.
