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Salih Mustafa, the former Kosovo Liberation Army KLA unit commander, is on trial in The Hague stemming from Kosovo’s 1998-1999 war and faces allegations that he murdered and tortured suspected collaborators with enemy Serbs.
“You will see the victims of Mr. Mustafa were fellow Kosovo Albanians…They were not enemies of the state of Kosovo, they were not spies, they were fellow community members,” a prosecutor told the court on Wednesday, according to Balkan Insight.
Mustafa faces allegations that he committed arbitrary detentions, cruel treatment, the torture of at least six people, and the murder of one person in detention, Al Jazeera reported.
“I am not guilty of any of the counts brought here before me by this Gestapo office,” the 49-year-old said.
The court will hear cases from Kosovo’s war for independence from Serbia. The Associated Press reported that the Hague-based court was put into place six years ago after a report from the Council of Europe claimed that Mustafa’s KLA fighters “trafficked human organs taken from prisoners and killed Serbs and fellow ethnic Albanians they considered collaborators. The report pointed out that a 78-day NATO air campaign against Serbian forces stopped the fighting.
The Trends Journal has reported on the politicization of war crimes. (See “BIDEN ADMINISTRATION: DON’T PROBE ISRAELI WAR CRIMES.”)
Accidents are not considered war crimes, but The New York Times reported that the last known missile fired by a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone after its two-decade-long campaign in Afghanistan resulted in the deaths of 10, including 7 children in a “dense residential block.”
After constantly denying that the strike killed innocent civilians, the Pentagon called the bombing a “tragic mistake.” The target of the attack worked for a California-based food charity and was believed to be linked to ISIS-K. His family said the tragedy did not end with the explosion. They were forced to come forward to deny a link to the terror group, but in the process exposed the link to the U.S. company.
The Pentagon went two weeks insisting that the strike was warranted, the NYT reported.
“We now know that there was no connection between Mr. Ahmadi and ISIS-Khorasan, that his activities on that day were completely harmless and not at all related to the imminent threat we believed we faced, and that Mr. Ahmadi was just as innocent a victim as were the others tragically killed,” Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said in a statement, according to The Times.
TRENDPOST: From the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Afghan War, the Iraq War, the Libyan War, the Syrian War, the Yemen War and the scores of U.S. warfare from Somalia to Sudan etc.—to overthrowing governments—not one of the scores of murderous war crimes committed by the United States’ presidents have found their way to the fraudulent Hague.