North Macedonia Albanian Leader Testifies to Kosovo War Prosecutors

North Macedonia’s top ethnic Albanian political party leader, Ali Ahmeti, who was a guerrilla fighter during the Kosovo conflict, was questioned by war crimes prosecutors from The Hague.

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Ali Ahmeti during North Macedonia’s general elections in 2016. Archive photo: EPA/VALDRIN XHEMAJ.

Ali Ahmeti, the veteran head of North Macedonia’s Democratic Union for Integration, DUI party who was a guerrilla fighter during the Kosovo conflict, began speaking to prosecutors from the Kosovo Specialist Chambers on Wednesday morning in Pristina, Kosovo media reported.

Ahmeti’s close party associate, North Macedonia’s recently-elected First Deputy Prime Minister, Artan Grubi, who accompanied Ahmeti to Pristina, told Kosovo’sTV21 that Ahmeti is expected to continue giving evidence on Thursday.

Another of Ahmeti’s close party associates, North Macedonia’s new Foreign Minister, Bujar Osmani, told a press conference in Skopje on Tuesday that the DUI leader has been summoned to testify “in the capacity of a witness” about what happened during the Kosovo conflict.

The invitation to testify came in late July, just after North Macedonia’s general elections, at which the DUI won in the ethnic Albanian political bloc and then resumed its position as the junior ruling partner to the main ruling Social Democrats of Prime Minister Zoran Zaev.

Ahmeti was summoned the week after the Hague prosecutors concluded their four-day questioning of Kosovo President Hashim Thaci.

The Specialist Prosecutor’s Office announced in June 24 that it has an unconfirmed indictment charging Thaci, as well as senior Kosovo politician Kadri Veseli and other former Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA fighters, with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Specialist Prosecutor’s Office and Kosovo Specialist Chambers, where suspects will be tried, are part of Kosovo’s justice system but are located in the Netherlands and staffed by internationals.

Ahmeti served in both the KLA, which fought for the independence of Kosovo from Serbia, and then in the Albanian National Liberation Army, NLA, which fought against North Macedonia’s security forces during a short-lived armed conflict in 2001.

After the conflict ended with a peace deal which granted ethnic Albanians greater rights, in 2002 Ahmeti and former NLA leaders formed the DUI party.

Since then, the DUI has remained the biggest ethnic Albanian party in North Macedonia and has been the junior ruling party in several governments, including the current administration led by the Social Democrats.