Albanian Parliament has approved an investigation and drafting of a report into alleged Kosovo Liberation Army crimes committed in Albania.
The approval comes after the ruling majority, headed by Taulant Balla said he was drafting a request for the parliament to set up a committee to report on the charges raised by The Hague-based prosecutors against former Kosovo president, two former speakers of parliament and an MP, all of them former senior KLA members.
The charges maintain that they committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in prisons set up in northern Albania.
These allegations were first made in a Council of Europe report drafted by Dick Marty and endorsed in 2011.
The Socialists’ request for an investigation comes nine years later, in the seventh year of their rule, amidst the newly started trial against Kosovo leaders, and a few months ahead of general elections in Albania.
Today, Parliament voted in favour of creating the commission that will conduct the investigation.
“Albania is a state governed by the rule of law, which has the obligation to verify them. “And then it’s up to the EC to re-evaluate the assessments for Albania”, said Balla today.
He clarified that this commission has been the task of the government.
Prime Minister Edi Rama has been criticised for politicising the issue and using it to attack Opposition Leader Lulzim Basha. Balla also accused him of being “an expert, an investigator against Kosovo’s liberation war”. Balla called on Basha to answer in public and in the court, and repent for his past.
According to public information, Basha worked as an operations officer for the Tirana Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1999, and then as a legal consultant for the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) from 2000 to 2004.
For about a week now, Basha has refused to reply to Rama and other Socialists’ growing multiple daily accusations regarding his alleged work against Kosovo people and war for freedom. Basha has instead continued to denounce Rama’s alleged failure in facing the Covid-19 crisis.
Basha claims these actions by the government are a distraction for the public over the Socialist Party’s alleged mismanagement of the COViD-19 pandemic.
Director of Human Rights Watch, Lotte Leicht called the attacks “shameful and misguided” and criticised Rama calling the Court “an assault on the inviolable justice of the liberation war”.
