With Pristina sentences, a wider and large process against the Albanians from Kosovo accused of organizing a parallel police force draws to an end. According to the indictment, those formations, arising from the legally registered syndicate of the former employees of the Serbian State Security Service, would serve "the Republic of Kosovo", the proclaimed goal of the Albanian national and political movement. Before Pristina, the first one of these trials was brought to the conclusion in Pec in the middle of April; the next one was concluded in Gnjilane on June 6 and one is still going on in Prizren. In Pec, the accused, who were tried in two groups (nine and seven persons), were sentenced to jail terms of one to five years; sentences in the following trial at Gnjilane were much milder. Out of 28 accused persons, 16 received jail terms of six months to three years, eight fled Kosovo, four persons were acquitted and all the sentenced were released until the sentences go into effect.
CALCULATIONS: In the context of Kosovo, and in the context of the overheated campaign with the newspaper headlines such as :"Parapolice on trial", "Lists for liquidation", "Ready for terror", "Spies in the Grocery Store", the sentences at Gnjilane were characterized as "measured" and "mild"; the conclusion was that the authorities had changed their attitude toward the case. Therefore, those sentences were a precedent hailing a change in conduct; hence, the people hastily started making calculations. The explanation for the end of the trial against the Gnjilane group was found in the alleged directive from the United Yugoslav Left (JUL) which, allegedly, wanted to demonstrate the policy of reconciliation with the Kosovo Albanians; along those lines, in calculations was included the reaction of the League of Communists - Movement for Yugoslavia (SKPJ) which accused the leader of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), Vojislav Seselj (currently arrested in Gnjilane), of spreading hatred between the nations in Kosovo. According to other speculations, Serbia wanted to demonstrate to the world that it was reaching out to the Albanians, while they were refusing reconciliation. After Pristina, two other explanations remain - local and "international". According to the first one, the president of the Court Council in Gnjilane is about to retire, and hence didn't have to excessively pay attention to the wishes of the authorities; therefore he won't end his career as a "hanging judge". The other, "international" explanation, instead of a sentimental judge, identifies the leader of the Republicans in the American Congress, Bob Dole, who is also a lobbyist for Albanians, as the primary mover; Dole has brought attention to the Kosovo trials in the political bodies of his country, especially because of use of torture in the investigation.
Regardless whether human or political sensibility was responsible, it was shown that guilt can be stretched from one case to another, as is always the case when art. 136 ("endangering territorial integrity") and 136 ("organizing for enemy activity") of the Criminal Code of the FRY are concerned. "Neither of these articles is questionable, in principle, although they should be analyzed to make sure they do not have ideological connotations," well-known Belgrade lawyer Nikola Barovic stated for Vreme. The problem is, according to Barovic, to prove that someone formed an organization and than decided "to endanger territorial integrity of the country." Or as Bajram Kelmendi, one of the defense attorneys in the Pristina trial stated for the news agency AIM, "at least one of the accused had to state that their intention had been to break away a part of the Yugoslav territory, namely Kosovo, and to form a separate state by force." This defense attorney believed that the public prosecutor drew the intent of the accused from the fact that the accused were Albanians; having in mind that the Kosovo Albanians en masse, in the referendum, declared their wish for independent Kosovo, the prosecutor stated that the accused, undoubtedly, also in favor of the secession of Kosovo. The crime sanctioned by the article 116 of the CC assumes the use of force, since that is the only way for secession, emphasize the defense attorneys.
PREPACKAGED SET UP: Defense attorneys, without an exception, emphasize that the trials are fabricated political trials packaged in the criminal law. Unofficially, one of them stated that in a trial like this, there was no defense and the epilogue would be the one desired by the authorities. Therefore, he said, the tactical space of the defense was narrowed down, most often coming down to the decision of whether is was better simply to do nothing and shorten the procedural troubles of the accused or to persistently insist on the lawfulness of the procedure and still produce no results in the end. This remark is interesting; one can say that it is appropriate, but also suspicious. It brings up several questions: does the defense counsel have a right, as a professional, to keep quiet once he determines that the trial has left the sphere of law; is the task of the defense to - when this is the case - only determine the political character of the trial, or to expose it during the proceedings, from "inside"? All this brings out another interesting point: if the defense attorney is, in the political trial, more involved as a politician then as a lawyer, isn't it perhaps in the interest of the political agenda which the defense attorney represents that the defendant receives a stiffer sentence; in other words, to sacrifice the defendant to the altar of certain ideology. Let us recall that the communists, also measured the greatness of their idea, force and victory with the sum of the years spent in jail; however, after coming to power, the "heroes" were ones who added up the years, not the ones who had been in jail.
In case of the trials in Pec, Gnjilane and Pristina authorities quickly finished their part and got rid of a hot potato. From their point of view, this was understandable: clean up your yard as quickly as possible so that the neighbors don't see the chaos.
The trial in Prizren is still far from its conclusion. It began on May 3 and was adjourned on Monday (after the sentencing in Pristina). 43 of the accused are Albanians and one is a Turk. "Group 44" is accused of "running an organization since 1991, until 1994, on the territory of the Prizren district; the goal of the organization was to change the constitution and social structure of the FRY with use of force, and to break off a part of Kosovo and Metohija, inhabited with the members of the Albanian minority, from the Republic of Serbia and FR of Yugoslavia; on the initiative of the so-called Ministry of Internal affairs of the Republic of Kosovo and the Ministry of National Defense of the Republic of Kosovo, they organized a police force, paramilitary forces with both active and reserve units..."
Officially, the trial was adjourned for July 24 because the accused Halil Blakaj was not able to follow the trial. The defense insisted that the trial be continued, and the Blakaj's case be continued later separately; Blakaj suffered a stroke in the courtroom, suffers from angina pectoris and is paralyzed in the left side of the body. The suggestion was rejected, and the defense suspects that the reason for adjournment was that the police refused to present evidence, even to the court, before July.
IMPROVISATION: "This trial is a pure legal improvisation; on the other hand, it represents a premeditated and organized political repression," said for Vreme Nikola Barovic, one of the defense attorneys in the trial. The other one, Orhan Nevzati, didn't hide his resentment when he said that from the start this was "an unjust trial." "This is not a legal trial; it serves a political purpose," said Nevzati for Vreme. As a proof for his statement he used the composition of the accused. Unlike in the other already finished trials in other towns, where the accused were all members of the syndicate of the former policemen, in Prizren, according to Borovic and Nevzati, there are four unrelated groups of accused. The accused come, according to the defense attorneys, from the so-called parallel Albanian county authorities from the county of Orahovac; second group consists of the former employees of the state security service; president of the Turkish Peoples Party (TNP), Sezair Saipi, his nephew, who has been pushed into this in order to testify against his uncle, and the former president of the court in Orahovac make up the third group (these three also had almost no contacts between themselves); finally the fourth group are two farmers who hardly know anyone among the other 42 accused, and are known by almost no-one of the other 42; however they were caught in possession of a German machine gun.
The defense attorneys Nevzati and Barovic concluded that the indictment was a pure political construction, amalgamation of the unrelated facts. In that construction, they explained, Sezair Saipi from TNP was inserted in order to passivize his party, the only politically relevant Turkish party in Metohija in opposition to the government; the same reasons guided insertion of the parallel Albanian authorities from Orahovac, while the two farmers with a machine gun were included so that the intentions of violent endangerment of the territorial integrity could be ascribed to the whole group. The construction was thus completed.
"These four groups were not even in a physical contact," said Barovic and added that "that story is totally incoherent; in order to put together those incoherent pieces, it was necessary to obtain confessions. That couldn't be achieved in any other way but with torture." "Those confessions were not even forced; instead, people simply signed whatever was given to them by the police. A forced confession is when I don't want to say something and somebody forces me; however, that was not the case here," said Nevzati.
"Political trials are characterized by pressure applied to the accused and members of their families," continued Barovic while looking for the title "Gulag Archipelago" [Solzenitsin's novel about Stalinist prison camps in Siberia] in his library. "Saipi was threatened with arrest of his 16-year-old daughter who has back-bone problems. Than it is up to a person: Saipi is a strong man with a lot of stamina; he hasn't said a word, nor signed anything; when his daughter was mentioned he hit the interrogator with the fist, so that he fell on the floor. In given conditions, naturally, the interrogator returned copiously, but Saipi held out. His nephew gave in when they told him that that his pregnant wife would be treated in the same way as himself; he said he would sign anything they want," related Barovic. To these stories he added another one about a minor, a boy, who was alone in the apartment for two days after his father had been arrested.
As their achievement, the defense attorneys in the Prizren trial listed their success in publicly exposing that "the evidence from the investigation, due to torture" is different from that given to the court.
The defense attorneys read "the Prizren trial" as a political trial and with their legal persistence keep trying to demonstrate that. The trial is getting old; when a trial like this lasts for a long time, it becomes, with time, more and more unpleasant for the instigator.