THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020 A
NBERLIN — President Hashim Thaci of
Kosovo, a guerrilla leader during Koso-
vo’s battle for independence from Serbia
during the 1990s, was indicted on 10
counts of war crimes on Wednesday at a
special court in the Netherlands. Pros-
ecutors accused him and other former
fighters of being “criminally responsible
for nearly 100 murders.”
The charges, long anticipated, have
yet to be accepted by
judges at the court,
but their timing
came as a shock,
both in the Balkans
and in Washington.
Mr. Thaci was to
meet on Saturday at
the White House
with his Serbian
counterpart, Presi-
dent Aleksandar Vu-
cic, to continue a
Kosovar-Serbian di-
alogue mediated by American officials.
Mr. Thaci, 52, will no longer attend the
meeting, dashing American hopes that
the negotiations might finally lead to a
settlement between Serbia and Kosovo.
Kosovo won autonomy in 1999, aided by a
NATO bombing campaign, but Serbia
has never recognized Kosovo’s
sovereignty, and negotiations to reach a
final peace deal stalled in 2018. The
United States is one of about 100 coun-
tries that recognize Kosovo’s independ-
ence.
“This affects Kosovo in all possible
ways,” said Agron Bajrami, the head of
the Koha Media Group, Kosovo’s largest
media conglomerate. “It affects the
process of dialogue, in which the presi-
dent was the main interlocutor for both
the European Union and the United
States, and it will have an enormous ef-
fect in the political scene in Kosovo.”
Though most of the more than 13,
casualties in the Kosovo War were Koso-
var Albanians killed by Serbian troops,
more than 2,000 were Serbs, Roma and
Kosovar Albanians killed mostly by
NATO bombs or by guerrilla groups like
the Kosovo Liberation Army, according
to figures from the Humanitarian Law
Center, a human rights group with of-fices in Serbia and Kosovo.
To investigate possible war crimes
carried out by these guerrilla groups, the
Kosovar Parliament founded a special ju-
dicial system in 2016, staffed by foreign
jurists and based in the Netherlands to
allow its officials to work more independ-
ently.
The prosecutors accused Mr. Thaci,
Kadri Veseli, a former spy chief, and sev-
eral unnamed defendants of crimes
against humanity, including murder, en-
forced disappearance of persons, perse-
cution and torture.
“If the indictment is confirmed, it
would be unprecedented,” said Vigan
Qorrolli, a law professor at the Univer-
sity of Pristina in Kosovo’s capital.
“Some people thought they’d go for the
smaller fishes, but they started with the
bigger fishes.”
Mr. Thaci began his public life as a
leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army
but turned to civilian politics after the
war ended, serving as both prime min-
ister and foreign minister. Since 2016, he
has been Kosovo’s mainly ceremonial
president. He remains a pillar of Kosovar
political life, revered as a hero of the war
by some while others accuse him of being
the embodiment of the wayward political
class that has ruled Kosovo since inde-
pendence.
A 2008 report compiled by German in-
telligence officers accused him of ramp-
ant corruption. “People identify him with
everything that went wrong after inde-
pendence,” Mr. Bajrami said.
Still, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presump-
tive Democratic nominee for president,
once described Mr. Thaci as the “George
Washington of Kosovo.”
Earlier this year, Mr. Thaci helped en-
gineer the collapse of the government of
Albin Kurti, a reformist prime minister
and longtime political activist who had
promised to clean up Kosovo’s judicial
system, and whom many younger Koso-
vars viewed as a necessary break from
former wartime leaders like Mr. Thaci.
Criticism of Mr. Thaci escalated after
his support for a land swap with Serbia.
Mr. Thaci now denies he discussed such
a land swap with Serbian officials, but
the claim remains central to Kosovar po-
litical discourse.
Prosecutors at the special court said
they had been forced into announcing
their indictment on Wednesday because
of unspecified actions taken by Mr. Thaci
and Mr. Veseli to undermine their work.Hashim ThaciKosovo Leader
Faces Charges
Of War Crimes
In 1990s War
By PATRICK KINGSLEY
and GERRY MULLANYA tribunal accuses a
president who was about
to visit the White House.
Patrick Kingsley reported from Berlin,
and Gerry Mullany from New York.
Marlise Simons contributed reporting
from Paris.SEOUL, South Korea — One of North
Korea’s favorite geopolitical strategies
has long been compared to dipping
alternately in pools of scathingly hot
and icy cold water in a public bath-
house.
Just a week ago, Kim
Yo-jong, the only sister
and key aide of North
Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-
un, threatened to kill the country’s
agreements with South Korea that were
intended to ease military tensions along
the border. She called the South Korean
president, Moon Jae-in, “disgusting”
and “insane.” Then the North blew up
the joint inter-Korean liaison office, the
first of a series of actions that threat-
ened to reverse a fragile détente on the
Korean Peninsula.
On Wednesday, Mr. Kim emerged as
the good cop, overruling his military
and suspending its plans to deploy
more troops and resume military exer-
cises along the world’s most heavily
armed border. Hours later, South Kore-
an border guards confirmed that the
North Korean military had dismantled
loudspeakers installed on the border in
recent days as part of its threat to
revive propaganda broadcasts against
the South.
If the flip-flop seemed disorienting,
that was exactly the effect North Korea
intended. Over the decades, alternating
between raising tensions and extending
an olive branch has been part of the
North’s dog-eared playbook.
In 2017, Mr. Kim conducted a series of
increasingly daring nuclear and long-
range ballistic missile tests, driving his
country to the edge of war with the
United States. Then he made a sudden
switch the next year to a giddy round of
diplomacy with President Trump, as
well as with Mr. Moon.
Mr. Kim’s grandfather Kim Il-sung,
North Korea’s founding president,
proposed reconciliation with South
Korea even as he prepared to invade
the South to start the 1950-53 Korean
War. His father and predecessor, Kim
Jong-il, discussed co-hosting the 1988
Summer Olympics with South Korea
before North Korean agents planted
bombs on a Korean Air Boeing 707 in
- The plane exploded near Myan-
mar, killing all 115 on board.
When the move is toward peace, the
change of tack is so dramatic that
North Korea’s external enemies often
take the shift itself as progress, even
though there is no evidence that the
country has decided to abandon its
nuclear weapons.
“When such a shift comes, the world
goes, ‘Wow!’ ” said Yun Duk-min, a
former chancellor of the Korea National
Diplomatic Academy. “The world is so
impressed that just starting dialogue
with the North feels like a major turn-
around.”
Mr. Kim’s decision on Wednesday will
at least temporarily keep the latest
tensions from spinning out of control on
the Korean Peninsula. But it also
showed that Mr. Kim was calibrating
his moves as he sought to reclaim some
of the domestic credibility and diplo-
matic leverage he had lost after his two
years of diplomacy with Mr. Moon and
Mr. Trump.
Mr. Kim returned from his second
summit with Mr. Trump, held in Viet-
nam in February of last year, without
winning a badly needed reprieve from
international sanctions that he had
promised to his people. Those sanctions
have devastated the North’s exports
since late 2017.
Mr. Kim began this year by exhorting
his people to build a “self-reliant econ-
omy” impervious to international sanc-
tions. At the same time, he tried to ease
the pain of sanctions by attracting more
Chinese tourists and encouraging ille-
gal smuggling.
But that plan sputtered amid the
coronavirus epidemic, which has forced
the country to shut its borders.
“First and foremost, the economy is
the problem for Kim Jong-un,” said
Park Won-gon, a professor of interna-
tional relations in Handong Global
University in South Korea. “As the
impact of the prolonged Covid-19 epi-
demic wore heavily on his people’s
livelihoods, Kim Jong-un doesn’t have a
lot of time left” before he must find a
way out, Mr. Park said.
In the North’s playbook, domestic
trouble often calls for raising tensions
with its outside enemies to win their
concessions and also consolidate inter-
nal unity.
The North is widely believed to have
expedited its nuclear weapons develop-
ment after it struggled under a devas-
tating famine in the late 1990s. It has
pushed its nuclear program as a deter-
rent against “American invasion,” as
well as a tool to extract economic and
other concessions from Washington and
its allies.
This year, the North’s first target wasSouth Korea and Mr. Moon. North
Korea has repeatedly accused Mr.
Moon of being so beholden to Washing-
ton’s policy of enforcing sanctions that
he has reneged on his promise to Mr.
Kim to improve inter-Korean economic
ties.
Mr. Kim’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, took
the lead in the attack against South
Korea. But Mr. Kim stayed out of the
escalating standoff with the South,
giving himself flexibility to change
course.
“The brother and sister play the good
and bad cop toward South Korea,” said
Lee Byong-chul, a North Korea expert
at Kyungnam University’s Institute for
Far Eastern Studies in Seoul.
Although North Korea has often
sounded incorrigibly bellicose, it has
proved to be a shrewd strategist capa-
ble of judging when to throttle up the
tensions and when to pull back on
them.
After two South Korean soldiers were
injured by land mines in 2015, the South
accused the North of planting the de-
vices near the soldiers’ front line guard
post. In retaliation, South Korea re-
sumed loudspeaker propaganda broad-
casts along the border, bombarding
North Korean soldiers with K-pop mu-
sic and screeds against Mr. Kim. WhenNorth Korea fired at the loudspeakers,
the South responded with artillery fire.
As both sides raised their military alert
level, it was the North that first
proposed dialogue, and it later ex-
pressed regret over the South Korean
soldiers’ injury.
In 2018, a North Korean diplomat
called Vice President Mike Pence
“stupid” and a “political dummy,”
threatening to cancel a planned summit
between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump. When
Mr. Trump acted first and called off the
meeting, North Korea immediately
issued another statement saying that
Mr. Kim wanted to meet Mr. Trump “at
any time.” Mr. Trump was happy to
revive the summit plan.
This month too, North Korea has
been carefully calculating its maneu-
vers. Even when its military drew up
action plans along the border, the state
news media took pains to point out that
they would need Mr. Kim’s “ratifica-
tion.”
Mr. Kim suspended those plans
during a meeting of his Central Military
Commission on Tuesday. The next day,
the North Korean media said the meet-
ing was “preliminary.” The language
prompted some analysts to suspect that
the commission could hold a regular
meeting to have more discussions and
potentially reverse course if needed.
“Now that he has succeeded in seiz-
ing the attention of Washington, Seoul
and Beijing, Kim Jong-un thinks he can
pause for a bit to see how they re-
spond,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a North
Korea specialist at Dongguk University
in Seoul. “By saying that he ‘sus-
pended,’ not terminated, the action
plans, he is still keeping the option on
the table.”
There were signs that North Korea’s
strategy was already working in the
South.
As tensions rose on the peninsula,
South Korea moved swiftly to ban send-
ing anti-North Korean leaflets across
the inter-Korean border. Liberal poli-
ticians urged Mr. Moon to persuade
Washington at least to allow inter-
Korean economic cooperation and
humanitarian aid shipments to the
North.
There was another reason Mr. Kim
hesitated: Some of the actions North
Korea threatened against the South
were tantamount to shooting itself in
the foot.
If North Korea follows through on its
threat to restart propaganda broad-
casts and leaflet distribution across the
border, the South would likely respond
in kind. North Korea has more to lose,
say analysts. The North’s propaganda
has little impact on South Koreans, who
are far more affluent, while the regime
doesn’t have sufficient electricity to
raise the volume on its loudspeakers.
Cross-border hostilities will also weak-
en South Koreans’ support for eco-
nomic or humanitarian help for the
North.
But analysts also warned that Mr.
Kim may shift his posture again if Seoul
and Washington don’t appease the
North. As the presidential election in
the United States draws near, Mr. Kim
could attempt major military provoca-
tions to gain leverage with whoever
wins the election.
“There may be a pause in provoca-
tions or Pyongyang might temporarily
de-escalate in search of external con-
cessions,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a pro-
fessor of international studies at Ewha
Womans University in Seoul. “But
North Korea will almost certainly con-
tinue to bolster its so-called ‘deter-
rent.’ ”An annual South Korean exercise near the border Tuesday. On Wednesday, Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, tabled a plan to resume such exercises.AHN YOUNG-JOON/ASSOCIATED PRESSLast week, Kim Yo-jong, above, Mr. Kim’s sister and adviser, called the South
Korean president “insane” and threatened to kill agreements with the South,
and North Korea blew up the joint inter-Korean liaison office, below.POOL PHOTOKOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESSKim’s Flip-Flop Strategy: Hawk Turns Dove Again
By CHOE SANG-HUNNEWS
ANALYSIS