New York Times-Kosovo’s Thaci Aspires to Statesmanship, but Guerrilla Past Haunts Him

Mr. Thaci (pronounced THAH-chee) is being hailed in Washington and Brussels as the Gerry Adams of the Balkans, his country on the road toward Europe, his name even invoked, however improbably, as a possible Nobel Peace Prize candidate./

By DAN BILEFSKY/New York Times/

PRISTINA, Kosovo — WHEN Hashim Thaci directed a bloody guerrilla war from the mountains of this poor and rugged country, he was so adept at evading capture that fellow fighters called him the Snake.

Now, Mr. Thaci, 45, the former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army and the current prime minister of Kosovo, wants to be remembered as a statesman. In June he agreed to put in place a landmark power-sharing agreement with Serbia that is being hailed in Europe and the United States as a triumph of peace and reconciliation in the region after the Balkan wars of the 1990s, in which about 120,000 people died, more than 10,000 of them in Kosovo.

Mr. Thaci (pronounced THAH-chee) is being hailed in Washington and Brussels as the Gerry Adams of the Balkans, his country on the road toward Europe, his name even invoked, however improbably, as a possible Nobel Peace Prize candidate.

But in Serbia, he remains a deeply reviled figure, a complication that underlines the challenges to overcoming ethnic enmities in a region where memories run deep. Former K.L.A. commanders and Western diplomats say he was a ruthless and much-feared leader during the 1998-99 Kosovo war, who ordered arrests, assassinations and purges within the rebel army’s ranks to fend off potential rivals. Mr. Thaci has strongly denied this.

“Most people in Serbia consider Thaci to be an unindicted war criminal who personifies the double standard of the victor’s justice,” said Ljiljana Smajlovic, a prominent Serbian commentator who is president of the Serbian Journalists’ Association. “He now wants to forget his past and go by the book, and he is no doubt sincere in that pursuit. But every warlord in the former Yugoslavia reinvents himself as a liberal democrat.”

In an interview, Mr. Thaci rebuffed that characterization, arguing forcefully that he had been fighting a brutal war against a violent enemy. “I was fighting on the right side of history, liberating my people from tyranny against a ruthless enemy engaged in a massive attempt at genocide,” he said.

Yet the past keeps coming back to haunt him. In 2010, a Council of Europe report accused Mr. Thaci of having led a “mafialike” group that smuggled weapons, heroin and human organs during the war and its aftermath. Mr. Thaci has rejected those accusations as well, and the Kosovo government at the time called them “despicable.” In August 2011, the European Union set up a special task force to investigate the veracity of organ-trafficking claims, including whether or not Mr. Thaci was involved. It has not yet delivered its findings.

Asked about the accusations, including that Kosovar Albanians kidnapped Serbs during the war and harvested their kidneys at a secret “yellow house” in Albania, Mr. Thaci transformed his grin into a grimace.

“Something like that never happened; we have nothing to hide,” he said. “The earlier the issue is clear, the better it is for Kosovo. It is really a very heavy burden for us, and we believe in truth and justice.”

Such demons hover over regional reconciliation, and the success of the power-sharing accord would mark a rehabilitation of sorts for Mr. Thaci and a turning point for his country, which has struggled to gain full international acceptance.

MR. THACI said his wartime experience had taught him to keep his patience during six months of 12-hour-a-day talks this year when he faced his former foe, Prime Minister Ivica Dacic of Serbia. Mr. Dacic was the wartime spokesman of the former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, whose forces had tried, without success, to hunt down and kill Mr. Thaci.

“It wasn’t easy to sit opposite one another at the table, two former sworn enemies,” Mr. Thaci said, recalling his first awkward handshake with Mr. Dacic. But he said pragmatism had ultimately prevailed. Being celebrated at home as a former soldier also helped.

An athletic and lanky man with a vise-grip handshake, Mr. Thaci, the seventh of nine children, comes from a family of farmers in the Drenica region of Kosovo, the heartland of Albanian resistance to the Serbs.

He said fighting was in his blood. His paternal grandfather fought the Nazis, and after the war his family became staunch anti-Communists who fought against Serb forces in the Yugoslav Army. Already an activist in his teens, he said, he became politicized while visiting family in Vienna and Paris in the 1980s, and glimpsed the possibility of a “normal” life away from Serbian police batons.(New York Times)