His supporters say he is Kosovo's best bet for independence. The Hague says the former prime minister is responsible for abduction, imprisonment, torture and murder. Who's right about Ramush Haradinaj, asks Molly McCloskey, in Pristina - and why does a high-flying Irish lawyer insist that the former 'freedom fighter' is innocent?
Rron, a restaurant outside Pristina, is a pocket of warm minimalism on the edge of a city otherwise characterised by concrete apartment blocks, by sidewalk salesmen hawking €7 "Rolexes" and by a depressing lack of green space. The waiters at Rron are solicitous, and the food is exceptional. The crowd, which tonight includes the new prime minister, Bajram Kosumi, and four members of his cabinet, is animated. Were it not for the prices - €6 for a fillet steak - and the loss of electricity twice during our meal, we could be in Paris or Brussels instead of the UN protectorate of Kosovo, where the unemployment rate is about 75 per cent, huge military vehicles prowl the roads and another grave - this one with the bodies of 21 Serbs - has just been uncovered.
The first time I came to Rron, last summer, two bodyguards were hanging around outside. When my companion and I got in, we saw why. Ramush Haradinaj was dining that night. A former regional commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which fought a guerrilla insurgency against Serbian forces in the late 1990s, he had founded a political party called the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo. At that time the party commanded less than 10 per cent of voter support. There was little sign that Haradinaj would, within four months, become Kosovo's prime minister and emerge as arguably the most important figure, both practically and symbolically, in Kosovo Albanians' political battle for independence from Serbia.
Now when you step inside Rron's foyer you see a poster of Haradinaj. It says: "Our prime [ minister] has work to do here." The slogan is directed at Carla del Ponte, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, who in March charged Haradinaj and two fellow former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army with 37 war crimes. Haradinaj, who says he is not guilty, resigned after being indicted, then turned himself in to the tribunal, in The Hague. The poster is all over the province: on billboards and in windows, on a banner three stories high fixed to the wall of a Pristina apartment block, on the T-shirt of the smiling young man who runs the vegetable section of our local supermarket.
Kosovo is still part of what remains of the former Yugoslavia (now the state union of Serbia and Montenegro). In 1999 an 11-week Nato bombing campaign expelled Serbian forces who, under Slobodan Milosevic, had been waging a decade-long campaign of brutal repression and expulsion against Kosovo's ethnic Albanians. Since then this province of two million people, about 90 per cent of which is now Albanian, has been administered by the UN. About 20,000 Nato troops - the Kosovo Force, or KFor - are currently stationed here. UN Resolution 1244, which marked the end of the bombing, recognised the "sovereignty and territorial integrity" of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, but it also stipulated that, "pending a final settlement", Kosovo should prepare for "substantial autonomy and self-government".
In March last year, however, five years after the war's end, talks on Kosovo's final status still had not begun. Kosovo Albanians, angry that their demands for independence were not being met, rioted for three days. The violence left 19 people dead. Thirty-six Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries were set on fire or seriously damaged, and nearly 5,000 people were forced to flee (more than 4,000 of them Serbs). UN buildings were attacked and 70 of its cars burned. For the many who feared a repeat of such violence in the wake of Haradinaj's indictment, the poster campaign has come as quite a relief.
When Haradinaj resigned as prime minister, on March 9th, he called on Kosovo's Albanians to eschew violent protest and allow the legal process to take its course. He was praised by Robin Cook, among others, who referred to his dignity and contrasted him with other Balkan indictees. (Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, wanted for their role in the murder of 8,000 Bosnians at Srebrenica, are still in hiding, as is Ante Gotovina, who commanded the expulsion of Serbs from Croatia.) Soren Jessen-Petersen, the UN's special representative in Kosovo, mourned the loss of a "close partner and friend". Haradinaj had turned a potential disaster into a PR coup. Besuited and bespectacled, he had come a long way from those nights spent crawling across the Albanian border, smuggling guns for the Kosovo Liberation Army.
One of the people who played a part in Haradinaj's conversion to statesman - a conversion that Serbs liken to a wolf donning sheep's clothing - is a Dubliner who is now co-ordinating his defence in The Hague. Michael O'Reilly, who is perhaps better known here as the owner of Lemonstreet Gallery, the former chairman of the Irish Hospice Foundation, a commercial lawyer or the former chairman of the National Gallery of Ireland, seems as surprised as anyone to find himself shuttling between Dublin, Pristina and The Hague.
He had been doing pro-bono work for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, an organisation affiliated to the US Democratic Party that does democracy-building work in "transition" countries, when he was asked, in 2003, to take a two-month job in Kosovo. The institute assigned him to Haradinaj's Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, to help develop it beyond its single-issue focus on independence.
The two men developed a very productive working relationship. "It was probably during that time," O'Reilly says, "that I promised Haradinaj that I would come here on a permanent basis when he became prime minister - an easy promise to give a 35-year-old who was showing at less than 10 per cent in the polls."
The indictment, which identifies Haradinaj as one of the most senior leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, rests heavily on the charge that he and his two co-accused were involved in a "joint criminal enterprise" targeting Serb, Albanian and Romany civilians for abduction, imprisonment, torture and murder.
Under the joint-criminal- enterprise rubric, each of the accused is responsible for the acts of his two co-accused, whether or not he physically had a hand in the commission of the crimes. (The joint-criminal-enterprise charge is being applied in other cases before the tribunal, including Milosevic's.)
O'Reilly, who is working with a team of three other lawyers, knew about the rumours of war crimes before the indictment was issued. "I asked him about all of this," he says, "and I have no hesitation in saying that I believed his response then just as I believe in his innocence now."
He regards Haradinaj as "the genuine article: a freedom fighter turned politician". He says that by the time he was faced with the decision, at Scheveningen Detention Unit in The Hague on March 10th, he had already decided that he would do whatever Haradinaj asked of him. "I was deeply convinced of the injustice of the indictment and the damage it does to the political process in Kosovo. I had his complete trust, and to turn away would have been unthinkable."
What was unthinkable for Serbs was that Haradinaj had managed to become prime minister of Kosovo. When he took up his post, last November - a result of his party's forming a coalition with the much larger Democratic League of Kosovo - Serbs both inside and outside of the province were horrified. It was well known that Haradinaj had for some time been under investigation by The Hague. Belgrade said it would never negotiate with him, and it called on the UN to annul his appointment (a call the UN ignored). The Youth of Serbia movement staged a protest performance entitled From Terrorist to Premier. One Serbian member of parliament, Dusan Prorokovic, said he doubted that the names of the Albanians who had kidnapped, tortured and ordered the executions of still-missing Serbs would be revealed when those same people "were presently in the leadership of the Albanian political establishment". (Almost 3,000 people, including Serbs and Albanians, are officially registered in Kosovo as missing or disappeared.) And Rada Trajkovic, former president of the Serbian coalition within the Kosovo government, said that Haradinaj's election was as insulting to Serbs as a Hamas leader's becoming mayor of Jerusalem would be to Jews.
The analogy was not carelessly chosen. Kosovo is something like a Serbian Jerusalem. The historic land of the Serb Orthodox church and the spiritual heartland of its people, the province is peppered with churches and monasteries from the medieval period onwards. Dozens of them now lie in ruins, looted, desecrated and burned by Albanian extremists.
The world remembers the Serbs as aggressors in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, but many innocent Serb civilians in Kosovo were also victims, both before the Nato bombing and after Serb forces withdrew from the province. A Human Rights Watch report from August 1999 describes kidnapping, torture, arson, the takeover of Serb properties and the murder of Serb civilians - all by Kosovo Albanians. The crimes often took place under the noses of the then 40,000-strong KFor contingent. One officer reported that the frequency of the abductions meant his unit did not even attempt to keep track of them. Tens of thousands of Serbs fled their homes. Now, apart from in the divided city of Mitrovica, no Serbs remain in any of the major cities of Kosovo.
Somebody is responsible for the disappearances, murders and expulsions, and Serbs have long accused Haradinaj, among others. In fact, he is wanted in Belgrade on 108 counts of alleged war crimes against Serb civilians.
Veljko Odalovic is a Kosovo-born Serb. Until 1999 he was governor of Pristina district. A member of the parliament of Serbia and Montenegro, he is now chairman of its committee on Kosovo and a member of the Serbian government's working group for missing persons. When I met him in Belgrade, he showed me his mobile phone. The background picture on its screen showed Gracanica, a 14th-century Kosovo monastery now under round-the-clock protection from KFor.
Odalovic is disappointed by the indictment, but it is for reasons entirely different from those of Haradinaj's legal team. It is, he says, too selective and does not go far enough. "The crimes Haradinaj is accused of cover only six months. But he was operational both before and after that. Carla del Ponte [ the tribunal's prosecutor] was given evidence of crimes up to June 1999 that she could have incorporated into the indictment."
He also wonders why the indictment was so late in coming. "All the relevant bodies, including the Kosovo administration and the European Union, were aware of the atrocities committed by Haradinaj himself. It was well known in 1999-2000 who kidnapped these people and how they were killed. The investigation was finished some time ago. Why was the indictment not handed down then?"
Odalovic is in no doubt about the attitude of the Serbian government to Kosovo's bid for independence. "Belgrade and Serbia will never, under any circumstances, recognise an independent Kosovo. This is not Albanian territory. The region was not taken from Kosovo Albanians."
His argument, which is similar to that of most Serbian and non-Serbian officials who object to independence, doesn't address the Serbian state's past abuses of its Albanian population. Granting independence, he says, would provoke more clashes, destabilising the region and setting an unhealthy precedent for the international community's approach to separatist movements in other parts of the world. Nobody in Belgrade, he argues, has the mandate to give up territory of his own country. In words that will have particular resonance for the Irish, he says: "Whoever would give up Kosovo . . . whoever would sign such a paper . . . that would be a critical point for any official."
But Belgrade may have to choose between moving towards EU membership and trying to hold on to Kosovo. In April the European Union said that Serbia and Montenegro could begin discussing membership of the EU. Serbia, which in recent months has stepped up its own co-operation with The Hague, is at last coming in from the cold.
On April 15th, in what is generally being regarded as part of an ongoing clan feud, Haradinaj's younger brother Enver was murdered in western Kosovo, his car sprayed with bullets. That Sunday, a bomb was planted at the Pristina headquarters of Ora, a small Kosovo Albanian opposition party. The previous week had seen the governing parties exchange accusations of corruption and criminality. Haradinaj's departure undoubtedly destabilised Kosovo's political landscape. He came back to Pristina just over a fortnight ago, having been provisionally released by the tribunal, pending his trial for war crimes. The effect of his return is yet to be seen, but the fact that he handed himself over to The Hague has likely inched the province closer to independence.
It is hardly the side effect that Belgrade would have wished the indictment to produce. Indeed, the international community seems largely to be treating independence as a fait accompli, a fact you can see reflected in the eyes of Kosovo's Serbs, living in shrinking Serb-only enclaves, sensing - but not wanting to admit - that they may well be on the verge of losing yet another piece of what was once Yugoslavia.
Molly McCloskey has spent part of the past year living in Kosovo. Her first novel, Protection, will be published next month by Penguin Ireland