Press Kit
Fact Sheet 11

 by Eleanor Beardsley*

 The Chief International Prosecutor in Kosovo, Michael Hartmann, is currently on leave from the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) as a Senior Fellow at the US Institute for Peace where he is working on rule of law issues for the new administration in Iraq.  He is an expert on the rule of law, terrorism, war crimes and Balkan legal systems.

Although his brief had been mainly war crimes, the case of “Valbona”, a victim of domestic abuse, had so preoccupied Michael Hartmann, the United Nations chief prosecutor in Kosovo, that he delayed his scheduled departure for a fellowship at the United States Institute for Peace in Washington by several weeks.

 For the last three years, Hartmann had been prosecuting war crimes, organized crime and ethnic violence cases on the last battleground of the 1990s Balkan wars.  But after this case had been abandoned, dismissed and then revived by an elderly Kosovo Albanian judge who felt too frail to pursue the trial, Hartmann was determined to do what he could to help the victim, a now 20-year-old woman who is charging her own father with rape, unlawful detention and murder. 

 “The fear of the father was so great in the household that for two years the sisters didn’t dare talk to each other about what was going on,” says Hartmann, who knew well what he was facing. With no direct witnesses to the rapes or murders, and two brothers and an older married sister cowered into acquiescence with the father, convincing the local, all-male panel of judges of the father’s guilt would not be easy.  

 “I as a prosecutor must persuade five Kosovo Albanian men who are all fairly old not only to find the accused guilty, but also in doing so to go against the cultural mores and some actions they may believe were justified,” explains Hartmann.  “The beatings of the daughters and sons make up part of that.  I also have to show the judges that the sons, who show extreme deference to their father in the patriarchal society of Kosovo, should not be believed.”

 Hartmann’s client comes from a rural village in Kosovo, in a region that remains steeped in Balkan patriarchal traditions. Even today, after the introduction of contemporary concepts of law and order, in the villages of Kosovo and the border regions of neighboring Albania, the Roman rite of pater familias remains absolute.

 An ancient code governed the way Albanians lived here, for centuries. The Kanun or “Code” of Leke Dukagjini, named after a 15^th century Albanian feudal prince, laid out basic instructions on everything from marriage and inheritance to the handling of livestock and exchange of property.  The code of honour and terms of the “blood feud” as delineated by the Kanun form the essence of the traditional Albanian cultural practices. Although anathema to modern sensibilities, the Kanun worked for centuries to preserve a kind of order amidst the clans of the region.

 While the Kanun is not legal today, some say it is still practised in parts of Albania and Kosovo.  The isolation and repression of Kosovo Albanians under the Serbian nationalist regime of Slobodan Milosevic only strengthened such tribal traditions.

 “The Kanun was like our constitution for 500 years,” says Seremb Gjeraj, a Kosovo Albanian journalist.  “We didn’t respect the regimes of the Turk and Serb occupiers, but we respected the Kanun, which was passed down orally from generation to generation.  There was no book, but it was in the minds of the people all the time.” 

 Hartmann’s juvenile victim, we will call her Valbona, contends that soon after her mother fled the family home from years of severe beatings by Valbona’s father, her father took her older sister as “the bride of the house”, forcing his daughter into regular sexual intercourse over a period of several years.  Returning home from school one day at the age of 14, Valbona walked in on her father raping her 18-year-old sister.

 The birth of his first child with his daughter did not dissuade Valbona’s father.  He went on to father a second child, murdering the child at birth and burning its body in the backyard with the trash.  The first child’s body had been dumped into a river.  Soon after the second child was born, Valbona’s sister fled her home and Kosovo, changed her name and disappeared. 

 The father then turned his attentions on Valbona, attempting to rape her.  She fought him off.  Knowing all too well what was in store for her, Valbona fled to her maternal uncle’s home, only to be forcibly brought back on the orders of her father. Her two brothers had to tie her up and beat her into submission before carrying her back to her father’s house on a horse cart.  Again her father tried to rape her.  This time Valbona fled to the capital city of Pristina where she sought help from a women’s organization.    

  Valbona’s first case against her father was dismissed by a local, ethnic Albanian judge after the local prosecutor abandoned the case during trial without even calling Valbona to testify.  That is when Michael Hartmann got a call to take the case. 

 Hartmann has been shattering conventions ever since he arrived in February 2000 as Kosovo’s first international prosecutor.  UNMIK began its mandate to administer the war-torn province in June 1999 with plans for an all-local judiciary. However, by the end of the year, Serb judges and prosecutors had either refused the office or had fled the province, and the results of cases involving Serb victims or Albanian-Kosovar suspects convinced the UN and human rights organizations that the Albanian judiciary was not equipped to handle war crimes or inter-ethnic criminal cases nor cases involving powerful organized crime figures, whether for reasons of fear, intimidation or bias. After the February 2000 Mitrovica riots involving murders of both Serbs and Albanians, UNMIK appointed an international judge and Hartmann as prosecutor. An international judiciary was gradually built up to some 30 members. 

 Hartmann, who was recruited from Bosnia and Herzegovina, made an immediate sensation in the Kosovo press by dismissing or reducing charges on several genocide cases against Serbs. 

 “Let’s just take the example of my case against minor X,” says Hartmann.  “X was 16 years of age and accused of genocide by the local prosecutor.  I talked to the witnesses.  It wasn’t genocide, nor was it a war crime. At most, it was aiding and abetting the burning of  three houses. Which is certainly a crime.  But he was 16.  So I amended the case and prosecuted that crime. But there was a great outcry because many Kosovar Albanians felt I had done the wrong thing.”

 Hartmann says many Albanians feel the prosecution of Albanians for war crimes committed against Serbs and so-called Albanian collaborators is unfair “because the Serb paramilitaries who committed crimes during the war got away, and more importantly they will never be identified because they wore masks.  But we still have to go after the criminals.”

“There is a theme here,” says Hartmann of Valbona’s case.  “It’s the same thing with war crimes and organized crime.  People are afraid to testify because of intimidation and reprisal.  Of course this is common in organized crime cases everywhere, but here it has added significance because the rule of law is not firmly established in the legal culture.”

 That is precisely why Hartmann believes the international community’s role here is so important.  “Changes are happening,” he insists. 

 But Hartmann fears the work being done in Kosovo could be jeopardized by the international community’s short attention span.  “To properly investigate, prosecute and convict one organized crime case can easily take a year or a year and a half.”

 Local Albanian judge Mejdi Dehari welcomes the international assistance: “Given the number of politically related murders in Kosovo, it is not possible for local judges, who have no protection, to handle high profile cases involving former KLA fighters.”

 Hartmann, like other international prosecutors and judges here, has several armed bodyguards, a luxury the local judiciary cannot afford. High risk and low salaries are among other reasons the local judiciary is loathe to or prevented from taking on many of the 100 sensitive cases currently being handled by internationals in Kosovo. Several witnesses in some of these cases have been murdered over the past year. 

 Hartman begins his closing argument by pulling out a large, red, English copy of the Kanun, which he ordered on amazon.com.  He turns to the panel of judges.  “When I turned to the Code of Leke Dukagjini, I found out why this man was not ashamed of how he treated his wife and daughters.”

 Hartmann begins reading:  “Article 62, ‘The Duties And Obligations Of The Son.’ I note the daughter is not even mentioned.  It states that children may not go anywhere without their father’s permission. It also states that children may not oppose their father’s word.  This explained to me why the sons came in here and lied to support their father.” 

 Hartmann feels there is a severe clash of cultures in Kosovo.  “Some Kosovo Albanians are European in all the positive senses of the word.  They have contact with people outside of Kosovo and they are open-minded.  Then there are those who are very much into the patriarchal, agrarian culture that is also part of this world.”

 In his closing arguments Hartmann compares the victim of attempted rape as the new Kosovo, the Kosovo of the future, and the accused and his lying sons as the old Kosovo of patriarchal control which, he says, has no place in a modern society.

 A new Kosovo, however, is emerging: “When I was working on an Albanian versus Albanian war crimes case recently,” says Hartmann, “there was a man who had given a statement to the police three years after the crime had occurred.  I asked him why he was coming forward to testify now.” 

 “He looked at me and he said, ‘I was afraid before, because I saw that no one else was going forward.  I am still afraid, but now I see on television and in the newspapers that there are cases against these people …  I realize that I’m not the only one, that other people are coming forward.’”

Two days after Hartmann delivered his closing arguments, the judges announced their verdict.  Valbona’s father was found guilty on all charges – a verdict Hartmann never expected.

 A retired Kosovo Albanian judge who helped Hartmann on the case credited the victim Valbona with turning the case.  “She spoke from beginning to end and always with the same words.”  But he credited Hartmann with tying it all together – making it possible for Valbona’s story to be believed. 

 Hartmann gives credit to a female Kosovo police officer, another phenomenon of the new Kosovo, who doggedly pursued the witnesses who corroborated Valbona’s testimony. 

 Valbona, whose life had been on hold for the last three years, received justice in the new Kosovo.  Hartmann could finally pack his bags for Washington.

 *Eleanor Beardsley is a Press and Information officer with the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK).

DPI /2311 (11)—May 2003