People who were jailed for supplying the Kosovo resistance with weapons for an armed uprising when the country was under Yugoslav rule are angry because they do not qualify for benefits as former political prisoners.
In June 1994, Atom Krasniqi used a variety of back roads from the Albanian capital Tirana to send weapons into Kosovo along a route that went through the territory of today’s North Macedonia.
Krasniqi was a member of a group of Kosovo Albanian students involved in preparations for war in Kosovo as part of guerrilla group which would later be known as the Kosovo Liberation Army and fight a war of resistance against repressive Yugoslav rule.
“At that time, I was studying in Tirana. In June, my brother Halim, Azem Syla [who would become a KLA commander in 1999] and I decided to send some arms to Kosovo,” Krasniqi told BIRN.
“We made a plan to stop first in Zajaz [a village in today’s North Macedonia] at the house of Ali Ahmeti [who is now leader of North Macedonia’s Democratic Union of Albanians party]. A day afterwards, we headed to Kosovo,” he said.
Krasniqi, then 25, and his older brother were stopped and arrested by police. Three months later, a court in Skopje sentenced them to three-and-a-half years in prison.
In 2015, Krasniqi applied for the status of political prisoner according to a benefits scheme that the Kosovo government offers to those who spent more than two months in jail on political charges between 1913 and 1999.
Krasniqi said that he experienced torture and even an attempt to murder him behind bars.
“All of Kosovo knows my case and there is no need for other evidence. The weapons [he tried to bring to Kosovo] were intended for war,” he said.
But he, like many others, had his application rejected by the authorities because the law regulating the status of political prisoners doesn’t include those convicted of illegal possession of weapons and arms trafficking for the cause of Kosovo’s liberation from Belgrade’s control.
More political prisoners than expected
In 2010, the Kosovo Assembly adopted a law setting out the rights of people who have been convicted and persecuted on political grounds. Four years later, the government established a commission to verify the status of former political prisoners.
Back in 2014, the government commission said that it expected to deal with around 5,000 people. But so far, 12,670 people have applied for the status.
Since 2014, more than 2,840 people have been verified as former political prisoners and a total of 49 million euros has been spent to compensate them.
The secretary of the Commission to Verify and Recognise Political Prisoners, Shefik Sadiku, told BIRN that the law has lot of gaps, such as those who were jailed for transporting weapons for the KLA.
“We may have discriminated against someone, but it is not our fault. We didn’t make this law,” said Sadiku, who is a former political prisoner himself.
Sadiku explained that cases like Krasniqi’s pushed the commission to ask the prime minister’s office for a legal interpretation of the legislation. But there has been no response so far.
“The law does not include compensation for those who are convicted for possession and transport of weapons. The law has many shortcomings and it is difficult to work with this law because of these shortcomings,” Sadiku said.
According to the law, every person who has served a sentence of more than two months is entitled to 16.70 euros for each day spent behind bars.
Currently, according to the commission, the majority of those who are being compensated were imprisoned during the 1990-95 period, and there are concerns that several years will be needed to complete the entire process because another 4,000 people have applied for compensation for the 1998-99 period alone.
The commission has also started to compensate families of political prisoners from the 1940-1960 period, which will cost more than 30 million euros in payments.
Families of prisoners from the earlier period of 1913-1940 do not get any compensation because the law only recognises the prisoner and his or her spouse as beneficiaries.
Arms suppliers tortured in jail
Another former political prisoner, Ahmet Sijaric from the western Kosovo town of Peja/Pec, is also not on the list for compensation.
In June 1994, Sijaric and eight other people brought a truck full of weapons to Kosovo. He says that the weapons came from supporters in an Albanian-Bosnian association and the Bosnian Ministry of Defence to supply the movement that was preparing for armed resistance in Kosovo.
This was the period in which Slobodan Milosevic’s regime stepped up its repression of the 1.8 million ethnic Albanians living in Kosovo. “Serb authorities have used police violence, torture and political trials to repress ethnic Albanians and encourage their emigration from the region,” said a report by campaign group Human Rights Watch in 1996.
Sijaric was arrested together with the majority of his group and sentenced to five years and six months in prison for arms trafficking, although he only served two years.
Now 59, Sijaric is a former soldier who was educated in Belgrade. He insisted that the weapons were acquired in order to fight a war, not for personal gain, and the accusations against him were politically motivated.
He cited the court’s verdict which he said states clearly that “the weapons were brought into Kosovo for an uprising”.
“The weapons were part of a contingent that was brought from Hungary for war in Bosnia and Kosovo,” he added.
He said that he was constantly tortured during his time in prison. “One of the members of the group died later from the torture in prison,” he said.
Sijaric, who is also a KLA war veteran, claimed that someone from the government commission to verify the status of former political prisoners asked him to pay in order to get his request for political prisoner status approved.
“I was asked to give 10 per cent of the total of 12,600 euros that belongs to me,” he alleged.
He claimed that the system was being abused. “I have seen people convicted for ordinary crimes who have obtained the status of political prisoner,” he said.
But Sadiku denied that there are any such abuses and said that all applicants have the right to complain, to the courts if necessary.
He cited the case of Jahja Lluka from Peja/Pec, who was also convicted by a Serbian court of transporting weapons to Kosovo. Lluka is now an adviser to outgoing Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj, but his application for political prisoner status was also rejected by the commission.
Sadiku said he doubts that applicants are being discriminated against on political grounds if someone who is politically connected to someone as senior as Haradinaj can be rejected.
Meanwhile Haradinaj’s office did not respond to BIRN’s request for a comment on the fact that the commission has processed only five cases in 2019. But Lluka told BIRN that government has extended the mandate of the commission.
Each year, the government allocates five million euros for the compensation of former political prisoners.
However the International Monetary Fund has warned that compensation payments being made to ex-political prisoners, war veterans and people who worked in Kosovo’s parallel education system of the 1990s have become a heavy burden for country’s meagre budget.
The IMF has repeatedly urged Kosovo to be cautious about such schemes because of their high cost.
However, Ahmet Sijaric is adamant that people who supplied weapons for Kosovo Albanians’ armed struggle should be eligible for compensation because they genuinely were political prisoners.
“If not political prisoners, what else could we have been?” he asked.