The strange case of Shefqet Kabashi ended partially on Friday before The International Criminal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) when judges sentenced Kabashi to two months in prison for contempt of court.

By Radosa Milutinovic in The Hague

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On August 26, Kabashi pleaded guilty to two counts of contempt of court, accepting that in June 2007 he obstructed the course of justice by refusing to testify in the first trial of Ramush Haradinaj.

Kabashi has “deprived...the trial chamber of the evidence relevant for an effective ascertainment of truth” in Haradinaj case, judge Alphons Orie said, delivering the judgment.
Defence claims of Kabashi's “frustration, war experience or witness intimidation” as possible motives for his behavior remained “vague” and “could not be considered”, according to the judgment.
As mitigating factors, the trial chamber considered that Kabashi “suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder which worsens in a prison environment”.

Paradox
Kabashi has already served half of the sentence since he was arrested on August 17.
Paradoxically, only four days before he pleaded guilty in August, Kabashi repeated the same offense when he declined to answer prosecutor's questions in Haradinaj's retrial. To make the paradox bigger, retrial has been ordered precisely to obtain Kabashi's testimony.

As a result, additional contempt of court charges are being brought against Kabashi by the Tribunal.
Haradinaj, former commander of Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and his subordinates Idriz Bala and Lahi Brahimaj, are accused of multiple crimes committed in 1998 in Kosovo, then a province of Serbia.

As a KLA guard at the time, 35-year old ethnic Albanian Kabashi was considered a key prosecution eye-witness of the crimes against Roma, Serb and Albanian civilians allegedly committed by Haradinaj's men in the village of Jablanica in western Kosovo.
Appearing before the judges on June 5 2007, Kabashi refused to testify, amid widespread claims of witness intimidation in Kosovo, where Haradinaj enjoyed the reputation of a hero and was briefly prime minister until the ICTY indicted him in 2005.

No protection
“It is not a matter of fear”, Kabashi told judges, but “there were persons who were asked questions as witnesses and whose names don't even appear on witness lists because they have been killed”. Witness protection measures, he said, “do not exist in reality”, outside the courtroom.

In violation of the judge's orders to stay in The Hague to face contempt of court charges, on June 6 2007, Kabashi fled to the US, where he has been living as an asylum-seeker.
In November 2007, Kabashi appeared before the judges via video-link from the US, but, once again, refused to testify.

Citing lack of evidence, in April 2008, ICTY acquitted Haradinaj and Bala of 37 war crimes charges and sentenced Brahimaj to six years in prison.

Three-judge panel said in a judgment that “many witnesses cited fear as a prominent reason for not wishing to appear...to give evidence”.

The Trial Chamber's refusal to allow prosecutors more time to obtain critical testimonies from Kabashi and another protected witness has been the sole ground of the prosecution's appeal.
In 2010, the Appeals Chamber granted the prosecution's appeal, ordering the partial retrial of Haradinaj on charges connected to Jablanica.

Lucky to be alive
On 17 August this year, the day before the beginning of Haradinaj's retrial, Kabashi suddenly reappeared in the Netherlands from the US and was immediately arrested at the airport, under an ICTY warrant.
In the courtroom once again, Kabashi stayed true to himself, consistently refusing to answer prosecutor's questions. At one point, he claimed that “eyewitnesses in Kosovo have either been killed or disappeared”, saying “I was lucky that I'm still alive”.

In the first days of September, judges initiated another contempt of court case against Kabashi which is pending.