Former KLA brigade founder bolsters defence case in ex-President Hashim Thaci’s trial by telling the Hague-based special court that the KLA was formed on a voluntary basis and did not have the ‘discipline of NATO armies’.

Fatmir Sopi, a former member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, in the Gollak region within the guerrilla force’s Llap operational zone, on Monday told the war crimes and crimes against humanity trial of Hashim Thaci and three co-defendants at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers that the KLA was formed on a voluntary basis.

“The Kosovo Liberation Army was a voluntary army, the source was in the people,” Sopi told the Hague court, adding that KLA “could not have order and discipline like NATO armies have today because it was voluntarily based and the soldiers that joined it did so fully on their will, with no pressure from anyone.”

According to the prosecution, Sopi was a founder of Brigade 153 in the Gollak region. Sopi told the court on Monday that before the brigade was created in February 1999, their actions depended on the situation and they did not need to take orders.

Identifying persons in photographs shown by the prosecution, Sopi identified defendant Thaci and called him a “living hero”.

According to the indictment, Thaci and his three co-defendants “shared the common purpose to gain and exercise control over all of Kosovo by means including unlawfully intimidating, mistreating, committing violence against, and removing those deemed to be opponents”.

These opponents included collaborators or those perceived as collaborating with Yugoslav forces or Serbian authorities, or who did not support the goals of the KLA, which included members of the Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK political party as well as Serbs, Roma and other ethnic groups.

But Sopi, whose brother was a member of both the KLA and the LDK, told the court that in his region, members of the LDK were not considered collaborationists with Serbian forces and there was no rift between the KLA and the LDK.

“In the area where I operated, there was no political division and no politics except the liberation war and there was no political disagreement among the ranks of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Everyone’s party and policy was the liberation war and the liberation of our country,” he said.

Thaci, Jakup Krasniqi, Rexhep Selimi and Kadri Veseli are accused of having individual and command responsibility for crimes committed against prisoners held at KLA detention facilities in Kosovo and Albania, including 102 murders.

The crimes were allegedly committed between at least March 1998 and September 1999, during and just after the war in Kosovo with Serbian forces. The defendants have pleaded not guilty.