Shehu recalled one woman in particular, who was initially asked to testify about the murder of her family but ended up telling the court about her rape at the hands of Serbian forces.
“When she first came back, after being the first witness in the Hague tribunal [to testify about wartime rape], two men from the same village tried to rape her,” she said. “They could not accept why she told them [the court] that she had been raped, having claimed she went to testify about the murder of her father.”
In December 2022, a BIRN analysis of ICTY archives identified a failure on the part of the tribunal to show the five women due consideration, sacrificing their interests and wellbeing and subjecting them to secondary victimisation in order to make all possible allowances for Milosevic, who was representing himself in court and belittled the witnesses.
The analysis identified “numerous blind spots from its earliest stages”: sexual assault did not even feature in the initial and first amended indictments of Milosevic for crimes committed during the Kosovo war and it was only the work of activists like Sevdije Ahmeti and Shehu, who identified and supported survivors, that made it possible for charges of sexual assault to be included in the second amended Kosovo indictment. Milosevic died in his cell in The Hague in 2006 before a verdict could be reached.
“We tried to coordinate with the Hague Tribunal to protect the identity of the witness,” Shehu recalled.
The 2022 BIRN analysis cites the testimony of a witness identified only as Witness K31 revealing that she had initially been interviewed by investigators in relation to the killings of her father, sister, and brother, and that her testimony was initially meant to only concern these incidents. However, in April 2002, after telling her mother about having been raped by at least three Serbian soldiers, she gave a second statement to ICTY investigators detailing these events.
Explaining why she had not mentioned the rape in her first interview, K31 stated: “This happened because when I gave the first statement, I was with my family… And when they came to make a statement with my family, I didn’t say. But when they came and took me to one side, I was able to talk about it when we were in private with them.”
Her account pointed to how the investigators’ decision to take witness statements in groups made it harder for survivors to tell their stories and may have even completely prevented some from doing so.
Shehu did not specify the codename of the witness she helped but told BIRN: “The sessions that did not cover the subject of sexual violence were open to the public but when this witness came to the Hague Tribunal, and the session was not open to the public, this raised doubts. Why didn’t she testify openly for the murder of her father, like the other witnesses who came to testify? There were indications that such a thing [the rape] happened.”
“Fortunately, I don’t regret that we participated in the Hague tribunal, and the decision of the Hague Tribunal was to place her in a new country within the European Union. So, today, her life is somewhere else. She is part of the [Kosovo] pension scheme or the reparation that the victims of sexual violence are offered.”
Later, between 2012 and 2014, Shehu again assisted witnesses in cases being handled by the EU’s rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, prior to war crimes cases being handed over to the local judiciary.
It was only in 2018, however, that Vasfije Krasniqi Goodman became the first Kosovo Albanian survivor of wartime sexual violence to speak publicly about her ordeal. In April this year, Ramadan Nishori became the first man in Kosovo to publicly testify about surviving sexual abuse during the war.
The first war rape conviction in Kosovo came in November 2022, when the Pristina Basic Court sentenced Serb ex-policeman Zoran Vukotic to 10 years in prison for rape and participating in the expulsion of ethnic Albanian civilians.
Justice after death