Kosovo Prime Minister and former KLA leader Hashim Thaci has written a paean to the new Atrocities Prevention Board. This is both utterly hypocritical and disgraceful. Thaci is one of the men implicated in a 2010 report in human and drug trafficking and organ-harvesting during 1998 and 1999:

But it was the leaking of a Council of Europe (CoE) report just days after Kosovo’s first post-independence election on December 2010 that really put this criminality and corruption out in the open. On Dec. 12, human rights rapporteur Dick Marty submitted a report to the CoE containing serious accusations against the local leadership and international missions currently presiding over Kosovo.

The report alleged that the ICTY, United Nations, NATO, and individual Western governments had failed to thoroughly investigate serious war crimes committed by the members of a KLA unit known as the Drenica Group during the 1998-1999 conflict with Serbia. According to Marty’s report, the unit had violently seized and operated the lucrative trading routes across the Prokletije mountain range on the Kosovo-Albania border. He alleges the group amassed considerable fortunes supplying weaponry to local forces — and trafficked in human beings, heroin, and organs taken from Serb and Albanian prisoners of war.

Marty’s report identified the leader of Drenica Group as a man called “The Snake” — a.k.a. Hashim Thaqi, who two days earlier had been named prime minister re-elect of the Republic of Kosovo. He has officially taken office in time for Kosovo’s third Independence Day celebrations.

The Atrocities Prevention Board may be mostly useless, or it may provide the means for increased military interventionism in the future, but it’s absurd to take seriously arguments for it from a war criminal. Indeed, the empowerment of Thaci and his associates since 1999 is a sobering reminder of what can result from “humanitarian” military interventions carried out in the name of halting atrocities.