In a government meeting held on November 27, 2014, head of the Commission Çeku notified that by that point 66,339 applications had been reviewed. From this number, 49,307 applications had been accepted, while the rest were rejected as unfounded.

And even that number would rise again. Gazmend Syla, head of the Office on Issues of Categories Deriving from the KLA War within the Prime Minister’s Office, told K2.0 that in total when the Government Commission stopped receiving applications in 2015, it had received around 100,000 applications by people claiming to have been KLA veterans, a figure that he evaluates as being exceedingly high.

It is still not clear how many of these were ultimately approved — as those documents have all been seized as part of legal proceedings — but in 2016, the previous government put this number at around 53,000.

Wow, something’s not right with the numbers…

It is no secret that veterans lists are full of phony veterans. Even the highest state officials agree on this.

President Hashim Thaçi has stated many times that the KLA had at most 15,000 soldiers, while Assembly deputies and members of different political parties have publicly stated that thousands of people are unjustly benefiting from the pension scheme for veterans.

In an interview in August 2012, Muharrem Xhemajli — who at the time was head of the Organization of KLA War Veterans — stated that the former commanders of the various zones are mainly responsibility for the extraordinary inflation of the number of soldiers. According to Xhemajli, the commanders had compiled lists together with their soldiers after the end of the war.

“They are responsible. Right after the war, a list was made, and then two more were made, and none of them were the same,” he said. “The last two lists were enormously inflated with phony veterans, invalids and martyrs. In these three categories there are people who were never part of the KLA war.”

Xhevdet Qeriqi, head of the Council for the Protection of the Rights of KLA Fighters, generally agreed.

“The main culprits for the inflation of the veterans lists are the commanders of the zones and representatives of the General Staff,” Qeriqi said in 2012. “This inflation was done by the superiors. There aren’t many people who could have done this.”

If everyone knows that the number of veterans is incorrect, what’s being done to resolve the issue?

In June 2016, Kosovo’s Special Prosecution opened an investigation into the case, which was given to Special Prosecutor Elez Blakaj.

Blakaj prepared a 900-page indictment — parts of which were subsequently leaked by Koha Ditore — in which 12 members of the Government Commission were accused of abusing official position or authority.

The 12 accused persons are: Agim Çeku, Nuredin Lushtaku, Sadik Halitjaha, Shkumbin Demaliaj, Qelë Gashi, Shukri Buja, Ahmet Daku, Rrustem Berisha, Faik Fazliu, Smajl Elezaj, Fadil Shurdhaj and Xhavit Jashari. All former KLA commanders, most have held — or still hold — public positions as ministers, deputy ministers, mayors, Assembly deputies or heads of veterans’ associations.

According to media reports, Prosecutor Blakaj’s indictment includes elements that directly implicate Çeku in the alleged fraudulent operation. It is claimed that Çeku came up with a justification to be given for the high number of veterans in the Dukagjini Zone.

“If we are asked how the Dukagjini Zone had 15,000 soldiers, as a Commission we will tell them that the KLA didn’t have all these soldiers in its ranks on one day, but 45,000 soldiers were part of the KLA and the high influx and outflux occurred in the Dukagjini and Pashtriku Zones bordering Albania,” Çeku is reportedly alleged to have told members of the Commission.

The indictment also reportedly says that those compiling the veterans lists invented the Hasan Prishtina Brigade, a segment of the KLA that never existed and was first heard of in 2016. It states that two of the defendants — PDK deputy Nuredin Lushtaku and the former head of the Office on Issues of Categories Deriving from the KLA War, Faik Fazliu — admitted that this brigade never existed.

Now that the justice system is dealing with it, can we expect any concrete answers?

Don’t expect any anytime soon.

On August 15, before the case reached court, it emerged that Prosecutor Blakaj had resigned and moved to the United States, citing pressure from people within the prosecution system, and also saying he had received many threatening messages from people demanding that he halt the investigation.

Following a media storm, on August 20, Blakaj responded with an open letter that he published on Facebook, further explaining why he had resigned, accusing his superior, Head Prosecutor Aleksandër Lumezi, of pressuring him during his work in the process of investigating the phony veterans case.

Specifically, he claimed that Lumezi had urgently called him to his office to ask him about an interview that he had conducted with President of the Assembly Kadri Veseli as part of his investigations.

“At the peak of the investigation, during the interview phase, Head Prosecutor Mr. Aleksandër Lumezi urgently invites me to his office and seeks my account as to why I invited Mr. Kadri Veseli to interview him (albeit as a witness) for the veterans case, justifying that ‘they have immunity, there is no need to invite them,’ even though I made it clear that the Constitutional Court in its interpretation has never, under any circumstance, given anyone immunity when it comes to penal crimes,” Blakaj wrote.

There have been calls for Kosovo’s head prosecutor, Aleksandër Lumezi, to resign following allegations that he interfered in the investigation into veterans lists. Photo: Atdhe Mulla / K2.0.

Lumezi responded to the former Special Prosecutor’s accusations by saying that Prosecutor Blakaj was unprofessional and a coward. “I think that if he was convinced that he had strong evidence and that he could do professional work, he should have stayed in Kosovo,” Lumezi said in an interview with Gazeta Express.

The head prosecutor admitted to having invited Blakaj to discuss the interview which he had conducted with Veseli, justifying the reprimand on the grounds that “it is absurd to interview a person who speaks from the Assembly podium.”

Concerns about high level political interference in the justice system grew when Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj revealed that he had sent Blakaj a letter demanding that the prosecutor report to him about the investigation and to inform him about his findings in the veterans case.

Haradinaj was also heavily criticized for a tirade of personal abuse that he directed at Blakaj, calling him a coward for having been a refugee during the war. Meanwhile, the prime minister’s AAK party colleague, Assembly deputy and indicted Commission member Shkumbin Demaliaj, was arrested after threatening Blakaj in a TV interview, in which he referred to the former prosecutor as “a deserter, a thief, an idiot, a thug” and saying he would “deal with him privately.”

It’s all starting to get a bit messy…

During this time, citizen-led protest movement #Protestoj [#IProtest] re-activated, having initially formed in 2016 in response to the ‘Pronto’ scandal that revealed wide scale corruption and misuse of public office by officials at the heart of one of the governing parties, PDK.

Under the #Protestoj banner, hundreds of citizens took to the streets on a number of occasions demanding Lumezi’s resignation, the refinement of the veterans lists and the initiation of a process to examine the wealth of public officials. Lumezi brushed aside any possibility of resigning from his post, and the protests fizzled out after a few weeks when it became clear that opposition political parties were not prepared to take the lead in developing them.

Meanwhile, then U.S. Ambassador Greg Delawie reacted by saying that Blakaj’s resignation marked a dark day for the rule of law in Kosovo and that the veterans lists issue should be solved by the justice system without threats or political interference.

Separately, in a lecture given to a group of students in the Justice Palace in August, he stated that the U.S. had carried out its own investigations into the number of KLA war veterans and that the numbers of applications accepted were severely inflated.

“We did research in the archives in Washington, and Kosovo never admitted to having more than 15,000 KLA soldiers,” he said. “It is mind-boggling how 20 years after the conflict the number of beneficiaries is growing, not declining. To put it short, the numbers don’t add up.”

Before he resigned, Prosecutor Blakaj had prepared an indictment… what happened to that?

When Prosecutor Blakaj departed in August, he left behind the indictment that he said he had been pressured not to file. The indictment claimed there were more than 19,000 people fraudulently claiming a KLA pension.

The Prosecution said it would follow through with the indictment and filed it at the Basic Court of Prishtina at the start of September. Pressure surrounding the indictment grew further when an online media portal published what it claimed to be the names of the alleged phony veterans included in the indictment.

It caused a particular reaction as the lists included the names of some people who are known to have been part of the KLA, such as Assembly deputy Time Kadrijaj. To prove this, she reacted immediately by publishing some pictures of her in the war zone, where she had contributed as a doctor.

Former Special Prosecutor Elez Blakaj resigned and moved to the United States alleging high level political pressure and interference in his investigations. Photo: Creative Commons License.

Some analysts have pointed out that the indictment not only refers to people who have fraudulently claimed to have been part of the KLA, but also legitimate veterans who are nonetheless not entitled to receive a pension. This is because the law foresees certain exceptions, such as officially recognized veterans who are regularly employed in the public or private sector, or those verified veterans who have chosen to be in some other pension scheme.

Meanwhile, the published lists contained hundreds more names of people alleged to be fraudulently claiming a KLA pension than had been in Blakaj’s original indictment. The authenticity of the published lists of names has not been confirmed or independently verified, and there have been suggestions that this was a deliberate attempt by people close to the issue to delegitimize the whole case.

From overseas, Blakaj stated that he would not be held responsible for names that were added to the indictment after his resignation.

To add further intrigue, in early November the court sent the indictment back to the Prosecution, with the justification that it needed further completion, thereby delaying the start of the court procedure.

It seems that there is a long road ahead of us. What’s happening in the meantime?

The Prosecution has a 30 day deadline to review the indictment before it must go back to the court.

Meanwhile, it has been suggested that once the court procedure for this indictment is initiated, the court could order the suspension of pensions for those named in the indictment as a temporary measure, although it is hard to determine how long it would take to conclude the court procedures for such a large case. Other high profile corruption cases have been dragging through the courts for years.

For now, veterans who are in the lists continue to receive pensions from the state budget of 170 euros per month (or 119 euros per month for families of martyrs).

The numbers of people receiving these pensions, as well as the amount spent by the state on them, is rising year by year. According to official data obtained by K2.0 from the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, in 2016, the first full year in which KLA pensions were paid, 47.9 million euros were paid to more than 28,000 recipients.

During 2017, that went up to 65.9 million euros in pensions to more than 36,000 recipients.

This year — up until November — the number of people receiving veteran pensions has increased by 1,900 compared to 2017. In the first 10 months of 2018 alone, the state paid 63.5 million euros in pensions, with the sum expected to grow by a further 13 million by the end of the year.

Kosovo’s Prosecution says that the cost of all those fraudulently receiving KLA veteran pensions is 38 million euros each year.

That’s a lot of money coming from the state budget…

Veteran pensions have become a huge burden for the budget, with the unexpectedly high number of veterans taking the previous government led by Prime Minister Isa Mustafa and his LDK party, in coalition with PDK, by surprise.

It also incited concerned reactions from international partners. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union have stated their objection to the budgetary implications caused by the pensions stemming from the veterans lists.

In November 2016, during a meeting with Mustafa, IMF representative Jacques Miniane demanded that the government not exceed the amount allocated to war veteran pensions in the 2017 budget. Moreover, Kosovo was close to going outside of the parameters of its agreements with IMF, and risked losing 100 million euros in investments from this institution. Financial issues that have been caused by unrealistic veterans lists were also reflected in the EU’s 2016 Progress Report for Kosovo.

The IMF and the international community in Kosovo successfully pressured Mustafa’s government into legally capping war veterans pensions through amendments to the 2014 Law on KLA War Veterans, which passed in the Assembly in December 2016.

The amendments further categorized KLA Fighter Veterans, setting fixed compensation amounts based on the level of their participation in the war, rather than leaving them up to the government to set annually. It also set a cap on the amount that could be spent on KLA Fighter Veteran pensions at 0.7 percent of Gross Domestic Product.

However, these categorizations have yet to be applied in practice.

Meanwhile, the current head of the IMF, Ruud Vermeulen, visited Kosovo in October and openly expressed concern at the Kosovo government’s pension schemes, including the veterans scheme.

In an interview, Vermeulen said that Kosovo risks going into a fiscal crisis if it continues to implement “senseless social schemes,” specifically mentioning schemes relating to pensions for teachers, police officers and Trepça miners. He added that the IMF had foreseen that Kosovo would support 12-13,000 veterans with 25 million euros in the form of pensions, but this sum of money is now insufficient due to the unanticipated rise in the number of veterans.

“We also determined the maximal level of the pension fund and demanded that veterans be reclassified, but unfortunately such a process is yet to begin,” Vermeulen said.

What happens next?

The next step is likely to be the return of the Prosecution’s indictment to court, sometime in early December.

However, nothing has been straightforward in this affair to date so expect many more twists and turns before any sort of resolution is reached.[logo]

Editing by Jack Butcher.

Feature image: Atdhe Mulla / K2.0.

How did Kosovo end up with so many veterans?

The KLA veterans lists controversy explained.

Arian Lumezi

How did Kosovo end up with so many veterans?

The KLA veterans lists controversy explained.

Arian Lumezi