General Wesley Clark starts his testimony at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague on Monday, November 17, 2025. Photo: Kosovo Specialist Chambers/Livestream.

General Wesley Clark, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, started his testimony at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague on Monday – telling the war crimes and crimes against humanity trial of Hashim Thaci and three others that the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, “wasn’t an organised military [force]”.

“As far as we knew, these were local groups that had been formed more or less in response to Serbian oppression over the years. In particular, after the murder of the Jashari family, there was a general alarm and for this reason people were increasingly forming these local groups,” Clark told the court.

He was referring to the massacre of the family of KLA commander Adem Jashari by Serbian forces in their home compound in the village of Prekaz in the Skenderaj/Srbica municipality, where from March 5-7, 1998, 59 people, including women and children, as well as Jashari himself, were killed.

Clark was NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe from 1997 to 2000. He commanded Operation Allied Force, the Western alliance’s wartime campaign of air strikes aimed at forcing Slobodan Milosevic to end his violent repression of Kosovo Albanians.

In court on Monday, Clark described the KLA as a “rudimentary organisation… [of] localised groups of fighters [who] got together to protect their community”. The KLA was “never really put together, my assumption was that after NATO got in [to Kosovo], people actually got to meet each other, got to talk, but no real submission on authority” was ever established, he claimed.

Recalling that ethnic Albanians in Kosovo had faced more than a decade of oppression prior to the war, Clark said that “these men who fought back were very independent minded. These were local people who risked their lives to stand up against oppression”, and were not prone to accepting orders, nor that the KLA committed any coordinated attack against Serbs or other ethnic minorities.

Thaci and his co-defendants, 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 in neighbouring Albania, including 102 murders. The crimes were allegedly committed during and just after the war in 1998 and 1999.

During questioning by Thaci’s lawyer, Luka Misetic, Clark talked about meeting Thaci before the NATO bombing of former Yugoslavia in March 1999, and described him as a very put together young man who visibly had no military experience.

“He was a spokesman, clean cut, more Western than the rest, he didn’t look like he had been in the woods fighting for a year or two. It was pretty clear that he wasn’t in charge,” Clark said. Thaci “had no idea what was happening”, in terms of the fighting on the ground, Clark added.

The retired general told the court that one of the main issues the NATO forces faced during the air campaign was that they did not have eyes on the ground, although they tried to obtain collaboration with the KLA on the locations of Serbian forces. However, there was none.

Clark recalled one occasion when NATO bombed a building that was surrounded by Serbian vehicles and wrongfully identified as a headquarters of Serbian forces. Later it was learnt that “it was not a Serbian building at all but the Serbs had placed Albanians there … had surrounded them to stop them…and it was a terrible incident”, he said.

Clark did not clarify which occasion he was talking about. However, a similar occurrence happened on May 13, 1999, in Korishe, a village near Prizren, where a NATO air strike killed up to 100 ethnic Albanian refugees as they slept in a warehouse, after descending from the nearby mountains earlier in the day. The convoy of refugees was planning on continuing to Albania the next day.

Around 500 refugees were sleeping there and on tractor-trailers on the night of the attack. Before the bombing, NATO had already attacked a Serbian military command post near Korishe and mistakenly identified the convoy of refugees gathered at the warehouse as a military target.

Clark’s testimony came a day after the KLA Veterans’ Organisation, together with supporters and diaspora members, protested in front of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, demanding justice for Thaci, Veseli, Krasniqi and Selimi.

The organisation announced that it submitted 285 letters to the Council of Europe, pointing out what they deem fundamental issues with a court that many ethnic Albanians consider ethnically biased.

The letters claimed that the court lacks transparency, has kept the defendants in detention unfairly for five years despite them surrendering themselves, has violated the human rights of the accused and noted a conflict of interest after one guard became a prosecutor.

They also criticised the indictment using the term “joint criminal enterprise”, which is widely viewed as being against the KLA generally.

Prosecutors have insisted that the KLA itself is not on trial, despite this perception.

The Kosovo Specialist Chambers are part of Kosovo’s justice system but are based in The Hague with an international staff to ensure fair proceedings after witness intimidation problems in previous KLA-related cases.

Many prosecution witnesses have testified behind closed doors to protect their identities due to fears of reprisals, but this has led to allegations of a lack of transparency. Even Clark’s testimony, which is expected to last for several days, went into private session for a few minutes shortly after it started on Monday.

Sunday’s protest was the fourth such large protest after others were held in Pristina, The Hague and Tirana in Albania.