Kosovo ex-president Thaci visits father's tomb after Hague court bars him from attending funeral
Thaci, 56, wasn't allowed to attend Tuesday's funeral, which leaders and local politicians from Kosovo and neighboring Albania were present for. Kosovo Justice Minister Albulena Haxhiu complained to the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague that Thaci was barred from going.
'I was the last to come, dad,' Thaci wrote on the wreath he put at his father's tomb on Friday in the village of Buroje, 70 kilometers (44 miles) west of the capital, Pristina. He was accompanied by police officers from the Kosovo-based European Union Rule of Law mission, known as EULEX.
Thaci was then taken to his house, where only close relatives could meet with him. It wasn't immediately clear when he would be returned to the custody of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers court in The Hague.
His father, Haxhi Thaci, died on March 16 at age 87.
Three days before his father's death, Hashim Thaci was allowed to visit his father for about three hours at a public hospital in Pristina accompanied by close family members.
Thaci and other senior leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, which waged Kosovo's 1998-99 war for independence from Serbia, have been in custody in The Hague since November 2020. They face charges including murder, torture and persecution during and after the war.
The court and a linked prosecutor's office were created after a 2011 report by the Council of Europe, a human rights body, that included allegations that KLA fighters trafficked human organs taken from prisoners and killed Serbs and fellow ethnic Albanians. The organ harvesting allegations haven't been included in indictments issued by the court.
Around 11,400 people who died in the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo were ethnic Albanians. A 78-day NATO air campaign against Serbian troops ended the fighting, but tensions between Kosovo and Serbia remain tense.
Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, a move Belgrade and its key allies Russia and China refuse to recognize.
A European Union-facilitated dialogue on normalization of their ties, which started in 2011, has given scarce results.
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San Francisco Chronicle
8 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘Just a jumble of bones.' How a baby grave discovery has grown to haunt Ireland
TUAM, Ireland (AP) — This story begins with a forbidden fruit. It was the 1970s in this small town in the west of Ireland when an orchard owner chased off two boys stealing his apples. The youngsters avoided being caught by clambering over the stone wall of the derelict Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home. When they landed, they discovered a dark secret that has grown to haunt Ireland. One of the boys, Franny Hopkins, remembers the hollow sound as his feet hit the ground. He and Barry Sweeney pushed back some briars to reveal a concrete slab they pried open. 'There was just a jumble of bones,' Hopkins said. 'We didn't know if we'd found a treasure or a nightmare.' Hopkins didn't realize they'd found a mass unmarked baby grave in a former septic tank — in a town whose name is derived from the Irish word meaning burial place. It took four decades and a persistent local historian to unearth a more troubling truth that led this month to the start of an excavation that could exhume the remains of almost 800 infants and young children. The Tuam grave has compelled a broader reckoning that extends to the highest levels of government in Dublin and the Vatican. Ireland and the Catholic Church, once central to its identity, are grappling with the legacy of ostracizing unmarried women who they believed committed a mortal sin and separating them from children left at the mercy of a cruel system. An unlikely investigator Word of Hopkins' discovery may never have traveled beyond what is left of the home's walls if not for the work of Catherine Corless, a homemaker with an interest in history. Corless, who grew up in town and vividly remembers children from the home being shunned at school, set out to write an article about the site for the local historical society. But she soon found herself chasing ghosts of lost children. 'I thought I was doing a nice story about orphans and all that, and the more I dug, the worse it was getting,' she said. Mother and baby homes were not unique to Ireland, but the church's influence on social values magnified the stigma on women and girls who became pregnant outside marriage. The homes were opened in the 1920s after Ireland won its independence from Britain. Most were run by Catholic nuns. In Tuam's case, the mother and baby home opened in a former workhouse built in the 1840s for poor Irish where many famine victims died. It had been taken over by British troops during the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. Six members of an Irish Republican Army faction that opposed the treaty ending the war were executed there in 1923. Two years later, the imposing three-story gray buildings on the outskirts of town reopened as a home for expectant and young mothers and orphans. It was run for County Galway by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic order of nuns. The buildings were primitive, poorly heated with running water only in the kitchen and maternity ward. Large dormitories housed upward of 200 children and 100 mothers at a time. Corless found a dearth of information in her local library but was horrified to learn that women banished by their families were essentially incarcerated there. They worked for up to a year before being cast out — most of them forever separated from their children. So deep was the shame of being pregnant outside marriage that women were often brought there surreptitiously. Peter Mulryan, who grew up in the home, learned decades later that his mother was six months pregnant when she was taken by bicycle from her home under the cover of darkness. The local priest arranged it after telling her father she was 'causing a scandal in the parish.' Mothers and their children carried that stigma most of their lives. But there was no accountability for the men who got them pregnant, whether by romantic encounter, rape or incest. More shocking, though, was the high number of deaths Corless found. When she searched the local cemetery for a plot for the home's babies, she found nothing. Long-lost brothers Around the time Corless was unearthing the sad history, Anna Corrigan was in Dublin discovering a secret of her own. Corrigan, raised as an only child, vaguely remembered a time as a girl when her uncle was angry at her mother and blurted out that she had given birth to two sons. To this day, she's unsure if it's a memory or dream. While researching her late father's traumatic childhood confined in an industrial school for abandoned, orphaned or troubled children, she asked a woman helping her for any records about her deceased mom. Corrigan was devastated when she got the news: before she was born, her mother had two boys in the Tuam home. 'I cried for brothers I didn't know, because now I had siblings, but I never knew them,' she said. Her mother never spoke a word about it. A 1947 inspection record provided insights to a crowded and deadly environment. Twelve of 31 infants in a nursery were emaciated. Other children were described as 'delicate,' 'wasted,' or with 'wizened limbs.' Corrigan's brother, John Dolan, weighed almost 9 pounds when he was born but was described as 'a miserable, emaciated child with voracious appetite and no control over his bodily functions, probably mental defective.' He died two months later in a measles outbreak. Despite a high death rate, the report said infants were well cared for and diets were excellent. Corrigan's brother, William, was born in May 1950 and listed as dying about eight months later. There was no death certificate, though, and his date of birth was altered on the ledger, which was sometimes done to mask adoptions, Corrigan said. Ireland was very poor at the time and infant mortality rates were high. Some 9,000 babies — or 15% — died in 18 mother and baby homes that were open as late as 1998, a government commission found. In the 1930s and 1940s, more than 40% of children died some years in the homes before their first birthday. Tuam recorded the highest death percentage before closing in 1961. Nearly a third of the children died there. In a hunt for graves, the cemetery caretaker led Corless across the street to the neighborhood and playground where the home once stood. A well-tended garden with flowers, a grotto and Virgin Mary statue was walled off in the corner. It was created by a couple living next door to memorialize the place Hopkins found the bones. Some were thought to be famine remains. But that was before Corless discovered the garden sat atop the septic tank installed after the famine. She wondered if the nuns had used the tank as a convenient burial place after it went out of service in 1937, hidden behind the home's 10-foot-high walls. 'It saved them admitting that so, so many babies were dying,' she said. 'Nobody knew what they were doing.' A sensational story When she published her article in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society in 2012, she braced for outrage. Instead, she heard almost nothing. That changed, though, after Corrigan, who had been busy pursuing records and contacting officials from the prime minister to the police, found Corless. Corrigan connected her with journalist Alison O'Reilly and the international media took notice after her May 25, 2014, article on the Sunday front page of the Irish Mail with the headline: 'A Mass Grave of 800 Babies.' The article caused a firestorm, followed by some blowback. Some news outlets, including The Associated Press, highlighted sensational reporting and questioned whether a septic tank could have been used as a grave. The Bon Secours sisters hired public relations consultant Terry Prone, who tried to steer journalists away. 'If you come here you'll find no mass grave,' she said in an email to a French TV company. 'No evidence that children were ever so buried and a local police force casting their eyes to heaven and saying, 'Yeah a few bones were found — but this was an area where famine victims were buried. So?'' Despite the doubters, there was widespread outrage. Corless was inundated by people looking for relatives on the list of 796 deaths she compiled. Those reared with the stain of being 'illegitimate' found their voice. Mulryan, who lived in the home until he was 4½, spoke about being abused as a foster child working on a farm, shoeless for much of the year, barely schooled, underfed and starved for kindness. 'We were afraid to open our mouths, you know, we were told to mind our own business,' Mulryan said. 'It's a disgrace. This church and the state had so much power, they could do what they liked and there was nobody to question them.' Then-Prime Minister Enda Kenny said the children were treated as an 'inferior subspecies' as he announced an investigation into mother and baby homes. When a test excavation confirmed in 2017 that skeletons of babies and toddlers were in the old septic tank, Kenny dubbed it a 'chamber of horrors.' Pope Francis acknowledged the scandal during his 2018 visit to Ireland when he apologized for church 'crimes' that included child abuse and forcing unmarried mothers to give up their children. It took five years before the government probe primarily blamed the children's fathers and women's families in its expansive 2021 report. The state and churches played a supporting role in the harsh treatment, but it noted the institutions, despite their failings, provided a refuge when families would not. Some survivors saw the report as a damning vindication while others branded it a whitewash. Prime Minister Micheál Martin apologized, saying mothers and children paid a terrible price for the nation's 'perverse religious morality.' 'The shame was not theirs — it was ours,' Martin said. The Bon Secours sisters offered a profound apology and acknowledged children were disrespectfully buried. 'We failed to respect the inherent dignity of the women and children,' Sister Eileen O'Connor said. 'We failed to offer them the compassion that they so badly needed.' The dig When a crew including forensic scientists and archaeologists began digging at the site two weeks ago, Corless was 'on a different planet,' amazed the work was underway after so many years. It is expected to take two years to collect bones, many of which are commingled, sort them and use DNA to try to identify them with relatives like Corrigan. Dig director Daniel MacSweeney, who previously worked for the International Committee of Red Cross to identify missing persons in conflict zones in Afghanistan and Lebanon, said it is a uniquely difficult undertaking. 'We cannot underestimate the complexity of the task before us, the challenging nature of the site as you will see, the age of the remains, the location of the burials, the dearth of information about these children and their lives,' MacSweeney said. Nearly 100 people, some from the U.S., Britain, Australia, and Canada, have either provided DNA or contacted them about doing so. Some people in town believe the remains should be left undisturbed. Patrick McDonagh, who grew up in the neighborhood, said a priest had blessed the ground after Hopkins' discovery and Masses were held there regularly. 'It should be left as it is,' McDonagh said. 'It was always a graveyard.' A week before ground was broken, a bus delivered a group of the home's aging survivors and relatives of mothers who toiled there to the neighborhood of rowhouses that ring the playground and memorial garden. A passageway between two homes led them through a gate in metal fencing erected to hide the site that has taken on an industrial look. Beyond grass where children once played — and beneath which children may be buried — were storage containers, a dumpster and an excavator poised for digging. It would be their last chance to see it before it's torn up and — maybe — the bones of their kin recovered so they can be properly buried. Corrigan, who likes to say that justice delayed Irish-style is 'delay, deny 'til we all go home and die,' hopes each child is found. 'They were denied dignity in life, and they were denied dignity and respect in death,' she said. 'So we're hoping that today maybe will be the start of hearing them because I think they've been crying for an awful long time to be heard.'
San Francisco Chronicle
37 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Concerns grow for 3 OSCE workers jailed since shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine
VIENNA (AP) — It was late at night when they came for Dmytro Shabanov, a security assistant in eastern Ukraine at the Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. His seizure from his home in the Luhansk region in April 2022 — weeks after Moscow's full-scale invasion — was part of a coordinated operation by pro-Russian forces who detained him and two other Ukrainian OSCE workers. Maksym Petrov, an interpreter, also was seized in the Luhansk region, while Vadym Golda, another security assistant, was detained in neighboring Donetsk. More than three years later, the three Ukrainian civilians who had worked with the international group's ceasefire monitoring efforts in the eastern regions remain behind bars. They have not been part of recent large-scale prisoner exchanges with Russia. Their detention has raised alarm among OSCE officials, Western nations and human rights advocates, who demand their immediate release while expressing concern about their health and prison conditions amid allegations of torture. The Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian mission to the OSCE did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press on those allegations or on OSCE personnel having immunity from prosecution as international civil servants. Rapidly unfolding events in 2022 'He was taken from his home after the curfew took effect,' said Margaryta Shabanova, Shabanov's wife, who lives in Kyiv. 'I had a last call with him around 20 minutes before it happened.' After his arrest, Shabanov disappeared for three months, held incommunicado by Russian separatists and interrogated in a Luhansk prison until he was forced to sign a confession. That fateful night turned Shabanova's life upside down. 'Every morning, I wake up hoping that today will be different -- that today I will hear that my Dima is free,' she said. 'Painfully, days stretch on, and nothing changes. The waiting, the not knowing, the endless hope slowly turning into quiet despair.' Fighting back tears, Shabanova describes life without her husband. 'The silence at the dinner table, the birthdays and holidays have been missed for over three years. People say to me that I am strong, but they don't see the moments I collapse behind closed doors,' she said. The Vienna-based OSCE monitors ceasefires, observes elections, and promotes democracy and arms control, and Shabanov 'really liked his job' at the international organization, said his wife, especially working with the foreign staff. She said her husband believed that 'international service could protect lives and make the world a little more just.' The OSCE had operated a ceasefire monitoring mission in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Moscow separatists had been fighting Ukrainian government troops since 2014, with about 14,000 killed even before the full-scale invasion. The monitors watched for truce violations, facilitated dialogue and brokered local halts in fighting to enable repairs to critical civilian infrastructure. But on March 31, 2022, Russia blocked the extension of the OSCE mission, and separatist leaders declared it illegal the following month. It remains unclear whether the three detained OSCE staffers had tried to flee eastern Ukraine. Locally recruited Ukrainians like Shabanov, Petrov and Golda worked in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions to help shut down the OSCE mission. They cleared offices, safeguarded OSCE assets, including armored vehicles, drones and cameras, and oversaw evacuations of their international colleagues. That operation was completed by October 2022. Convictions and prison sentences The three men were arrested despite carrying documents confirming their immunity, the OSCE said. Shabanov and Petrov were convicted of treason by a Russian-controlled court in Luhansk in September 2022 and sentenced to 13 years in prison. Golda, 57, was convicted of espionage by a court in Donetsk, also under Moscow's control, in July 2024 and sentenced to 14 years. The Russian Foreign Ministry said in November 2022 it believed the activities of the OSCE monitors 'were often not only biased but also illegal.' Without identifying the three Ukrainian OSCE staff by name, the ministry alleged that local residents were recruited by the West to collect information for the Ukrainian military and 'several' were detained. The OSCE condemned the sentences and called for the immediate release of the three men, asserting they were performing their official duties as mandated by all of its 57 member states, including Russia. Seven months after the invasion, Russia illegally annexed the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, despite not fully controlling them. On March 27, 2025, Russia transferred Shabanov from a detention facility in the Luhansk region to a high-security penal colony in Russia's Omsk region in Siberia, according to Ievgeniia Kapalkina, a lawyer with the Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group who represents the Shabanov and Petrov families. Petrov remains at risk of being moved to Russia, she said. Penal colonies in Siberia are known for harsh conditions, where 'prisoners often lose all contact with the outside world, effectively 'disappearing' within Russia's penal system,' the legal group said in March. "Given their existing health issues, the lack of proper medical care in remote regions could prove fatal,' it added. Allegations of beatings, psychological pressure Ukrainian human rights activist Maksym Butkevych, who was in the same Luhansk penal colony with Shabanov and Petrov from March 2024 until being released in October 2024, said both men were tortured during interrogation. Shabanov was 'beaten several times during the interrogations until he lost consciousness and was subjected to extreme psychological pressure,' he said. Butkevych said Shabanov, 38, has problems with his back and legs. "He had to lie down at least for couple of hours every day due to pain,' he added. Petrov, 45, has 'a lot of health issues,' Butkevych said, including allergies worsened by his captivity, "specifically the interrogation period.' Kapalkina said both men were 'subjected to repeated unlawful interrogations during which they suffered severe physical and physiological abuse' and eventually 'signed confessions under coercion.' The allegations of torture could not be independently verified by the AP. Bargaining chips for Russia? Butkevych suggested the three imprisoned OSCE workers, who are not prisoners of war, are likely 'bargaining chips' for Moscow, to be 'exchanged for someone or something significantly important for Russia.' Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen, the current chairperson of the OSCE, said in a statement to AP that imprisoning civilian officials of an international organization "is completely unacceptable." "Securing their release is a top priority for the Finnish OSCE Chairpersonship,' she said. OSCE Secretary General Feridun H. Sinirlioğlu is 'very closely and personally engaged on this matter,' a spokesperson said, noting he traveled to Moscow in March and raised the issue with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Yurii Vitrenko, Ukraine's ambassador to International Organizations in Vienna, called for the unconditional release of the three, saying they should 'never have been illegally detained' by Russia, should 'never have been put on a fake trial,' and should 'never have been handed illegal sentences." Vitrenko suggested that other states with more influence with Russia should exert more pressure to help secure their release. He did not identify those countries. Shabanova said she regularly asks 'those who have the power' to take action. 'Do not look away,' she said, adding that the OSCE and the international community must ask themselves why their actions have not led to the release of her husband. Her only wish, she said, is "to see my Dima walk through the door, just to hold his hand again, to look into his eyes and say, 'You are home now. It's over.''
San Francisco Chronicle
37 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Florida set to execute man for killing wife, 2 kids in new state death sentence record for 1 year
STARKE, Fla. (AP) — A Florida man convicted of killing his wife and two children with a machete in 1994 is set for execution Thursday, which would be the ninth death sentence carried out in 2025 to set a new state record for a single year. A 10th execution is scheduled for Aug. 19 and an 11th on Aug. 28. A death warrant signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis directs that 60-year-old Edward Zakrzewski be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday at Florida State Prison near Starke. Zakrzewski's final appeal for a stay was rejected Wednesday by the U.S. Supreme Court. The highest previous annual total of recent Florida executions is eight in 2014, since the death penalty was restored in 1976 by the U.S. Supreme Court. Florida has executed more people than any other state this year, while Texas and South Carolina are tied for second place with four each. Zakrzewski, an Air Force veteran, was sentenced to die for the 1994 slayings of his 34-year-old wife, Sylvia, and their children Edward, 7, and 5-year-old Anna, at their home in Okaloosa County in the Panhandle. Trial testimony showed he committed the killings after his wife sought a divorce, and he had told others he would kill his family rather than allow that. Sylvia was attacked first with a crowbar and strangled with a rope, testimony shows. Both children were killed with the machete, and Sylvia was also struck with the blade when Zakrzewski thought she had survived the previous assault. Opponents of the execution point to Zakrzewski's military service and the fact that a jury voted 7-5 to recommend his execution, barely a majority of the panel. He could not be executed with such a split jury vote under current state law. The trial judge imposed three death sentences on Zakrzewski. The Action Network, which organized an anti-execution petition, asked people to call DeSantis' office and read a prepared script urging a stay of execution for Zakrzewski. 'Florida does not need the death penalty to be safe. This execution will not make us safer, it will simply add another act of violence to an already tragic story. Justice does not require death,' the script reads in part. Zakrzewski's lawyers have filed numerous appeals over the years, all of which have been rejected. Twenty-six men have died by court-ordered execution so far this year in the U.S., and 11 other people are scheduled to be put to death in seven states during the remainder of 2025. Florida was also the last state to execute someone, when Michael Bernard Bell died by lethal injection on July 15. DeSantis also signed a warrant for the 10th execution this year for Kayle Bates, who abducted a woman from an insurance office and killed her more than four decades ago. Wednesday night, DeSantis issued a death warrant for Curtis Windom, 59, convicted of killing three people in the Orlando area in 1992. His execution is scheduled for Aug. 28.
