Florina Skeja

DO YOU KNOW WHO THE WITNESS IN THE VIDEO PUBLISHED BY @lasgushh69836 IS? She is Sandra Mitchell, a former @OSCE official. From December 1998 to April 2000, she served as Head of the Human Rights Division of the @OSCEKosovo Verification Mission (KVM), as well as in the OSCE Task Forces and Mission in Kosovo. In OSCE reports from that period, including Human Rights in Kosovo: As Seen, As Told, she presented the “Panda” case, the killing of six young Serbs at the Panda Café in Peja on December 14, 1998, as a possible revenge attack by the KLA/Albanians following a Serbian police ambush against a KLA group. But here is what happened when she faced questioning in The Hague! During her testimony before the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in December 2023, under cross-examination by Gregory Kehoe, Hashim Thaçi’s lawyer, Mitchell admitted that she had not personally conducted any field investigation into the case. The report had been compiled on the basis of information and allegations provided to the mission. She also acknowledged that the conclusions attributing the attack to the KLA could have been inaccurate. In other words, a narrative linking the KLA to the killing of six young Serbs had been included in an OSCE report without the person presenting it having personally investigated the facts on the ground! And that is not all. Subsequent developments have seriously undermined this narrative: • In 2013, Aleksandar Vučić, then Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia, publicly stated that there was no evidence that Albanians had committed the crime. • The Serbian Organized Crime Prosecutor’s Office, which launched an investigation in 2016, concluded that the massacre had not been committed by Albanians. • Statements by Vuk Drašković and other sources have raised serious suspicions about the possible involvement of Serbian intelligence structures (RDB), linked to Radomir Marković, and a possible false-flag operation intended to portray the KLA as a terrorist organization and justify further actions by the Serbian regime. Do you understand now how narratives against the KLA are constructed? An unverified allegation is enough to make its way into a report, be repeated for years, and then be used as an argument against Kosovo’s liberation struggle, even when the report’s own author admits that she did not investigate the facts on the ground and that the conclusions could have been inaccurate. This is how many allegations against the KLA are built: unsubstantiated accusations, lies, disputed testimonies, and narratives designed to smear the just liberation struggle of the people of Kosovo. Unfortunately, among those spreading these narratives are also many Albanian speakers, some even hiding behind the label of “investigative journalists” who, instead of seeking the truth, help spread allegations that serve anti-KLA propaganda. History cannot be written on the basis of unsubstantiated accusations, and justice cannot be built on lies. Anyone who claims to seek the truth must investigate the facts to the very end, rather than turn suspicions into verdicts against those who fought for Kosovo’s freedom!