Former British diplomat John Stewart Duncan, invited by Hashim Thaçi’s defense to testify before the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague, said that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) did not have a hierarchical structure. On the first day of his testimony in The Hague, he stated that real power lay with the zone commanders.

“They did not have hierarchical structures; they were organized differently. We could not simply go and talk to Mr. Thaçi or General Çeku and think the problem was solved. It did not work like that. We had to talk to the people who really had authority, and those were the zone commanders,” Duncan emphasized.

He said that real power in the KLA rested with the zone commanders.

“We called them the army of those who had nothing—that was the term I used at the time. When I went to the field, I saw people who had lived normal lives: civilians, doctors, lawyers, people who had left their jobs and taken up arms. Their aspirations were not the same, and when negotiating with such people, you had to understand what their goals were, how they had reached that point, what factors pushed them there, what their aspirations and interests were. And these had to be used to persuade them to do something different. But their aspirations were not the same—they came from different layers of society,” the former diplomat said.

The former British diplomat also said they did not believe that at the time the fighters could be persuaded by Hashim Thaçi to accept a disarmament agreement.

“The other big problem was that the KLA leadership might not have been able to convince the fighters. If we had been convinced this would happen, we would have gone to the political leadership of the KLA and told them we needed a disarmament agreement. But, as I said, we did not have much time available, and we had no confidence that Mr. Thaçi would be able to convince the fighters,” he stressed.

He further emphasized that Hashim Thaçi did not reflect the political reality.“It was not realistic for Mr. Thaçi to be recognized as the political leader of Kosovo. There were other political forces that existed there, such as the LDK, Mr. Rugova, and others. They may have chosen him as head of the Rambouillet delegation, but he did not have what is called political legitimacy in a democratic society—he was not elected by the people. For Thaçi to be recognized as prime minister was not realistic; he did not represent reality and it was not politically sustainable,” he said.