On Haradinaj's orders 9 May 2007 | 15:54 | Source: SENSE *THE HAGUE -- The trial of three former KLA commanders continued Monday with the testimony of a former KLA commander in the village of Donja Luka.
* The prosecution called former KLA commander Rustem Tetaj to prove that Ramush Haradinaj had the command role in the Dukagjin Operative Zone. Before he even started answering the prosecutor’s questions, Tetaj noted that he had come to The Hague against his will, after he had received a subpoena. He could hardly remember the events in 1998, because “a lot of time has passed”, he went on to say. After the police attacked the Haradinaj property on 24 March 1998, Tetaj considered that he, as former Yugoslav Army (JNA) officer, had to do something to protect his compatriots from the village of Donja Luka, where he was born. In early April, after a meeting with Ramush Haradinaj and the second accused, Idriz Balaj, he set up a KLA unit in the village. Once KLA units had been set up in other villages in the Dukagjin area, Ramush Haradinaj called a meeting of all village commanders, the witness said, adding that at the meeting in late May 1998, Ramush was elected the commander of one of the four subzones, headquartered in Glođane. At the same time, Ramush was the acting commander of all four subzones, the witness contended, but, he went on to explain, he could not actually exercise command “for various reasons”. In mid-June 1998, the witness attended two other similar meetings: on 21 June in Rznic and two days later in the village of Jablanica. At the second meeting, Ramush Haradinaj was elected the commander of the Dukagjin Operative Zone, with Lahi Brahimaj as his deputy. Former Chief of the KLA Main Staff, Bislim Zyrapi, said the same thing testifying as a prosecution witness. When the prosecutor asked Tetaj whether he had always complied with Haradinaj’s orders, he said he had not. He “can’t recall all that well”, he said, whether it was on Haradinaj’s orders that he and his unit attacked the Serbian police on the Peć-Dečani road several times. He had said so in the statement he had provided to the Office of the Prosecutor in 2002. “If that’s what I said, then that’s how it was, because my memory served me better at that time than today, five years later,” Tetaj said.
