Former Kosovo PM ordered to The Hague for trial

AMSTERDAM, Feb 2 (Reuters) The UN war crimes tribunal has ordered Kosovo's former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj to return to its detention unit in The Hague on February 26, a week before his war crimes trial is due to begin.

Haradinaj, a former regional commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), resigned as prime minister in 2005 to face charges of murder, rape and torture allegedly committed by his troops during a 1998-99 war against Serb forces.

He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Haradinaj, 38, is accused of leading a campaign to drive Serbs and Roma from their villages and for attacks on ethnic Albanian and Roma civilians the KLA saw as collaborators.

Considered a hero by many Kosovo Albanians, Haradinaj is the most senior former KLA guerrilla to be indicted over the war against Serb forces and the first serving head of government to be indicted since former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.

A former nightclub bouncer in Switzerland who was appointed prime minister in late 2004, Haradinaj was granted provisional release by the tribunal pending the start of his trial and allowed to engage in politics.

He has urged Kosovo's Albanian majority of close to 2 million people to maintain the struggle for independence from Serbia after the 1998-99 war that killed 10,000 people.

Kosovo has been run by the United Nations since 11 weeks of NATO bombing drove out Serb forces in 1999. Revenge attacks for Serb repression of Albanian civilians prompted up to 200,000 Serb civilians to flee their religious heartland.

Today, United Nations special envoy Martti Ahtisaari handed Serbia a plan that sets its breakaway Kosovo province firmly on a path to independence, an outcome Belgrade said it would ''never accept''.

Reuters PDM VV2122