Albania's prime minister came to the defence of Kosovo's President Hashim Thaci on Monday, slamming war crimes charges filed against him last week as a "stain on the world's history of justice".
Edi Rama tweeted the message of support after arriving in Pristina to meet Thaci and other officials in neighbouring Kosovo, a former Serbian province whose population is majority ethnic Albanian.
The visit comes hours before Thaci is expected to hold his first national address on the indictment filed against him last Wednesday by prosecutors from the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague.
The charges are linked to the 52-year-old president's role as political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the Albanian guerrilla group that waged a separatist rebellion against Serbia in the late 1990s.
"In Pristina to listen and learn more", Rama wrote on Twitter, accusing prosecutors of leaving a "disgraceful stain on the world's history of justice" because they published the indictment before it was approved by a pre-trial judge.
The prosecutors said they rushed the announcement because Thaci and other suspects had been trying to obstruct the work of the court, which operates under Kosovo law but has international judges.
They accuse Thaci, his political ally Kadri Veseli and others of being "criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders", as well as enforced disappearances, persecution and torture of Serb, Roma and Kosovo Albanian victims.
The 1998-99 war ended after a NATO bombing forced Serb troops to withdraw from Kosovo, which was then a southern province of Serbia.
Top Serbian military and police officials were later convicted by international justice of war crimes during the conflict that left 13,000 people dead, mainly ethnic Albanians.
But KLA members have also been accused of coordinating a campaign of revenge attacks on Serbs, Roma and ethnic Albania rivals during and after the war.
Many rebel commanders have gone on to dominate the young democracy politically during its first decade of independence.
Thaci has remained at the centre of it all, serving as prime minister and now president since 2016.
Critics accuse him of corruption and wielding a strongman's influence over state institutions.
But the war crimes charges have upset even his detractors, who are steadfast in their support of Kosovo's "just" independence struggle.
Twenty years later, Belgrade still denies Kosovo's statehood, a constant source of tension in the region.
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