Kosovo’s prime minister has resigned after being invited for questioning by a Hague-based court investigating crimes against ethnic Serbs during and after the 1998-99 war.

Ramush Haradinaj said he had agreed to be interviewed at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutor’s Office next week and did not want to appear there as prime minister.

“I considered that I cannot go to the questioning as head of the government,” he said during a news conference on Friday.

Haradinaj, who took office in September 2017, said he would “respect the legal request” although he thought the summons was politically bad for Kosovo. “I will go there,” he said. “I will defend myself as a fighter of my country.”

He urged Kosovo’s president to call an early parliamentary election.

The Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutor’s Office is a court that was established in 2017 at the EU’s urging. It started questioning former Kosovo fighters this year.

In 2011 the Council of Europe, a human rights body, had catalogued allegations of widespread war crimes committed by the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

Haradinaj was one of the top KLA commanders during the war. A UN tribunal cleared him three times of war crimes charges.

At the time of the war Kosovo was a Serbian province and most KLA members were ethnic Albanians. A bloody Serb crackdown against Kosovo Albanian separatists and civilians led Nato to intervene by bombing Serbia in the spring of 1999.

Kosovo made a unilateral declaration of independence in 2008 and it is recognized by the US and most of the west, but not by Serbia and its allies Russia and China.