Blair's Kosovo triumph turns sour

Hashim Thaci, the prime minister of Kosovo, is facing questions over his role in an organ-trafficking scandal that has shaken the nation and called into question Tony Blair's backing for the Balkan ruler.

 

Switzerland's Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty speaks during the news conference Photo: REUTERS

 

By Tim Judah, Pristina 8:00AM GMT 19 Dec 2010

Dick Marty, the bespectacled and bearded Swiss senator who has been investigating some of the darkest corners of recent European history, doesn't look like a natural crowd-puller.

But in Paris on Thursday, officials and journalists poured into a room on the plush Avenue Kleber to hear him formally present a document which delivered a devastating blow against Europe's newest state.

In a report for the Council of Europe which took two years to compile, he has accused Hashim Thaci, the prime minister of newly independent Kosovo, not only of being a mafia boss, a murderer and a drug dealer – but of having been involved with a group that in 1999 killed prisoners to sell their kidneys.

In Kosovo, which was already reeling from allegations that Mr Thaci's party had indulged in what a senior diplomat called "industrial scale" fraud during last Sunday's elections, the report has been greeted with dismay. Not because of what is contained in it, little of which is really new, but rather because these are allegations which have been made before, remain unproven, and meanwhile sap the credibility of the country which declared independence in 2008.

In 1999 British troops took the high road to Pristina, Kosovo's capital, after a punishing 78 day Nato-led bombardment of the remains of what still then called Yugoslavia.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/kosovo/8211605/Blairs-Kosovo-triumph-turns-sour.html