For A Few Kidneys More

For A Few Kidneys More

December 31, 2010: It has become a Balkan policy with a different wrinkle. Israel is continuing to develop stronger military and political ties with Balkan nations. The Israeli policy definitely irks Turkey, which is the point of it. Turkey and Israel were close allies but Turkey's moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) has broadened its relations with other Muslim countries at Israel's expense. Now Israel is conducting small-scale military training exercises with Greece. It is also working with Bulgaria and Romania. The Israelis once used Turkish air space to train its air force. Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece have air space that Israel now uses for training. Israel is also talking with the Greek Cypriot government on Cyprus.

December 30, 2010: Greek police reported a large bomb exploded near a court building in Athens. No one was killed. However, authorities labeled the incident a terrorist attack. Anarchist and left-wing militant groups are continuing to exploit Greece's fragile economic situation in hopes of igniting a larger revolution. Union members and government pensioners continue to protest the government's economic austerity program.

December 29, 2010: Finland is completing the withdrawal of its peacekeeping contingent in Kosovo. Since 1999 Finland has rotated some 7,000 troops through Kosovo. Finland's Camp Ville was located in the town of Lipljan, Kosovo.

December 25, 2010: Turkey and Macedonia have agreed to a new military assistance program. Turkey will provide financial support to Macedonian defense forces. Over the last decade Turkey has donated equipment to Macedonian forces and provided some training assistance. Balkan politics are of course involved. Greece and Macedonia remain at odds over Macedonia's name. Greece insists on calling Macedonia the FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). Macedonia calls itself the Republic of Macedonia. Greece does not want Macedonia to claim Greek Macedonia.

December 24, 2010: The Turkish government announced that it will conduct military exercises with Afghanistan and Pakistan in March 2011.

A Turkish court ruled against the government's decision to deny promotion to three senior military officers the government claims were involved in a coup plot.

Turkish media reported that Greece will send a representative to a ceremony recognizing the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Air Force. The ceremony will be held in June 2011.

December 22, 2010: The strangest Balkan story of the month have been accusations that Kosovo's prime minister, Hashim Thaci, belongs to an organized crime syndicate that traffics in human organs. Thaci denies the allegations and says he will sue his accusers. Former UN war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte is one of them. The accusations are ugly, in some ways Dracula-esque. The crime syndicate allegedly murdered prisoners then sold their kidneys. Some of the victims may have been Kosovar Serbs who were killed in 1999 at Kosovo Liberation Army camps in Albania.

December 17, 2010: Albanian weapons continue to crop up everywhere in the Balkans. Greek police report that weapons taken from Albanian military depots in the 1990s are now in the hands of Greek criminal gangs and terrorist groups such as the Revolutionary sect. The weapons include AK-47s and Skorpion submachine guns.

December 16, 2010: Turkey has begun to prosecute 196 active-duty and retired military officers accused of participating in planning a coup. The accused include Turkish Air Force, Navy, and Army officers, and some paramilitary gendarme officers as well. The charges center around Operation Sledgehammer, which the military claims was an exercise. The AKP-led government said it was a plan designed to destabilize Turkey so that the military could remove the AKP (a moderate Islamist party) from power. Turkish secularists claim that the AKP intends to turn Turkey from a secular state into an Islamic republic like Iran.

December 14, 2010: The Serbian government said that it is interested in participating in U.S.-Bulgarian military training exercises. The U.S. and Bulgaria conduct regular training exercises in Bulgaria.

December 13, 2010: The final results are in from Moldova's November election and it confirms initial results. The Moldovan parliament remains split. The Communists have 42 sears, the Liberal Democratic Party 32 seats, the Democratic Party 15 seats, and the Liberal party 12 seats. It takes a 61 seat supermajority to elect a president. Count them up: the pro-Europe parties have 59 seats among them. That means the Communists must be included in a coalition government.

December 5, 2010: The Turkish government insists that Israel must apologize for the deaths of nine Turkish people who were killed in May when Israeli commandos intercepted their ship. The ship was attempting to run the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Israel refuses to apologize because it says the passengers on the ship assaulted its soldiers.

Greek security forces conducted a series of raids on suspected guerrilla and terrorist safe houses. Police arrested two people suspected of belonging to the Conspiracy of Fire Cells (a left wing guerrilla-terrorist group, sometimes called The Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire). Police also seized a weapons cache.

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/balkans/articles/20101231.aspx

Afghanistan, Kosovo, Georgia: NATO Quad Backs Terrorism, Despotism

http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/12/30/38345230.html

Voice of Russia
December 30, 2010

Better let the Genie stay in the bottle
Boris Volkhonsky


The British National Archives have declassified a scope of documents relating to the 1980s, the times of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.

The papers are too numerous for all to be mentioned, but what seems to be most interesting is the account how shortly after the Soviet Union started its military operation in Afghanistan, British, American, German and French politicians secretly agreed to render "discreet support for the Afghan guerrilla resistance".

It should be noted that the Mujahideen in Afghanistan were from the very beginning covertly funded by the CIA, and later some factions of the "resistance movement" went on to form the "public enemy No 1" of today, the notorious Al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden himself was at the time one of the prominent figures among the Mujahideen, although little is known about his actual military successes.

The meeting disclosed in the declassified papers took place in Paris on January 15, 1980, less than three weeks after the Soviet troops entered Afghanistan. The participants included the British Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong, the US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and government representatives from France and West Germany.

Among the measures agreed to by the western powers was the maintenance of "refugee" camps in Pakistan that served as bases for insurgents, and supply of certain equipment including surface-to-air missiles.

The training and supply of equipment went on till the Soviet troops' withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989. What resulted from this massive military support for the insurgents is all-too-well known. The Al-Qaeda militants, trained and equipped by the West, turned their arms against their former patrons. And now the West, most notably the US, is plunged into the worst war since World War II with no definite guarantee of ultimate victory.

This could be an isolated incident, but the West seems to keep on falling into the same trap over and over again.

When Chechen separatists demanded secession from Russia in the mid-1990s and Russia was compelled to take military measures, how much talk there was on the alleged "violations of human rights" and "disproportionate use of force" Thousands of Chechen "refugees" found a safe haven in Western Europe. And it was only much later that the West found out that a huge number of those "political refugees" it had welcomed open-heartedly were in fact ordinary criminals who continued their illegal activity in the West.

The same can be said about the Balkans. How much sympathy was shown towards the Kosovo separatists! It was the West, and namely the four countries that back in 1980 agreed to support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, who were first to recognize Kosovo's unilaterally proclaimed independence in 2008. In less than three years the Council of Europe accused Kosovo Premier Hashim Thaci of being the head of a criminal ring involved in illegal trafficking of human organs back in the 1990s.

These are just a few of the many examples of when the West is eager to support some dubious public figures with only aim in mind – that is, to create a counter-balance, first against the Soviet Union and now Russia. But at the end of the day, the forces initially conceived as a counter-balance seem to backfire on their creators.

Now, the West is turning a blind eye to the crimes against humanity and open aggression against its neighbors committed by its new darling, the Georgian leader Mikhail Saakashvili. As for him personally, the West may feel safe – Saakashvili is quite happy with his status of a puppet in the West's hands which is the only guarantee for him to stay in power domestically. But this power is not to last long, and who knows what reactive force will eventually replace him in Georgia, and what targets it will choose in the future.

The lessons of the past are not to be forgotten, and the story of former allies turned primary enemies as was the case with Mujahideen who later formed Al-Qaeda is a good reminder.

__._,_.___

US, Europe concealed organ trafficking by Kosovo Liberation Army

US, Europe concealed organ trafficking by Kosovo Liberation Army

By Tony Robson
29 December 2010

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) has been implicated in war crimes involving torture and the illicit trade in human organs, including those removed from Serb civilians taken captive and killed during and after NATO's 1999 war against Yugoslavia.

The current prime minister of Kosovo and former KLA commander, Hashim Thaci, is identified as the leading figure within a criminal network involved in drug trafficking as well as the trade in human organs. Thaci and other commanders within the "Drenica group" faction of the KLA exercised command control over detention facilities based in neighbouring Albania and determined the fate of those held captive.

A two-year inquiry conducted by the Council of Europe (CoE), the results of which were published earlier this month by the CoE rapporteur Dick Marty, provides details showing that the human organ trade has continued to the present day, with the KLA running Kosovo as a criminal fiefdom.

The CoE oversees the European Court on Human Rights.

The Medicus clinic in the Kosovan capital, Pristina, is the subject of criminal proceedings over the trade in human organs. It has been closed down by EULEX (the European Union rule of law mission), which took over aspects of law enforcement from UNMIK (the United Nations Mission in Kosovo) in 2008. A number of individuals, including doctors and a former health ministry official, have been charged with being part of an international criminal network. Health law in Kosovo forbids organ transplantation, but the health secretary granted the centre a licence.

The KLA brought people into Kosovo for the purpose of removing and selling their organs, European Union prosecutor Jonathan Ratel said in the indictment. Some victims came from countries such as Moldova, Turkey and Russia. They were promised up to US$20,000 (€14,500), but the organ recipients were required to pay between US$110,000 and US$137,000 (€80,000 to €100,000).

In his report, Marty did not pull his punches with regard to the wealth of information long in the possession of Western intelligence services regarding Thaci's criminal activities. He cited records from five countries—Germany, Britain, Italy, Greece and the United States—showing that they all knew of the KLA's activities and helped conceal them.

Point 70 of the report states: "Thaci and these other 'Drenica Group' members are consistently named as 'key players' in the intelligence reports on Kosovo's mafia-like structures of organised crime. I have examined these diverse, voluminous reports with consternation and a sense of moral outrage."

Other sources cited in the report include witness testimony from former KLA soldiers and auxiliaries involved in transporting detainees as well as from some of those held captive.

The CoE inquiry was undertaken to follow up allegations of the KLA's involvement in human organ trafficking that were first made public in early 2008. These were contained in the memoirs, entitled The Hunt, of Carla Del Ponte, the outgoing chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). She chose to make these revelations only after she was replaced as chief prosecutor and Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence was endorsed by the US and other European powers.

Del Ponte's claims centred on a suspected detention facility in Rripe, near Burrel in central Albania. Referred to as the "Yellow House," it was identified as a location where Serb civilians abducted from Kosovo were taken and killed and their organs removed for sale abroad.

One of the most damning aspects of Marty's report is its revelation that the ICTY and UNMIK, which conducted an initial investigation of the "Yellow House" in 2004 and found bloodstains in the main room, later destroyed the physical samples retrieved from the site. The report states, "We must permit ourselves to express astonishment that such a step was taken."

Large numbers of people listed as missing during and directly after the 1999 Kosovo conflict are still unaccounted for. There remain 1,869 missing persons, according to the International Red Cross. Two thirds of these are Kosovan Albanians. Of this total, 470 disappeared after NATO troops entered the province on June 12, 1999. Of these, 95 are Kosovan Albanians and 375 are non-Albanian, mainly Serbs.

At this time, the KLA, backed by NATO, was able to exercise control over a large amount of territory. The proportion of those who went missing after NATO entered Kosovo may, in fact, be even higher. The law on compensation for "martyrs" excludes those who died after the June 12, 1999, cut-off point.

A major reason for the lack of progress in tracing missing persons has been obstruction by the authorities in Kosovo and Albania. While Serbia has been obliged to cooperate with the ICTY in exhuming suspected sites of mass graves, the same pressure has not been exerted on the governments in Tirana and Pristina.

Albania has continued to refuse to cooperate with the investigations, even though it served as the launch pad for the KLA's terrorist attacks and was the site of all of its detention centres.

The report describes the claim by the government of Albania that no bodies of deceased persons from the Kosovo conflict have been buried in the country as "manifestly untrue." It cites records obtained from a local cemetery in Kukes, the site of one of the secret detention facilities, including a five-page document entitled "List of deceased immigrants from Kosovo, 28 March 1999-17 June 1999."

One of those named is Anton Bisaku, identified as a detainee at the Kukes facility. His killing is cited in an indictment of a KLA operative issued in August of this year. The indictment states that Bisaku was "killed as a result of gunfire directed at him during a session of inhuman treatment, beating and torture which occurred on or about 4 June 1999."

The report divides the detention facilities operated by the KLA into two categories—war-time and post-conflict. It identifies three detention facilities operational during the conflict between April and June 1999, which also served as military bases. Included is the facility at Kukes.

The inquiry was informed that the Albanian national intelligence apparatus participated in some of the interrogations of prisoners at these facilities. Those detained were abducted at the border by the KLA from the thousands of refugees fleeing the conflict. Detainees were held in makeshift prison cells without food or water.

The Office of Special Prosecutor took statements from 10 individuals between 2009 and 2010 who had been incarcerated and subjected to beatings.

The report explains that after the cessation of the conflict, the KLA operated a separate network of makeshift detention centres, which were used primarily for the gruesome practice of trafficking in human organs. Most of the victims were Serb civilians abducted from southern Kosovo, but they also included Kosovan Albanians. There are no known survivors in this category.

According to testimony from former KLA soldiers and auxiliaries, prisoners were transported in unmarked trucks and vans, which were also used for the trafficking of women for the sex trade. These operations spanned the period between July 1999 and August 2000.

The report states that the Yellow House served as a "way station for those taken captive for organ trafficking." It continues: "The end point was the detention centre in Fushe–Kruje, a two-storey farmhouse set back from main roads but in close proximity to Tirana Airport, where the organs could be shipped abroad."

There are substantial "elements of proof" that a small number of captives were killed at the Yellow House, including witness accounts from people who saw the burial, disinterment, movement and reburial of captives' corpses. Captives were killed by a gunshot to the head before the operation to remove one or more organs took place. The principal trade was in kidneys.

The report offers certain rationalisations for the cover-up by NATO and the United Nations of these crimes, attributing it to a dearth of UN personnel and a misguided attempt to achieve short-term stability. In fact, the report exposes the criminal character of the US-NATO war against Yugoslavia and the utterly cynical nature of the propaganda campaign waged to justify it. The air war was presented as a humanitarian campaign against genocide and rape, with the Serbs cast as the villains and the KLA as freedom fighters defending the Albanian Kosovar population.

The CIA and European intelligence agencies backed the KLA and used it as a cat's paw to facilitate the plans of the US, using NATO as its military umbrella, to complete the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and undermine Serbia, a long-time ally of Russia.

At the Rambouillet talks directly before the US-NATO declaration of war on Yugoslavia, the KLA leader, Hashim Thaci, was inserted at the head of the Kosovo negotiating team by the US, which had delisted the KLA as a terrorist group in 1998. Through Thaci, Yugoslavia was served a diktat to accept the full and unconditional surrender of its sovereignty to NATO.

Allegations of genocide were ramped up in order to justify the 78-day aerial bombardment by NATO, during which 15,000 bombs and precision guided missiles were rained down on Yugoslavia, killing an estimated 1,200 to 2,000 civilians. This was the context in which the KLA was able to carry out its own atrocities as America's chosen proxy and ally.

The UN provided the rubber stamp for this act of military aggression and a multinational fig leaf for the establishment of a NATO protectorate. It worked with Washington, Bonn and London to whitewash the crimes of the KLA. The US and the major European powers recognised Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008, under the rule of a clique of gangsters, drug pushers and murderers.

The CoE report points to the fact that Washington has been able to carve out a permanent military presence in Kosovo as part of its broader geo-political interests. It states: "The United States of America has an Embassy endowed with impressive resources and a military base, Camp Bondsteel, of a scale and significance that clearly transcends regional consideration.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/koso-d29.shtml

 

http://www.balkanstudies.org/articles/demolition-yugoslav-tribunal

The Demolition of the Yugoslav Tribunal

Edward S. Herman

A review of  Germinal Chivikov's book Srebrenica: The Star Witness (orig. Srebrenica: Der Kronzeuge, 2009, transl. by John Laughland) - "a devastating indictment of  the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)."

The book shows that the Tribunal "does not behave according to the traditions of the rule of law"--it is a political rather than judicial institution, and has played this political role well. It is not the first work to effectively assail the Tribunal—Laughland's own book Travesty (Pluto: 2006), and Michael Mandel's How America Gets Away With Murder (Pluto: 2004) are powerful critiques. But Civikov's book is unique in its intensive and very effective focus on a single witness, Drazen Erdemovic, and the ICTY's prosecutors and judges handling of that witness. Erdemovic was the prosecution's "star witness," the only one in the trials of various Serb military and political figures to have claimed actual participation in a massacre of Bosnian Muslim prisoners. It is therefore of  great interest and importance that Civikov is able to show very convincingly that this key witness was a charlatan, fraud, and mercenary, and that the ICTY's prosecutors and judges effectively conspired to allow this witness's extremely dubious and contradictory claims to be accepted without verification or  honest challenge.  

Erdemovic was a member of a Bosnian Serb military unit, the "10^th Sabotage Unit," an eight-man team of which he claimed shot to death 1,200 Bosnian Muslim prisoners at Branjevo Farm north of Srebrenica in Bosnia on July 16, 1995. Erdemovic confessed to  having personally killed 70-100 prisoners. He was initially arrested by Yugoslav authorities on March 3, 1996, and quickly indicted, but was turned over to the ICTY at pressing U.S. and ICTY official request on March 30, 1996, supposedly temporarily, but in fact, permanently. He was himself eventually tried, convicted, and served three and a half years in prison for his crimes. This was a rather short term for an acknowledged killer of 70-100 prisoners, but longer than he had anticipated when he agreed to testify for the ICTY—he had expected complete immunity, as he told Le Figaro reporter Renaud Girard ("Bosnia: Confession of a War Criminal, " Le Figaro, March 8, 1996).  He claimed to have an agreement with the ICTY whereby "in return for his evidence he will be allowed to settle in a Western country with his family. He will enter the box as a witness, not as an accused, and will thus escape all punishment." But his earlier arrest, indictment and publicity in Yugoslavia may have made some prison term necessary for the ICTY's credibility. He ended up after his prison term in an unknown location as a "protected witness" of the ICTY. But even before his own sentencing he had begun his role as star witness in the ICTY's (and U.S. and NATO's) trials of accused Serbs. He appeared in five such trials, and from beginning to end was taken as a truth-teller by prosecutors, judges, and the mainstream media. 

 

One of the most remarkable and revealing features of the Erdemovic case is that although he named seven individuals who did the killing with him, and two superiors in the chain of command who ordered or failed to stop the crime, not one of these was ever brought into an ICTY court either as an accused killer or to confirm any of Erdemovic's claims. These co-killers have lived quietly, within easy reach of  ICTY jurisdiction, but untroubled by that institution and any demands seemingly imposed by a rule of  law.  The commander of his unit, Milorad Pelemis, who Erdemovic claimed had given the order to kill, made it clear in an interview published in a Belgrade newspaper in November 2005, that the Hague investigators have never questioned him. He had never gone into hiding, but has lived  undisturbed with his wife and children in Belgrade. Nor have ICTY investigators bothered with Brano Gojkovic, a private in the killer team who Erdemovic claimed was somehow in immediate command of  the unit (a point never explained by him or prosecutors or judges). Civikov points out that only once did the judges in any of the five trials in which the star witness testified ask the prosecutors whether they were investigating these other killers. The prosecutors assured the judges in 1996 that the others were being investigated, but 14 years later the Office of the Prosecutor had not questioned one of them. And from 1996 onward the judges never came back to the subject. 

 

As these seven were killers of many hundreds in Erdemovic's version, and the prosecutors and judges took Erdemovic's version as true, why were these killers left untouched? One thing  immediately clear is that the ICTY was not in the business of serving impartial justice even to the point of  arresting and trying wholesale killers of Bosnian Muslims in a case the ICTY itself called "genocide." But ignoring the co-perpetrators in this case strongly suggests that the prosecutors and judges were engaged in a political project—protecting a witness who would say what the ICTY wanted said, and refusing to allow any contesting evidence or cross-examination that would discredit the star witness. Civikov points out that the only time Erdemovic was subject to serious cross-examination was when he was questioned by Milosevic himself during the marathon Milosevic trial. And Civikov shows well that the ICTY presiding judge in that case, Richard May, went to great pains to stop Milosevic whenever his questions penetrated too deeply into the area of Erdemovic's connections or credibility.  

 

In April 2004, a Bosnian Croat, Marko Boskic, was arrested in Peabody, Massachusetts, for having caused a hit-and-run car crash while drunk. It was soon discovered that Boskic was one of the members of  Erdemovic's killer team at Branjevo Farm But journalists at the ICTY soon discovered that the Tribunal did not intend to ask for the extradition of this accused and confessed murderer. A spokesman for the Office of the Prosecutor stated on August 2004 that the prosecutor was not applying  for the extradition  of Boskic because it was obligated to concentrate on "the big fish."  So killing hundreds, and being part of a "joint criminal enterprise" murdering 1,200, does not yield big enough fish for the ICTY. In fact, this is a major lie as dozens of cases have been brought against Serbs for small-scale killings or even just beatings, and the ICTY has thrived on little fish for many years. In fact, the first case ever brought by the ICTY was against one Dusko Tadic in 1996, who was charged with a dozen killings, all dismissed for lack of evidence, leaving him guilty of no killings whatsoever, but only of  persecution and beatings, for which he was given a 20 year sentence. A number of other Serbs were given prison sentences, not for killing people, but for beatings or passivity in not exercising authority to constrain underlings (e.g., Dragolic Prcac, 5 years; Milojica Kos, 6 years, Mlado Radic, 20 years, among others). The dossier of  ICTY prosecution of little (Serb) fish is large. 

 

Thus, the Boskic case does not fall into any little-fish-disinterest category. Rather, it is perfectly consistent with the failure to bring to court Pelermis or any of the seven known co-perpetrators of  the massacre. Civikov's very plausible hypothesis is that this is another manifestation of  star witness protection—the ICTY does not want his convenient testimony to be challenged. Little fish like Boskic might gum up a political project. Civikov contrasts the extremely alert and aggressive actions of  the ICTY and U.S. authorities in getting Erdemovic transferred to the Hague in March 1996 with this remarkable reluctance to even question Erdemovic's fellow killers. He was seen quickly as a man who might make proper connections to enemy targets, so no holds were barred then, or later.. 

 

Another remarkable feature of  the handling of Erdemovic is his use as a star witness immediately after he had been declared mentally impaired and before his own sentencing. Following his first confession of  guilt on May 31, 1996, on June 27, 1996 Erdemovic was declared by his trial judges to be unfit for questioning in his own sentencing hearing because psychiatrists found him to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, the doctors urging a pre-hearing review of  his mental condition in six to nine months time. But on July 5^th, little more than a week after this medical report, Erdemovic was put forward as the star witness in a pre-trial hearing to publicize the current allegations against Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.  

 

This was a remarkable spectacle. The two accused had not been apprehended, so they were not present to defend themselves, nor were their attorneys. It was only the prosecutors and ICTY judges in action. The same judges who had just declared him mentally unfit for questioning in his own hearing now pushed him forward without any further medical examination. The presiding judge Claude Jorda explained that Erdemovic's own trial and sentencing were postponed "because we have asked for some further medical information," which suppresses the fact that the judgment of  the doctors was that Erdemovic was "unfit to be questioned," presumably not just in his own trial. But Jorda's service to the political project runs deeper—he not only allows the Prosecutor to put on the stand a just-declared medically unfit person, and does this before this self-admitted murderer is sentenced, he even assures Erdemovic that his evidence as a witness for the prosecution "might be taken into consideration."  It was mainly on the basis of  unverified and unchallenged (and unchallengeable) testimony of  this sick man and mass killer still facing his own trial and sentencing, that arrest warrants were issued for Karadzic and Mladic.  

 

What Erdemovic was prepared to do in service to the ICTY program was to help build the case that there was a line of command between himself and his co-murderers  at Branjevo Farm and the Bosnian Serb high command, i.e., Karadzic and Mladic, and hopefully eventually Milosevic. He did this poorly, never showing those leaders' involvement in or knowledge of  this killing expedition, but mainly just asserting that its local commanders were under the authority of  central Bosnian Serb headquarters. He claimed that immediate authority over the killing operation was held by Brano Gojkovic, a private in a team that also included a Lieutenant, and he mentions a mysterious and unnamed Lieutenant Colonel who took the unit to the killing site and then left. Erdemovic is not consistent on whether Pelermis ordered the killing or this unnamed Lieutenant Colonel. He also asserts that Colonel Petar Salpura, an intelligence officer of the Bosnian Serb army had direct command responsibility for the massacre.  He vacillates on Gojkovic's power, sometimes making him "commander" with great authority, sometimes merely serving as an intermediary. Erdemovic himself was allegedly without authority and coerced into killing, but Civikov makes a very good case that  at that time Erdemovic was a sergeant, and that he had joined the team voluntarily. But he and a Lieutenant Franc Kos were supposedly bossed by private Gojkovic in this killing enterprise. This line of command is very messy!  

 

Civikov shows that the prosecution and judges strove mightily and successfully to prevent any challenges to Erdemovic's implausible and contradictory, and partly disprovable, claims about the line of command. This includes, importantly, their refusal to call before the court even one of those "little fish" co-murderers and higher commanders who might have clarified the facts. Instead of calling to the stand his boss, Lieutenant Pelermis, or Pelermis's boss, Colonel Petar Salpura, the ICTY is happy to stop with "a psychologically disturbed and apparently demoted sergeant," who makes the ties that this court is pursuing with undue diligence. 

 

Erdemovic and a number of his colleagues in the .10th Sabotage Unit were clearly mercenaries, and after the ending of the Balkan wars served the French in Africa. Erdemovic himself had worked for a time with the Bosnian Muslim army, then with the Croatians, and then with the Bosnian Serbs. He was trained as a locksmith, but never managed to work that trade. He found military service, and eventually serving as a star (and protected) witness, more profitable, but he regularly claimed before the Tribunal that he was a good man, hated war, was coerced into participating in the Branjevo Farm mass murder, and confessed to his crimes there because he was a man of conscience. The ICTY judges believed him, never saw him as a mercenary despite his performing military service for all three parties in the Bosnian warfare, and the ICTY took pains to exclude any witnesses from testifying who would put him in a bad light. They could not avoid several awkward witnesses in other trials: Colonel Salpura, a defence witness in the Blagovic and Jokic trials, denied authority over  the 10^th Sabotage Unit, and gave clear evidence that the killer team was on holiday leave on July 16, 1995; Dragan Todorovic, a witness for the prosecution in the Popovic case and officer of the Drina Corp of the Bosnian Serb army, also testified that the killer unit was on leave, that Lieutenant Kos, not private Gojkovic, signed out for the arms to be used by the unit, and that Erdemovic volunteered to be a member of that unit, and was not coerced into joining it. 

 

Except for these awkward witnesses, the prosecutors and judges were able to keep out of the court record the fact that the Erdemovic unit that went to the Branjevo Farm did so during a ten-day vacation leave, not during regular service hours. Erdemovic himself never mentioned this fact. They also successfully buried the fact that, according to an early interview with Erdemovic, he claimed that his colleagues received a large sum of gold, perhaps 12 kilos, for some kind of service rendered. This payment, which suggests mercenary service, and not payment by the Bosnian Serb army, was never explored by prosecutors or judges in any of the trials in which Erdemovic participated, and was only raised by Milosevic, who, as noted, was harshly limited in his questioning by Judge Richard May. The facts that  members of the killing group were on leave on July 16, 1995, and later findings of  a French secret service connection of  Pelemis and several of his colleagues, and the subsequent recruitment of  soldiers from the 10^th Sabotage Unit for mercenary service in Zaire to fight in the war there on the side of Mobutu, are suggestive. So is the fact that this mass murder of prisoners was extremely unhelpful to the Bosnian Serb cause, but worked out very well for the NATO powers. And it is clear why the ICTY, in service to NATO, would refuse to explore these questions and linkages.  

 

The protection of  Erdemovic and the notable ICTY-NATO success in getting his problematic testimony accepted as truth in five separate trials of Serbs owes much to the media, which in the United States and Britain raised no questions and swallowed the party line intact (for a  case study, see Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Marlise Simons on the Yugoslavia Tribunal: A Study in Total Propaganda Service,"  ZNet, 2004). This applied not just to the mainstream media but to the supposedly left and dissident media, with only Z Magazine in the United States publishing reviews of  serious critical works dealing with the ICTY (notably, Mandel, Laughland and Johnstone). 

 

Germinal Civikov points out that killing 1,200 people in five hours, ten at a batch, as claimed by Erdemovic, would allow under three minutes for each batch, including getting them out of the buses, taking them to the shooting zone, shooting them, making sure of  their being dead, and disposing of  the bodies. There were also claimed interludes of  drinking, arguing, and cavorting. Why did the prosecutors, judges and media never address this issue of timing? Why did the prosecutor sometimes speak of only "hundreds" killed at the Branjevo Farm? Could it be related to the fact that fewer than 200 bodies were recovered from the site, and no aerial photos were ever produced that showed body removal or reburial? Civikov says, "So something between 100 and 900? This lack of knowledge, incidentally, will not prevent the judges, several months later, from putting the figure of 1,200 in their judgment after all—mind you without any proof, then or now, apart from the accused's own claim." Once again, why did they not call any other perpetrator to discuss numbers? 

 

One would love to know what the ICTY prosecutors and judges said behind the scenes in confronting Erdemovic's numbers, lines of authority, role, lies and contradictions.  Perhaps the ICTY insiders did discuss them, but they and the media have played dumb. A Wikileaks was, and still is today, desperately needed to deal with the Erdemovic/ICTY travesty—and in fact, a Wikileaks on the ICTY would wreak havoc in the trial of Karadzic and pursuit of Mladic. So will Civikov's Srebrenica: The Star Witness if it gets the exposure that it deserves.

 

 

Kosovo: Europe's Mafia State

 

Tom Burghardt

среда, 22. децембар 2010.

(Global Research, December 22, 2010) Kosovo: Europe's Mafia State. Hub of the EU-NATO Drug Trail Kosovo's Prime Minister Accused of Running Human Organ, Drug Trafficking Cartel In another grim milestone for the United States and NATO, the Council of Europe (COE) released an explosive report last week, "Inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking in human organs in Kosovo." The report charged that former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) boss and current Prime Minister, Hashim Thaçi, "is the head of a 'mafia-like' Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe," The Guardian disclosed. According to a draft resolution unanimously approved December 16 in Paris, the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights found compelling evidence of forced disappearances, organ trafficking, corruption and collusion between criminal gangs and "political circles" in Kosovo who just happen to be close regional allies of the United States. The investigation was launched by Dick Marty, the Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe (PACE) special rapporteur for human rights who had conducted an exhaustive 2007 probe into CIA "black fights" in Europe. The PACE investigation gathered steam after allegations were published by former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Carla Del Ponte in her 2008 memoir. After it's publication, Ms. Del Ponte was bundled off to Argentina by the Swiss government as her nation's ambassador. Once there, the former darling of the United States who specialized in doling out victor's "justice" to the losers of the Balkan wars, was conveniently silenced. A series of damning reports by the Center for Investigative Journalism (CIR), the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and the BBC, confirmed Del Ponte's allegations and spurred the Council to act. Reporting for the BBC, investigative journalist Michael Montgomery learned that political opponents of the KLA and Serb prisoners of war "simply vanished without a trace" into a secret prison "in the Albanian border town of Kukes." According to sources who feared for their lives, including former KLA guerrillas, the BBC revealed that disappeared civilians "were Serbs and Roma seized by KLA soldiers and were being hidden away from Nato troops. The source believes the captives were sent across the border to Albania and killed." In an uncanny echo of Nazi practices during the period of the Third Reich, The New York Times reported that "captives" were "'filtered' for their suitability as donors, based on sex, age, health conditions and ethnic origin. "We heard numerous references to captives' not merely having been handed over, but also having been 'bought' and 'sold,'" the special rapporteur told the Times. "Some of the guards told investigators," the Times reports, "that a few captives understood what was about to happen and 'pleaded with their captors to be spared the fate of being chopped into pieces'." Mercy was in short supply however, behind KLA lines. The report states: "As and when the transplant surgeons were confirmed to be in position and ready to operate, the captives were brought out of the 'safe house' individually, summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic." Once organs were removed from the victims they were auctioned off to the highest bidder and sold by a global trafficking ring still operating today. The former prosecutor further alleged, The Guardian reported, that "she had been prevented from investigating senior KLA officials" who she claimed had "smuggled captive Serbs across the border into Albania, where their organs were harvested." In a classic case of covering-up the crimes of low-level thugs to protect more powerful criminals, Del Ponte has charged that forensic evidence gathered by ICTY investigators at one of the northern Albania death houses was destroyed at The Hague. International Network This brisk underground trade didn't end in 1999 however, when the break-away Serb province was occupied by NATO troops; on the contrary, operations expanded and grew even more profitable as Kosovo devolved into a protectorate of the United States. In fact, a trial underway in Pristina has revealed that "desperate Russians, Moldovans, Kazakhs and Turks were lured into the capital 'with the false promise of payments' for their kidneys," The Guardian reported. It was a "growth industry" that fed on human misery. According to The Guardian, recipients "paid up to €90,000 (£76,400) for the black-market kidneys [and] included patients from Canada, Germany, Poland and Israel," EU prosecutor Jonathan Ratel told the British paper. "Donors" however, were left holding the bag, lucky to escape with their lives. At the center of the scandal is the Medicus clinic. Located some six miles from downtown Pristina, Medicus was allegedly founded by university hospital urologist Dr Lutfi Dervishi, and a former permanent secretary of health, prosecutors claim, provided the clinic with a false license to operate. Two of the accused, The Guardian revealed, "are fugitives wanted by Interpol: Moshe Harel, an Israeli said to have matched donors with recipients, and Yusuf Sonmez, perhaps the world's most renowned organ trafficker." Prosecutors believe that Harel and Sonmez are the brains behind Medicus and that Shaip Muja, a former KLA "medical commander" who was based in Albania, may have overseen operations at the "clinic." Muja remains a close confidante of Thaçi's and, in an macabre twist, he is currently "a political adviser in the office of the prime minister, with responsibility for health," The Guardian reports. Investigators averred they had "uncovered numerous convergent indications of Muja's central role [in] international networks, comprising human traffickers, brokers of illicit surgical procedures, and other perpetrators of organised crime." Besides lining the pockets of Albanian, Israeli and Turkish criminals who ran the grisly trafficking ring, whose interests might also be served in covering-up these horrific crimes? A Gangster State, but which One? The veil of secrecy surrounding KLA atrocities could not have been as complete as it was without the intervention of powerful actors, particularly amongst political and military elites in Germany and the United States who had conspired with local gangsters, rebranded as "freedom fighters," during the break-up of Yugoslavia. As in Albania years before NATO's Kosovo adventure, organized criminal activities and "the trade in narcotics and weapons [were] allowed to prosper," Michel Chossudovsky wrote, because "the West had turned a blind eye." These extensive deliveries of weapons were tacitly permitted by the Western powers on geopolitical grounds: both Washington and Bonn had favoured (although not officially) the idea of a 'Greater Albania' encompassing Albania, Kosovo and parts of Macedonia. Not surprisingly, there was a 'deafening silence' on the part of the international media regarding the Kosovo arms-drugs trade. ("The Criminalization of Albania," in Masters of the Universe? NATO's Balkan Crusade, ed. Tariq Ali, London: Verso, 2000, pp. 299-300) The consequences of this "deafening silence" remain today. Both in terms of the misery and impoverishment imposed on Kosovo's citizens by the looting of their social property, particularly the wholesale privatization of its mineral wealth which IMF economic "reforms" had spawned, and in the political cover bestowed upon Pristina's gangster regime by the United States. In the intervening years NATO's "blind eye" has morphed into something more sinister: outright complicity with their Balkan protégés. Virtually charging the ICTY with knuckling under to political pressure from the Americans, the PACE report states that "the ICTY, which had started to conduct an initial examination on the spot to establish the existence of traces of possible organ trafficking, dropped the investigation." "The elements of proof taken in Rripe, in Albania" during that initial inquiry investigators wrote, "have been destroyed and cannot therefore be used for more detailed analyses. No subsequent investigation has been carried out into a case nevertheless considered sufficiently serious by the former ICTY Prosecutor for her to see the need to bring it to public attention through her book." This is hardly surprising, considering that the ICTY was created at the insistence of the Clinton administration precisely as a retributive hammer to punish official enemies of the U.S. Hailed as an objective body by media enablers of America's imperial project, with few exceptions, while it relentlessly hunted down alleged Serbian war criminals--the losers in the decade-long conflagration--it studiously ignored proxy forces, including the KLA, under the operational control of German and American intelligence agencies. The report averred that human organ trafficking was only a part of a larger web of crime and corruption, and that murder, trafficking in women, control over global narcotics distribution and money laundering networks were standard operating procedure for Thaçi and other members of the "Drenica group," the black widows at the center of the KLA spiders' web. For his part, Thaçi has called the PACE report "libelous" and the Kosovo government has repudiated the Council's findings claiming that the charges "were not based on facts and were construed to damage the image of Kosovo and the war of the Kosovo Liberation Army." While one can easily dismiss prevarications from Kosovo's government, the White House role in covering-up the crimes of their client regime should have provoked a major scandal. That it didn't only reveals the depths of Washington's own venal self-interest in preventing this sordid affair from gaining traction. In all likelihood fully-apprised of the Council of Europe's investigation through any number of American-friendly moles implanted in European institutions as WikiLeaks Cablegate files have revealed, last summer Thaçi met with U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden at the White House. Shamelessly, Biden "reaffirmed the United States' full support for an independent, democratic, whole, and multi-ethnic Kosovo," and "reiterated the United States' firm support for Kosovo's sovereignty and territorial integrity," according to a White House press release. Indeed, the vice president "welcomed the progress that Kosovo's government has made in carrying out essential reforms, including steps to strengthen the rule of law." An all too predictable pattern when one considers the lawless nature of the regime in Washington. The Heroin Trail As I reported more than two years ago in "Welcome to Kosovo! The World's Newest Narco State," the KLA served as the militarized vanguard for the Albanian mafia whose "15 Families" control virtually every facet of the Balkan heroin trade. Albanian traffickers ship heroin originating exclusively from Central Asia's Golden Crescent. At one end lies America's drug outpost in Afghanistan where poppy is harvested for processing and transshipment through Iran and Turkey; as morphine base it is then refined into "product" for worldwide consumption. From there it passes into the hands of the Albanian syndicates who control the Balkan Route. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported back in 1999, "Kosovars were the acknowledged masters of the trade, credited with shoving aside the Turkish gangs that had long dominated narcotics trafficking along the Balkan Route, and effectively directing the ethnic Albanian network." As the murdered investigative journalist Peter Klebnikov reported in 2000 for Mother Jones, as the U.S.-sponsored war in Kosovo heated up, "the drug traffickers began supplying the KLA with weapons procured from Eastern European and Italian crime groups in exchange for heroin. The 15 Families also lent their private armies to fight alongside the KLA. Clad in new Swiss uniforms and equipped with modern weaponry, these troops stood out among the ragtag irregulars of the KLA. In all, this was a formidable aid package." Despite billions of dollars spent on failed interdiction efforts, these patterns persist today as more than 106 metric tons of heroin flow into Europe. So alarmed has the Russian government become over the flood of heroin penetrating their borders from Central Asian and the Balkan outposts that some officials have likened it to American "narco-aggression" and a new "opium war, researcher Peter Dale Scott reported. Scott avers: "These provinces" in Afghanistan, "support the past and present CIA assets in the Karzai regime (headed by Hamid Karzai, a former CIA asset), including the president's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, an active CIA asset, and Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former CIA asset. In effect America has allied itself with one drug faction in Afghanistan against another." Much the same can be said for CIA assets in Pristina. As the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) published in their 2010 World Drug Report: Once heroin leaves Turkish territory, interception efficiency drops significantly. In the Balkans, relatively little heroin is seized, suggesting that the route is exceedingly well organized and lubricated with corruption. ... Another notable feature of the Balkan route is that some important networks have clan-based and hierarchically organized structures. Albanian groups in particular have such structures, making them particularly hard to infiltrate. This partially explains their continued involvement in several European heroin markets. Albanian networks continue to be particularly visible in Greece, Italy and Switzerland. Italy is one of the most important heroin markets in Europe, and frequently identified as a base of operation for Balkan groups who exploit the local diaspora. According to WCO seizure statistics, Albanians made up the single largest group (32%) of all arrestees for heroin trafficking in Italy between 2000 and 2008. The next identified group was Turks followed by Italians and citizens of Balkan countries (Bulgaria, Kosovo/Serbia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and to some extent Greece). A number of Pakistani and Nigerian traffickers were arrested in Italy as well. As has been documented for decades, U.S. destabilization programs and covert operations rely on far-right provocateurs and drug lords (often interchangeable players) to facilitate the dirty work. Throughout its Balkan campaign the CIA made liberal use of these preexisting narcotics networks to arm the KLA and then provide them with targets. When NATO partners Germany and the U.S. decided to drive a stake through Yugoslavia's heart during the heady days of post-Cold War triumphalism, their geopolitical strategy could not have achieved "success" without the connivance, indeed active partnership forged amongst Yugoslavia's nationalist rivals. As investigative journalist Misha Glenny has shown, Most shocking of all, however, is how the gangsters and politicians fueling war between their peoples were in private cooperating as friends and close business partners. The Croat, Bosnian, Albanian, Macedonian, and Serb moneymen and mobsters were truly thick as thieves. They bought, sold, and exchanged all manner of commodities, knowing that the high levels of personal trust between them were much stronger than the transitory bonds of hysterical nationalism. They fomented this ideology among ordinary folk in essence to mask their own venality. As one commentator described it, the new republics were ruled by "a parastate Cartel which had emerged from political institutions, the ruling Communist Party and its satellites, the military, a variety of police forces, the Mafia, court intellectuals and with the president of the Republic at the center of the spider web... Tribal nationalism was indispensable for the cartel as a means to pacify its subordinates and as a cover for the uninterrupted privatization of the state apparatus. (McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, p. 27) Thaçi and other members of his inner circle, Marty avers, were "commonly identified, and cited in secret intelligence reports," published by the German secret state agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND "as the most dangerous of the KLA's 'criminal bosses'." Trading on American protection to consolidate political power, thus maintaining control over key narcotics smuggling corridors, the special rapporteur writes that "having succeeded in eliminating, or intimidating into silence, the majority of the potential and actual witnesses against them (both enemies and erstwhile allies), using violence, threats, blackmail, and protection rackets," Thaçi's Drenica Group have "exploit[ed] their position in order to accrue personal wealth totally out of proportion with their declared activities." Indeed, multiple reports prepared by the U.S. DEA, FBI, the BND, Italy's SISMI, Britain's MI6 and the Greek EYP intelligence service have stated that Drenica Group members "are consistently named as 'key players' in intelligence reports on Kosovo's mafia-like structures of organised crime." As the Council of Europe and investigative journalists have documented, northern Albania was the site not only of KLA training camps but of secret detention centers where prisoners of war and civilian KLA opponents were executed and their organs surgically removed and sold on the international black market. "The reality is that the most significant operational activities undertaken by members of the KLA--prior to, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the conflict--took place on the territory of Albania, where the Serb security forces were never deployed." The report avers, "It is well established that weapons and ammunition were smuggled into parts of Kosovo, often on horseback, through clandestine, mountainous routes from northern Albania," the site of secret NATO bases, "yet only in the second half of 1998," Marty writes, "through explicit endorsements from Western powers, founded on strong lobbying from the United States, did the KLA secure its pre-eminence in international perception as the vanguard of the Kosovar Albanian liberation struggle." "What is particularly confounding" Marty writes, "is that all of the international community in Kosovo--from the Governments of the United States and other allied Western powers, to the EU-backed justice authorities--undoubtedly possess the same, overwhelming documentation of the full extent of the Drenica Group's crimes, but none seems prepared to react in the face of such a situation and to hold the perpetrators to account." While the special rapporteur's outrage is palpable, the ascension of a political crime family with deep roots in the international drugs trade and other rackets, including the grisly traffic in human organs, far from being an anomalous event conforms precisely to the structural pattern of capitalist rule in the contemporary period. "What we have uncovered" Marty informs us, "is of course not completely unheard-of. The same or similar findings have long been detailed and condemned in reports by key intelligence and police agencies, albeit without having been followed up properly, because the authors' respective political masters have preferred to keep a low profile and say nothing, purportedly for reasons of 'political expediency'. But we must ask what interests could possibly justify such an attitude of disdain for all the values that are invariably invoked in public?" Marty need look no further for an answer to his question than to the "political masters" in Washington, who continue to cover-up not only their own crimes but those of the global mafias who do their bidding. As we have seen throughout the latter half of the 20th century down to the present moment, powerful corporate and financial elites, the military and intelligence agencies and, for lack of a better term, "normal" governmental institutions are suborned by the same crooked players who profit from war and the ensuing chaos it spawns to organize crime, thereby "rationalizing" criminal structures on more favorable terms for those "in the loop." In this regard, the impunity enjoyed up till now by Thaçi and his minions merely reflect the far-greater impunity enjoyed by the American secret state and the powerful actors amongst U.S. elites who have profited from the dirty work allegedly performed by Kosovo's Prime Minister, and others like him, who are counted amongst the most loyal servants of imperial power. Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

http://www.nspm.rs/nspm-in-english/kosovo-europes-mafia-state.html

Еулекс обуставио истрагу о убиству деце у Гораждевцу

Еулекс обуставио истрагу о убиству деце у Гораждевцу

субота, 25 децембар 2010 12:56 ТАНЈУГ

 

Полиција Еулекса обуставила је истрагу о терористичком нападу у којем је 2003. у Гораждевцу код Пећи, на Косову и Метохији, убијено двоје српске деце, а још четворо младих тешко рањено, изјавио је данас Танјугу Богдан Букумирић који је тада задобио седам прострелних рана и једва преживео.
Букумирић је за "затварање" ове истраге управо сазнао из одговора на писмо које је 3. новембра ове године упутио шефу Еулекса Гзавије де Марнаку тражећи да га обавести да ли је било нове истраге о злочину у Гораждевцу и какви су резултати.

У писаном одговору, који је Танјугу предочио Букумирић, а који је потписао шеф Особља Еулекса Томас Мулман, каже се да је "Еулекс полиција спровела поновну истрагу случаја".

"До сада ниједна осумњичена особа није идентификована. Међутим, уколико се појаве додатне релевантне информације, истрага ће бити поново отворена", стоји у одговору.

Мулман притом обавештава Букумирића да, "као интегрални део механизма мисије Еулекс на Косову" делује Одбор за разматрање људских права и да, "као независно тело", има мандат да размотри притужбе било које особе која тврди да је била жртва кршења људских права од стране мисије Еулекса за време спровођења њеног извршног мандата.

Међутим, жртви се одмах скреће пажња да мора имати у виду да "Одбор није правосудно, нити дисциплинско тело и да нема овлашћења да додељује новчану надокнаду".

На обали реке Бистрице код Гораждевца 13. августа 2003. године албански сеператисти пуцали су из шибља, с леђа на децу и младе који су пекли кукуруз проводећи летњи распуст на купању.

Тада су убијени Иван Јововић (19) и Панто Дакић (12), а рањени су Драгана Србљак (13), Марко Богићевић (12) Ђорђе Угреновић (20) и Ђорђе Букумирић, који је тада имао 15 година.

Букумирић се од 2007. у више наврата обраћао шефовима Унмика са захтевом да га обавесте о резултатима истраге.

"Најпре сам добио одговор да је формиран нови тим за истрагу и да се ради на откривању додатних сведока. И све је остало на томе, а пре годину дана из УНМИК-а ме нису ни удостојили одговора", испричао је он и додао је зато поново писао шефу Еулекса де Марнаку.

Он је истакао да је огорчен због тога што му они који би требало да брину о владавини права на КиМ, после седам година, практично поручују да не очекује да ће починиоци злочина бити приведени правди.

Истакавши да се у овом случају "не ради о кршењу људских права, већ о тешком кривичном делу злочина", Букумирић је у изјави Танјугу изразио уверење да је "било довољно релевантних трагова, поготово одмах после напада, који су могли довести до убица и њихових налогодаваца и расветлити позадину овог терористичког акта"

 

http://in4s.net/index.php/magazin/hronika/3715-euleks-obustavio-istragu-o-ubistvu-dece-u-gorazdevcu

Serbia Poll: Life Was Better Under Tito

A poll shows that as many as 81 per cent of Serbians believe they lived best in the former Yugoslavia -"during the time of socialism".

Belgrade

Tanjug

The survey focused on the respondents' views on the transition "from socialism to capitalism", and a clear majority said they trusted social institutions the most during the rule of Yugoslav communist president Josip Broz Tito.
The standard of living during Tito's rule from the Second World War to the 1980s was also assessed as best, whereas the Milosevic decade of the 1990s, and the subsequent decade since the fall of his regime are seen as "more or less the same".

45 percent said they trusted social institutions most under communism with  23 percent chosing the 2001-2003 period when Zoran Djinđic was prime minister. Only 19 per cent selected present-day institutions.

According to the poll coordinator Srecko Mihailovic, "what seems to be most disturbing" in the answers is that 23 per cent of respondents think that Serbia is governed by criminals, 18 per cent believe that the country is run by the president, the government and parliament, the same percentage believe that the country is run by owners of large companies, while 12 per cent think that Serbia is ruled by "the international community".

By saying that life was better in socialism than it is now, the Serbian citizens primarily refer to better economic situation and standard of living, but the majority of them would not go back to that period.

Mihailović said that similar results were obtained in other post-communist countries, as well as in some post-dictatorship regimes, adding that there are various reasons for this.

The poll was conducted by the Center for Social Democratic Studies (CSSD), Friedrich Ebert Stiftung foundation and Center for Free Elections and Democracy (CeSID) in September of this year and it included 1,813 respondents.

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/for-simon-poll-serbians-unsure-who-runs-their-country

Independent (UK): The Human Organs of the Council of Europe: Evidence Please

 

JPM's  response: MacShane cannot name a single witness to the allegations against Serbs or evidence that Milosevic was engaged in the crimes you allege.  Serbia's "plot" to exterminate Albanians, the so-called "Operation Horseshoe (Potkova)", was revealed in the German Parliament as a fraud. The January 1999 "Racak massacre" was as phony as Nazi Germany's 1939  "Radio Sender Gleiwitz" hoax that Hitler uses against Poland. ...  Senator Marty is his own man and his sincerity is not up for question. He believes in what he believes. But a reading of his 19,000 word report throws up one problem. There is not one single name or a single witness to the allegations that Thaci was involved in the harvesting of human organs from murdered victims.  ... ...  Terrible things were done by Serb soldiers and para-militaries in Kosovo once Richard Holbrooke's forceful diplomacy at  Dayton fifteen years ago closed down Milosevic's Serb nationalist passions further north. Visit Kosovan villages and the Muslim cemeteries have dozens of headstone with people born on different dates but all killed on the same day as Serb execution squads went wild.  ... ...  perhaps before the full Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly debate his report in January might he produce just a scintilla of incontrovertible evidence that would justify the lurid headlines he enjoys producing.   [ The West's attack dogs (led off by UK's Dennis MacShane) have been let loose.    Now what? ]   http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2010/12/23/the-human-organs-of-the-council-of-europe-evidence-please/   The Human Organs of the Council of Europe: Evidence Please By Denis MacShane Eagle Eye 23 December 2010  In the midst of the Wikileaks, another story exploded onto front pages around the world which claimed that the present prime minister of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, had been a master-mind criminal involved in the killing of people to extract their kidneys for sale. Not since Pol Pot have quite such lurid statements made about a serving leader of his nation. Thaci was re-elected In December with just 34 per cent of the Kosovan voters supporting him, a little less than David Cameron and a lot more than George W Bush in 2000. No Balkan election is without allegations of voting irregularities. Kosovan political parties are clannish, linked to dubious business interests, and bankrolled in part by the Kosovan diaspora. Kosovan, like Croatian, Montenegran, Albanian, and Macedonian political leaders are regularly accused (often with justice) of diverting money for their own or for party political ends. And since "business" in the Western Balkans is based on cigarette smuggling and sex slave trafficking as much as legal economic activity the politician who cannot be accused of keeping bad company is a rare animal indeed. Thaci is no different.  But Thaci who has been in and out of power for a decade operates as a politician closely supervised by an assortment of UN and EU bodies as well as outside observers and visitors. The report that has caused the stir is not yet adopted or approved by the Council of Europe, merely one of its innumerable sub-committees. It is written by a forceful Swiss-Italian politician-cum- prosecuting lawyer called Dick Marty. He is close to his fellow Italian political lawyer, Carla del Ponte, whose book in Italian made identical allegations to Mr Marty's report. Mr Marty is a member of the Swiss Liberal Party . It is not liberal in the modern English sense but in the 19th century continental sense of supporting  the ideology of an ultra-free market,  protection of private property rights and a small state. Mr Marty's party is the strongest ideological supporter of Switzerland's banking secrecy laws which have indeed, been much used by the Kosovan Diaspora which is strongly present in Switzerland. Mr Marty's report is not a precise judicial document. It contains long rambling enunciations of Western policy as it unfolded in the Kosovo crisis at the end of the 1990s. In this Mr Marty reflects the politicisation of the Council of Europe which ever since it admitted Russia as a member in 1995 had been skilfully used by the Kremlin to advance Russian diplomatic interests. Russia has cultivated allies there in different political blocks. In Britain, the Liberal-Demcratic MP and Council of Europe member, Mike Hancock, has been accused by the Chair of the British All Party Parliamentary Group on Russia of being flagrantly pro-Kremlin  in Council of Europe debates. The British Conservative MPs on the Council of Europe sit in the same group at Vladimir Putin's hand-picked delegation. The Russians, with the support of British Conservative MPs, sought to place a former KGB staffer as president of the Council of Europe in 2008. In short, the Council of Europe is not some disinterested gathering of Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch parliamentarians but a deeply conflicted politicised body where states mobilise to promote support for their current Weltanschauing. A top priority for the Kremlin has been to maximise support for anti-US and anti-Nato positions at the Council of Europe. Russia has sought to cultivate allies to protect Serbia and other Slav or Orthodox states from criticism. Efforts by centrist social democrats from Sweden to promote reconciliation between Serbs and Kosovans have been rebuffed. Terrible things were done by Serb soldiers and para-militaries in Kosovo once Richard Holbrooke's forceful diplomacy at  Dayton fifteen years ago  closed down Milosevic's Serb nationalist passions further north. Visit Kosovan villages and the Muslim cemeteries have dozens of headstone with people born on different dates but all killed on the same day as Serb execution squads went wild. Equally terrible things were done as some Kosovans turned from the two decades-long peaceful and passive resistance under Ibrahim Rugova and instead for a brief but intense 15-18 month period opted for armed resistance, including the assassination, and brutal treatment of collaborators in the style of the French resistance in 1944. Instead of seeking peace and reconciliation there has been a constant effort by the Serb-Russian axis at the Council of Europe to pretend that Kosovo is a criminal gangster breakaway province of Belgrade that one day would return to Serb rule. Discrediting the different Kosovan leaders, nearly all whom took part in one way or another in the resistance struggle against Milosevic which ended with the Blair-Clinton Nato intervention in the summer of 1999, has been a top political priority for Serbs and Russians. Mr Marty together with others hostile to the United States on the Council of Europe has never made any secret of his oppositions to Kosovan independence. He has opposed calls for Kosovo to be given member or even observer  status at the Council of Europe. Now Mr Marty has produced his highly personalised report which is the biggest propaganda coup for revanchist Serbs since the fall of Milosevic. Rapporteurs at the Council of Europe are workaday politicians. There are dozens of such reports each year. Britain's  (Lord) Frank Judd was one such when he was a delegate. He resigned in disgust when his reports on the brutality of Russia forces under Putin in Chechnya were side-lined by the pro-Moscow alliances at the Council. Senator Marty is his own man and his sincerity is not up for question. He believes in what he believes. But a reading of his 19,000 word report throws up one problem. There is not one single name or a single witness to the allegations that Thaci was involved in the harvesting of human organs from murdered victims. That such disgusting practices happened and happen elsewhere in the world is not in doubt. But Marty fails to link Thaci directly to organ harvesting though the lurid title of his report  – "Illicit trafficking in human organs in Kosovo" – is designed to maximise headlines. Senator Marty does all he can to blacken Thaci's name, accusing him of being little more than a criminal who used the crisis of Kosovo chiefly to establish a mafia-style operation. To read this is to require a very great suspension of belief. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovans fled their country as the Serb rage, frustrated that attempts to destroy Croatian and Bosnian identity in the break-up of Yugoslavia had been thwarted, was turned on Kosovo. After all, it had been in Kosovo that Milosevic had made his famous threat "We will beat you" as he unleashed the monster of Serb nationalism at the end of the 1980s. Like IRA, ETA and other armed political movements, the Kosovans were brutal, greedy and used every illegal means to advance their cause. Marty makes much of the fact that Thaci and other young Kosovan resistance leaders who formed the KLA (Kosovan Liberation Army) operated as much in Albania as in Kosovo proper. Well, yes, they did just as the IRA floated between northern Ireland or ETA sought refuge from Spanish police in France. Marty's superficial commentary on how Kosovan'sand the Republic of Ireland or Norwegian resistance fighters in World War 2 used  Sweden for shelter. But Marty is re-writing history as he opts for the Serb world-view which paints all Kosovan resistance as essentially and exclusively criminal. Moreover argues Marty it was "explicit endorsements from Western powers, founded on strong lobbying from the United States" that led to "the pe rception of KLA pre-eminence – largely created by the Americans." Here Marty wears his anti-US heart on his Council of Europe sleeve. Council of Europe parliamentarians who were active in their parliaments in this period will recall rather that the US refused to put any real pressure on the Serbs and their supporters in Russia who constantly blocked and vetoed effective UN action against the mass murder of European Muslims in Kosovo. President Clinton continually baulked at effective military action to stop the bloodshed. Far from the KLA being the creation and creature of the US, it would be more accurate to depict the KLA as waiting helplessly until the world realised that after Srebrenica, Milosevic was willing to oversee a second genocidal assault on secular European Kosovan Muslims who dared defy his bullying. What did happen in the months after the air-assault and then military invasion finally convinced Milosovic to pull out of most of Kosovo was undoubtedly terrible. But Marty is unable to produce one eye-witness who can connect Thaci to the crime of organ harvesting. Marty says that Kosovans have a clan loyalty that forbids them testifying against leaders. But Thaci is just one of a number of competing ex-KLA political leaders. There have been thousands of international investigators, police and lawyers operating in Kosovo since 2000. The Serbs have been unable to produce any victims or families of people who were killed and then had their kidneys extracted. According to the BBC legal experts from the EU operating in Kosovo cannot substantiate Marty's allegations. Senator Marty says he has read the many denunciations of Thaci with "consternation and a sense of moral outrage". He claims that MI6 backs his claims but again produces no evidence that he has read MI6 reports naming Thaci and his group. Moral outrage and consternation are important reactions but should a factual report endorsed by the Council of Europe not have some direct witness statements, some dry facts, some proof, and, find at least one person who can substantiate the link between Thaci and organ harvesting? Perhaps one day such proof will emerge. That Kosovan and Albanian criminal gangs blossomed as the ten-year crisis of the Yugoslav wars of succession destroyed all sense of moral order in the Serb, Croatian, Bosnian  and Albanian regions of the western Balkans cannot be denied. That truly evil things were done by men carrying guns and wearing rudimentary uniforms who were half an armed expression of national rejection of Serb rule and half a group of thugs with an eye on the main chance to make money fast is also not in doubt. That Kosovo needs law, order and justice is also not in doubt. But as long as Serbia still claims that Kosovo bleibt unser, as post-war revanchist Germans dreaming of a return to Silesia used to say, there will be no stability and peace and the chance for normal economics and democracy to root themselves in. The Marty report is a huge headline win for Serbia's narrative that all that happened in Kosovo was the result of Albanian criminals. The Swiss Senator may well be right that Thaci is unfit to be a European government leader. He is certainly right that more investigation is needed. But perhaps before the full Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly debate his report in January might he produce just a scintilla of incontrovertible evidence that would justify the lurid headlines he enjoys producing.