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January 04, 2011
USA humanitarian war & Kosovo Albanian crimes
January 03, 2011
Empowering the Body Snatchers: Washington’s Appalling Kosovo Policy
Empowering the Body Snatchers: Washington's Appalling Kosovo Policy
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December 30, 2010
The revelations just keep coming, and the evidence mounts that Washington's policy since the mid-1990s regarding Kosovo has been stubbornly obtuse. The latest blot on America's diplomacy is an investigative report for the Council of Europe released just before Christmas confirming long-standing rumors that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was involved in the trafficking of human organs, including killing Serbian prisoners to harvest their kidneys and other organs. Two aspects of the report were especially damning. First, the author and lead investigator was Swiss Senator Dick Marty, a highly respected champion of human rights. Second, the report specifically named Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci as an accomplice in those atrocities—as well as being involved in other criminal activities, including drug trafficking and politically motivated murders. Thaci, of course, has vehemently disputed the Marty report, but people who have followed his career since his guerrilla days, when he was known as "The Snake," find the allegations all too credible.
This thoroughly distasteful situation might be a parochial issue if it were not for the high-profile role that the United States and its leading NATO allies played in the two-stage process of securing Kosovo's independence from Serbia. During the first stage in the mid and late 1990s, Clinton administration officials and their cheerleaders in Congress, the think tank community, and the news media portrayed the KLA's secessionist war as a stark melodrama featuring noble Albanian Kosovars and their evil Serb oppressors.The most notorious expression of that view was Senator Joseph Lieberman's assertion that the United States and the terrorist KLA shared the same goals and values.
That grotesque oversimplification of a bitter ethnic struggle eventually led to a NATO air war against Serbia in 1999, which killed well over 1,000 Serbian civilians, and a subsequent NATO-led military occupation of Kosovo under the nominal auspices of the United Nations. Stage two of the amputation of the province from a now fully democratic Serbia was the decision by the United States and the leading European Union powers to recognize Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence in early 2008. That action was taken despite vehement criticism from Russia and China about ignoring the UN Security Council, which was officially responsible for policy regarding Kosovo.
As I've written elsewhere, the West's arrogant bypassing of the Security Council (and, thereby, a certain Russian veto) set a bad precedent on several levels. At the time, the Russian foreign minister warned that the logic the NATO powers used regarding Kosovo could be applied to numerous situations around the world, including Georgia's secessionist provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow made good on that implied threat later in the year during its war with Georgia.
The Obama administration should use the Marty report as an opportunity for a comprehensive reassessment of U.S. policy regarding the Kosovo issue. From the beginning, Washington has been the principal advocate of Kosovo's independence, and has worked closely with Thaci and other KLA leaders. The outcome has been unsatisfactory at best and shameful at worst. One of the first actions of the victorious KLA following NATO's intervention in 1999 was to drive more than 200,000 non-Albanians—not just Serbs, but other ethnic minorities as well—out of the province. Such ethnic cleansing took place on NATO's watch, yet Alliance (including U.S.) forces did nothing at the time or in the years since to reverse it.
U.S. and other Western policy makers persist in portraying the Kosovo intervention as a great success. But Kosovo is an economically dysfunctional international ward with an unemployment rate exceeding 45 percent. Indeed, the legal economy—absent the extensive financial inputs from foreign would-be nation builders—is scarcely relevant at all. Instead, political corruption is rampant, and the country is now a haven for various mafia criminal enterprises. The Marty report merely lifts the lid on one aspect of an odious situation that has gone on for more than a decade.
Governments are notoriously reluctant to acknowledge being responsible for a major policy blunder. But the United States and its principal NATO partners need to make such an admission regarding Kosovo. Pretending that the policy has been justified, much less that it has been successful, will not make the unpleasant reality go away
January 01, 2011
Amorality of US Kosovo Policy: Friends with the Snake
Amorality of US Kosovo Policy: Friends with the Snake
Dec 28, 2010
By Vojin Joksimovich | No amount of human rights violations against the Serbs; no amount of dead Serbs nor any amount of Serbs whose organs are gruesomely extracted by the Kosovo Albanian KLA terrorists is sufficient for Washington to at least re-examine its wrong policy in the Balkans.
On April 17, 2008 I published article titled Bankruptcy of Moral Values: Butchering of Serbs Condoned by the West. It was written in response to the revelations in Carla Del Ponte's book translated into English as Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity's Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity. Del Ponte, for nine years the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribune for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), based on credible reports and witnesses revealed existence of macabre German Nazi/Croatian Nazi style of crimes, including organ trafficking from the Serbian prisoners, committed by the current Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci and his fellow Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) cohorts. Nebojsa Malic said: "Here we have the KLA, whose conduct would make the Waffen SS blush." While the ICTY chief prosecutor, Del Ponte did not submit evidence of organ trafficking to the ICTY judges, claiming that the court rules didn't allow her to pursue war crimes beyond June 1999, when the war ended, and that the court lacked jurisdiction in Albania. She also revealed that some elements of the proof taken by the ICTY investigators from the notorious "Yellow House" in the Albanian town of Rripe were destroyed at The Hague thus enabling stonewalling by Pristina and Tirana with full support from the KLA apologists in Washington and some European capitals to claim that there was no evidence for the organ trafficking allegations. Del Ponte story withered away. After the book publication Del Ponte was bundled off to Argentina as the Swiss Ambassador. The Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs banned Del Ponte from promoting her book both in Milan and her hometown of Lugano. "Any public presentation of this work is incompatible with the author's status of Swiss ambassador."
Left: Organ extractor, the Snake, hugged by Albright. Right, The Snake given full NATO military support to do away with Serbs as he sees fit.
Over the years Del Ponte never concealed her dislike of Serbia and even Russia. Her court, over the 15 yr existence indicted 161 individuals, 92 Serbs. Fifty have been sentenced for over 700 years. Therefore she should have been highly credible in the West. Washington was informed about the book content, and being aware of Del Ponte's credibility rushed to orchestrate the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) as of February 17, 2008 before her book hit the streets. So called U.S. allies responded rapidly to support the U.S. in the spirit of western solidarity. European superpowers like Germany, France and Italy (Great Britain acts typically as the U.S. lapdog) chose not to stand up to the U.S., while some small countries, such as the Czech Republic and Poland, didn't dare to challenge the U.S. "leadership." There were, however, those who did: Spain, Slovakia, Rumania, Greece and Cyprus, which refused to recognize the UDI. The EU countries, which did recognize Kosovo, did not act in the interest of their taxpayers. They inherited the royal mess created by the U.S. and now are paying huge bills including the EU Rule of Law (EULEX) mission of 1,800 persons. Switzerland, not an EU member, compromising its reputation for neutrality, was in the forefront of the craze to recognize Kosovo.
Washington, using the propaganda lies asserted that Kosovo deserved independence because the KLA thugs were in fact martyrs, rather than the crime perpetrators as everybody interested in the truth has concluded. The U.S. had a plan to convince about 100 countries to rapidly recognize Kosovo, This plan did not materialize. Even as of today only 72 countries recognized the Republic of Heroin out of 192 UN members. However, Del Ponte revelations influenced no country to de-recognize the mafia state of Kosovo. Thus, revealed macabre Nazi/Croatian-Nazi style crimes have been condoned by the West using the rationale of pragmatism, i.e. promotion of short-term stability at any price and ignoring the principles of justice. It is the same West (NATO countries), that violated seven major international laws, including the UN and NATO Charters, to launch an allegedly "humanitarian war" (a new oxymoron) based on a bunch of lies of "humanitarian catastrophe," "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing." NATO thus became an international law pariah. NATO de facto provided the air force for the KLA insurrection from Albania. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair characterized it as a just war in his Chicago April 1999 speech. "We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand." This despite the fact that seven German courts had ruled that there were no pre-March 24, 1999 bombardment genocide or ethnic cleansing.
Council of Europe Report
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) was shocked with disclosures in Del Ponte's book, trafficking in human organs in particular, and that the crimes had gone unpunished hitherto and had not been the subject of any serious investigation. In April, 2008 seventeen European parliamentarians signed a motion for a resolution. The Assembly has charged its Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights to conduct an investigation led by Swiss Senator Dick Marty, as its Special Rapporteur. Marty, Swiss-Italian politician and prosecuting lawyer, belongs to the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. Marty has gained notoriety for his exhaustive 2007 probe into the CIA "black flights" (U.S. rendition flights and secret prisons) in Europe. After the two-year investigation, Marty has submitted the 27 page report in draft form on December 12, which was immediately disclosed by the British Guardian newspaper. The draft resolution was unanimously approved December 16 in Paris at the meeting of European diplomats from all 47 member states. Next, The Parliamentary Assembly is to debate the report during its winter plenary session in Strasbourg on January 25, 2011.
The resolution says that "numerous concrete and convergent indications confirm that some Serbs and some Kosovar Albanians were held prisoner in secret places of detention under KLA control in northern Albania and were subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment before ultimately disappearing. Numerous indications seem to confirm that organs were removed from some prisoners at a clinic in Albanian territory near Fushe-Kruje to be taken abroad for transplantation." The resolution comes out with damning accusations of Hashim Thaci, aka "The Snake," Washington backed criminal mafia leader, who served as the KLA political leader during the war and now is serving as the "prime minister" of an illegal separatist administration. The resolution says that Thaci heads a "mafia-like" operation that included murdering Serbs, but also Kosovo Albanians accused as Serb collaborators (no mention of Roma and some Eastern European women), and prior to that extracting their organs like kidneys, hearts for sale on the black market. The New York Times reported that "captives" were "filtered "for their suitability as donors, based on sex, age, health and ethnic origin. Marty told the Times: "We heard numerous references to captives not merely been handed over, but also 'bought' and 'sold.' Some of the guards told investigators that a few captives understood what was about to happen and 'pleaded with captors to be spared the fate of being chopped into pieces." Mercy however was never a part of the KLA culture. Of course, to individuals such as me who has written two Kosovo books, the information presented in the CoE report is no news.
George Bush shakes hands with The Snake.
The report further says: "Thaci and these other 'Drenica Group' members are consistently named as 'key players' in intelligence reports on Kosovo's mafia-like structures of organized crime. We found that the 'Drenica Group' had as its chief—or, to use the terminology of organized crime networks, its 'boss'—the renowned political operator and perhaps most internationally known personality of the KLA, Hashim Thaci." "The Parliamentary Assembly strongly reaffirms the need for an absolutely uncompromising fight against impunity for the perpetrators of serious human rights violations and wishes to point out that the fact that these were committed in the context of the violent conflict could never justify a decision to refrain from prosecuting anyone who has committed such acts. There cannot and must not be one justice for the winners and another for the losers. Whenever a conflict has occurred all criminals must be prosecuted and held responsible for their illegal acts, whichever side they belong to and irrespective of the political role they took on. This amounts to a stinging condemnation of the Clinton and Bush administrations as well as their European allies and Tony Blair in particular for ignoring disgusting crimes committed by Hashim Thaci and his KLA cohorts.
The report concludes that in the name of short-term stability the international organizations in Kosovo, UNMIK replaced with EULEX at the end of 2008, sacrificed "important principles of justice." EULEX has done little or no investigation into "organized crime and its connections with representatives of political institutions, or in respect to war crimes committed against Serbians and Albanian Kosovars regarded as collaborators or as rivals of the dominant factions. This last-named subject is still truly taboo in Kosovo today, although everybody talks about it in private very cautiously. The report points out that the pressing priority from the humanitarian viewpoint is to account for the fate of missing persons. After providing an account for the 6,005 missing persons initially identified by the ICRC, 470 persons disappeared after the arrival of NATO troops, 95 Kosovo Albanians and 375 non-Albanians, mainly Serbs.
I have failed to find in the CoE report a reference to the Serbian government 40,000 page investigation submitted to the ICTY in 2001. Then the Serbian Justice minister Batic provided the evidence to the UN Special Representative in Kosovo Harri Holkeri. Anna Filmonova in her Strategic Culture Foundation blog Thaci's Regime of Butchers and Europe Moral Weakness says the Holkeri letter, which became available to the media, presents the worst atrocities since WWII. "7,000 proven cases of terrorist attacks which led to over 12,000 deaths, 1,350 injuries, almost 1,000 kidnappings, 340,000 expulsions of non-Albanians, the burning of 107,000 residences, and the killing of 70 children. Some of the victims were ritually beheaded and detention camps to hold Serbs were set up. The 'international Community' promptly intervened and had the investigation suspended." Holkeri, former Prime Minister and President of Finland as well as the president of the UN General Assembly, resigned in May 2005, claiming ill health. Presumably, the Batic letter made him sick.
ORGAN TRAFFICKING WAS KNOWN BY COUNTRIES WHICH RECOGNIZED KOSOVO
Dick Marty, in an interview with the Swiss Le Temps stated that the reports by the intelligence services—the German, British, Italian, Greek ones—as well as reports from the FBI—were sent to various ministries of foreign affairs and all of them noted gruesome crimes committed by the KLA. These countries gave priority to diplomatic policy, Marty said. He was critical of own country, which played a pioneering role in recognizing Kosovo. As a result, Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey decided not to receive an award by the Albanian Kosovo diaspora for her contribution to the recognition of Kosovo UDI. The Swiss took hard line: "The Swiss Foreign Ministry calls on the affected countries and particularly Kosovo for clarification on these accusations. The appropriate and international authorities must lead legal steps to assemble potential evidence." The Swiss called on EULEX and its War Crimes investigation unit to "drive investigation." EULEX, however, responded that they may not have jurisdiction over the case, even if the perpetrators are in Kosovo, because the body parts were removed in Albania. Thaci has been prohibited from entering Switzerland "for a certain period of time." The Swiss media, like Geneva's Le Temps took Switzerland to task by questioning how much responsibility should it bear, considering it was one of the first countries to recognize Kosovo. The Swiss Parliament is expected to debate the Thaci accusations on January 11-12.
The Swiss will have another headache. The Serbian war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic asserted that Thaci used bank accounts designated to Islamic charities, such as Al-Haramain which played a key part in the Bosnian jihad, to deposit profits from the organ trafficking proceeds in the Swiss, German and Albanian bank accounts. He also pointed out that the FBI had also uncovered those accounts after 9/11. Christa Markwalder, President of the Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, called for an investigation.
A country which might also have headaches is France. Its foreign minister Bernard Kouchner served as Special Representative of the UN Secretary General in Kosovo at the time when the KLA crimes summarized in the Marty report had been committed. Ironically he is a co-founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning medical charity Medecins Sans Frontiers or Doctors Without Borders. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Pristina for his services in Kosovo. Needless to say, Kouchner denies any knowledge and was surprised when Del Ponte published her book. He disputed a number of findings in the CoE report and urged EULEX investigation.
It is not credible that Kouchner didn't know anything about organ trafficking although needless to say he denies it. Canadian Captain Stu Kellogg, head of UNMIK police for hard crimes in 2000-2001 when Kouchner served, said in an interview with the Belgrade media—Blic, Politika, Vecernje Novosti, Press —that Kouchner was regularly briefed on organized crime and must have known about the organ trafficking but Thaci was untouchable at the time. Furthermore he said that Thaci and his buddies controlled everything in Kosovo, including the police and the borders. The Americans selected Thaci and he was untouchable. Kellogg said that he knew who Thaci was adding yet that any critic on Thaci's account was discarded immediately. Thaci's buddies enjoyed the ambassador status. Kouchner's deputy was an American Jock Covie, who was involved in every major decision. This was a part of Holbrooke's methodology to have an American as a deputy to closely oversee what an UN appointee was doing.
The Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha may spend some sleepless night although he was not directly implicated by Senator Marty. Berisha's ranch was used as a detention camp for the unfortunate victims. A Serbian lady, interviewed by Belgrade's Vecernje Novosti, who visited four detention camps in Albania and named the Serbian prisoners she saw there, implicated Berisha and his wife in addition to Bernard Kouchner.
CARLA DEL PONTE REACTION
She has expressed skepticism that EULEX is capable of any meaningful and impartial investigation as she recalled that her investigators in 2004 were threatened with death by the Albanian mafia. "I am afraid that EULEX will not be in position to lead the investigation because you can imagine the problems with which it will be faced."
NO REACTION FROM AHTISAARI
I have failed to find any reaction from Marti Ahtisaari. In my book Kosovo is Serbia I dedicated the whole chapter to his Independence Proposal. There is no question that this former Finnish President played a key role in securing the Kosovo UDI. He knew as everybody else involved about the macabre crimes committed by Thaci and his cohorts. The Finnish News Agency (STT) published two articles alleging that Ahtisaari was "bought" by the Albanian mafia. The UN Secretary General requested and obtained from German BND a detailed report. A connection between the Albanian mafia and Ahtisaari was established but the report was locked up by the UN.
Ahtisaari was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2008. While most legal experts testified that there was no legal case for independence the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo proceeded with the award and characterized Ahtisaari as a tireless negotiator in conflicts in the Balkans. His mediation was nothing short of a farce. His job was only to choreograph the predetermined outcome: independence. Did the Oslo committee also know about Thaci's macabre crimes?
MEDIA REACTIONS
Within days of the Guardian's report, there has been an avalanche of articles mostly in the European press. Some of them were nothing short of brilliant. This was not the case in the American mainstream media, which was timid and obviously embarrassed because of their biased Kosovo reporting amounting to demonization of the Serbs and extolling the KLA virtues as the freedom fighters. Srdja Trifkovic called it U.S. Damage Limitation and Self-Censorship.
Neil Clark, writing in the Guardian assailed the "myth of liberal intervention." Far from being Tony Blair's "good war," the assault on Yugoslavia was as wrong as the invasion of Iraq. "It was a fiction on the liberal left bought into. In 1999 Blair was not seen as a duplicitous warmonger in hock to the US but as an ethical leader taking a stand against ethnic cleansing." As the war in Iraq has become discredited, Clark concludes:"So it is even more important for the supporters of 'liberal interventionism' to promote the line that Kosovo was in some way a success. The Council of Europe report of the KLA's crime makes the position much harder to maintain. And if it plays its part in making people more skeptical about any future western 'liberal interventions,' it is warmly welcomed."
Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail said: "Tony Blair has some bizarre friends, but a monster, who traded in human body parts beats the lot." He concludes: "What happened in Kosovo helped shape subsequent events in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is richly ironic that 'liberated' Kosovo should now be a failed, gangster state…With his messianic certainties, the morally bipolar Tony Blair liked to divide the world into 'goodies' and "baddies,' having presumptuously placed himself in the first category. How fitting that this begetter of war after war end up receiving the Golden Medal for Freedom from a monster who traded in body parts."
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, author of Yo Blair, writing in the Financial Times wrote: "Ardent spirits such as Mr. Blair and Mr. Lieberman (U.S. Senator from Connecticut, who was Al Gore's VP candidate) in their desire for moral clarity, forgot what an Oscar Wilde character says when asked for the 'truth plain and never simple:' the truth is rarely plain, and never simple." Wheatcroft recalled Roy Jenkins, a Labour cabinet minister who had admired Mr. Blair, but came to regret what he called his Manichean tendency to view everything in black and white. President George W. Bush suffered from Manichaeism as well. Tony Blair visited Kosovo last July, met with Thaci and several children who had been named after him.
In contrast the Independent (UK) published The Human Organs of the Council of Europe: Evidence Please written by Dennis MacShane, a former Labour Minister. "Senator Marty is his own man and his sincerity is not up for question. He believes in what he believes. But in 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." Mr. MacShane, had Senator Marty revealed the names they would have been dead by now and there is tons of evidence with names collected by the Serbian war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic. Then MacShane, in an attack dog style, talks about terrible crimes committed by Serb soldiers and para-militaries without naming a single witness. Alleged Serbia's plot to exterminate Albanians, so called "Operation Horseshoe" was a fraud and so called "Racak Massacre" was staged as Thaci himself admitted.
While the British press has clearly discredited Tony Blair's war, no such thing happened in the U.S. Srdja Trifkovic wrote in Kosovo's Thaci, Human Organs Trafficker that no major daily has published a word of doubt about "Clinton's wisdom of waging a war on behalf of Thaci and his cohorts a decade ago, or perpetuating the myth of it having been a good war today." In the Wall Street Journal article more space was allocated to denials by Thaci and his cohorts than to the content of the Marti report.
In contrast there is Tom Burghardt column in the Pacific Free Press titled Gangsta State: Kosovo's Drugs, Slaves, and Organ Farms. Burghardt has provided an overview of the CoE report plus previous reporting on the issue of the KLA's macabre crimes. He concludes: "The impunity enjoyed up till now by Thaci and his minions merely reflect the far-greater impunity enjoyed by the American secret state and the powerful actors amongst the 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."
There is another American pearl written by Daniel Greenfield Terrorizing Our Own. He makes the point that airline travelers are degraded in public in order to spare Muslim feelings. "In a war we terrorize the enemy. In a siege we terrorize our own. And we have been terrorizing our own for a long time. In 1999, we dropped thousands of tons of explosives on Yugoslavia, bombing trains, fuel depots, homes, bridges and people. We did that in order to give the Muslim drug dealing terrorists of the KLA their own state. Today that state is a gateway for drug trafficking and sex slaves in Europe, and a training ground for terrorists."
The German media is pretty unanimous saying that there is nothing new in the report and urging EULEX to conduct an investigation.
WILL THE U.S. DEFEND OR DUMP THACI?
On December 16, the State Department spokesman Phillip Crowley stated that the U.S. will continue to cooperate with Thaci regardless of the report by special CoE rapporteur Dick Marty linking him to a crime ring. Furthermore, Crowley stated that these claims will not change fundamentally the relations between the U.S. and Pristina. "At this point, since any individual anywhere in the world is innocent until proven otherwise, he is the current prime minister, and will continue to work with the government". One should recall that the State Department treated the Serbian President Milosevic as a war criminal before he ever made it to The Hague. As a Serb he was treated as guilty until proven innocent. Many analysts of the Milosevic Hague trial concluded that he did prove his innocence. But then his human rights were violated as he was not allowed to receive treatment as a heart patient despite the Russian government guarantees. He died in prison. This duplicity is a key ingredient of the U.S. foreign policies. Crowley did suggest that the State Department fully supports any investigation by a legitimate authority into the charges presented in the CoE report.
Subsequently Thomas Countryman, undersecretary of State, in an interview with the Voice of America, stated that all countries should participate in the investigation related to the Marty report. He continued by suggesting that the U.S. would welcome the commitment from Pristina and Tirana to participate.
After denouncing the CoE report and threatening to take a legal action against Dick Marty for slanderous accusations, Thaci is planning a trip to some European capitals and Washington for "consultations." Marty dismissed Thaci's legal threat: "Mister Thaci knows very well that Council of Europe rapporteurs have immunity and filing a suit in such cases means nothing." Subsequently, Thaci promised to reveal names of Albanians who helped Dick Marti. So what will Washington do? James Jatras, in his brilliant piece U.S.-Backed Kosovo Administration Implicated in Organ-Trafficking Racket—But Will it Matter? makes the point that a Google image search with Thaci's name will show "almost any top U.S. figure of either party you can think of and you'll see him in a warm handshake, often a chummy embrace with a virtual Who is Who of the American establishment: George W. Bush, Condi Rice, Bill Gates, Clinton (both of them), Joseph Biden, Madeleine Albright, Wesley Clark, etc." Jatras has assembled a photo library of all above mentioned U.S. foreign policy heavyweights with Thaci and called it Snake and Friends. Hopefully, President Obama will not join Thaci's fan club. In addition, there should be an international photo library of Snake and Friends headed by Tony Blair.
Furthermore, Jatras says that all of those U.S. heavyweights knew from Day One that Thaci and Co. were a bunch of thugs. "So did the intelligence services of our allies. They knew that the KLA were criminals running the drug, slave, and weapons rackets throughout Europe. They knew that the KLA was supported by Osama bin Laden, the Iranians, the Saudis, the Turks, and other supporters of an Islamic re-re-conquest of the Balkans. And we supported them anyway, shredding every rule of law and decency in the process. Now what? In all probability, circle the wagons, hope it will blow over, and keep twisting arms around the world in support of the illegal separatist terrorist entity 'KosovA..'''
An indication that the Jatras prediction might carry the day, can be concluded from the statement of the Serbian President Tadic and his quisling government, who has indicated that he would not preclude a dialogue with Thaci until the accusations were confirmed or disapproved. However, foreign minister Vuk Jeremic, after saying that the Marty findings show "the true face of Kosovo," said that he was not going to meet with Thaci.
Anna Filmonova and Julia Gorin pointed out to recent presence of William Walker in Kosovo. Walker is a veteran U.S. Foreign Service diplomat who headed the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) and played a key role in staging so called "Racak Massacre," which president Clinton used as the casus belli. Previously, Walker served as the chief of the U.S. Embassy's political section in El Salvador and as the ambassador. He armed and trained contra death squads and was implicated in the massacre of six Jesuit priests. He worked with Oliver North to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. He headed the United Nations Transitional Administration in Eastern Slavonia. Clinton's administration imposed him on other OSCE members to be the head of KVM. He was ideal for the job as he was good at covering up massacres and staging phony ones.
Walker said: "There's a lot of things around, a lot of criminal activity. I fault the international community as much as the Albanians. They feel that the PDK (Thaci's party) represents stability." Has Walker said anything bad about the Albanians before? He was granted an honorary Albanian citizenship. In the Kosovo elections Walker supported so called Self-Determination movement, led by Albin Kurti, which advocates a plan for Greater Albania. Walker also blasted EULEX for its failure to annex Northern Kosovo. It is difficult to believe that Walker is acting on his own. Hence, at least two questions need to be asked. Is there a diplomatic war between the U.S. and the EU over Kosovo? The Europeans might be fed up pushed to clean the mess the U.S. has created. Is the U.S. willing to dump Thaci and pursue the Greater Albania concept with the Self-Determination movement, whose leaders are presumably "clean?" Thaci's Kosovo is an economic wasteland as the foreign investors shy away from investing in the Republic of Heroin. Second, there are plenty of precedents for the U.S. dumping previous darlings and sending them even to the "gallows." To name a few: Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein.
http://serbianna.com/analysis/?p=807
December 31, 2010
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
December 30, 2010
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.
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December 29, 2010
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
December 28, 2010
The Demolition of the 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 "10th 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 5th, 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 10th 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 10th 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.
