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.

 

Kosovo: Thaci's Regime Of Butchers And Europe's Moral Weakness

 

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2010/12/23/thacis-regime-of-butchers-and-europes-moral-weakness.html

Strategic Culture Foundation
December 23, 2010

Thaci's Regime of Butchers and Europe's Moral Weakness
Anna Filimonova

-A letter to Holkeri which became available to the media said the crimes against Serbs described in the report were the worst atrocities since World War II. The materials described over 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.
-Currently we are witnessing a new tide of the information war over Kosovo. The US is exercising undivided control over the historically Serbian province jointly with the dependent local administration, and Washington is not going to abandon its long-term partner Hashim Thaci.d had the investigation suspended.


The European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) headquartered in Pristina was set up in December, 2008 and opened on April 6, 2009.

Its stated objectives included assistance to Kosovo's authorities, legal institutions and judiciary aimed at forming and strengthening the province's multi-ethnic legal system and law-enforcement agencies.

The EULEX priority tasks were to fight war crimes, corruption, organized crime, inter-ethnic crimes, money laundering, and terrorism as well as to help resolve various proprietary disputes. Therefore, one might expect EULEX to regard the crimes described in the now-famous Dick Marty's report to the Council of Europe as belonging to its sphere of responsibility.

The report based on the investigation of the disappearance of some 500 people in Kosovo since the end of the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia contained data on the existence of a network of detention facilities operated by the Kosovo Liberation Army, the illicit extraction and trafficking of human organs, and the key role played by Kosovo's outgoing premier Hashim Thaci in organized crime in the province. The revelations about atrocities like forced extractions of organs caused a storm across the global media but, oddly enough, EULEX stated on December 21, 2010 that it would not investigate human organ trafficking in Kosovo as [the issue does not belong under] EULEX jurisdiction.

Considering that it is up to Washington to decide where the jurisdiction of EU institutions ends in Kosovo, the truth must be that all the EU is allowed to assist in is implementing the US strategy in the region, which at the moment is centered around dismantling the delimitation line between Kosovo's Albanian-populated south and the Serb-populated north.

EULEX officials shy away from commenting on Marty's report. Moreover, it transpired recently that even they are defenseless in Kosovo as EULEX Police Head of Executive Department James Albrecht, who was charged with the mission of investigating the organized crime network in the province, came under attack.

Visiting Moscow on December 21, Marty spoke about the lack of protection provided to international justice officers and witnesses. He said court hearings are typically hard to organize given that even the Hague Tribunal was under permanent external pressure and people are too intimidated to trust national and international institutions alike. The trial of Ramush Haradinaj by the international Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was a vivid example of the situation: the prosecution witnesses never testified in court simply because all of them had been killed before the hearings opened. Marty said potential witnesses cannot present their testimonies because nobody is able to guarantee their safety.

There is information that, concerned over its own safety, the EULEX top brass considers leaving the heavily criminalized Pristina. As for Europe, it is already paying the price for complicity in building a criminal enclave in Kosovo. While infantile EU propaganda is touting "multi-ethnic and democratic Kosovo", Interpol reports reflect the penetration of EU countries by Albanian organized crime, Kosovo's emergence as the key drug trafficking hub, and the increasing seizure of the European drug market by the Albanian mafia.

News resurfaced last December that some 400 DNA samples taken from crime victims in Kosovo in 1999 by the German police on the Hague Tribunal's request were destroyed.

Reportedly, every Kosovo Liberation Army division in Kosovo and Metohija as well as in Albania maintained its own secret prisons where Serbs, Gypsies, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, and other nationals were held (even former Albanian president Sali Berisha's ranch was converted into a prison).

In other words, many of the facts unearthed by Marty did not come as a total surprise. A Serbian court charged Hashim Thaci with killing 661 Serbs and other non-Albanians, crippling 518 people, and kidnapping 584. Charges against Thaci also include the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Serbs from Kosovo since the advent of KFOR. In 2001, Serbia submitted to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia a 40,000-page report with evidence implicating Kosovo's Thaci-Ceku-Haradinaj permanent triumvirate. The total number of pages in Serbia's materials on crimes against Serbs supplied to the Tribunal almost reached 200,000.

Serbia's prosecutor for war crimes V. Vukevic investigated the genocide charges against former Kosovo Liberation Army commanders Thaci, Ceku, and Haradinaj in 2001, and Serbia's then-minister of justice V. Batic provided the resulting evidence to the head of the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo Harri Holkeri.

A letter to Holkeri which became available to the media said the crimes against Serbs described in the report were the worst atrocities since World War II. The materials described over 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.

US and NATO servicemen fully share the responsibility for the crimes. They bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days and then helped cover up the repressions against its civilian population. Nor did the UN officials put to work in the due time documents shedding light on the existence of secret detention facilities in the northern and central parts of Albania.

The "international community" found no way to protect the lives and the rights of Serbs, other non-Albanians, and even, in some cases, Albanians in Kosovo. For over 6 years, the UN has been conducting a sluggish investigation into the torture and killings at secret Kosovo Liberation Army bases and Albanian prisons. A Peruvian anthropologist and chief of the UN unit investigating the disappearance of people claims that already in 2003 the UN was fully aware of what was happening.

***

The US geopolitical objectives in the Balkan region are being put into practice based on cooperation in the framework of the Washington-Tirana-Pristina triangle.

Former OSCE mission head William Walker (who, by the way, had been granted an honorary Albanian citizenship) expressed the view that the people of Kosovo and Albania have serious reasons to consider a common future.

In Kosovo, Walker supports the Self-Determination movement which advocates a plan for a Greater Albania and criticizes EULEX over failing to gain control over the Northern part of the province for years.

Europeans may be prone to hesitation, but Albanians, time-tested warriors, are eager to fight. For example, police minister Bajram Rexhepi has been saying that his special forces have been ready to enter the northern part of Kosovo since the summer of 2010. The aforementioned special forces are the south-based Kosovo Liberation Army and the paramilitary formations including Wakhabbi terrorist groups. They are ready to do what it takes to subdue Kosovo's north. Thaci declared on December 21 that he did not take the charges against him seriously and would shortly head for the US to regain Washington's support.

Currently we are witnessing a new tide of the information war over Kosovo. The US is exercising undivided control over the historically Serbian province jointly with the dependent local administration, and Washington is not going to abandon its long-term partner Hashim Thaci. The EU is not a significant player in Kosovo, and EULEX was created simply as a part of the Ahtisaari plan meant to strengthen the Kosovo self-proclaimed independence. Since, according to the plan, Kosovo is supposed to be indivisible, gaining control over the northern part of the province has to be its indispensable element.

Will the storm triggered by Marty's report translate into a serious judicial investigation and lead to the punishing of Albanian war criminals - thus changing things not only in the Balkan region but also in Europe - or will the storm subside under Washington's pressure? The inability of EU authorities to stand up for justice promises the EU an ugly future painted in the bloody colors of the Albanian flag.

__._,_.___

Gangsta State: Kosovo's Drugs, Slaves, and Organ Farms - by Tom Burghardt

Gangsta State: Kosovo's Drugs, Slaves, and Organ Farms - by Tom Burghardt     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."  ...   ... 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.  ...   ...  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. [ Very damning.  Where does it go from here? ]     http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/7627-gangsta-state-kosovos-drugs-slaves-and-organ-farms.html   Gangsta State: Kosovo's Drugs, Slaves, and Organ Farms   written by Tom Burghardt   Mafia State: Kosovo's Prime Minister Accused of Running Human Organ, Drug Trafficking Cartel by Tom Burghardt l Antifascist Calling...     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.   Prime Minister, Hashim Thaçi: Dazzling Madeleine Albright back in the day. 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, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, 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.   < Prev   Next >   Add comment

 

Report Links Top Kosovo Officials to Organ Harvesting

 

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14 Dec 2010 / 21:43

Report Links Top Kosovo Officials to Organ Harvesting

A damning report obtained by Balkan Insight names the Kosovo premier as the boss of a crime gang that sold body parts, carried out assassinations and dealt drugs.

By Michael Montgomery and Altin Raxhimi

A criminal network linked to Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci summarily executed prisoners and harvested their kidneys to sell for illicit organ transplants, Europe's top human rights investigator alleges in a report obtained by BIRN's Balkan Insight, and the US based Center for Investigative Reporting.

Kosovo's government denied the allegations in a statement released on Tuesday evening. The statement denounced the allegations as a smear campaign against the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Kosovo state.

Kosovo's Government Response

"Today, the Guardian newspaper published an article that referred to a report from a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Dick Marty, which follows up on past reports published over the last 12 years aiming at maligning the war record of the Kosovo Liberation Army and its leaders. The allegations published by The Guardian have been investigated several times by local and international judiciary, and in each case, it was concluded that such statements have were not based on facts and were construed to damage the image of Kosovo and the war of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Furthermore, it is unacceptable that the slanders of a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe should be presented as the opinion of the institution itself, an institution that has nothing to do with the quoted report. It is clear that someone wants to place obstacles in the way of Prime Minister Hashim Thaci after the general election, in which, the people of Kosovo, placed their clear and significant  trust in him to deliver the development program and governance of our country. Such despicable and bizarre actions by people with no moral credibility, serve the ends of only those  specific circles that do not wish well to Kosovo and its people. It is well known locally and internationally that Dick Marty has been prejudiced from the start, has not relied on any fact and arguments, and has been determined to report favourably on the positions expressed by his co-worker and friend Carla del Ponte and the Government and politicians of the Republic of Serbia."

The 27-page draft report will be submitted on Thursday to the Council of Europe's legal affairs committee by Dick Marty, a former Swiss prosecutor who spent more than two years conducting the investigation. Click here to read the full report.

Among the victims referred to in the report were Kosovo Serb civilians who disappeared from under the noses of NATO troops and United Nations officials following their arrival in Kosovo in June 1999.

The report alleges that the organ trafficking was part of a broader web of organised crime activities including assassinations and drug dealing. The report describes Thaci's role in the criminal network as akin to that of a mafia boss.

Thaci himself has repeatedly denied links to organised crime. In a 2009 interview he dismissed reports that KLA operatives ran secret detention camps and engaged in organ trafficking in Albania.

"It just didn't happen," Thaci said. "At any time, in any case, in any place, any space - this has nothing to do with the Kosovo Liberation Army."

The Council of Europe report alleges that the executions and organ extractions allegedly occurred at two locations near the town of Fushe Kruje, 20 kilometres north of the Albanian capital, Tirana. Medical personnel who conducted the operations in a makeshift clinic arranged to ship the organs abroad for what's known as "cadaver transplantations".

Some operatives in the criminal network remained involved in organ trafficking for a decade after the Kosovo war. A recent case involved illicit kidney transplants conducted at a clinic in Pristina, which is now the focus of a criminal investigation. European prosecutors today filed charges in the case in a Pristina courtroom.

The Council of Europe alleges that the organ trafficking ring was set up by Shaip Muja, a former chief medical officer in the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA. Muja is currently a top advisor to Thaci.

Asked whether he was part of an organised crime network as alleged in the report Muja told Balkan Insight on Tuesday: "I have not read the report. These are allegations that have been aired for the past ten years. I will employ all legal means to respond to this."

The findings of the Marty report substantiate allegations aired in a 2008 memoir by Carla del Ponte, the former prosecutor of the Hague war crimes tribunal, ICTY, as well as the findings from a 2009 investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and the BBC.

The report states: "The signs of collusion between the criminal class and the highest political and institutional office holders are too numerous and too serious to be ignored.

"It is a fundamental right of Kosovo's citizens to know the truth, the whole truth, and also an indispensable condition for reconciliation between the communities and the country's prosperous future."

The report criticises Western countries, including the United States, for failing to take action to combat organised crime in Kosovo in spite of extensive intelligence reports documenting high levels of corruption.

Detainment facilities mentioned in the report

During the Kosovo war, prisoners, largely ethnic Albanians, were detained, tortured and in some cases killed. Cahan – KLA supply and logistics outpost right on the Kosovo border. Kukes – A one-story shack at a disused mechanical plant in an Albanian town on the Kosovo border. Durres – KLA base at a hotel on the beachfront in Albania's largest port. Post-war detainment facilities Bicaj – privately-owned house in a village near Kukes, serving as a transit point for prisoners. Burrel – two structures and a house in a compound outside a northern Albanian town, serving as a transit point for prisoners. Rripe – two-storey farmhouse, known as the Yellow House, subject to UNMIK/ICTY forensic site visit, serving as a transit point for prisoners. Fushe Kruje – Two-storey detached farmhouse and final destination, where harvesting of organs from executed prisoners was alleged to have taken place.

  Among the report's findings:

*An organized crime network that engaged in illegal trafficking, including organ harvesting was controlled by the 'Drenica group'. The group included prominent Kosovo Albanian guerrilla figures. KLA medical chief and current Thaci advisor Shaip Muja was also named as member of the group. Muja  denied the allegations.

*The Drenica group evolved from a guerrilla unit into a band of  'criminal entrepreneurs', involved in illegal detention, torture and murder of ethnic Albanians and other people suspected of collaborating with Yugoslav authorities as well as political adversaries in Albania during the escalation of the conflict in 1998 and 1999.

* Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci is named as the 'boss' of the Drenica group. But he "owed his elevation to having secured political and diplomatic endorsement from the United States and other Western powers as the preferred domestic partner in their foreign policy project in Kosovo."

* Albanian intelligence and military officials took part in interrogating people detained by the KLA in Albania.

*Albanian authorities have refused to cooperate with EU inquiries into war crimes and other abuses which allegedly took place in Albania.

* Investigations initiated by UNMIK into allegations of organ harvesting in Albania were not followed up, and evidence collected by investigators was destroyed by ICTY staff in The Hague without conducting an analysis. "We must permit ourselves to express astonishment that such a step was taken," the report states.

* Investigations into organised crime in Kosovo are often unsuccessful due to tightly-knit clan relations among Albanians, according to the report, but it also describes the situation with organised crime as "state capture".

* The recent case of illegal transplants conducted at the Medicus clinic in Pristina is not an isolated episode. "We believe that there are sufficiently serious and substantial indications to demonstrate that this form of trafficking long pre-dates the Medicus case, and that certain KLA leaders and affiliates have been implicated in it previously," the report states.

 

 

Features & Opinion

No more lies about the Caucasus or Kosovo

Topic: Russian-Georgian dispute

 

No more lies about the Caucasus or Kosovo

16:47 21/12/2010

© RIA Novosti. Mikhail Fomichev

RIA Novosti political correspondent Dmitry Kosyrev

Dick Marty, who chairs the Monitoring Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), is traveling to Moscow and Tbilisi on December 20 and 21. At first glance, this long-planned visit seems routine and relatively minor. But on January 17, PACE will hold hearings on the humanitarian and other consequences of the Russian-Georgian war of August 2008. Marty is gathering information in cooperation with the Russian and Georgian parliaments for a document to be presented at the hearing.

This summer Marty wrote a report on human rights in the North Caucasus, meaning Russia. Surprisingly, for the first time in the 14 years that Russia has been a member of the Council of Europe, the Russian delegation to PACE supported a report on the region, albeit with some amendments and reservations.

The real headline, however, is the sensational report Marty produced last week alleging that Hashim Thaci, the current prime minister of the breakaway region of Kosovo, is a gangster with long-standing ties to organ, drug and arms trafficking, as well as prostitution. Moreover, everyone who made decisions on Kosovo during the war in 1999 also knew about Thaci's nefarious dealings.

Russia also knew

The truth about Thaci and NATO's campaign against Serbia in 1999 are even more important for Russia than the reports on Georgia and the Caucasus. It was the events of 2008 - when the United States and Europe told lies to justify Kosovo's independence from Serbia - that poisoned Russia's attitude toward Europe. And these events ultimately trace back to 1999, as does the August 2008 war.

Unlike today, in 1999 Russia still had prominent international correspondents. The inertia of the glasnost era could still be felt, and many seasoned journalists were doing good work around the world. New correspondents were trying to steal the spotlight from their eminent predecessors.

Many Russian experts in international affairs worked in or visited the former Yugoslavia. I also went there, and I had no reason to doubt the reporting of our correspondents. Kosovo was front-page news at the time. A large section of the Russian public was aware of what was happening in Belgrade and Pristina.

We knew that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was a criminal organization that had been coordinating the seizure of Serbian land in Kosovo by ethnic Albanians for many years, that the attempts by Slobodan Milosevic to counter this creeping expansion were thwarted by the United States and Europe. We knew that Thaci and his colleagues bought weapons for the KLA using money from arms trafficking and other criminal activity. And that's not all we knew.

Now Marty writes in his report that U.S. and EU security agencies knew full well who Thaci was, but even ordinary Russians knew this back in 1999. We knew that apart from a narrow circle of officials, the public in the United States and the EU did not know about the true nature of the KLA and, as a result, they generally supported Kosovars over the Serbs. At that time, this realization came as a shock to Russians because we were still under the illusion that the Western media were the freest in the world, an example to the rest of us.

NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, which began on March 24, 1999, shattered any remaining illusions about the Western media. And this launched an era of Russia's profound and almost irreversible mistrust of the words and deeds of the West.

If one side had simply started a war against the other, there would not have been this massive fallout. But in this case everything began with a massive lie, and people hate lies even more than aggression. It is an innately human reaction.

Laws of war

The era of intractable mutual mistrust between Russia and the West lasted just under a decade, from the aggression against Yugoslavia until the very similar events of August 2008 (similar in the sense that in both cases, the public in the West was misinformed about the true nature of the conflict). In 2008, the public in the United States and the EU simply could not believe that Georgian troops were ordered by President Mikheil Saakashvili to attack Tskhinvali while innocent people slept. Some people do not believe this even now, even though evasive and half-hearted reports on this issue have been written and conclusions made. But nobody can admit on the record that Saakashvili was the aggressor, although a narrow circle of Europeans has known this for a long time. Marty has only just now denounced Thaci as a gangster, and his report has yet to produce any major repercussions.

Let's sum up this era of mistrust. We can do this now because after August 2008, Russia and the West agreed to at least resume dialogue, bringing the era to a close. The damage, however, has already been done. Now we have an entire generation in Russia that instinctively mistrusts "foreigners."

Any reasonable Russian politician remembers the lies of 1999 and 2008 and reacts accordingly. Lies are a weapon of war, and these two wars were born of a lie. For that reason, you should always question the other side's information and adhere to the laws of war, whether the information is true or only half true.

Russia-EU political ties, unlike economic ties, have become a masquerade. Both sides harbor ill feelings. Now Western politicians will have to face the anger of their voters, who were told all these years that Tachi (and Saakashvili) are angels and Russia is the devil.

Russian politicians with pronounced pro-American or pro-European views - or simply views popular in the West - went to their political deaths in 1999. The internal structure of Russian politics became distorted. There is now an uneasy balance between two poles - enlightened nationalists and die-hard nationalists, without anything in between.

Politicians know more than voters

There have been efforts to turn some major European and American politicians around on this issue since around the winter of 2008 and 2009, but there is one problem with that: Politicians have always known that Tachi is a gangster, that the destruction of Yugoslavia was very dirty business, and that attempts were made to pit some puppet regimes against Russia - in Ukraine and Georgia, for instance - to effect regime change.

It is easy for politicians to reach agreements because they know the real facts. It's part of their job. But what to do with a public that is a full era behind?

Marty's report is a step in the right direction because it speaks the truth. Organizations like PACE are not very influential in Europe. It is seen as a supranational parliamentary conference. And the Council of Europe is just that - only a council. But such forums are sometimes the only way to get the truth heard in Europe, be it the truth about Kosovo or the humanitarian situation during the August 2008 war.

The views expressed in this article are the author's and may not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20101221/161873184.html

Was Europe blind?

17 December 2010 Presseurop

Nicknamed "The Snake" when head of the KLA, Kosovo's PM Hashim Thaçi at a financial aid conference, Brussels, 2008.

AFP

The European Council report released on 15 December accusing Kosovo's leadership of organ trafficking raises plenty of questions about the EU's indulgent attitude towards prime minister Hashim Thaçi and former Albanian separatists.

In his report, Swiss senator Dick Marty, who gained fame for first revealing the existence of secret CIA prisons holding alleged terrorists, "accuses the prime minister and several government officials from the UÇK [KLA - Kosovo Liberation Army] of being directly responsible for organ trafficking", explains Le Monde. "Marty has identified six detention centres in Albania in which Kosovo Serbs or pro-Serb Albanians were held. These centres allegedly continued to operate even after the Serb surrender [following NATO bombardments] in June 1999". This situation, notes the French newspaper, "persisted until NATO deployed international forces. Once the prisoners were taken to Albania, they were tortured" – and their organs were removed, in some cases.

This is not the first time such accusations have been levelled at Thaçi and his henchmen, points out Le Monde: in her book The Hunt (2008), Carla del Ponte, former prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, "already accused KLA members, who were leading the armed struggle against Serbia at the time, of extracting organs from nearly 300 captives held in Albania".

Kidnapped on orders from the prime minister of a European state?

"Is it possible? Is it possible that people could have been kidnapped on orders from the prime minister of a European state? That he had them murdered in order to extract organs from their dead bodies, e.g. kidneys for rich customers in Germany, Canada, Poland or Israel willing to shell out up to €45,000 for the deal?" asks the Tageszeitung (TAZ). "Is it possible that Hashim Thaçi, the prime minister of Kosovo, unanimously backed by Berlin, London, Paris and Washington, owes his political power to wealth he amassed in criminal activities?" At any rate, according to the Berlin daily, "Dick Marty's report will heavily impact the dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo that has been heralded with much pomp and circumstance in Brussels."

Indeed, explains the TAZ, "Not a single Serb would agree to sit down at the negotiating table with Thaçi. Without him, however, it will be virtually impossible to form a government in Pristina following the general elections on 12 December." Furthermore, "If Eulex, the EU mission in Kosovo, wants to remain credible, it will now have to conduct an impartial investigation into Thaçi & Co – which it has refrained from doing so far because a number of Albanian politicians are former guerrilla commanders and still have armed groups at their disposal."

Everything about Thaçi's criminal involvement puts the EU in the dock

So how will Brussels react? Hard to say: "In September 2010, the War Crimes section head for EULEX made statements that completely, or almost completely, contradict Dick Marty's report", notes Le Temps. There was "no evidence", according to Finnish police officer Matti Raatikainen, to corroborate the charges of organ trafficking made against Thaçi's entourage, recalls the Swiss daily.

And yet, adds the paper, "The European Union knows that everything that emerges about Thaçi's criminal involvement will put the EU in the dock. How can it then keep demanding that Belgrade arrest Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general still on the lam? Above all, how can it argue against those, like the young nationalist Kosovar politician Albin Kurti, who call for EULEX to get out after its shady concessions to the power elite?"

It is quite telling that the cabinet of EU High Representative Catherine Ashton reacted to Marty's report by asking him "to furnish proof", observes Le Temps, adding that "In truth, the EU hardly has any choice. Kosovo's independence (which Spain, Romania, Greece, Cyprus and Slovakia still won't recognise), rubber-stamped by a joint agreement with the United States, has always been perceived in Brussels as a bitter pill to swallow on the road to the future integration of the Balkans."

Translated by Eric Rosencrantz

Opinion

Burying the "good war" myth

The horrific human rights abuses that have emerged from the Council of Europe's report on Western ally the Kosovan Liberation Army (KLA) undermine former British PM Tony Blair's claim that Nato's 1999 war with Yugoslavia was "a battle between good and evil; between civilisation and barbarity; between democracy and dictatorship", argues Neil Clark in the Guardian. "It was a fiction many on the liberal left bought into," Clark writes. "But if the west had wanted to act morally in the Balkans and to protect the people in Kosovo there were solutions other than war with the Serbs, and options other than backing the KLA – the most violent group in Kosovan politics. They could have backed genuine multi-party negotiations, or offered to lift sanctions on Belgrade if a peaceful solution to the problem of Kosovo could be found." Nato's intervention in Yugoslavia, Clark concludes, was as immoral as the 2003 war against Iraq. "But as the Iraq war has become discredited, 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's report on the KLA's crimes makes that position much harder to maintain."

http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/433801-was-europe-blind