The 29 page secret Report of UNMIK over the criminals: Salih Berisha, Haradinaj, Hashim Thaci, Sahit Muja, SHIK
Kosovo's organ-trafficking scandal
Is the mud sticking?
Feb 24th 2011, 16:17 by T.J. | TIRANA
KOSOVO marked the third anniversary of its independence on February 17th in sombre mood. Only last July the country's leaders were riding high last year in the wake of an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice that its declaration of independence had not been illegal. Now their reputations are in tatters.
First came allegations of fraud in last December’s elections, which angered its strongest supporter, the United States. Soon afterwards, a report produced by Dick Marty, a Swiss politician and former prosecutor, made lurid claims about the involvement of Kosovo's leadership in organised crime. In the last few days two new documents [PDF: download site] have come to light that appear to bolster the most nightmarish of those allegations.
First, a disclaimer. In Balkan politics, the dictum, “if you are not with us, you are against us” usually applies. Some readers have attacked this blog simply for reporting on the Marty affair. As a fog of confusion, claims and counter-claims swirls over the allegations laid against Kosovo's leaders, we lay out here what is already known about the issue, and what is new.
The allegations
Last December, Mr Marty delivered a report to the Council of Europe that alleged that Hashim Thaçi, who has just begun a second term as Kosovo's prime minister, was close to people who, after the 1999 Kosovo war, had kidnapped some 500 Serbs, Albanians and others, all of whom were eventually killed. Some of them, the report claimed, were murdered so that their organs could be harvested and sold. Mr Thaçi has vigorously denied the claims.
Mr Marty's allegations were not new. Their first public outing was in a 2008 book by Carla Del Ponte, the former prosecutor of the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague (ICTY), and Chuck Sudetic, a former ICTY analyst.
Now, however, documents have been leaked to the Serbian press that appear to strengthen Mr Marty’s claims. They contain transcripts of original interviews with witnesses gathered by a key source known to me and handed over confidentially in 2003 to the then UN administration in Kosovo (UNMIK). The witnesses in the documents are quoted as saying they believed kidnapped Serbs and others had been killed for their organs.
At the time there was no corroboration for these claims. But they did inspire UNMIK investigators and a team from the ICTY to visit, in February 2004, the now-infamous “yellow house” in rural north Albania, near the town of Burrel, where the witnesses said the killings had taken place.
A forensic report [PDF: download site] produced by UNMIK says that the team found traces of blood at the yellow house, but that these did not constitute “conclusive evidence” of criminal acts. Neither ICTY nor UNMIK undertook a search for bodies, and no full criminal investigation was ever undertaken. Yet the traces, as well as medical paraphernalia found outside the house, could have been considered to be corroborative physical evidence of the claims made in the witness statements we now know about.
Why did UNMIK shelve the case? Political expediency, basically. It had to work with the men implicated by the witnesses on a daily basis. The implications of what a criminal investigation might uncover horrified those in the UN charged with building a modern and stable administration in the post-war territory.
As for the ICTY, its prosecutors concluded that, even if crimes had been committed, they were beyond their jurisdiction because the had taken place after the Kosovo war had ended. Several years later, in a mysterious and embarrassing move for which it has never been properly taken to task, the ICTY destroyed the physical evidence collected at the yellow house. Had it been kept it might have yielded the DNA samples critical for a full criminal investigation.
As Mr Sudetic notes, because neither UNMIK nor the ICTY pursued the case, they were able to claim that they had no evidence to support the allegations. This was not, however, the case for Mr Marty, who conducted a much more thorough investigation. Albanians and others say that Mr Marty was opposed to Kosovo’s declaration of independence, and claim his report is part of a campaign to smear the new state.
Mr Marty has also been attacked for not revealing details about his sources. He says their lives would be in danger if their identities were known. How convenient, retort the sceptics.
The new evidence
But the new documents will dismay Mr Marty's critics. They make for sickening reading about what happened in Albania after the war (although it is important to acknowledge that the claims they contain have never been tested by a proper criminal investigation). They also include details of the witnesses' identities, although not their names.
The first document is dated October 30th 2003. It is an internal ICTY text containing an annex with the witness statements gathered by the external source that had been sent to it by UNMIK. The second, dated December 12th 2003, is from the director of UNMIK's department of justice.
A summary of the witness statements in the first document states that between June and October 1999, 100-300 people, mostly Serb men, were abducted and taken to Albania. Between 24 and 100 of them were then taken to secondary detention centres, from where they were moved again to a “makeshift clinic” where “medical equipment and personnel were used to extract body organs from the captives, who then died.” The organs were then taken to Tirana airport and flown to Turkey and other destinations.
The document states that the witnesses were all ethnic Albanians who had served in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Four of them had been involved in the transport of at least 90 Serbs to central and northern Albania. Three of them delivered captives to the “house/clinic” near Burrel (the yellow house), the document states, two of them said they had helped dispose of human remains near the house, and one said he delivered body parts to Tirana airport.
The document also notes that none of the sources claimed to have witnessed the medical procedures. But they all claim that the operations and the transport of body parts took place with at least the knowledge, and in some cases the active involvement, of mid- to senior-level KLA officers.
At one point, the document quotes the sources as saying that: "The operation was supported by men with links to Albanian secret police operatives of the former government of Salih Berisha." Mr Berisha is, again, Albania's prime minister today.
The names
Significantly, the new documents do not mention Mr Thaçi's name. But they mention Ramush Haradinaj and his brother Daut. Mr Haradinaj is a former KLA commander and prime minister of Kosovo. In 2008 he was acquitted of war crimes by the ICTY, but he is now being retried on some counts after the prosecution successfully alleged witness intimidation.
Mr Haradinaj is a political foe of Mr Thaçi....
http://www.economist.com/node/21016145
UN knew about Kosovo organ trafficking, report says
No “Freedom Fighters”, Just Criminals and Thugs
On the preceding pages, the latest Drugs & Crime UN report offers a rarely accurate analysis of the situation among the ethnic Albanians (both next door to Serbia, in neighboring Albania, and in Serbia itself, mainly in the southern Kosovo province), which led to formation of the Albanian terrorist KLA (UCK) and to the terrorist attacks in Serbia — an unusually honest glimpse at the root-causes of Albanian insurrection and occupation of part of Serbia, impossible to find in the tons of worthless junk produced daily by the Western mainstream media.
The following excerpt effectively dismantles the pompous claims of heroic “struggle for freedom and independence” and disingenuous references to the “self-determination” of an ethnic group which has already exercised its right to self-determination with the formation of state of Albania.
No, it has nothing to do with “freedom”, “independence” or “self-determination”, it is all about illicit trade, crime without punishment, lawlessness, thuggery and insatiable greed.
Criminals, Terrorists or Politicians? In Kosovo-Metohija, all Three.
Excerpt from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime report for March 2008
[pg 52] According to an Interpol statement made before the U.S. Congress in 2000:
http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Balkan_study.pdf
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