Hashim Thaci

"Landep News"

Hashim Thaci

The Kosovo Prime Minister’s case related to organ trafficking reached the highest European commissions, after an international arrest warrant was issued in his name by Serbian investigators under the accusation of trafficking organs harvested from Serbian people during the 1999 war waged by Kosovo Liberation Army against Serbia.

A report issued by the Council of Europe in December 2010 mentioned Hashim Tachi’s name in accusations related to involvement in organized crime, including in organ trafficking. The conclusions of the report follow a two-year investigation conducted by special rapporteur Dick Marty, in which Thaci’s name, who was at the time the political leader of Kosovo Liberation Army, appears 27 times.

According to the report, the organs were collected from the Serbian prisoners of war, in Kosovo camps at the border with Albania, where prisoners, including civilian Serbian people, were killed for their organs, which were subsequently sold on the black market.

Dick Marty specified that he never said in so many words that Hashim Thaci was directly implicated in these heinous crimes, but added that it was virtually impossible for the current Kosovo PM not to have had any information about it.

As a result, EU Rule of Law mission appointed US prosecutor John Clint Williamson to lead an investigation task to look into the allegations made in January. Williamson, 50, former UN worker, is to investigate both organized crime and war crimes.

Dick Marty’s report was done under very difficult conditions, as the Kosovo authorities constantly refused the Serbian demand to investigate the information about mass graves in Kosovo, while Eulex, European Union Law and Justice Mission in Kosovo, continued to point in another direction, toward some presumed 1,861 people disappeared in 1999, most of them Albanian Kosovans. Eulex deemed the information about the organ trafficking as mere “fairytale.”

The Yellow House in Albania

As his effort to obtain evidence seemed condemned to a bitter failure, Marty succeeded in convincing Western governments to postpone the release of the report until December 2010, by which time he was able to gather evidence from several dozen primary sources: combatants and affiliated of various armed factions, and direct victims of the hostilities in Kosovo 1999.

In an article published in December 2010, soon after the release of the report, by the electronic edition of BBC, it is alluded to the fact that Dick Marty was a steady opponent of Kosovan independence and that he has been working with the Serbians to prove the accusation against the Kosovo Prime Minister, accusations he strongly rejected every time.

Still, in November 2010, an organ trafficking case was documented about international trafficking occurring in the capital of the Kosovo, Pristina, involving doctors of various nationalities.

Three investigations have been conducted so far by Serbia, the European Union and the Council of Europe, but they all failed to uncover the evidence that would link the Kosovo Liberation Army to the alleged killings of the Serbian prisoners soon after the war was over.

It is alleged that dozens of Serbian nationals were taken to a “yellow house” near Burrel, central Albania, from June 1999 to May 2000, where their organs have been removed and sold systematically, according to Carla del Ponte, former war crime prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, who mentioned this data in her autobiography.

The investigation was rendered more difficult by the fact that the primary sources have left the Kosovo zone a long time ago and it was difficult to identify them.

Still, media investigations have documented the presence of KLA detention camps in Albania, and American journalist Michael Montgomery was able to speak to KLA soldiers who told him that they had transported Serbs and Albanian prisoners, dead or alive, across the border. The Albanian prisoners were those found disloyal to KLA.

Three of seven sources Montgomery encountered referred to the possibility of organ trafficking, and pointed to the house near Burrel.

UN representatives of the war crime tribunal visited the house in February 2004, and found traces of blood on the floor, and medical equipment that was fit for extraction procedures was found at the spot thrown at a rubbish dump.

Carla del Ponte, The Hunt: Me and the War Criminals

The investigation was halted especially after the primary sources Montgomery spoke to had in the meantime vanished. Eulex did everything to put an end to this “fairytale” and point to the mass graves and the crimes committed by Serbians. Why? Why are the Albanian dead more important for Eulex than those of the Serbians? Are they covering for someone?

Hashim Thaci denied that the Kosovo Liberation Army has committed any crimes against the prisoners, and denied any possibility of mistreatment anywhere in Albania or Kosovo. He did admit that crimes have been committed after the war, but added that the perpetrators only pretended to be members of KLA. He threatened to sue Marty for his 2010 report.

Carla del Ponte, the Swiss prosecutor who put Slobodan Milosevic in the dock, spoke about these alleged crimes in the book The Hunt: Me and War Criminals, an autobiography in which she speaks of 300 people who were not of Albanian descent and that were taken to the “yellow house,” where she says they were killed and their organs were harvested and sold on the black market.

According to reports offered by a person that was a driver and was reported to have taken the organs to the airport of Tirana on some occasions, the kidneys were being harvested before the persons were killed. Afterwards, other organs were taken from those executed.

Del Ponte says that the people were aware of their fate and were pleading to be killed as soon as possible. She said that some of the people were buried near the “house-clinic” and others in the nearby cemetery.

Ramush Haradinaj, former Kosovan PM, was tried for war crimes in The Hague and was acquitted in April 2008, being the highest-ranked Kosovan to have been put on trial for what happened in 1999.

Carla del Ponte quotes a meeting with a local Albanian prosecutor who told her that no Serbs were being killed in that house, nor were they buried in the nearby places. She said he added that if KLA brought Serbs and killed them, they did a good thing.

Del Ponte believes that the organs harvested were taken to Istanbul, where they were implanted in the suffering bodies of different wealthy Arab people.

Many criticized her release at five years after the findings she speaks about, but considering that the release of the book was received with a lot of enmity and she was asked to resign her new position of Swiss ambassador to Argentina, one has reasons to think that this matter is very sensitive for many across Europe and no official is actually interested in the finding of the truth.

The suspect insistence on pointing only to the 1,861 Albanian missing, while the 300 Serbs seem very unimportant shows that someone really wants the investigations thrown off track.

Though many turned against her for her disclosure, Human Rights Watch believes she brings enough evidence to support the idea that something wrong happened to those people in 1999.

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