http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2010/12/16/kosovo%e2%80%99s-thaci-human-organs-trafficker
Kosovo’s Thaçi: Human Organs Trafficker
by Srdja Trifkovic
Chronicles Online, December 16th, 2010
The details of an elaborate KLA-run human organ harvesting ring, broadly known
for years, have been confirmed by a Council of Europe report published on
January 15. The report, “Inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking of
human organs in Kosovo” identifies the province’s recently re-elected “prime
minister” Hashim Thaçi as the boss of a “mafia-like” Albanian group specialized
in smuggling weapons, drugs, people, and human organs all over Europe. The
report reveals that Thaçi’s closest aides were taking Serbs across the border
into Albania after the war, murdering them, and selling their organs on the
black market. In addition, the report accuses Thaçi of having exerted “violent
control” over the heroin trade for a decade.
Deliberate Destrution of Evidence – Long dismissed in the mainstream media as
“Serbian propaganda,” the allegations of organ trafficking – familiar to our
readers – were ignored in the West until early 2008, when Carla Del Ponte,
former Prosecutor at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
at The Hague, revealed in her memoirs that she had been prevented from
initiating any serious investigation into its merits. She also revealed –
shockingly – that some elements of proof taken by ICTY field investigators from
the notorious “Yellow House” in the Albanian town of Rripe were destroyed at The
Hague, thus enabling the KLA and their Western enablers to claim that “there was
no evidence” for the organ trafficking allegations.
In April 2008, prompted by Del Ponte’s revelations, seventeen European
parliamentarians signed a motion for a resolution calling on the Assembly to
examine the allegations. The matter was referred to the Assembly’s Committee on
Legal Affairs and Human Rights, which in June 2008 appointed Swiss senator Dick
Marty as its rapporteur. He had gained international prominence by his previous
investigation of accusations that the CIA abducted and imprisoned terrorism
suspects in Europe.
“Genuine Terror” – In his Introductory Remarks Marty revealed some of the
“extraordinary challenges of this assignment”: the acts alleged purportedly took
place a decade ago, they were not properly investigated by any of the national
and international authorities with jurisdiction over the territories concerned.
In addition, Marty went on,
… efforts to establish the facts of the Kosovo conflict and punish the attendant
war crimes had primarily been concentrated in one direction, based on an
implicit presumption that one side were the victims and the other side the
perpetrators. As we shall see, the reality seems to have been more complex. The
structure of Kosovar Albanian society, still very much clan-orientated, and the
absence of a true civil society have made it extremely difficult to set up
contacts with local sources. This is compounded by fear, often to the point of
genuine terror, which we have observed in some of our informants immediately
upon broaching the subject of our inquiry. Even certain representatives of
international institutions did not conceal their reluctance to grapple with
these facts: “The past is the past”, we were told; “we must now look to the
future.”
The report says Thaçi’s links with organized crime go back to the late 1990’s,
when his Drenica Group became the dominant faction within the KLA. By 1998 he
was able to grab control of “most of the illicit criminal enterprises” in
Albania itself. Thaçi and four other members of the Drenica Group are named as
personally guilty of assassinations, detentions and beatings:
In confidential reports spanning more than a decade, agencies dedicated to
combating drug smuggling in at least five countries have named Hashim Thaçi and
other members of his Drenica Group as having exerted violent control over the
trade in heroin and other narcotics… Thaçi and these other Drenica Group members
are consistently named as “key players” in 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.
Marty notes that the international community chose to ignore war crimes by the
KLA, enabling Thaçi’s forces to conduct a campaign of murdereous terror against
Serbs, Roma, and Albanians accused of collaborating with the Serbs. Some 500 of
them “disappeared after the arrival of KFOR troops on 12 June 1999,” about a
hundred Albanians and 400 others, most of them Serbs. Some of these civilians
had been secretly imprisoned by the KLA at different locations in northern
Albania, the report adds, “and were subjected to inhuman and degrading
treatment, before ultimately disappearing.” Captives were “filtered” in ad-hoc
prisons for their suitability for organ harvesting based on sex, age, health and
ethnic origin. They were then sent to the last stop – a makeshift clinic near
Fushë-Krujë, close to the Tirana airport:
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.
Thaçi the Untouchable – The report states that Thaçi’s Drenica Group “bear the
greatest responsibility” for the prisons and the fate of those held in them. It
criticizes the governments supportive of Kosovo’s independence for not holding
to account senior Albanians in Kosovo, including Thaçi, and of lacking the will
to effectively prosecute the former leaders of the KLA. The diplomatic and
political support by such powers “bestowed upon Thaçi, not least in his own
mind, a sense of being untouchable.”
Marty concludes that “[t]he signs of collusion between the criminal class and
the highest political and institutional office holders are too numerous and too
serious to be ignored,” but “the international authorities in charge of the
region did not consider it necessary to conduct a detailed examination of these
circumstances, or did so incompletely and superficially.”
Following Marty’s presentation of the report to the Council of Europe in Paris
on December 16 it will be debated by the Parliamentary Assembly in Strasbourg on
January 25.
Media Reaction – Within days of the publication of Marty’s report, numerous of
excellent articles were published in the mainstream media Europe linking his
revelations with the broader problem of NATO’s war against the Serbs in 1999,
the precedent it had created for Afghanistan and Iraq, and the nature of the
“Kosovar” society today.
Neil Clark in The Guardian assailed “the myth of liberal intervention.” Far from
being Tony Blair’s “good” war, he wrote, the assault on Yugoslavia was as wrong
as the invasion of Iraq:
It was a fiction many on the liberal left bought into. In 1999 Blair was seen
not as a duplicitous warmonger in hock to the US but as an ethical leader taking
a stand against ethnic cleansing. 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… Instead, a virulently anti-Serb stance led the west
into taking ever more extreme positions, and siding with an organisation which
even Robert Gelbard, President Clinton’s special envoy to Kosovo, described as
“without any question, a terrorist group.”
Clark reminds us that it was the KLA’s campaign of violence in 1998 which led to
an escalation of the conflict with the government in Belgrade. “We were told the
outbreak of war in March 1999 with NASTO was the Serbian government’s fault,” he
adds, yet Lord Gilbert, the UK defence minister, admitted “the terms put to
Miloševic at Rambouillet [the international conference preceding the war] were
absolutely intolerable … it was quite deliberate.” Then came the NATO
occupation, under which an estimated 200,000 ethnic Serbs and other minorities
from south Kosovo, and almost the whole Serb population of Pristina, have been
forced from their homes. But as the Iraq war 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’s
report on the KLA’s crimes makes that position much harder to maintain. And if
it plays its part in making people more sceptical about any future western
“liberal interventions”, it is to be warmly welcomed.
Tony Blair has some very bizarre friends, wroteStephen Glover in The Daily Mail,
but a monster who traded in human body parts beats the lot. The prime minister
of Kosovo is painted by the report as a major war criminal presiding over a
corrupt and dysfunctional state, Glover says, and yet this same Mr Thaci and his
associates in the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army were put in place after the
U.S. and Britain launched an onslaught in March 1999 against Serbia, dropping
more than 250,000 and killing an estimated 1,500 blameless civilians: „This was
Mr Blair’s first big war, and it paved the way for the subsequent Western
invasion of Iraq. The crucial difference is that while the Left in general …
opposed the war against Saddam Hussein, both were among Mr Blair’s main
cheerleaders as he persuaded President Bill Clinton to join forces with him in
crushing Serbia.“ Both London and Washington tended to ignore atrocities
committed by Hashim Thaci’s KLA, Glover concludes, and offered unacceptably
draconian terms to the Serbs “because by that stage Blair and Clinton preferred
war”:
Those were the days, of course, when most of the media thought Tony Blair could
do no wrong. His military success in 1999 convinced him that Britain could and
should play the role of the world’s number two policeman to the U.S. A
messianic note entered his rhetoric, as at the 2001 Labour party conference,
when he raved that ‘the kaleidoscope has been shaken… Let us re-order this
world about us.” … 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 should end up by receiving the Golden Medal of Freedom
from a monster who traded in body parts.
U.S. Damage Limitation and Self-Censorship – Such commentary is light years away
from the feeble and half-hearted reporting in the American mainstream media. The
Chicago Tribune, for instance, did not deem it fit to publish a story about the
Council of Europe report itself. It published two related items critical of the
report instead, on the European Union expressing doubt about its factual basis
and on the “government” of Kosovo planning to sue Dick Marty for libel. No major
daily has published a word of doubt about Bill Clinton’s wisdom of waging a war
on behalf of Thaçi and his cohorts a decade ago, or perpetuating the myth of it
having been a good war today.
That Thaçi aka “The Snake” is a criminal as well as a war criminal is no news,
of course. The intriguing question is who, on the European side, wanted to end
his “untouchable” status, why now, and what is the U.S. Government – his
principal enabler and abettor – going to do about it.
Unsurprisingly, Thaçi’s “government” dismissed the report on December 14 as
“baseless and defamatory.” On that same day Hashim Thaçi wrote in a telegram to
President Obama that “the death of Richard Holbrooke is a loss of a friend.”
“The Snake” has many other friends in Washington, however, people like US
senator (and current foe of WikiLeaks) Joseph Lieberman, who declared back in
1999 at the height of the US-led war against the Serbs that “the United States
of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same human values and
principles … Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American
values.” Thaçi’s photos with top U.S. officials are a virtual Who’s Who of
successive Administrations over the past 12 years: Bill and Hillary Clinton,
Albright, Bush, Rice, Biden, Wesley Clark…
Thaçi’s American enablers and their media minions are already embarking on a
bipartisan damage-limitation exercise. Its pillars will be the assertion that
the report rests on flimsy factual evidence, an attempt to discredit Dick Marty
personally, and the claim the Council of Europe as an irrelevant talking shop.
Filed under: AKTUELNO, English, Vesti | Leave a comment »
Dobro dosli na Internet prezentaciju srpske dijaspore 