Kosovo's prime minister is the head of a "mafia-like" Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe, according to a Council of Europe inquiry report on organised crime.
Hashim Thaçi is identified as the boss of a network that began operating criminal rackets in the runup to the 1999 Kosovo war, and has held powerful sway over the country's government since.
The report of the two-year inquiry, which cites FBI and other intelligence sources, has been obtained by the Guardian. It names Thaçi as having over the last decade exerted "violent control" over the heroin trade. Figures from Thaçi's inner circle are also accused of taking captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market.
Legal proceedings began in a Pristina district court today into a case of alleged organ trafficking discovered by police in 2008. That case – in which organs are said to have been taken from impoverished victims at a clinic known as Medicus – is said by the report to be linked to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) organ harvesting in 2000. It comes at a crucial period for Kosovo, which on Sunday held its first elections since declaring independence from Serbia in 2008. Thaçi claimed victory in the election and has been seeking to form a coalition with opposition parties.
Dick Marty, the human rights investigator behind the inquiry, will present his report to European diplomats from all 47 member states at a meeting in Paris on Thursday. His report suggests Thaçi's links with organised crime date back more than a decade, when those loyal to his Drenica group came to dominate the KLA, and seized control of "most of the illicit criminal enterprises" in which Kosovans were involved south of the border, in Albania.
During the Kosovo conflict Slobodan Miloševic's troops responded to attacks by the KLA by orchestrating a horrific campaign against ethnic Albanians in the territory. As many as 10,000 are estimated to have died at the hands of Serbian troops.
While deploring Serb atrocities, Marty said the international community chose to ignore suspected war crimes by the KLA, "placing a premium instead on achieving some degree of short-term stability". He concludes that during the Kosovo war and for almost a year after, Thaçi and four other members of the Drenica group named in the report carried out "assassinations, detentions, beatings and interrogations". This same hardline KLA faction has held considerable power in Kosovo's government over the last decade, with the support of western powers keen to ensure stability in the fledgling state.
The report paints a picture in which ex-KLA commanders have played a crucial role in the region's criminal activity. It says: "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."
Marty says: "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."
His inquiry was commissioned after the former chief prosecutor for war crimes at the Hague, Carla Del Ponte, said she had been prevented from investigating senior KLA officials. Her most shocking claim, which she said required further investigation, was that the KLA smuggled captive Serbs across the border into Albania, where their organs were harvested.
The report, which states that it is not a criminal investigation and unable to pronounce judgments of guilt or innocence, gives some credence to Del Ponte's claims.
It finds the KLA did hold mostly Serb captives in a secret network of six detention facilities in northern Albania, and that Thaçi's Drenica group "bear the greatest responsibility" for prisons and the fate of those held in them.
They include a "handful" of prisoners said to have been transferred to a makeshift prison just north of Tirana, where they were killed for their kidneys.
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.''
The same Kosovan and foreign individuals involved in the macabre killings are linked to the Medicus case, the report finds.
Marty is critical of the western powers which have provided a supervisory role in Kosovo's emergence as a state, for failing to hold senior figures, including Thaçi, to account. His report criticises "faltering political will on the part of the international community to effectively prosecute the former leaders of the KLA".
It concludes: "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."
If as expected the report is formally adopted by the committee this week, the findings will go before the parliamentary assembly next year.
The Kosovo government tonight dismissed the allegations, claiming they were the produce of "despicable and bizarre actions by people with no moral credibility".
"Today, the Guardian 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," it said in a statement.
"The allegations 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.
"It is clear that someone wants to place obstacles in the way of prime minister, Hashim Thaçi, after the general election, in which the people of Kosovo placed their clear and significant trust in him to deliver the development programme 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."
Legal proceedings began in a Pristina district court today into a case of alleged organ trafficking discovered by police in 2008. That case – in which organs are said to have been taken from impoverished victims at a clinic known as Medicus – is said by the report to be linked to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) organ harvesting in 2000
You do come on with science fiction nonsense do you not.
One can’t help but wonder how many times we have to be hit over the head before it begins to sink in that America’s intervention in Kosovo was based on a pack of lies from the start. The “accepted” narrative of Kosovo as the great success story parades under the headline: U.S. and NATO Allies Nobly Stepped in to Stop Genocide by Evil Serbs. The reality was U.S. Dragged NATO Allies Kicking and Screaming Into Support for Muslim Mafia Committing Genocide Against Christian Serbs.
Comes now the Council of Europe’s human rights investigator Dick Marty with damning accusations that Hashim Thaci, a/k/a Gjarpër (“Snake”), currently masquerading as “prime minister” of the illegal separatist administration in Pristina, heads a “mafia-like” operation that included murdering captives, mainly Serbs, to sell their organs on the black market. Is even that ghoulish revelation enough to force a reconsideration of the preening self-justification of a “humanitarian” intervention most Americans have long since forgotten? We can hope. But did the plotted attack on Fort Dix changes any minds? No. Now we have organ trafficking. Let's remember the organ-trafficking story first broke over two years ago and seemed to be withering away in the face of brazen stonewalling by "authorities" in Pristina and Tirana (with full backing from Washington, of course.)
Release of Mr. Marty’s report, just as Thaci is claiming victory in Kosovo’s recent elections, suggests that somebody in Europe wants to jump off this bandwagon to disaster. But for Americans, the question is: How horrible do the facts need to be before we start looking behind the curtain to see what our government is so desperate to conceal?
In the unfortunate partisan myopia that plagues American politics, some of my fellow conservatives might be tempted to blame it on Bill Clinton and leave it at that. Of course, it was largely a “Clinton problem” back during the 1999 NATO war against Serbia. To their credit, most Congressional Republicans voted against the war, which our Razorback Rommel illegally launched even though the House of Representatives had voted down the authorization to use military force. But while Republicans mainly voted No, the neoconservative establishment was whipping up support for the Clinton White House. Unfortunately, with neocon domination of the George W. Bush administration's foreign policy, and their desperation to win Islamic friends after 9/11, the Bush policy on Kosovo was even more Clinton than Clinton, leading to the decision to try to force the issue of Kosovo’s independence in violation of every principle of international law and national sovereignty.
So, what will Washington do now about “our” guy Thaci? Do a Google Image search for his name with almost any top U.S. figure of either party you can think of and you'll see him in a warm handshake, often a chummy embrace with a virtual Who’s Who of the American establishment: George W. Bush, Condi Rice, Bill Gates, Clinton (both of them), Joseph Biden, Madeleine Albright, Wesley Clark, etc. (See “Snake and Friends” at the end of this message.) One would like to think some one of these worthies would now have the decency to say (even if only in virtuous hypocrisy), “What? I didn't know! I'd never have supported these guys if I had!” But the problem is, even aside from these organ-trafficking peccadilloes, the U.S. establishment did know – from Day One – that Thaci and Co. (the "Kosovo Liberation Army," KLA) were a bunch of thugs. So did the intelligence services of our allies. (And make no mistake – it's not just Thaci. If Thaci needs to be dumped, we can guess that “Plan B” will be to install in his place another of his equally vicious KLA colleagues.) They – our government – knew the KLA were criminals running the drug, slave, and weapons rackets throughout Europe. They knew the KLA was supported by Osama bin Laden (with whom Thaci met personally in Tirana in 1998 to plan the jihad in Kosovo, according to the former head of Albanian intelligence), the Iranians, the Saudis, the Turks, and other supporters of an Islamic re-re-conquest of the Balkans. And we supported them anyway, shredding every rule of law and decency in the process. Now what? In all probability, circle the wagons, hope it will blow over, and keep twisting arms around the world in support of the illegal separatist terrorist entity “KosovA.”
As for Serbia – if there were a respectable government in Belgrade, instead of a group of quislings, they wouldn’t be preparing to meet with representatives of Thaci’s “government” in direct negotiations. Instead, conspiring with their U.S. and European supporters and collaborators in the Serbian Orthodox Church, Belgrade’s recent “contribution” to the Kosovo fiasco is their persecution of Vladika Artemije, Bishop of Ras and Prizren and Kosovo and Metohija, who over two years ago was calling for then-President Bush to refuse to meet with Thaci and demanding an accounting for the organ-selling outrage!
Let us hope that Mr. Marty’s fine work doesn’t get thrown down the Memory Hole with any and all other facts inconvenient to Washington’s policy. But it’s not enough just to track down the individual perpetrators, or even to pack Thaci off to jail (though both would be a good start). It’s time for the lies that have undergirded our entire Balkan policy to be exposed, for the United States to stop its obsessive support for Islamic jihad against the indigenous Christian population, and specifically to back off from our absurd and destructive global lobbying on behalf of the KLA regime.
Some might argue that “we’ve come too far” to reverse course now, that American commitment to “KosovA” is irreversible. But it’s never too late to stop doing the wrong thing and start doing the right thing. If Mr. Marty’s organ-trafficking revelations can be a catalyst for a truthful reassessment of American policy and of the events of recent years, the victims will not have died in vain.
0 Replies
djjd62
2
Reply
Wed 15 Dec, 2010 05:57 pm
@BillRM,
seems to be a true story, the pm is alleged, but the health minister seems to be deeply involved, seems poor folks were lured to the clinic, offered money for their kidneys, sent home and told the check was in the mail (never fall for that)
People were just being hauled off and killed for their organs. The good news is that the day IS coming when Serbian tanks and/or Russian tanks roll back into Kosovo.
the news report i saw (Global National in Canada) dealt with recent (in the last couple of years) events, money was offered (about $25,00 for kidneys they were selling for $125,000) to poor people from around the area (lots of the "stan" countries), but apart from transportation and a small stipend no big amount was ever paid out
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