Posted on 04/12/2008 8:50:14 AM PDT by Ravnagora
I have written in today's paper about the revelations from Carla del Ponte's new book "The Hunt: Me and War criminals". I wanted to talk to her before writing the piece, but was unable to get an interview.
Some readers of this blog have already posted snippets of the book in their comments. Most of these excerpts - translated from the original Italian - have come from Serb media outlets - perhaps not the most objective source for a story about Serbs being tortured.
So with the help of our Rome correspondent, Malcolm Moore, I have put together a transcription of the relevant parts of CdP's book for those interested parties.
In it she reports allegations made by several sources that KLA fighters, at a senior level, had authorised and profited from an organ-harvesting racket preying on Serbs transported from Kosovo.
It is worth remembering she got the information they provided through UN officials and "trusted journalists" not from the sources themselves. Here it is uncut for you to judge.
In a chapter entitled: Kosovo 1999-2007, she writes:
"The prosecutors office received information which UNMIK officials had received from a team of trustworthy journalists that during the summer months of 1999 Kosovan Albanians had transported 300 kidnapped people from Kosovo to Albania.
These prisoners were initially held in sheds and other structures in Kukes and Tropoje [Harry's note - north-eastern Albania]. According to the journalists' sources, who were only identified as Kosovo Albanians, some of the younger and fitter prisoners were visited by doctors and were never hit.
They were transferred to other detention camps in Burrel and the neighbouring area, one of which was a barracks behind a yellow house 20 km behind the town.
One room inside this yellow house, the journalists said, was kitted out as a makeshift operating theatre, and it was here that surgeons transplanted the organs of prisoners. These organs, according to the sources, were then sent to Rinas airport, Tirana, to be sent to surgical clinics abroad to be transplanted to paying patients.
One of the informers had personally carried out a shipment to the airport.
The victims, deprived of a kidney, were then locked up again, inside the barracks, until the moment they were killed for other vital organs. In this way, the other prisoners in the barracks were aware of the fate that awaited them, and according to the source, pleaded, terrified to be killed immediately.
Among the prisoners who were taken to these barracks were women from Kosovo, Albania, Russia and other Slavic countries. Two of the source said that they helped to bury the corpses of the dead around the yellow house and in a neighbouring cemetery.
According to the sources, the organ smuggling was carried out with the knowledge and active involvement of middle and high ranking involvement from the KLA.
The tribunal investigators discovered that even if the information for the journalists was tear-jerking, the details were coherent within themselves and confirmed information directly gathered by the tribunal.
'The material within [from the office of the court] does not contain specific material from Albania; but a low number of witness statements and other material we have confirms and to a certain extent amplifies the stated information,' I noted in a memo on this activity.
'All the individuals whom the sources cite as present in the Albanian camps in the summer of 1999 were declared to be lost in the summer of 1999 and had never been seen since then.'
The implications were obvious; 'Given the extremely grave nature of the these cases, the fact that practically none of the bodies of the victims of the KLA were found in the exhumations in Kosovo and the fact that these atrocities would have been committed under the supervision or command of the leadership of the KLA at the medium or high level, they should be investigated in the most thorough way possible by professional investigators and experts.'
The victims of these cases were probably seized after the end of the NATO air campaign in a period in which Kosovo was overrun with foreign peacekeepers and legions of investigators and representatives from Human Right operations. It was not clear whether crimes committed in this arc of time fell under the mandate of the tribunal.
The prosecutors office should have asked for the names of the sources from the journalists and UNMIK as well as any other information they had on this case."
In a second passage Ms del Ponte goes on to relate a visit to the alleged organ surgery in Burrel, Albania "a few months" after October 2002, presumably in early 2003.
She writes:
"A few months after [October 2002] the investigators of the tribunal and UNMIK reached central Albania and the yellow house which the journalists sources had revealed as the place where the prisoners were killed to transplant their organs. The journalists and the Albanian prosecutor accompanied the investigators on to the site.
The house was now white. The owner denied it had ever been repainted even though investigators found traces of yellow along the base of its walls.
Inside the investigators found pieces of gauze, a used syringe and two plastic IV bags encrusted with mud and empty bottles of medicine, some of which was of a muscle relaxant often used in surgical operations.
The application of a chemical substance revealed to the scientific team traces of blood on the walls and on the floor of a room inside the house, except for in a clean area of the floor sized 180x60cm.
The owner offered a variety of explanations for the bloodstains over the course of the two days the investigators spent in the village.
Initially he said that many years ago his wife had given birth in that room then when his wife said she had her children elsewhere he asserted that the family had used the building to butcher animals for a Muslim festival.
It is tempting to draw conclusions from these investigations, combined with the fragmentary testimony from the journalists. Stories of prisoners killed by organ traffickers circulate in many conflict areas, but rarely is it possible to find concrete proof which would separate these tales from urban legend.
The syringes, the iv solution bags, the gauze are clearly material which confirms the tales, but as proof they are unfortunately insufficient. The investigators were not able to determine whether the traces they found were of human blood. The sources did not indicated the position of the grave of the presumed victims and so we did not find the bodies."
_____________________________
i’m waiting for this to be aired on Fox News..............
> i’m waiting for this to be aired on Fox News..............
Don’t hold your breath.
FYI
There are few creatures on earth lower, more deserving of the contempt of civilized human beings than Albanians, yet they are the financiers of the McCain presidential bid, the joyous beneficiaries of the deaths of countless Orthodox Serbian civilians at the hands of Clinton lead NATO forces and deemed worthy of high praise and hundreds of millions of dollars from the present Administration.
Its discouraging, R, very discouraging.
Poor choice of words; Albanians would not care to be called Slavs.
There is witness testimony that this author did not quote:
"General Mamir Stayanovich was head of the intelligence service of the Serbian army during the war.
He has no doubt that the claims in Del Ponte’s book will sooner or later be proven. The places she mentions as hidden operation rooms are in exactly the same location as the camps Albanians used for training soldiers.
“In these hospitals they decided amongst themselves what each commander of the KLA would have. They decided who would make his money from drug dealing, who from weapons, and who from selling body parts. Hashim Thaci, the prime minister, was among them,” General Stayanovich claims.
There are more than 2,000 names on the list of missing Serbs. Sima Spasich is the leader of an organisation trying to discover their fate. He showed the pictures of body parts he filmed in 2003.
“Right after the war, when we understood that too many people had disappeared, I went to the KFor commanders and asked them where were the people, and they just shrugged their shoulders. Only after they saw Serbian people demonstrating and were afraid of their anger, they took me to some place,” Spasich said.
“I cannot explain what I saw there. It was a small mountain of pieces of bodies and the first thing I saw was a baby who’d been taken from his mother’s stomach, lying there. It was impossible to look. It was a massive grave they’d dug before. Today I know in this massive grave were 26 Serb bodies - also there was my brother Milosh,” Spasich added.
the sentence twins ‘Russia and other Slavic nations’, not Albania and Slavic nations.
There is little reason to doubt the limitless evil of certain practicioners of islam...
Ummmm.
K.
And muslims are misunderstood...
BUMP
Is there such a thing anymore?????
Discouraging, Kolo, yes. But everything that’s “Bad” has its point of diminishing returns.
Don’t forget that there is a higher power than John McCain, George W. Bush, Condi, Thaci, the U.N., etc.
He will be the final arbitrator of who gets what in this scenario.
I’m very encouraged about the book. Notice it was not published in ENGLISH. Very telling. But, now, in part thanks, I believe, to Free Republic, more and more attention is being paid to this.
It’s early yet in “Kosova’s independence”. The southern states in the U.S. tried this, too, back some years ago, and things didn’t work out. So, be encouraged.
Sobieski wrote:
“the sentence twins ‘Russia and other Slavic nations’, not Albania and Slavic nations.”
Sobieski, you win the reading comprehension prize of the day!
Good catch.
This would have been a gigantic story. It would have guaranteed you a Pulitzer. Yet no one published?
If this took place it was a crime of monumental proportions. And all who participated on knew and did nothing deserve exemplary punishment. Or it is a lie of monumental proportions.
Evidence, please.
Cheburashka wrote:
“Who were these trustworthy journalists and why didn’t they publish in 1999? In 2000? In 2001? In 2003? Today?
This would have been a gigantic story. It would have guaranteed you a Pulitzer. Yet no one published?”
****
There were many stories worthy of publication during those years. And in the 1990s. However, stories that exposed atrocities against Serbs were NOT politically correct. Censorship of “Serb friendly” stories was so rampant that regardless of the “evidence” or the “source”, they were either nixed or invalidated or trivialized as “Serb propaganda”. Anything pro-Moslem, i.e. ‘Bosnian’ or pro-Albanian, i.e. ‘Kosovar’ was welcomed, was encouraged, was published, was accepted, and was validated by whatever phony means necessary, and it became “the truth”.
People didn’t “demand evidence” when it came any stories demonizing the Serbs. And plenty of evidence was “manufactured” to fulfill the anti-Serb agenda. Even massacres were “manufactured”.
This story would not have seen the light of day back then, much less guaranteed anyone the Pulitzer prize.
Would you be asking for “evidence” if this had been a story about Serbs doing business with Albanian organs?
Interesting that you do not feel the need for evidence, or "evidence", for that matter (whatever the difference between the two is in your mind). It says much about your mindset.
“Evidence” or Evidence - it doesn’t matter. Requests for neither were accomodated by U.N. and Kosovo officials, an essential point that del Ponte makes.
Cases have been tried on the basis of ‘circumstantial evidence’ in the United States, and such has been compelling enough for a justified conviction.
If there was nothing “wrong” [or wrong] going on, U.N. officials and Kosovo officials would have been more accomodating in complying with the “evidence” [or evidence] gathering requests. And, of course, if Serbs had been accused of the crimes, the “officials” [or officals] would have been more than happy to provide all the “evidence” [or evidence] requested.
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