Body blow

A Council of Europe report indicts Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of Kosovo for having been involved in organ trafficking.

IMAGINE the head of a state being accused of human organ trafficking. This is precisely what Prime Minister Hashim Thaci of Kosovo is facing. Soon after he was re-elected Prime Minister in the second week of December, the Council of Europe (CoE) released a report accusing the former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) of having once headed a mafia like grouping that dealt in gunrunning, human trafficking and organ smuggling.

The 47-member CoE, set up in 1949, works closely with the European Union and lays emphasis on human rights and the rule of law. A Committee of Ministers, comprising all Foreign Ministers of E.U. member-countries, functions under the CoE.

Kosovo today is virtually a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)/E.U. protectorate. Its independence has not been recognised by a majority of the international community, including many states in the E.U. But Kosovo has the strong backing of the United States and powerful E.U. states such as Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

Information about the KLA's illegal detention camps had reached the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) way back in 2000. Some KLA fighters had told the ICRC in 1999 that captured Serb civilians were killed and their organs removed and sold abroad for transplant operations. The charges against Thaci were taken more seriously after the BBC ran a story on organ trafficking in the Balkans in April 2009.

Thaci was one of the leading KLA fighters waging a war against the central government in Belgrade from the early 1990s. He became the pre-eminent leader of Kosovo after its separation from Serbia, which was facilitated by NATO and the E.U.

Despite his notoriety, Thaci was the man favoured by the West to lead the newly independent country. The former government of Yugoslavia had been crying hoarse that the KLA was a terrorist organisation with known criminal links. The West, however, chose to turn a blind eye to the documented allegations that the government in Belgrade had presented since the mid-1990s. Led by the U.S., the West single-mindedly pursued its goal of dismantling the Yugoslav Federation. The final act in the bloody Balkan drama was the detaching of Kosovo from the Republic of Serbia.

The late Richard Holbrooke, whose last job was as a trouble-shooter in South Asia for the U.S. President, played a crucial role in the events that led to the creation of Kosovo and the transformation of Thaci into a respected politician. Washington had until the early 1990s proscribed the KLA as a terrorist grouping. NATO admitted at the time that the KLA was the main initiator of violence in Kosovo as it sought to provoke the Yugoslav authorities to retaliate and then provide the West the fait accompli to intervene militarily.

But during the Rambouillet talks in 1999, the U.S. State Department, in preparation for an all-out war against Yugoslavia, recognised Thaci as the legitimate representative of the Kosovar people and seated him at the negotiating table. When queried about the dubious antecedents of Thaci, the U.S. State Department spokesman at the time said there was no evidence to substantiate the claims that the KLA leadership was involved in assassinations or executions. The West and many liberals supporting the 70-day NATO war against Yugoslavia justified it as a humanitarian intervention to protect the right of the two million Kosovars to self-determination.

CoE report

The CoE report, based on the findings of a two-year long inquiry, describes Thaci as the head of an Albanian criminal group that began functioning before the start of the 1998-99 Kosovo war. According to British media reports, U.S. intelligence agencies provided significant inputs for the investigations. The report states that Thaci exerted violent control over the heroin trade, in particular in the last decade. It further says that Thaci's close associates took many Serb captives across the border into Albania where they were killed and their organs harvested and sold in the flourishing black market.

Dick Marty, a Swiss Senator and former prosecutor who led the inquiry team, said that Thaci was the head of the Drenica group comprising his clansmen from the Drenica region. This group went on to dominate the KLA. The Drenica group, the report says, took over all the criminal enterprises the KLA had across the border in Albania.

Marty reported that the international community chose to ignore the war crimes carried out by the KLA. Instead, it placed a premium on achieving some degree of short-term stability in Kosovo. Marty said that during the Kosovo war and for a short period after that, Thaci and his close associates who are named in the report carried out assassinations, detentions, beatings and interrogations.

Marty's inquiry started after the former war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte, in a book she recently wrote, asserted that she was prevented from investigating senior KLA leaders. Carla del Ponte was given a free hand, however, when she went after Slobodan Milosevic, another former head of state. It was described as victor's justice. Milosevic died in his prison cell.

Carla del Ponte, perhaps stricken with guilt, demanded more investigations into the allegations that Serb prisoners were smuggled across the border and their organs harvested. Marty's report states that there is evidence that the KLA held captive Serbs in a secret network of facilities in northern Albania. The report emphasises that Thaci's Drenica group bears the greatest responsibility for the prisons and the fate of those held in them. A state-of-the-art medical reception centre for organ trafficking was set up in Albania. 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 report says.

A report in the Guardian said that many of the clients for the organs were from Israel. One of the wanted men in the organ trafficking racket is an Israeli, Moshe Harel. He is on Interpol's fugitive list. Most international trafficking rings have an Israeli connection. Demand for organs, especially the liver, is high in Israel. There are few organ donors in Israel because of the religious sensibilities of its people. Those Israelis in urgent need of organs go on transplant tours. In late 2010, the South African media reported that the recipients of illegally transplanted organs in a private hospital in the country were all Israelis. A South African hospital chain admitted that it received more than $800,000 from an illegal trafficking syndicate.

The Medicus Clinic in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, is also under investigation for trade in human organs. The E.U., which does most of the policing in Kosovo, has now closed down the clinic. E.U. investigators found that the KLA brought people to Kosovo from neighbouring countries for the purpose of removing organs. The donors were paid around $20,000, while the recipients coughed up as much as $137,000.

Though there is a law forbidding organ transplants in Kosovo, the Medicus Clinic was given a special dispensation by the Thaci government to conduct organ transplants. Marty's report concludes by stating that the signs of collusion between the criminal class and institutional office holders are too numerous and too serious to be ignored.

The Kosovo authorities have described the report as despicable and bizarre actions by people with no moral credibility. A statement by the Kosovo government said the report was part of the campaign to damage the image of Kosovo and the KLA. It noted that the report was released just after the people of Kosovo had placed their trust in Thaci.

Thaci denounced the findings as scandalous. He said the allegations were aimed at undermining Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008. International election observers, incidentally, have said that significant fraud in the conduct of the December elections helped Thaci get another term in office. His Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), according to reports, resorted to mass rigging in Drenica. The PDK got 33.5 per cent of the votes and emerged as the largest party. The opposition is demanding a re-poll.

A former Prime Minister of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, is facing trial for war crimes at The Hague. The charges against him include abetment to murder, rape and torture. It was at the Haradinaj trial that the first credible reports of the human organ trade emerged. Many of the witnesses in the Haradinaj case have been killed and others cowed into silence.