Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was one of the key players in the traffic of organs of Serb prisoners after the 1998-1999 conflict there, according to allegations in a draft Council of Europe report.
The report, by Swiss Council of Europe deputy Dick Marty, accuses Thaci and other senior commanders of the ethnic Albanian guerrilla group the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) of having set up the traffic.
The draft report was published on the Council of Europe Web site on Tuesday and will be considered by its legal affairs committee today.
In Pristina, the government of Thaci dismissed the report as fabrications designed to smear the country’s leaders.
Marty wrote of substantial evidence that Serbians — and some Albanian Kosovars — had been secretly imprisoned by the KLA in northern Albania “and were subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, before ultimately disappearing.”
In the wake of the armed conflict, before international forces had time to re-establish law and order there, “organs were removed from some prisoners at a clinic in Albanian territory, near Fushe-Kruje,” he said.
Those organs were then “shipped out of Albania and sold to private overseas clinics as part of the international ‘black market’ of organ-trafficking for transplantation.”
This was carried out by KLA leaders linked to organized crime, and “has continued, albeit in other forms, until today,” he wrote.
In this respect, Marty cited an investigation by the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) into the Medicus clinic in Pristina.
EULEX said in October it had charged five people, including doctors and a former senior health ministry official, for trafficking in human organs, organized crime, unlawful medical activities and abusing official authority.
Marty specifically named Thaci, one of the KLA leaders during the conflict with Serb security forces in 1998-1999, in his report.
Thaci, he said, was “the boss” of the Drenica Group, a “small but inestimably powerful group of KLA personalities” who took control of organized crime in the region from at least 1998.
The diplomatic and political support the US and other Western powers gave him during the talks following the Kosovo conflict “bestowed upon Thaci, not least in his own mind, a sense of being ‘untouchable,’” he said.
“The signs of collusion between the criminal class and high political and institutional office bearers are too numerous and too serious to be ignored,” Marty wrote.
Thaci also operated with the help not just of the Albanian government “but also from Albania’s secret services, and from the formidable Albanian mafia,” he wrote.
The report’s sources also implicated Thaci and his lieutenants in “assassinations, detentions, beatings and interrogations” in Kosovo and Albania between 1998 and 2000, he wrote.
Thaci’s ruling Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), which won the most votes in Sunday’s general elections, denounced Marty’s allegations as “fabrications” in a statement on Tuesday.
The report’s “goal was to disgrace KLA and its leaders,” it said. “It is based on groundless facts which are invented with a goal to harm Kosovo’s image.”
It would “take all possible and necessary steps in order to confront Marty’s fabrications, including legal and lawful ones,” it said.
Marty, a former prosecutor in Switzerland, will present his report to the Council’s legal affairs committee in Paris today, when he will also hold a press conference on his findings.
If the legal affairs committee accepts his report, it will go before the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) — of which Marty is a member — late next month.
Claims of organ-trafficking in Kosovo first arose in the 2008 memoirs of former UN chief war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, prompting the Council of Europe investigation.
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
INSPIRING: Taiwan has been a model in the Asia-Pacific region with its democratic transition, free and fair elections and open society, the vice president-elect said Taiwan can play a leadership role in the Asia-Pacific region, vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) told a forum in Taipei yesterday, highlighting the nation’s resilience in the face of geopolitical challenges. “Not only can Taiwan help, but Taiwan can lead ... not only can Taiwan play a leadership role, but Taiwan’s leadership is important to the world,” Hsiao told the annual forum hosted by the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation think tank. Hsiao thanked Taiwan’s international friends for their long-term support, citing the example of US President Joe Biden last month signing into law a bill to provide aid to Taiwan,
China’s intrusive and territorial claims in the Indo-Pacific region are “illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive,” new US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo said on Friday, adding that he would continue working with allies and partners to keep the area free and open. Paparo made the remarks at a change-of-command ceremony at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, where he took over the command from Admiral John Aquilino. “Our world faces a complex problem set in the troubling actions of the People’s Republic of China [PRC] and its rapid buildup of forces. We must be ready to answer the PRC’s increasingly intrusive and
STATE OF THE NATION: The legislature should invite the president to deliver an address every year, the TPP said, adding that Lai should also have to answer legislators’ questions The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday proposed inviting president-elect William Lai (賴清德) to make a historic first state of the nation address at the legislature following his inauguration on May 20. Lai is expected to face many domestic and international challenges, and should clarify his intended policies with the public’s representatives, KMT caucus secretary-general Hung Meng-kai (洪孟楷) said when making the proposal at a meeting of the legislature’s Procedure Committee. The committee voted to add the item to the agenda for Friday, along with another similar proposal put forward by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The invitation is in line with Article 15-2