Dick Marty, Swiss rapporteur for the Council of Europe (photo, COE)
Brussels, Belgium and Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) Evidence of organ trafficking in Kosovo and brutal treatment of some
500 Kosovo Serb prisoners before they disappeared, by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), are two of the damning details that are part of a report made public 14 December by the Council of Europe. The draft report, by Dick Marty, member of the Council of Europe from Switzerland, was published on the COEs web site Tuesday with the agreement of the chair of the legal affairs committee Christos Pourgourides.
Among its allegations: Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was a leader of the ethnic Albanian guerrilla group KLA that was behind the trafficking. The report implies that Albanian organized crime may be involved even today in trafficking.
The long-awaited report, which was undertaken by Marty in July 2008, was the result of allegations of prisoner abuse and trafficking in human organs made in her memoirs in 2008 by Carla Del Ponte, former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The book provoked heated debate at the time, not least because De Ponte, despite her position, seemed to show little or no official followup by national and international authorities of crimes of which she had some knowledge.
The new report, the COE says in its introductory remarks, shows why: international organizations were overwhelmed and under-staffed at the end of the war in former Yugoslavia, details that surfaced 10 years after the facts were hard to verify, and rumours were rife. The new report promises to provoke yet more debate, at the very least, given the councils strong words:
All the indications are that 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 parties to the war are denounced in strong terms, but the support given, tacitly or otherwise, by western powers is also harshly criticized:
The crimes committed by the Serb forces have been documented, denounced and, to the extent possible, tried in courts of law. The frightful nature of these crimes hardly needs to be further illustrated. These crimes stemmed from a wicked policy ordered by Milosevic over a lengthy period, including at times when he was simultaneously being accorded full diplomatic honours in the capitals of many democratic states. These crimes claimed tens of thousands of victims and disrupted a whole region of our continent. In the Kosovo conflict, the ethnic Albanian population suffered horrendous violence as the result of an insane ethnic cleansing policy on the part of the dictator then in power in Belgrade.
The report then turns to Kosovo:
Yet in the case of Kosovo, the prevailing logic appears to have been rather short-sighted: restore a semblance of order as quickly as possible, while avoiding anything that might be liable to destabilise a region still in a state of very fragile equilibrium. The result has been a form of justice that can only be defined as selective, with impunity attaching to many of the crimes that appear, based on credible indications, to have been directly or indirectly the work of top KLA leaders. The Western countries that engaged themselves in Kosovo had refrained from a direct intervention on the ground, preferring recourse to air strikes, and had thus taken on the KLA as their indispensable ally for ground operations. The international actors chose to turn a blind eye to the war crimes of the KLA, placing a premium instead on achieving some degree of short-term stability.
The CEOs legal affairs committee will discuss the report 16 December in Paris, with Marty meeting journalists at the end of that session. If the committee approves the report it will go to the Council of Europe parliament in January. Marty is a member of that body.
Marty, a lawyer from canton Ticino, is known for taking on tough subjects, with his
uncovering of CIA flights over Europe having cemented his reputation.
He was given the annual Swiss Foreign Press Association award in 2007.
Links to other sites: draft report on COE web site, AFP, AP/GMA News
http://genevalunch.com/blog/2010/12/...port-update-2/
Krijoni Kontakt