What did Carla say?

The ‘KLA organ harvesting’ story has become a centerpiece of Serbian noise. Perhaps its best that those interested read what Del Ponte actually said. It appears obvious that she considered what she saw in Burrel “hard evidence elevating the organ harvesting urban myth to reality”

Dont how ‘hard’ the evidence could be if the sources are not identified. It appears the mysterious group of journalists refused to reveal who gave them this info about the Burrel house.

On January 25, 2001, during my first visit to Belgrade, I had met with family members of missing persons from Kosovo who had gathered inside the foreign ministry building while, in the streets outside, a few hundred demonstrators were filling the air with noise. The chairman of the Kosovo group [representing families of missing Serbs], Ranko Djinovic, briefed me and my delegation about the persons who had disappeared in Kosovo between 1998 and 2001. The association had in its possession evidence of criminal activities by KLA members. This evidence, he said, included witness accounts of abductions of men, women, and children, three-quarters of whom were taken captive after the arrival of KFOR and UNMIK. Djinovic accused the KLA’s top leaders, Hashim Thaci, its political director, and Agim Ceku, its commander, of responsibility for abductions and killings in Kosovo; Djinovic said the association had collected the names of 200 kidnappers, all of them KLA members. [Thaci is now the prime minister of Kosovo; Ceku was prime minister from 2006 to 2008.] Djinovic asked me to investigate crimes committed after KFOR’s arrival in Kosovo in June 1999. I said I would try. But I asked him to urge Yugoslavia’s government to support extending the Tribunal’s mandate to cover these alleged crimes. At this time, many family members of the disappeared Serbs believed their relatives were still alive and had been transported across the border into Albania, but, strangely, there had been few if any credible requests for ransom payments. Back outside after the meeting, I saw the demonstrators waving placards and heard them shouting “Carla is a whore.” Some of them used slingshots to pelt my car with marbles as it pulled away.

The Office of the Prosecutor would eventually receive information, which UNMIK investigators and officials had acquired from a team of credible journalists, about how, during the summer months of 1999, Kosovo Albanians had trucked 100 to 300 abducted persons across the border from Kosovo into northern Albania. These captives were initially locked inside warehouses and other facilities, including locations in the towns of Kukës and Tropoje. According to the journalists’ sources, whom they identified only as Kosovo Albanians, some of the younger, fitter captives, who were kept well fed, examined by doctors and never beaten, were transferred to other holding facilities in and around Burrel, including a shack behind a yellow house about twenty kilometers south of the town. A room inside this yellow house, the journalists reported, had been set up as a makeshift surgical clinic; and there, doctors extracted the captive’s internal organs. These organs were then smuggled through Rinas airport near Tirana for transplant into paying patients in surgical wards abroad, according to the sources, including one who described delivering such a shipment to the airport. Victims deprived of only their first kidney were sewn up and confined again inside the shack until they were killed for their other vital organs; in this way, the other captives in the shack learned of their approaching fate; and they reportedly pleaded in terror to be killed immediately. Among the captives reportedly taken to this shack were women from Kosovo, Albania, Russia, and other Slavic countries, and two of the sources said they helped bury the bodies of the dead around the yellow house and at a nearby graveyard. According to the sources, the smuggling operation occurred with the knowledge and active involvement of mid- and senior-level KLA officers. Tribunal investigators found that, while the information from the journalists and UNMIK officials was sketchy, the details were internally consistent and corroborated information the Tribunal had developed in house. “The (Office of the Prosecutor’s) in-house material does not … contain material about Albania as such; however the few witness statements and some other material that we have do corroborate to a certain extent the information above,” I read in a memo on this activity. “All the individuals that the sources have mentioned to be in the camp/s in Albania in late summer 1999 had gone missing in summer 1999 and have not been seen since.”

The recommendations were obvious: “Bearing in mind the extremely serious nature of these cases, the fact that practically none of the bodies of the victims of the KLA have been found in exhumations in Kosovo and the fact that these atrocities were allegedly committed under the supervision or command of the KLA mid- or high-level leadership, they should definitely be investigated as properly as possible by professional and experienced investigators.” The known victims in these cases had probably been abducted after the NATO air campaign had ended – at a time when Kosovo was crawling with foreign peacekeepers and legions of human-rights investigators and aid workers – so it was unclear whether or not the crimes committed during this period fell under the Yugoslavia Tribunal’s mandate. The Office of the Prosecutor wanted the journalists and UNMIK to provide the sources’ names and other personal details and all other information they had about these allegations. The Office had to compile and analyze all in-house material related to the case. If the journalists and UNMIK were uncooperative, the Office had somehow to identify, locate, and interview the journalists’ sources, without knowing their identities or whereabouts; undertake a mission with the sources to the locations in Albania; and, if necessary, conduct a crime scene investigation and exhumations.

Only months later did Tribunal and UNMIK investigators travel to central Albania and visit the yellow house the journalists’ sources had identified as the place where captives had been killed for their organs. The journalists led the investigators and an Albanian prosecutor to the site. The house was now white; the owner denied that it had ever been repainted even though the investigators saw obvious blotches of yellow along the base of its walls. On the ground, investigators discovered pieces of gauze. Nearby lay a used syringe, two empty plastic drip bags crusted with dirt, and spent medicine vials, some of them for a muscle-relaxer routinely used during surgery. A forensic chemical spray revealed blood splatters along the walls and floor of a room inside the house, except for a clear area of the floor about six feet in length and two feet wide. The owner offered up a variety of explanations for the blood stains during the two days the investigators spent in the village. Initially he said that his wife had given birth to their children in this room years earlier. Later, after his wife had revealed that her children had actually been born elsewhere, he asserted that the family had used the room to slaughter animals for a Muslim holiday.

The investigators’ findings, combined with the anecdotal information the journalists had provided, were tantalizing. Stories of prisoners being killed by organ smugglers arise from many conflict areas, but rarely is there hard evidence to lift these accounts out of the realm of urban myth. The syringes, the drip bags, the gauze … were clearly corroborative evidence, but this evidence was, unfortunately, insufficient. The investigators could not determine whether the blood traces had been human. The sources had not pinpointed the locations of the alleged victims’ graves, so we found no bodies. The mission did not convince any of the people in and around the yellow house to come forward with truthful information. The journalists had all along refused to reveal their sources; and the Tribunal’s investigators were unable to identify or locate them. There were also jurisdictional obstacles, given the dates of the reported abductions, the transport of the victims across the border into Albania, the criminal activity in Albania, and the crime scene there. The local Albanian prosecutor revealed another dimension of the “cooperation” problem; he boasted that his relatives had fought in the KLA and he told the Tribunal’s investigator: “No Serbs are buried here. But if they did bring Serbs over the border from Kosovo and killed them, they did a good thing.” So, in the end, the attorneys and investigators on the KLA cases decided that there was insufficient evidence to proceed. Without the sources or a way to identify and find them, without bodies, and without other evidence linking high-level accused to these acts, all avenues of investigation were barred. It would be up to UNMIK or the local Kosovo and Albanian authorities, perhaps in conjunction with the Serbian law enforcement agencies, to investigate these accounts further and, if necessary, prosecute them.