Council of Europe Adopts Kosovo Organ Trafficking Report

Sofia News Agency reports:

The human rights committee of the Council of Europe adopted Thursday a resolution requesting investigation of the traffic of drugs, weapons and human organs carried out by organizations in Kosovo under the heading of Hashim Thaci (in civilian clothes on the photo below).

Council of Europe Secretary-General Thorbjørn Jagland has called the information in the report "very serious and concerning" and has requested that the allegations not be left unanswered.

Thaci, a former Kosovar PM, who just won snap elections over the weekend, was a combat leader of the controversial KLA that fought with Serbian authorities for independence with heavy backing from Western countries, especially the USA.

Now the Council of Europe report, drafted by Swiss deputy Dick Marty, and passed by a large 2/3 majority, argues that Thaci and other Kosovar leaders organized the traffic not only of weapons and narcotic, but also of human organs, sometimes harevested from involuntary donors.

“Numerous indications seem to confirm that, during the period immediately after the end of the armed conflict, organs were removed from some prisoners at a clinic in Albanian territory, near Fushë-Kruje, to be taken abroad for transplantation," reads the report.

There has been 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," the report says.

In Kosovo, the government of Thaci dismissed the report as fabrications designed to smear its leaders.

For the full text of the Marty report, read HERE.

If you thought the Bodies Exhibit was bad...

(re-printed by kind permission from the Prisoner of Starvation's excellent blog)

A couple months ago, I looked at 20/20's exposé of the Bodies exhibits that are popping up all over the country. I didn't think that the sordid alliance of corrupt officials of a repressive government and the greedy corporations buying bodies of tortured/executed political prisoners and putting on display could be topped in terms of macabre, but I was wrong.

Kidnapping and killing people based on their race or ethnicity in order to sell their organs is worse. The misnamed Kosovo Liberation Army in the summer of 1999 kidnapped, killed, and sold the organs of hundreds of Serbs from Kosovo as part of their campaign to rid Kosovo of its Serb population. Independent journalist Robert Fisk reported at the time that "the number of Serbs killed in the five months since the war comes close to that of Albanians murdered by Serbs in the five months before NATO began its bombardment." More than 250,000 Serbs, Roma (Gypsies), Bosniacs, Croats, Turks and Jews have been forced to flee the province.

NATO, led by the U.S., bombed Serbia in spring of that year to stop the supposed genocide of Albanians by Serb security forces. (The numbers of dead the Clinton administration claimed at the time to justify the use of the term were later proven to be massively inflated.)

Yet no bombs were to be seen when their partners in crime, the KLA, committed genocide right under NATO's nose. Apparently genocide is OK, depending on who is doing it.

When Carla del Ponte, the former prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague, was given evidence in 2001 about the kidnapping and organ harvesting in Kosovo but she ignored it. It wasn't politically convenient. It would undermine the "Serbs are the bad guys" mantra that has been the U.S. line since the early to mid 1990s as the U.S. intervened in the bloody civil war that consumed Yugoslavia to weaken Serbia, a Russian ally.

Now del Ponte has published an autobiography , "The Hunt," detailing the gruesome details of the crimes she ignored as a prosecutor. (The book is in Italian and won't be translated and published in English until spring of next year.) Families of the missing Serbs are suing her for supressing the investigation.

Meanwhile the KLA's leader, Hashim Thaci, is now the Prime Minister of the newly independent Kosovo. Who knows if he profitted personally from the sale of Serb organs? Oh, and the U.S. has decided to arm them.

And they say the Americans can't compete with the Chinese in the 21st century!