Two-year inquiry accuses Albanian 'mafia-like' crime network of killing Serb prisoners for their kidneysBy Paul Lewis in PristinaHashim Thaci, prime minister of Kosovo. Photograph: Dieter Nagl/AFP/Getty Images
Kosovo's prime minister is the head of a "mafia-like" Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe, according to a Council of Europe inquiry report onorganised crime.
Hashim Thaçi is identified as the boss of a network that began operating criminal rackets in the runup to the 1999 Kosovo war, and has held powerful sway over the country's government since.
The report of the two-year inquiry, which cites FBI and other intelligence sources, has been obtained by the Guardian. It names Thaçi as having over the last decade exerted "violent control" over the heroin trade. Figures from Thaçi's inner circle are also accused of taking captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market.
Legal proceedings began in a Pristina district court today into a case of alleged organ trafficking discovered by police in 2008. That case – in which organs are said to have been taken from impoverished victims at a clinic known as Medicus – is said by the report to be linked to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) organ harvesting in 2000. It comes at a crucial period for Kosovo, which on Sunday held its first elections since declaring independence from Serbia in 2008. Thaçi claimed victory in the election and has been seeking to form a coalition with opposition parties.
Dick Marty, the human rights investigator behind the inquiry, will present his report to European diplomats from all 47 member states at a meeting in Paris on Thursday. His report suggests Thaçi's links with organised crime date back more than a decade, when those loyal to his Drenica group came to dominate the KLA, and seized control of "most of the illicit criminal enterprises" in which Kosovans were involved south of the border, in Albania.
During the Kosovo conflict Slobodan Miloševic's troops responded to attacks by the KLA by orchestrating a horrific campaign against ethnic Albanians in the territory. As many as 10,000 are estimated to have died at the hands of Serbian troops.
While deploring Serb atrocities, Marty said the international community chose to ignore suspected war crimes by the KLA, "placing a premium instead on achieving some degree of short-term stability". He concludes that during the Kosovo war and for almost a year after, Thaçi and four other members of the Drenica group named in the report carried out "assassinations, detentions, beatings and interrogations". This same hardline KLA faction has held considerable power in Kosovo's government over the last decade, with the support of western powers keen to ensure stability in the fledgling state.
The report paints a picture in which ex-KLA commanders have played a crucial role in the region's criminal activity. It says: "In confidential reports spanning more than a decade, agencies dedicated to combating drug smuggling in at least five countries have named Hashim Thaçi and other members of his Drenica group as having exerted violent control over the trade in heroin and other narcotics."
Marty says: "Thaçi and these other Drenica group members are consistently named as 'key players' in intelligence reports on Kosovo's mafia-like structures of organised crime. I have examined these diverse, voluminous reports with consternation and a sense of moral outrage."
His inquiry was commissioned after the former chief prosecutor for war crimes at the Hague, Carla Del Ponte, said she had been prevented from investigating senior KLA officials. Her most shocking claim, which she said required further investigation, was that the KLA smuggled captive Serbs across the border into Albania, where their organs were harvested.
The report, which states that it is not a criminal investigation and unable to pronounce judgments of guilt or innocence, gives some credence to Del Ponte's claims.
It finds the KLA did hold mostly Serb captives in a secret network of six detention facilities in northern Albania, and that Thaçi's Drenica group "bear the greatest responsibility" for prisons and the fate of those held in them.
They include a "handful" of prisoners said to have been transferred to a makeshift prison just north of Tirana, where they were killed for their kidneys.
The report states: "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 same Kosovan and foreign individuals involved in the macabre killings are linked to the Medicus case, the report finds.
Marty is critical of the western powers which have provided a supervisory role in Kosovo's emergence as a state, for failing to hold senior figures, including Thaçi, to account. His report criticises "faltering political will on the part of the international community to effectively prosecute the former leaders of the KLA".
It concludes: "The signs of collusion between the criminal class and the highest political and institutional office holders are too numerous and too serious to be ignored.
"It is a fundamental right of Kosovo's citizens to know the truth, the whole truth, and also an indispensable condition for reconciliation between the communities and the country's prosperous future."
If as expected the report is formally adopted by the committee this week, the findings will go before the parliamentary assembly next year.
The Kosovo government tonight dismissed the allegations, claiming they were the produce of "despicable and bizarre actions by people with no moral credibility".
"Today, the Guardian published an article that referred to a report from a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Dick Marty, which follows up on past reports published over the last 12 years aiming at maligning the war record of the Kosovo Liberation Army and its leaders," it said in a statement.
"The allegations have been investigated several times by local and international judiciary, and in each case, it was concluded that such statements have were not based on facts and were construed to damage the image of Kosovo and the war of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
"It is clear that someone wants to place obstacles in the way of prime minister, Hashim Thaçi, after the general election, in which the people of Kosovo placed their clear and significant trust in him to deliver the development programme and governance of our country.
"Such despicable and bizarre actions by people with no moral credibility, serve the ends of only those specific circles that do not wish well to Kosovo and its people."
Afghanistan ranks 155th out of 169 countries on the U.N. Development Programme's Human Development Index
By Michelle Nichols
The United Nations on Saturday launched a $678 million humanitarian appeal for Afghanistan, where despite inflows of millions of foreign aid dollars, the world body said about a quarter of the population goes hungry.
7.4 million Afghans live with hunger and fear of starvation, millions more rely on food help and one in five children die before the age of five.
U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Catherine Bragg said some 7.4 million Afghans were living with hunger and fear of starvation, millions more rely on food help and one in five children die before the age of five.
"Despite progress in some areas, the toll of the ongoing conflict and endemic natural disasters on Afghanistan's people remains immense, requiring continued life saving assistance," Bragg, also the U.N. deputy emergency relief coordinator, said in a statement marking the 2011 appeal.
Western nations supporting President Hamid Karzai are pouring vast amounts of aid into Afghanistan, but much of the cash is spent in areas with the worst insurgency problems to show locals that they can reap gains from rejecting the Taliban.
A substantial portion also goes on security costs and the salaries of foreign experts.
Afghanistan does not grow enough food for its people, and the war between NATO-led forces and the Taliban -- now in its 10th year -- has pushed up costs of imports. The conflict has also made swathes of the country inaccessible for aid groups.
The International Committee of the Red Cross warned on Thursday that the dire humanitarian situation was likely to deteriorate further unless a political settlement was reached between the government and the Taliban.
Afghanistan ranks 155th out of 169 countries on the U.N. Development Programme's Human Development Index, which measures health, knowledge, and income. Bragg said the conflict had cut the capacity and availability of basic services.
"We hope to recast the humanitarian agenda in Afghanistan based upon the core tenets of humanity, impartiality and neutrality and be better placed to reach more people," she said.
But the pressure on 192 U.N. member states for aid is high with fundraising competing with other campaigns, including help for earthquake survivors in Haiti and flood victims in Pakistan.
The 2010 U.N. appeal for $775 million for Afghanistan has achieved two-thirds of its target and is the fourth most funded U.N. appeal this year behind Haiti, Pakistan and Sudan.
The ICRC also launched its appeal this week for $89 million for Afghanistan, its largest humanitarian operation for the second year in a row.
Despite the presence of 150,000 foreign troops, military and civilian casualties are at their worst levels since the 2001 removal of the Taliban.
U.S. and NATO leaders agreed last month to a schedule set by Afghan President Hamid Karzai for foreign forces to end combat operations in Afghanistan by 2014. U.S. President Barack Obama, who will review his Afghanistan war strategy next month, has said Washington will begin a gradual drawdown from July 2011.
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ISAF immediately attacked the credibility of the Afghan government's report, complaining bitterly of Karzai's decision to condemn the incident without conferring with U.S. and allied forces.
Working with our team in Afghanistan led by Anita Sreedhar, Brave New Foundation's Rethink Afghanistan campaign sent an intrepid local blogger into Sangin--one of Afghanistan's most volatile areas--to get the truth. The video interviews he obtained are incredible and horrifying. We made the full interview transcripts available online at http://rethinkafghanistan.com, and we encourage you to read them. Here's the short version: Every survivor our interviewer talked to confirmed that a massive civilian casualty event occurred, and that NATO was responsible.
NATO vs. the Kabul Government
ISAF began their push-back against press accounts of the Sangin incident with a simple press release on July 24: "We have no operational reporting that correlates to this alleged incident." No further press release available on the ISAF website expands or updates this statement. However, ISAF personnel soon ratcheted up their attacks on the Afghan government's narrative and, in the process, circulated alternative (and often contradictory) official responses, tallies and accounts of the event.
"Any speculation at this point of an alleged civilian casualty in Rigi village is completely unfounded...We are conducting a thorough joint investigation with our Afghan partners and will report any and all findings when known."
Later, again on August 5, while ISAF provided quotes from named sources for attribution that denied knowledge of the outcome of the investigation, an unnamed "senior intelligence official" told The New York Times that six civilians died with eight Taliban fighters when a troop fired a Javelin rocket into a structure from which U.S. Marines took fire.
When asked to explain the discrepancy between his tally and that of the Afghan government, the unnamed official cited "political challenges," as if "political challenges" account for a 33-person difference in the death tallies. This explanation reminds one of the Gardez massacre earlier this year, when ISAF tried to pass off its blatant lie about an American special forces team finding women "bound, gagged and executed" as a "cultural misunderstanding," when in fact they'd killed the women themselves and tried to dig the bullets out while one of them was still alive, screaming in pain. In effect, this unnamed source accused Afghan locals and officials of lying about civilian deaths because of hard feelings between them and the coalition.
What is going on here? One explanation might be that ISAF engaged in the same type of damage control campaign utilized in other horrifying incidents like the Farah airstrike and the Gardez massacre. In both cases, ISAF initially denied wrongdoing, aggressively attacked the credibility of alternative accounts that disputed the official story, and claimed that the evidence was either neutral or exculpatory. Only when new information made it impossible to deny responsibility did ISAF admit its guilt in both cases. Perhaps we're seeing a repeat of that behavior here.
Regardless of the source and possible motivation for all this contradicting information and blatant disinformation, what is clear, based on interviews obtained by our team on the ground in Sangin, is that ISAF troops killed dozens of civilians on July 23.
52 people were killed! We don't know how many children or women! ...The rest of my family is scattered and lost I don't know where they are. ...My mind doesn't work okay. ... My daughter's in laws were sitting in our house with their other children when the bombing started I saw them get killed with my own eyes!
--Mahmoud Jan Kaka
I saw a child on the floor was injured. I thought he was the only injured one so I took him to the clinic. When I came back my nephew told me that there were more injured people. I tried to pull my daughter from the rubble but I couldn't. I heard her calling for help but I couldn't reach her.
--Abdul Zahar
In all of my experiences not the Russians or the Taliban ever did what they (N.A.T.O.) did. ...I wanted to go to the government post and tell them to kill the rest of us too as we have nothing to live for anymore!
...In the morning we see bodies with heads, blood and guts everywhere, arms here and legs there. All of my loved ones who were still alive were soaked in blood. We tried to go and identify the bodies; everyone was looking for there missing relatives. There was so much sorrow and pain from those people who were lost in shock.
U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan have denied they killed several dozen civilians in Sangin District of Helmand Province on July 23. But new video of Rethink Afghanistan exposes the truth about one of the worst civilian casualty incidents of the war.
The most important takeaway from these interviews, aside from the universal attribution of blame to NATO, is that there is absolutely no way that the civilian death toll is in the single digits. One person described losing eight family members; another said he lost nine loved ones; still another lost 11. One of the men, Abdul Barg, insisted that, "the number of martyred were no less than 35 up to 50." He also related that "every family in the village was placing at least a couple of their loved ones in a bag."
These video interviews prove what NATO wants to deny. As you watch the footage of these Afghan men and hear their voices crack, it becomes sickeningly clear. U.S. and allied forces killed dozens of Afghan civilians in Sangin.
More than 200 people demonstrated over the July 23 incident in the Sangin district of Helmand province... The protesters shouted "Death to America" and carried banners calling for justice and pictures of children they say were killed in the strike...
This is what our elected officials need to understand: when we debate the war in Afghanistan, it's not an academic exercise. It's a string of specific incidents like Sangin, concrete moral outrages that pay us back with increased strategic risk.
Our reaction to Sangin and the other similar catastrophes defines us. That's why when I go into a voting booth this November, or I get a solicitation for a political donation or a request to volunteer for a federal candidate, I'm going ask, "How did this person respond when he or she heard that we slaughtered the heart of a village? Did this person explain it away? Did they continue to support a policy that ensured more Sangins all across Afghanistan? Or did they finally catch themselves, finally realize that this war ensures the slow death of more children under rubble while parents claw at the pile?" These are the questions I'll ask myself before I punch the touch-screen at the local library, and if the opinion polls are any indication, I'll be far, far from alone.
I encourage all of you to visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com to send a note to your elected officials and let them know you'll be watching what they do in response to this disaster, and that you'll remember it when you vote in November.
