London Telegraph: Balkan Christians stripped of organs in Kosovo-- the story's finally mainstream

Serb prisoners had their internal organs removed and sold by ethnic Albanians during the Kosovo war, according to allegations in a new book by the world's best known war crimes prosecutor.

Carla Del Ponte, who stepped down in January as chief prosecutor at the Hague tribunal for crimes committed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, said investigators found a house suspected of being a laboratory for the illegal trade.

A senior adviser to Hashim Thaci, Kosovo's prime minister and a leading member of the Kosovo Liberation Army which is accused of benefiting from the trade, yesterday denied the allegations.

"These are horrible things even to imagine," said Bekim Collaku. "But this is a product of her [Miss Del Ponte's] imagination."

Miss Del Ponte reports that the allegations were made by several sources, one of whom "personally made an organ delivery" to an Albanian airport for transport abroad, and "confirmed information directly gathered by the tribunal".

According to the sources, senior figures in the Kosovo Liberation Army were aware of the scheme, in which hundreds of young Serbs were allegedly taken by truck from Kosovo to northern Albania where their organs were removed. Miss Del Ponte provides grim details of the alleged organ harvesting, and of how some prisoners were sewn up after having kidneys removed.

"The victims, deprived of a kidney, were then locked up again, inside the barracks, until the moment they were killed for other vital organs. In this way, the other prisoners were aware of the fate that awaited them, and according to the source, pleaded, terrified, to be killed immediately," Miss Del Ponte writes.

The claims in The Hunt: Me and War Criminals have renewed tensions between Serbia and its former province of Kosovo, which declared independence two months ago. In it, the Swiss ex-prosecutor reveals how her efforts to bring alleged war criminals to justice were stymied by lack of co-operation from all sides - Serb, Albanian and even Nato. But it is her report of the organ traffic that has caused most shock, even in a region long hardened to horror.

Vladan Batic, Serbia's former justice minister, said: "If her allegations are true, then this is the most monstrous crime since the times of Mengele, and it must be made a priority, not only of the domestic judiciary but also of the Hague Tribunal." The book reports a visit by Hague tribunal investigators to a house south of the Albanian town of Burrel where they found traces of blood across a wide area, as well as medical equipment.

"The investigators found pieces of gauze, a used syringe and two plastic IV bags encrusted with mud and empty bottles of medicine, some of which was of a muscle relaxant often used in surgical operations," she writes. However, she concludes that the finds do not amount to sufficient proof for a war crimes tribunal. In Belgrade, the Serbian capital, an association of families of Serbs still listed as missing since the Kosovo war, said it would sue Miss Del Ponte, alleging that she had failed to act over the alleged organ-farming scandal. Serbia's war crimes office announced it had opened its own investigation.

The book has also prompted concern in Switzerland, where it has been criticised for tarnishing the country's celebrated neutrality, particularly as Miss Del Ponte has been named as the Swiss ambassador to Argentina.

In Belgrade, Natasha Kandic, the highly respected head of the investigative Humanitarian Law Centre, said ordinary Serbs "welcome the publication of this book" but said allegations of organ-smuggling were "rumours". "I talked to her many times, she never told me about this," said Miss Kandic.

Free Republic ahead of the curve again-- we've been reporting on this revelation by Carla del Ponte for some time now. It's hit the Telegraph of London and is one of the most popular stories in that newspaper, AFAIK the first time this story has hit the journalistic mainstream.

It's finally beginning to appear that the Balkan Christians will pull through, after all, and fight back against the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Christians and Gypsies in Kosovo by the KLA Islamofascists. Orthodox churches continue to be defaced and ancient Christian landmarks in Kosovo, dating back to the 14th century, are vandalized or shut down. All of this in the midst of continued narcoterrorism and human trafficking by the Islamofascist KLA.

But the vast majority of the world's nations have refused to recognize Kosovo, and now that the state's nonviability is being exhibited to the world, even NATO is having second thoughts. On top of that, media sources are finally reporting the atrocities and ethnic cleansing perpetrated against the Serbs and other Balkan Christians. No side in this conflict has totally clean hands, but at long last, the relentless portrayal of Balkan Christians being evil vs. the "good, peace-loving KLA" is being attacked.

The only remaining obstacle to scrapping this misguided NATO project in Kosovo (which would also cost the USA billions of dollars and troops we need elsewhere in Iraq, BTW) is the stubbornness of a few NATO leaders. France's Nicolas Sarkozy, true to form, is playing the compliant fool and continuing to support the attacks on Serbs. Condi Rice's thugs in the State Department (many of them inherited from the Clinton Administration) continue to push for a campaign against the Serbs, despite the doubts of officials as noted in the article.

But the real ringleader of the effort to ethnically cleanse the Balkans of its Christians, remains Germany's Angela Merkel, the Fuhrerin of Eurabia. We may even be coming close to a breakthrough here, and it might be a place we can make a difference. Merkel's grand coalition in Germany is dangerously vulnerable and the German foreign policy establishment quite divided-- even among those officials who supported the 1999 bombing campaign, most were suspicious of or downright opposed to recognition of the state, in violation of UN Resolution 1244 and the Ahtisaari Plan. Moreover, the German public does not support Merkel on this, and she is therefore on the verge of being toppled.

As an update of the protest plans to humiliate Merkel in Germany and bring down her coalition, my old Christian friend, who had lived for several years in Germany, now says that the enormous Serb community in Germany, along with other Balkan Christians (even including some Croatians and Slovenians), is now beginning to organize such demonstrations. The idea is to use protests involving Christian themes and Nero's persecution of them-- with Merkel, obviously, in the role of the emperor who fiddled while the nation burned. They'll be graphic with lots of mock blood, involving themes of persecution and physical torture by corrupt authorities, though scrupulously avoid Nazi themes, which can backfire within Germany itself.

As he said, Germans like things to run smoothly and without too much controversy, and they tend to turn against leaders who stir up too much of a ruckus for a misguided foreign policy objective. They plan to make this protest against Merkel, with its justifiable themes of Christian persecution, a weekly theme in Germany, while spreading to petitions and other acts to shame and humiliate Fuhrerin Merkel, and ultimate bring her down. In effect, her regime is the last domino in finally pushing NATO to take a more neutral stance on Kosovo and honor international law. If any of you have contacts in Germany who might be interested, especially those with some Balkan Christian heritage, please spread the word and we can help move this process forward!

Well, well, Diocletian my friend, we’ve struck a nerve with Ms. del Ponte here, haven’t we? It’s funny that Carla del Ponte was the cat’s meow for you when she was pointing the finger at Serbs for human rights violations.

But then, when Ms. Del Ponte has the temerity to actually note atrocities committed by KLA thugs against Serbs and other Christians as well as Roma— how dare she?— suddenly, she becomes evil in your book.

Nobody here claims that the Serbs were all sweetness and goodness either, and certainly Karadzic and others did some awful things. What we’re pissed off about is the one-sidedness in the Soros-funded Western media, which portrays the Serbs and other Balkan Christians as evildoers in spite of any of their actions, and the KLA as the “good guys” even when they’re mass-murdering Christians and defacing Orthodox Churches.

Yet you could never, ever accept this complicated concept, the whole idea that neither side is “good” or “evil” but that both have committed atrocities, that the Serbs and Christians have been victims of ethnic cleansing themselves, that the KLA secession attempt on an ancient region close to the Serbs’ heart is also a violation of UNSCR 1244 and thus international law...

No, to you, the Serbs are always evil, the KLA always in the right. And so when your once-favorite hobbyhorse Carla del Ponte calls BS on her own prior claims and shows that, well, the KLA committed quite a few atrocities themselves, your head explodes. You’re a hypocrite, and it’ll be fun to watch your head continue to explode as Carla del Ponte continues to reveal the messy truth about the Balkans that KLA apologists have been so desperate to keep down.

Well, Diocletie, gettin’ all hot and bothered by this thread, huh? Deep breaths, bring that blood pressure down. Funny you haul out the little noobie ad hominem, when you’ve been taken down repeatedly in the other Balkan threads by numerous posters for your own strawmen on this issue.

You also seem to be missing the significance of this thread in the first place which is that, for quite possibly the first time, a more balanced perspective on the Kosovo conflict is finally emerging in the mainstream media. A welcome trend.

Are Ms. Del Ponte’s accusations accurate? Who knows? There has been a good deal of talk about this supposed organ-harvesting ring in Kosovo at the hands of the KLA. Perhaps there’s some truth to it. Perhaps not.

What we do know for certain, is that both sides in the Kosovo conflict have dirty hands yet, up until recently, the Serbs were almost uniformly accused of wrongdoing while the KLA— a known terrorist organization involved in narcoterrorism, arms dealing and human trafficking— was basically given a pass from the media. This, despite clear and documented evidence of prior KLA atrocities against not only Serbs but Roma and many others within Kosovo— especially the mass ethnic cleansing carried out by the KLA in 2004, with associated mass vandalism of Orthodox churches and monasteries. Something that was almost ignored in the media.

Now that’s changing. I’m not a fan myself, and I’m not terribly happy that del Ponte is the vector of this change, considering her own spotty record. But the very fact that even she is re-balancing her own views, as well as the mainstream media, means that the get-out-of-jail-free card held by the KLA Islamofascists has finally been used up. And to the extent this leads to halfway-intelligent policy in the region, without the expenditure of billions of $US and even more US soldiers in our already hard-pressed military— that’s a very welcome thing.

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