Tag Archives: Kosovo

Murder and organ harvesting in Albania

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Two and a half years ago, an ugly little story came out about the aftermath of the Kosovo War. According to Carla del Ponte, prisoners had been held by the Kosovar Liberation Army at a secret facility in Albania. These prisoners had been tortured and murdered.

That much was ugly enough. But there was a twist: some of the prisoners had been used as involuntary organ donors. Their organs had been harvested for sale on the international black market.

When this story first broke, I wrote a long-ish post about it here at the Fistful. For various reasons, I was extremely skeptical.

Okay, then. How believable is it?

Not very.

One, “300 Serbs” is more than half of all the Serbs unaccounted for from all of Kosovo. Depending on who you talk to, the number of Serbs who went missing in 1999 is between 200 and 400. So, for this story to be true, you’d have to figure most or all the missing the Serbs ended up in this one place.

Two, you’d also have to figure that the Albanians managed to keep this a deep secret ever after. This seems unlikely…

Five, organ-legging is… well, let’s say it’s also pretty unlikely. Albania has a pretty primitive medical infrastructure even today. In 1999 it was much worse. Now, in theory you wouldn’t need much to get organs out of someone: a good doctor, a couple of assistants, and some basic equipment would do it. The problem is, once you have the organs out the clock starts ticking… In developed countries, there’s a whole infrastructure for moving fresh organs around fast fast fast. In Albania… umm.

[...]

Okay, so the story is pretty unlikely. But on the other hand, del Ponte’s people did find… something. A house that had been repainted; a homeowner engaged in obvious lies; blood traces and medical supplies… So what was going on there?

I don’t know, and I doubt we ever will. But I can make a couple of guesses.

One, it was a KLA field hospital…

That’s the most benign explanation. A less pleasant one is that it was a KLA torture center, where Serbs (and possibly some troublesome Kosovar Albanians — the KLA liquidated a number of “collaborators”) were taken to be dealt with. I think this is less likely, but only because it’s hard to see why they’d drag people over the mountains into Albania — there was a war on, and they were perfectly capable of doing torture and interrogation fast and in the field. But I think it’s a possibility. Long time readers of this blog know I support Kosovar independence, but that doesn’t mean I think the KLA were a bunch of Boy Scouts.

The long and the short of it is, we’ll probably never know. We can say with pretty high confidence that the story of “300 Serbs” being held “so that their organs could be sold” is probably bullshit, but that doesn’t mean we’ll ever know the truth.

So here’s the thing: it looks like I was wrong. The EU sent a special rapporteur to Kosovo last year to investigate this story. His name is Dick Marty, he’s Swiss, and at first glance he seems respectable and thorough. He took most of a year to come up with a report. You can find the whole thing here — it’s about 30 pages printed out.

Short version (because I’m sitting in an airport): Dick Marty says he’s found very strong evidence that the essentials of the story were true. On one hand, there probably weren’t 300 Serbs; on the other hand, there were Serbs (and some Albanians), many were tortured and killed, and at least some of them had their organs harvested.

I’ll come back to this story in a few days, when the first round of reactions are in. But here’s the short version: it looks like I was wrong, and this horrible story really is true.

Comments are open, but please take a few minutes to at least skim the report before commenting.

Kosovo and the ICJ: well, damn

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So the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”)delivered its opinion on the legality of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence (“UDI”)today. (I blogged about this a few months ago.)

To everyone’s surprise — mine included — the decision was clear, strong, and favored Kosovo. A clear majority of the judges held that the UDI was legal. They tried to frame the decision narrowly, but it’s still a big win for the Kosovars. Some people are saying it’s therefore a big loss for Serbia, but let’s get real — Serbia had no prospects of recovering Kosovo or ever getting the Kosovar Albanians to accept rule from Belgrade, however tenuous, again. (It is a hit for the Tadic administration, but probably not a serious one.)

Immediate knock-on effects: a few more recognitions for Kosovo. It won’t make that big a difference, though, in the short run — the few EU members who are refusing to recognize Kosovo are mostly doing so for internal domestic reasons, and that won’t change. Russia will still veto any UN resolution affecting Kosovo’s status, which sharply limits room for maneuver.

That said, it’s a win. And the longer-term effects could be interesting.

Meanwhile, watch for various other frozen conflicts, from North Cyprus to Abkhazia, to claim that this decision validates /their/ UDIs. Of course, to make that stick, they’d have to file and win similar suits before the ICJ. And to do that, they’d have to get a resolution past the UN General Assembly. Good luck with that, South Ossetia.

I’d say more, but I haven’t read the decision yet — it just came out a few hours ago, and the ICJ’s website has crashed. Give me a day or two.

Thoughts?

Kosovo snips another cord

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So Kosovo just turned off the remaining Serbian mobile phone towers:

The Kosovo Albanian authorities in Priština removed the equipment of all Belgrade-based mobile and landline operators this morning…

Eyewitnesses, who secured the premises, said that “special police” broke into Telekom, Telenor and VIP structures to help cut off cables and take down equipment, at around 05:00 CET.

Eyewitnesses said that workers of a “telecommunications regulatory body” from Priština removed transmitters and randomly severed cables.

As a consequence, 40,000 Serbs are either left without mobile service in that part of the province, or have very poor reception.

A little background. Before 1999, Kosovo was covered by Serbian mobile phone networks. Since 1999, it’s developed its own — three of them. But the Serbian networks have continued to operate towers and provide mobile telephony. Unsurprisingly, most of the users have been Kosovar Serbs in the enclaves. Meanwhile the Kosovar Albanians have been buying chips and service contracts from the three Kosovar networks.

If this sort of thing interests you, there’s more. Continue reading →

Kosovo: waiting for the ICJ

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So Kosovo and Serbia are now waiting for the International Court of Justice to rule on whether Kosovo is independent or not.

Except, not really.

Back in October 2008, the new Government of Serbia asked the ICJ to rule on whether Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence (“UDI”) in March 2008 was legal. This was clever in several ways. Internally, the new, relatively liberal and pro-Western Serbian governmnent shored up its flank against certain sorts of nationalist attack. Externally, it showed Serbia being a good, reasonable international citizen by submitting its problem to the highest body of international justice. And tactically, it invited the Court to rule on a narrow issue — was the UDI, done in that way at that time, legal? — rather than the much broader and more fraught question of whether Kosovar independence itself could be legal.

The case went before the Court for several days in December of 2009, with 25 countries submitting oral or written testimony. A decision is expected in summer.

But here’s the thing:the ICJ is very unlikely to deliver a clear opinion. Continue reading →

About that coal in Kosovo (II)

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A couple of years back, I wrote an article about Kosovo’s coal industry. Short version: Kosovo has lots of coal, and most of it is middle-quality lignite. But the mines suffer from a horrible lack of investment; many of them are still using thirty to forty year old equipment. So both output and quality are far below where they should be.

So I wasn’t exactly surprised to see this recent article:

Continue reading →

Death on the Tisza

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A sad story from the edge of Europe last week: fifteen Kosovar Albanians died trying to cross the border between Serbia and Hungary. The border there is a a river, the Tisza, which is a large and swift-flowing tributary of the Danube. The Albanians were illegal immigrants trying to move from Kosovo into the EU. Their boat capsized and most of them drowned. The immigrants seem to have been family groups, and the dead include at least two children.

Kosovo declared a national day of mourning last week. Serbia, which still claims Kosovo as part of its territory, made no official statement.

It’s a very sad incident that points to some realities in the region.

Continue reading →

New Balkan visa rules: Serbia in, Albania still out

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And the Montenegrins and Macedonians. EU Commissioner Olli Rehn just announced his recommendation that these three countries be granted visa-free travel to the EU starting January 1, 2010.

While many European readers will blink and shrug, this is a huge, huge deal for the region. For the last 20 years, it’s kinda sucked to be a Serb. Back in Yugoslav times, you had one of the world’s best passports. East, west, developing world… the Yugoslav passport was welcomed for easy travel in almost every country on earth. But after 1991, suddenly your passport was a piece of junk: nobody welcomed Serbs, you were often viewed with suspicion, and you had to fill out elaborate forms (and wait for months) to get a visa to enter the EU. Even after the wars ended, Serbia was still kept firmly at arm’s length.

A whole generation of young Serbs have grown up grumpy about this: they didn’t do anything, so why are they being punished, while young Croats and Bulgarians can freely travel to London and Paris?

No more. Assuming the recommendations is approved — and it’s almost a rubber stamp — then six months from now, Serbs (and Montenegrins and Macedonians) will be able to jump on a plane and just fly to anywhere in the EU, no visa required.

Mind you, they won’t be able to get work permits. It’s just travel. But still: it’s going to make a huge difference.

This being the Balkans, there are of course some complications.
Continue reading →

Serbia and Prishtina: further and further

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Here’s an interesting article that I somehow missed when it came out a few months back. It’s a dialogue between Serbian writer Vladimir Arsenijević (who we’ve met before) and Kosovar Albanian journalist Migjen Kelmendi.

If you’re interested in Kosovo, read the whole thing: it’s all good. But this is the bit that jumped out at me:

Arsenijević: [I] really don’t known anyone in Serbia who is keen to maintain regular contacts with artists in Kosovo, or who thinks that it should be done. Books by Kosovo Albanians are not being published, so we have no idea what is happening there. Each act that assumes some good intention towards Kosovo Albanians has to be explained at great length. It is not that the police ask you to come down to the station for a chat, no, that does not happen; but you have to justify yourself in the most normal, everyday conversations. The problem lies in the fact that, when it comes to the Albanians, we are filled with anger, rage and a feeling of being losers; that we act like some injured partner or spouse who has been denied something that he believes naturally to be his own. If you say: ‘There is a great writer in Kosovo, who has written a novel’, they will talk not about the novel, but about the author’s nationality.

Karabeg: Mr Kelmendi, do Albanian artists from Kosovo want to work with Serbia, to have their books translated there, to exhibit their paintings, to have a theatre perform there, or do they want artists from Serbia to come to Kosovo, to Prishtina?

Kelmendi: No. They are definitely no longer interested in Belgrade and Serbia. They are fully oriented towards Tirana and Albania. It is there that they wish their works to appear. I would say that the Kosovo Albanians have turned their backs on Serbia for good. There is not the smallest wish to know what is going on there. It seems at times that Belgrade for them is a faraway city, that Serbia is a faraway land. They do not translate books by Albanian authors. Apart from occasional individual contacts, communication has practically ended.

Arsenijević: Belgrade was not very open towards Kosovo Albanians, and now we see this being repaid by turning their backs on Serbia.

This is, unfortunately, true. Kosovo is a young society — the average Kosovar Albanian is about 25 — which means that most Kosovars have no adult memory of peaceful, friendly interaction with Serbs. The Serbs north of the Mitrovica have as little contact with Albanians as possible; the Serb communities left in the rest of Kosovo are small and insular. Continue reading →

Kosovo at 62; still not unique

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The Dominican Republic recognized Kosovo last week, which brings the number of recognizing countries to 62. Kosovo has been collecting recognitions at the rate of 1 or 2 per month lately — this is the tenth since the beginning of this year — and while recognition by Palau or the Comoros may not count for much, getting Malaysia and Saudi Arabia on board is no small thing.

That said, 62 is still a lot less than 192, which is the total number of UN member states. And — for reasons I went into a while back — quite a lot of UN members unless either (1) Serbia consents, or (2) the UN recognizes it. Since Russia and China are both committed to a veto of recognition, that’s unlikely to happen any time soon.

Still, there are a couple of interesting questions. Continue reading →

A bit of Balkan kabuki

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The Bulgarians arrested Agim Ceku last week! But then, after a couple of days, they let him go. Serbia is upset.

Who is Agim Ceku, and why should you care?

Well, Agim Ceku is a very important Kosovar Albanian. He was an officer in the Yugoslav army and then, after 1991, he was a commander in the Croatian Army during their war against the Serbs. Then, after that, he was chief of staff of the Kosovar Liberation Army during the 1999 Kosovo War. Later, he was Prime Minister of Kosovo. He’s sort of retired now, or at least politically in eclipse, but he’s still one of the most important political figures in Kosovo.

The Serbs say he’s a war criminal. They have indictments against him for various horrible acts, including genocide. They tried him in absentia for some of them, back in 2002, and convicted him to 20 years in prison. They’ve managed to get an Interpol warrant for his arrest. So, Interpol member states are supposed to assist in capturing Ceku and, if necessary, extradite him to Serbia.

There have been several attempts to do this. None have yet succeeded. The most recent was last week, when Ceku visited Bulgaria. He was stopped at the border, then detained, while a Bulgarian court considered whether to hand him over to Serbia. After a couple of days the Bulgarians decided no, they weren’t going to do that, and Ceku went free. The Serbian government has expressed outrage, outrage! Ceku is still in Bulgaria but should be heading back to Serbia soon.

So why should anyone care? Continue reading →