The Times (U.K.)
December 16, 2010
State of Horror; Kosovo’s Prime Minister stands accused of trafficking in heroin and human organs
(We have added comments in bold to the first article)
The youngest state in Europe unilaterally declared independence in 2008. Kosovo’s parliament voted unanimously to secede from Serbia. The recent history of Kosovo had been embattled and bloody, in which Western states played a crucial role. Nato conducted a 70-day bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999 to repel an assault on Kosovar Albanians by Serb forces. Yet the most direct beneficiaries of Western commitment to Kosovo now stand accused of sickening crimes. [Serbian forces were not assaulting Kosovo Albanians. They were driving back a KLA army, armed and trained by western powers, which had invaded Kosovo in early 1998 and at one point taken control of some 60% of the Serbian province.]
Hashim Thaçi, Kosovo’s Prime Minister, was formerly the political head of the paramilitary organisation the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the late 1990s. A report written by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, for the Council of Europe now concludes that Mr Thaçi and his KLA associates are gangsters who have trafficked in heroin and human organs. The accounts that Mr Marty has investigated and assembled are a narrative of horror.
Kosovo’s independence is an accomplished fact and a just cause. But the state’s integration into Europe’s family of nations is now at stake. Its parliament must demand from the country’s political leadership a proper accounting for the allegations levelled against Mr Thaçi. Since his emergence in Kosovo’s diplomacy in the 1990s, he has been known as a mercurial and sectarian figure. Mr Marty’s evidence suggests that he is more sinister still: a psychopathic mafia boss for whom human life literally has a price. [Kosovo’s ‘independence’ was illegal under rafts of international law and the UN Charter. It was not a just cause, just the culmination of many years of Albanian brutality to the Serb minority in the province that was the oldest part of modern Serbia.]
Witnesses allege that Serb prisoners have been killed so that their kidneys can be sold to an Albanian clinic. The claim may appear macabre to the point of fantasy. Yet the Balkan wars did throw up apparently incredible stories of inhumanity that turned out to be true. During their assault on Kosovo in 1999, Serb forces exhumed the corpses of their victims and transported them to Serbia in refrigerated lorries to hide the evidence of war crimes. These were the most brutal conflicts to scar Europe since the defeat of Nazism. [Thaçi was later indicted for the organ smuggling and remains in custody at The Hague awaiting trial at the rogue tribunal. The story about the removal of bodies in refrigerated trucks has long since been proved totally untrue.]
The Nato powers have particular reason to insist that Mr Thaçi respond convincingly to these allegations or be arraigned for trial. Nato’s intervention allowed Kosovo to escape repression and attempted genocide at the hands of Slobodan Milosevic, then President of Serbia. And it is important that the West’s policies in the Balkans be recognised as a vital and humanitarian venture, for so they have been. [Within days of the end of the Kosovo war UN observers released figures and a report which showed that this allegation was completely false.]
The true begetter of Kosovo’s independence is Milosevic. He abolished the autonomy that Kosovo had enjoyed under the Yugoslav constitution. [Milosevic revoked Albanian autonomy because they had for years been using this autonomy to oppress the Serbian minority with extreme brutality with the aim of driving them all out of Kosovo.]
His forces expelled hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians from their homes long before Nato responded with military force. And Nato never aligned itself with the KLA, even though the group’s initial support and funding came from the Albanian diaspora rather than the atrocious activities that Mr Marty alleges. Kosovo is a viable state and a more populous one, with two million citizens, than some existing EU members. [Again this is totally untrue. The UN made clear that there had been no ethnic cleansing of Albanians by Serbs before the start of the Nato bombing. The US, UK and some other Nato countries were giving constant support to the KLA. Extraordinarily, Robin Cook, the UK Foreign Secretary, had given Thaçi a satellite phone programmed with Cook’s personal number so that Thaçi could pass him reams of anti-Serb propaganda to feed to the UK media. Kosovo is an illegal state and the years have proved that it is not viable. International intervention into the affairs of a sovereign nation has yet again proved a disaster]
But the integrity of a state is measured ultimately not by demography but by the quality of its institutions. Kosovo’s executive appears to have been captured, admittedly through popular vote, by a collection of thugs. Until the crimes reported by Mr Marty are investigated and prosecuted, Kosovo will be the newest in a litany of failed states. Kosovo’s independence is precious. The disinterested application of justice is still more so.
The Times
December 16, 2010
Nato stopped us from controlling Kosovo’s gangsters
Brigadier Paul Gibson
No one should be surprised that Hashim Thaçi, the Prime Minister of Kosovo, has been described as “the Boss “of a criminal network that dealt in heroin and human organs. In 1999 I saw how he and other Kosovo Liberation Army leaders ran Pristina as their personal fiefdom. As the commanding officer of 1 Para, which was charged by Nato with bringing order to Pristina, I witnessed elements of the KLA rampaging like a victorious mob intent on retribution against the beleaguered and evidently defenceless Serbian minority.
The violence meted out by the KLA shocked even the most hardened of paratroopers. The systematic murder of Serbs, who were often shot in front of their families, was commonplace. After nightfall, gangs of KLA thugs wielding AK47s, knuckledusters and knives terrified residents of Serbian apartment blocks. Many Serbs fled and their homes were taken by the KLA.
In the early days of the operation, we were authorised to be firm; we arrested KLA men and confiscated their weapons. But this was stopped by Nato leaders who were ignorant of the ethnic dynamics of the region and who preferred to see the civil war in black and white, not shades of grey. The Blair Government’s spin machine wanted moral simplicity. We were, after all, a “liberating force”; the Serbs were the “bad guys”, so that must make the Kosovo Albanians the “good guys”. The tough line was dropped and the KLA commanders and their numerous bodyguards were allowed to re-arm. Prostitution and drug and people trafficking increased as the KLA’s grip on Pristina tightened.
Worse still, because of that political naivety, British Forces were told to treat the KLA as a legitimate authority. This weakened our operations and emboldened the KLA to greater brutality. One night a Parapatrol arrested four KLA soldiers, carrying weapons and grenades, intent on murder and intimidation in a Serb block of flats. We detained them, but six hours later were told to release them without charge. The gang was back in action the following night.
It was wholly unforgiveable that the politicians put British troops into this situation. Had we maintained a tough line we might have inculcated KLA commanders seeking political office with a respect for the rule of law.
In June 1999, just before he fled with his family to Belgrade, a Serbian professor at Pristina University told me: “You must understand that for us the KLA is like the IRA is to you.” That Kosovo is an impoverished, corrupt and ethnically polarised backwater is testament to Nato’s unwillingness to control KLA gangsters.
[Brigadier Paul Gibson commanded 1 Para on Nato operations in Kosovo. The Serbs were the ‘bad guys’, so the Albanians must be the ‘good guys’.]