May 14, 2008 on 4:38 am | In In Focus, Kosovo & Metohija, News in English |
Aleksander KOTS, Dmitry STEPSHIN. Photos by the authors — 12.05.2008
After Kosovo declared independence, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Carla Del Ponte raucously quit her position at The Hague. She slammed the door so loudly behind her that the ceiling plaster cracked at parliaments across the European Union. After her exile to Argentina as Switzerland’s ambassador, Ponte said the new Kosovo was run by butchers who made a fortune trafficking organs extracted from kidnapped Serbs. In her book titled, “The Hunt: Me and the War Criminals,” Ponte describes how a black organ market formed during the Kosovo War. Meanwhile, she says, the European Union played dumb paying no attention to the crimes. KP journalists went to Kosovo to learn more about the crimes.
Iron Carla’s revelation
Hardly a day goes by without fragments of Ponte’s book hitting Belgrade newspapers. Here is a commonly quoted section that details the horrors of Kosovo organ trafficking:
“According to the journalists’ sources, who were only identified as Kosovo Albanians, some of the younger and fitter prisoners were visited by doctors and were never hit. They were transferred to other detention camps in Burrel and the neighboring area, one of which was a barracks behind a yellow house 20 km behind the town.
“One room inside this yellow house, the journalists said, was kitted out as a makeshift operating theater, and it was here that surgeons transplanted the organs of prisoners. These organs, according to the sources, were then sent to Rinas airport, Tirana, to be sent to surgical clinics abroad to be transplanted to paying patients.
“One of the informers had personally carried out a shipment to the airport. 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 in the barracks were aware of the fate that awaited them, and according to the source, pleaded, terrified to be killed immediately.
“Among the prisoners who were taken to these barracks were women from Kosovo, Albania, Russia and other Slavic countries. Two of the sources said that they helped to bury the corpses of the dead around the yellow house and in a neighboring cemetery. According to the sources, the organ smuggling was carried out with the knowledge and active involvement of middle and high ranking involvement from the KLA (ed. Kosovo Liberation Army).
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| Law students from Prishtin University at a rally. |
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“A few months after [October 2002] the investigators of the tribunal and UNMIK reached central Albania and the yellow house which the journalists sources had revealed as the place where the prisoners were killed to transplant their organs. The journalists and the Albanian prosecutor accompanied the investigators to the site.
“The house was now white. The owner denied it had ever been repainted even though investigators found traces of yellow along the base of its walls. Inside 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. The application of a chemical substance revealed to the scientific team traces of blood on the walls and on the floor of a room inside the house, except for in a clean area of the floor sized 180×60cm.
“The investigators were not able to determine whether the traces they found were of human blood. The sources did not indicate the position of the grave of the presumed victims and so we did not find the bodies.”
However, Serbian journalists began conducting their own investigations into the purported organ trafficking. Correspondents from the Press newspaper were said to have found the barracks described by Ponte. However, they refused to share detailed information with KP. The tabloid published several photos related to the incident, but many local media representatives believe their authenticity is dubious.
“They wanted to fabricate this huge story, but they ended up with a piece of crap,” said Aleksandr Bechich, deputy chief editor of the Pravda opposition newspaper. “Press has been caught lying on more than one occasion. But there is truth to the article. Many Serbs heard about these crimes even before the book’s publication. Serbia’s Justice Minister Vladan Batich gave Ponte numerous materials about executed and kidnapped Serbs. There was also evidence, but no one was sure if the organs had actually been trafficked. I originally heard about this 5 years ago from Serbia’s former head of Military Intelligence. But no one listened to special agents at the time. The Serbian special forces had documents that certified that medical equipment had been brought to camps in Albania. This evidence was given to Western intelligence agencies. ‘We can’t work in Albania,’ they said. ‘Help us with this.’ But no one did a thing. U.S. and German special forces knew that Serbs had been kidnapped in 1999. As they didn’t do anything to fix the situation, we should assume they were also were involved in the trafficking network. How was the system organized? The KLA received huge sums of cash for the organs. This money was used to buy drugs from Afghanistan, which were later sold in Western Europe. The KLA bought arms using this money. Enough facts had been dug up to indict Kosovo’s former Prime Minister Ramush Kharadinay, current head of state Khashim Tachi and other prominent Albanians. But as opposed to being sent to prison, Kharadinay was released from The Hague in early April even though he had been charged with murdering Serbian civilians. They said he wasn’t guilty. But we have documented facts proving that Kharadinay personally executed 60 Serbs and ordered 300 more to be killed. Kharadinay’s release was a severe blow for the families of the deceased.”
The tribunal’s decision to set Kharadinay free was as hurtful for Serbs as when the West recognized Kosovo’s independence. The KLA’s field commander was the equivalent of an Albanian Shamil Basaev — cruel and uncompromising. Nine witnesses were lined up to testify against Kharadinay at The Hague. But they were all killed under various circumstances during the trial. Two were killed by a sniper, one died in an automobile accident in Montenegro, two were stabbed, two were burned to death in their car while serving in Kosovo’s Police and two were killed in a village cafe in Kosovo.
Many people in Serbia believe that Ramush Kharadinay was a key figure in the organ trafficking network.
“Tachi was a criminal,” Deyan Mirovich, a radical party deputy in Serbia’s parliament, told KP before our trip to Kosovsku-Mitrovitsu. He spouted off his version of a brief history of modern-day Serbia. “First, Tachi was involved in drug trafficking, then he headed a gang and later a terrorist group. Now he’s a U.S. and EU ally. Kharadinay is the same story. He was a bouncer at a night club and ended up running a terrorist organization. In the forward to his book ‘Peace and Freedo,’ he wrote: ‘I’ve killed Serbian policemen. I’ve killed civilian Serbs and Albanians who were disobedient.’ This is why I believe everything Ponte wrote. We know all about this in Serbia. Kharadinay had a camp on Lake Radonich in Metokhia. People were taken there from Prizren, Pecha and Djakovitsa. Many were executed. People were also selected for so-called medical centers. They were kept captive while their organs were systematically extracted. You want proof? Look for their relatives in Kosovo. That’s the only way. All the other e
vidence is destroyed.”
Nothing to lose for Serbs in Kosovo’s enclaves
Many people have heard the phrase “humanitarian catastrophe,” but few have actually seen one. Serbian enclaves in Kosovo fall into this category. Homeless children roam the streets. Adults loiter in the sun, or wait for clients who never come in self-styled cabs. Piles of trash lie by the roadside. Disfunctional state services that won’t do anything even if they’re asked to.
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| Forty last names of deceased Serbs are written on an obelisk on the Serbian side of the bridge dividing the town along ethnic lines. The Albanians have tried to annex the Serbian section of the city on numerous occasions. The bridge has served as a stage for bloody wars. |
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KP traveled to the Kosovsku-Mitrovitsu enclave in north Kosovo to learn more about the enclave phenomenon. Our journalists sat in a dilapidated cafe waiting for the Kosovo Serbian rally to begin. The cafe’s windows were covered in bullet holes. The rally was to commence at 12:44. The number has a special subtext. It’s the number of a UN resolution on Kosovo declaring the territory an indelible part of Serbia.
Romanian soldiers from the NATO Kosovo Force (KFOR) took the cover off the machine gun on the small armored car. They knew they had to be ready. Meanwhile, we drank coffee behind the UN courthouse. Shrapnel had killed a Ukrainian peacekeeper there only a week before. He had been on a peacekeeping mission to introduce constitutional order in the country. But Serbian lawyers weren’t a part of that order. They had been asked to leave the courthouse and were later replaced by Albanians. Those who refused to leave were arrested. The peacekeepers hadn’t realized Kosovo Serbs had been on the edge of an explosion for several years. They had nothing to lose. Their country had been taken from them, and they had been left in poverty waiting for a miracle. As we were told numerously, many Kosovo Serbs consider a miracle to be 250,000 Russian volunteers. Russian journalists, like us, were taken for spies or advanced detachment.
“Sweet life” of guardian’s of the east
Mitrovista isn’t really an enclave. It practically borders Serbia, but a bridge divides the city into Albanian and Serbian sections. Unofficial guards man the Serbian side. This small detail shows who is the aggressor in the situation and who is on the defense.
Forty last names of deceased Serbs are written on an obelisk on the Serbian side. The Albanians have tried to annex their section of the city on numerous occasions. The bridge served as a stage for bloody wars. It’s quiet on the Serbian side. Muscular men sit in a pink 24-hour cafe. They’re officially called the bridge’s guardians, as their job is to stop Albanians attacking from across the bridge. They greeted us cautiously. The waiter approached us slowly and indifferently.
“One coffee, one bottle of water,” we asked in Serbian, adding in Russian that we were Russian journalists writing about Kosovo Serbs. The demeanour of the waiter and the guards changed immediately. They offered us the table with a view of the bridge. Soon after, the leader of the local branch of National Serbs Union, Neboysha Iuvovich, came to the cafe and greeted us.
“Many politicians are straying from their positions and writing about the truth,” Neboysha said. “Carla Del Ponte didn’t want to write about what really happened before because she would have had to launch investigations into crimes connected with organ trafficking. It would have been career suicide for an EU politician in Kosovo. We have enough facts to prove genocide. We have information confirming 1,200 Serbs were kidnapped and 1,700 killed. No one can say for sure. Serbs were kidnapped all over Kosovo. People disappeared — and not farmers but doctors. Several were kidnapped. One was the famous surgeon Andrea Tomanovish. His body was never found. Try going south to the Albanian border. Don’t think about talking about this with the Albanian administration, though. You’ll disappear. And only speak English with the Albanians.”
In the morning we saw we were almost in the mountains. The enclave was overtaken by a thick icy mist. They came to pick us up. A red jeep poked through the clouds. The numbers on the Kosovo license plate were cardboard. Our driver, Dushko, a Serb, took off the numbers before crossing the bridge onto the other Albanian side. Two-hundred meters, barbed wire fences, a KFOR outpost… Then everything changed. All the sudden we saw clean, swept streets, bright signs, shop Turkish- and Roma-style windows. And U.S. flags. The new Albanian Kosovo is still celebrating victory.
Big laundry mat
Kosovo was once considered Yugoslavia’s poorest province. However, the situation has recently changed thanks to the world’s most progressive democracies. Of course, myriad sacrifices were made along the way. Many Kosovo residents were exiled or sent to reservations, which the European Union refers to as “enclaves.” Humanitarian mission representatives don’t like visiting Serbian ghettos. The reservations are an unpleasant sight — especially compared to the rest of Kosovo which is a perfect example of good peacekeeping.
Kosovo is crammed with cash. EU and U.S. humanitarian organizations are making significant contributions to the economy. Albanians are also sending huge annual remittances from Western Europe. Part of this money is earned from criminal activities. But Kosovo can’t yet cope with these substantial money streams. The funds are poorly managed and large sums are invested in outlandish construction projects, such as 100-meter swimming pools in entirely uninhabited areas. Thousands of consumer goods stores stand by the road. The average Kosovo village has 5-10 supermarkets for every 500 residents, as well as three car washes and mechanic’s shops. The country’s elegant agrarian landscape now has tens of thousands of newly built elite homes. Scattered among them are the skeletons of Serbian homes in ruins, covered in weeds. Albanians are dismantling these homes and using the materials to build more multilevel mega markets. One theory why these stores are built is that they are used for money laundering. They have few customers and the assortment is always e — nuts and mineral water. It’s interesting to think how long these stores would have to run before covering their costs. The average land plot for these mega markets sells for 100,000 euro.
The EU can’t explain why the Albanian mafia was given a republic to rule after massacring the Serbian population. But the Albanians know how to play the democratic game. Each mega market boasts a collection of small EU and U.S. flags, although the well-being of Kosovo residents is divided purely along ethnic lines — a mockery of the democratic values that the country pretends to uphold.
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| When Kosovo declared independence, automobile amnesty was given to all vehicles stolen from the EU. The automobile business has served as an economic engine for Kosovo. |
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Istok
A Western humanitarian mission employee based in Prishtin recapped the events that had transpired in the Kosovo village, Istok. He said that Albanians had misbehaved a bit in the summer of 1999, but everything fell into place shortly after. Moscow built 48 homes in the village for the Serbians whose houses had been burned down. Today, he added, Istok is the pinnacle of peaceful coexistence of Albanians and Serbs.
Lawyer Lozanka Radoyvich told us an altogether different story in Belgrad. A massacre had ensued for a week in Istok in 1999. All the homes of Serbs were burned down or seized. Forty-three people were kidnapped. They have never been found.
As we made our way through Kosovo, we couldn’t imagine the danger facing two Russian Orthodox journalists. We relied on our Serbian driver to handle all our safety issues. At first, Dushko refused to go to Istok. But we told him that as a refugee of the Grachanitsa reservation he could help us to put together an article about the real situation in Serbian enclaves, or sit at home waiting for his enclave to be cleansed.
Our jeep had already been riding for half an hour in the mountainous village Istok. Passers-by stared at us intensely. Doshko gripped the wheel tightly. His large hairy paws whitened from stress and he whispered through his teeth: “Albanians, Albanians.”
Doshko visually screened everyone around us, looking for his fellow Serbs. But he didn’t find any. All the sudden, the car backed up, he turned down an alley and we stopped at a house with a satellite dish that read: “Total-TV.”
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| The Moscow government built these houses in the Istok village after Serbian homes were burned down by Albanians. We managed to find one family living in the area. |
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“It’s Serbian TV,” Doshko said. “Albanians don’t watch it.”
We exited the car. Destroyed walls of old homes surrounded us. New smaller houses had been built among them. Typically Albanians don’t live in such modest residences. And in Istok the Serbs don’t either, although these homes had built especially for them by the Moscow government.
All the homes sat empty and silent. The windows were covered by rags. We walked around the homes and stood next to the crumbling walls that had eroded beneath the rain. Snakes warmed themselves under the sun on concrete blocks. We were looking for the only remaining Serbian family. And we found her. An elderly Serbian woman stood looking at us cautiously.
Doshko asked her in Albanian: “Are you a Serb?”
“Yes. So?” she answered in the same tongue.
“No, really tell us, are you a Serb?” he asked again, only in Serbian.
“And so?” she repeated, only in Serbian.
“I’m a Serb from Grachanitsa! These are Russian journalists from Moscow!” he said.
In half a moment we were already in her kitchen. The coffee boiled on the gas stove. Milavitsa put shot glasses and rakia on the table. The home was half-dark. All the windows were covered in blankets. She told us how she had run away from Istok, but later returned.
“I came back when I learned that Moscow had decided to help us. But the Russians outsourced the work to a German company that hired Albanians to fulfill the contract. In effect, the Albanians made money off the Russians, by building our homes and not providing us with electricity or water. This was done on purpose. But I’m still happy the house was built. Before I was living in a shed with a cow.”
Milavitsa’s family had lived in Istok for nearly a century. In the summer of 1999, Albanians blew up a home, fish restaurant, wine cellar and four-car garage in the village. They also stole a tractor and land. Her family home was burned. She named the dead, counting them on her fingers.
“Did you know that Serbs were kidnapped and their organs trafficked?” we asked her cautiously.
“Yes, we all knew! We knew that only young, strong men went missing. On June 10, the Albanians rounded up about 50 people here in Istok and took them away. No one ever saw them again. We appealed to both the Serbian and EU authorities for help. But they said that we didn’t have any evidence. As if you can just go to a clinic where organs are being trafficked, take photos and leave!”
When we left, Milavitsa complained that the humanitarian aid in Mitrovitsa was subsiding from Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry. She added there was no communication among the enclaves. We told her that service was being held again at the Grachanitsa Monastery and some enclaves were holding up well.
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| Tsveta’s son may have been a victim of underground organ trafficking. But she hopes to find him alive. |
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Serbs give birth in enclaves
Try to imagine a Russian village in a mountainous district of Chechnya in the mid-1990s. There’s poor communication with mainland Russia and transport is unreliable. The local population has no one to rely on in an emergency.
It’s a long hike to the Serbian border from the Shtripts enclave. The 10,000 or so population doesn’t have any employment opportunities. They’re farmers, although portions of the land border with Albanian villages and locals don’t let Serbs work the fields.
“They shoot farmers,” said Mile Popovich, a member of the local administration. “Almost everything in our enclave is completely natural. The economy is ruined and the Albanians don’t buy anything from the Serbs.”
“Doesn’t Belgrade help you?” we asked.
“It’s hard to call it ‘help,’” Popovich said. “Their policy is to move all the educated people to Serbia and help them find work. Belgrade helped all qualified workers leave. Only we farmers and workers remain. But that’s okay. We’ll win Kosovo back the same way we lost it. And our friends will be stronger by then. I don’t think we should drag Russia into a war right now. In the meanwhile our kids are growing up.”
“Do Serbs really have children in the enclaves?” we asked.
“People just understood what they need to do,” Popovich answered. “There’s an average of three children per family in the enclaves.”
“Have Albanians tried to take Shtripts?” we asked.
“They’re too afraid. We can call 5,000 men to arms in a moment,” Popovich said. “The KFOR soldiers already tried to disarm us. The Poles came first. They walked through the enclave, spoke with locals and later told their commanding officers they wouldn’t do it. Then the Americans came with their search dogs on helicopters. They went to each home looking for arms, but we sent our shepherd dogs after them. Then the Americans climbed back into their helicopters and took off. For some reason, they haven’t rushed to disarm the Albanians… But the KLA has shot at our buses. People have died in the thousands. A lot of people have disappeared without a trace. We used to worry during kidnappings in 1999. My neighbor was kidnapped and they never found his body. The kidnapping started as soon as NATO forces came to Kosovo.”
A government employee told us how to find the mother of a kidnap victim. We went to see her.
“They kept telling me my son’s alive.”
It wasn’t easy to find her home. We wandered the streets until a local woman carrying groceries offered to escort us to Tseta Dogandjich’s house. As we walked, we read the many death notices glued on the fences and lampposts. The woman caught us staring and said in good Russian: “There aren’t many of us left…”
Dogandjich’s story is typical in Kosovo. Her son Yakov disappeared in 1999.
“He was coming home and had to pick up some shepherds along the way,” she said. There was an old Soviet TV in the corner of the room.
“Someone stopped Yakov. They found his car by the road with the doors half open. I went to the KFOR for help, but they said calmly: ‘Your son was kidnapped by an independent criminal group.’ The authorities didn’t look for him at all. But then word came that Yakov was still alive. We asked a foreign journalist who was preparing to meet Albanian criminals to help us find him. They again told her that Yakov was alive. About one month later, some people contacted me and asked me to give them clothes and money for food for my son. Albanians have contacted me several times saying that he was alive, but they couldn’t release him. Why did they want him to begin with?”
“Have you continued searching for your son?” we asked.
“Yes. We were continuously told he was alive. We met with Major Taylor who commanded KFOR in our region. He told us they couldn’t find and free our son. But he added we should try to buy him back through our Albanian acquaintances. A good Albanian friend of Yakov’s said that if he tried to intervene, he and his whole family would be killed. Other Albanians refused to help us, although we’ve managed to set aside a good amount of money to buy him back.”
Soldiers of the enclave self-defense movement explained why prisoners were often sent from one area to the next speaking on the condition of anonymity.
“Many kidnap victims were found in mass graves,” they said. “But they were mostly older. Young healthy men were kept in special camps. When international commissions headed to the area, the Albanians relocated their prisoners. And this is how the victims live until the Albanians receive an order for a specific organ. Then the victim is taken from Kosovo to an underground clinic.”
Our investigation was nearing an end. Most importantly, we had learned that Ponte’s scandalous statements were true. Many Serbs were kidnapped at the same time in the summer of 1999. The majority were young healthy men. Also, they weren’t killed immediately, but kept in special camps. KP came across a woman who was examined by doctors working for the underground organ trade. She was saved by a astounding chain of events.
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We never read any of these stories in western media Only that strong man Milosevic was ethnicaly cleansing a million Albanians from Kosovo . And United States had to send peacekeepers to stop Serbia .
Comment by Eric — June 11, 2008 #