Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Balkan butchers and prime ministers

Radovan Karadžić was captured in Serbia and will be prosecuted in Den Haag for war crimes. Fair enough. Hashim Thaçi who committed similar crimes became a prime minister of "independent" Kosovo.
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, reports horrible details about Serb prisoners that had their internal organs removed and sold by ethnic Albanians during the Kosovo war in her new book. 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. More details here and here, some interesting information can be found in the dicussions, for instance about a camp Bondsteel, the AMBO pipeline, Halliburton etc. From all of the above, I can't get rid of a feeling that we (as Europeans) were fooled again by both the Kosovans and the US. I am not a fanatic supporter of either side but if we want justice then it must be justice for all.
P.S. Ramush Haradinaj, a former guerrilla leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army and former prime minister of Kosovo, charged of war crimes was acquitted on April 3rd, 2008, because of lack of convincing evidence.

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