Are War Crimes committed in Kosovo being ignored?

The Kosovo Liberation Army fought to free Kosovo from Serbian rule, but now they're being accused of also liberating internal organs from captured prisoners for sale on the black market.

Last week the BBC ran gruesome testimony from a former KLA soldier who said he routinely saw prisoners being starved, tortured, beaten and shot while working at a prisoner-of-war camp during the Kosovo-Serbia conflict in 1999. The soldier said that many former KLA members knew of similar abuses, but kept quiet both out of feelings of loyalty to their former comrades and fear of retribution - according to the United Nations, some KLA officers who spoke out on possible war crimes committed by their side have received death threats, while some have just disappeared.

But the BBC story left out the worst allegations, that the KLA killed Serbian soldiers captured during the war to harvest their organs, which were then sold on the black market for transplant operations. Last November the Guardian sent reporter Paul Lewis to a small farmhouse in Northern Albania where some of the organ harvest was said to have taken place. According to the report, organs were removed from captured prisoners, driven to the airport in Albania’s capital, Tirana, where they were then flown to Turkey and transplanted into waiting patients.

Carla Del Ponte, the hard-nosed former prosecutor for war crimes committed during the wars that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia, said she has “credible” reports about KLA harvesting the organs of as many as 300 Serbian prisoners. But here’s where the story takes a turn towards the conspiracy side. In the Guardian report from last November, Del Ponte said she was stymied in her efforts to investigate the KLA organ ring because of evidence that suddenly went missing and resistance from senior UN officials. Now the Huffington Post is reporting that the Swiss government is barring Del Ponte from promoting her new memoir about her time as special prosecutor: “The Hunt: Me and War Criminals,” over what the Swiss government is calling “statements, which are impermissible for a representative of the government of Switzerland.” Those statements are thought to be her claims about the KLA organ smuggling ring.

So why the reluctance to investigate, or even discuss, these awful crimes? Two likely reasons: first there’s a reluctance (still) to promote anything that doesn’t portray the Serbs of the 1990s as the bad guys set on ethnically cleansing their little corner of Europe. The bigger reason though is likely that European and American officials don’t want the young Kosovo government to be painted in a bad light. The US and Europe were enthusiastic supporters of Kosovo’s bid for independence in February 2008, short-circuiting an UN-led effort in the process. Kosovo’s government today is made up largely of old KLA figures; so an investigation into these same individuals as war criminals would be rather embarrassing to Kosovo’s Western patrons. It’s worth noting again though that as recently as the mid-1990s, the United States, and other Western governments, listed the Kosovo Liberation Army as a terrorist group with probable ties to al-Qaeda.

The attitude among the Europeans and Americans though now seems to be to let bygones be bygones, even if that means ignoring some truly disturbing allegations into what are rightly called war crimes by some.