December 26, 2008, 9:12
http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/35306
Serbian war crime prosecutors have received new
evidence that hundreds of Serbs had their internal organs removed
and sold by ethnic Albanians during the Kosovo war. The UN document
obtained through unofficial channels contains photographs of what
are believed to be mass graves of the victims.
Film-maker Ninoslav has put his life on the line to show the
suffering of the Serbian population in Kosovo, but fewer and fewer
people want to listen. Until now the West has ignored him
completely and the Serbian government would also prefer he kept
quiet.
“We see that they were killed and
dumped. Now there’s legitimate concern that some of them had been
used to take organs and killed later on. Now we can only
reconstruct this. But what do we do today to make sure that a
civilised solution to the Kosovo crisis will be achieved?”
says Randjelovic.
However now that everybody wants to close the files, new evidence
has emerged of what happened in Kosovo in 1999. Reports suggest
Serb prisoners of war were taken by the Kosovo Liberation Army to
the Kosovo-Albanian border.
In a place called ‘the yellow house’ their vital organs were cut
out and sold on the black market. The Serbian war crimes
prosecution has through its own means obtained photographs
purported to show a nearby mass grave and a report on the fate of
these kidnapped Serbs.
“We have evidence that there was
an operating room in that yellow house. A UN Mission in Kosovo
[UNMIK] report, which we got through our own channels, said they
found a couple of bottles of penicillin there. There’s not enough
proof to say there was an operating room. From the report you can
see that there were some other medicines and containers for
transporting the organs. There are nine pages missing. The
investigation is now on and we are trying to find out what really
happened,” said Bruno Vekaric, prosecution spokesperson for
Serbia’s War Crimes Court.
The UN, though, denies knowing about any of this. UNMIK
spokesperson Russell Geekie said he has no information about this
report.
“It may very well be an internal
report. You have to go to the UN headquarters to ask about it, but
they won't necessarily be able to divulge anything about an
internal report,” he said.
RT contacted the UN but they referred us back to Geekie.
The story first came to light when former UN Chief Prosecutor Carla
del Ponte published her book earlier this year. For Russian
journalist Evgeny Baranov it’s not surprising. He’s been working on
this story since the war and the latest information just confirms
what he suspected all along.
“The first serious information
came in 2006. There is a town called Merderi at the administrative
border between Kosovo and Serbia, and at that time the
international forces were handing over remains of exhumed Serbs to
Kosovo. Among the relatives was this woman who hysterically tried
to tell the journalists gathered there that her husband had been
gutted and his organs had been taken to a hospital in Gnjilane in
Kosovo. His organs had been sold and his remains buried in the
courtyard of the hospital. Everybody thought she was insane until
April this year,” Baranov recalls.
In November Kosovo police arrested two people, one Israeli and one
Turk, for illegal organ trafficking. They are currently under
investigation.