Albania denies implication in claims Serbs were killed for organs

TIRANA, April 12 – Albania’s former Prime Minister, Pandeli Majko, who headed the government during the Kosova war and its aftermath and now an opposition Socialist Party lawmaker, rejected claims alleged in Carla Del Ponte’s book as “strange stories, a fantasy.”
A book by a former U.N. war crimes prosecutor that ethnic Albanian guerrillas killed dozens of Serbs and sold their organs at the end of the war in Kosova.
“I do not believe that if there was proof of that, the Hague tribunal would have waited for Del Ponte to publish her book,” Majko said. The U.N. tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where Del Ponte worked, is based in The Hague, Netherlands.
He said he had met twice with Del Ponte and that she had never raised the issue, nor had any of the Serb officials he met with after the war.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said Carla Del Ponte has presented “sufficiently grave evidence” in her newly published book to warrant an investigation into claims guerrillas took Serbs into Albania, killed them and then sold their organs to international traffickers in 1999.
In a letter dated April 4 and addressed to Kosova’s prime minister, the rights group called upon Kosovo’s authorities “to determine the veracity” of the claims with counterparts in Albania.
“We urge you to initiate a thorough investigation, in cooperation with your Albania counterparts, in order to determine the veracity of Del Ponte’s claim and to ensure anyone found responsible for such crimes is held accountable in a court of law,” it said.
The rights group said Del Ponte was told that Kosova Albanians transported between 100 and 300 people, most of them Serb civilians, by truck from Kosova into northern Albania in June 1999, as NATO and the U.N. were moving into Kosova at the end of the war between separatist rebels and Serbian forces.
They were then transported into facilities near the Albanian town of Burrel, 55 miles north of the capital, Tirana, where “doctors extracted the captives’ internal organs,” Human Rights Watch said.
“Bodies of the victims may be buried near a yellow house close to a graveyard about 12 miles south of Burrel,” the letter says. It cites Del Ponte saying U.N. investigators inspected the house and found medical equipment used in surgery and traces of blood, but were unable to determine if the blood was human.
But Qemal Minxhozi, also a Socialist lawmaker from the area discussed in the book, rejected the charges saying no witness from that area could confirm such words.
Kosova’s justice minister, Nekibe Kelmendi, dismissed the allegations as “fabrications.”
“These are pure fabrications by Del Ponte or by Serbia itself,” Kelmendi said. “I have had four private meetings with Carla Del Ponte and she never once mentioned any such allegations.”
She criticized Del Ponte “for writing about issues that were not turned into official charges.”
The most senior Kosovar Albanian to be tried for war crimes in The Hague, Ramush Haradinaj, a former prime minister of Kosova and ex-guerrilla commander, was acquitted last week, sparking bitter protests in Serbia.
The Swiss foreign ministry barred Del Ponte, now its ambassador to Argentina, from attending her book launch and ordered her to keep quiet. Senior Swiss figures are calling for her resignation.