Secrets And Lies: The roots of the ‘organs’ controversy

By Frank Ledwidge
I know many of their families. Some of them, against all reason, believe that some day their son, husband or brother will return. They have heard the stories. There is a special camp, they were taken to work in mines. Friends had seen them alive long after the kidnapping. Anything. But most mothers, fathers, sisters and wives know in their hearts that for the Serbian civilians kidnapped by the Kosovo Liberation Army there will be no return. They understand now that they are dead. But now there are new stories. Stories of butchery and organ sales.
I know the families because for two years I was the Missing Persons Officer for the OSCE in Southern Kosovo. The majority of the missing were Kosovar Albanians murdered by Serbian security forces. We made no distinction in how cases were treated, Albanian, Serb or Roma. I am proud that I was threatened by both KLA and by Serb paramilitaries claiming that I was working ‘too much with the other side’. We were proudly non-partisan.
Now though we can make a small but significant distinction. For many of the dead Kosovar Albanians there is some kind of Justice. Some Serb killers are serving long prison sentences in the Hague. Milosevic himself is dead. Others are on the run. Many bodies of missing Albanians have been recovered. Not enough justice, true, and not all the dead have been given decent burial and lie still to be discovered. At least for some there is a grave to visit and a place where families may remember.
But for the Serb missing there is no kind of justice. Very few bodies have been recovered. No graves for them. And to add to the injustice, not a single KLA leader has been convicted of their killing. The agony of their families goes on and on.
Not only have they been denied justice, but there is a new horror for their families. Allegations have now arisen that these missing men, or some of them, have been murdered for their organs. Carla del Ponte seems to have abandoned her critical faculties in believing this nonsense, let alone writing about it. In the two years I was involved in these cases, speaking to witnesses, investigators and prosecutors both in Kosovo and the Hague I heard no word of this or anything like it. This is because it never happened.
Even to discuss this is to dignify the story with plausibility, but I will say two things. First the KLA were insufficiently well organised to operate such a complex system, with its requirement for medical precision and speed of transport. Second, this kind of allegation is what is called an ‘urban myth’. Similar stories are to be found concerning traffickers of human beings, and the same considerations apply. Fiction.
Of course in Serbia, extreme nationalists love this story. They are keen at any cost to apply mud to the new Kosovo state. The same applies in Russia where the story of the KLA and the Organ transplants’ is playing well.
My question to them is ‘Isn’t what really happened to the missing Serbs, Roma and Albanians bad enough without prolonging the agony of their families?’ But they care nothing about that.
And what did really happen to these men, almost all civilians? You have seen what happened on television. Scared, terrified men many of them severely beaten and tortured led out of a bus into a forest. Screams, gunfire and then silence. You have seen it in the recently released film of the ‘Skorpion’ killers at Srebrenica. The only substantial difference is that the murderers I am talking about speak Albanian. If you have access to the internet you can read about it in the evidence given at the Hague in the case of the ICTY Prosecutor against Fatmir Limaj and Others (Case IT-03 -66).
Let me be quite clear. The KLA had some fine men. The zone commander for the area I worked Ekrem Rexha, also known as Commander Drini was a brave soldier respected by his own men and his enemies alike. Very many other KLA fighters were decent men, fighting for what they believed in and defending their homes. I knew some of them. Most are now dead, killed fighting the Serbian forces or murdered like Drini by other KLA factions.
Other ‘officers’ in the KLA are nothing less than a disgrace to the Albanian nation. Some of them avoided arrest altogether. Others have been to the Hague and though ‘lack of evidence’ have been released and have returned to political careers. Believe me there was evidence. Plenty of it. The problem was that few people were willing to risk death to give that evidence in court. Ultimately the KLA killers have made this horrible story happen. If they had not viciously murdered so many civilians, what story would there be?
So what should Albanians do when confronted by this kind of story? Albania is not Kosovo. It has a very long and unbroken tradition of tolerance and fair play. There are no mass graves in Albania. Real Albanians should not cry ‘injustice’ or ‘anti-Albanian prejudice’, however true this may be. Bringing actions of criminal libel against Del Ponte will serve no purpose except to attract derision. What Albanians should say, and what I say is ‘lets identify the killers of these innocent men and bring them to some kind of justice, even if it is only the justice of public shame.’ Whatever is done, for the sake of honour and honesty it is about time that all Albanians acknowledged that Serbs do not have the monopoly on massacre.