December 26, 2008, 9:12
Serbs murdered for their organs in Kosovo – new evidence 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. Related links: <http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/25455> Council of Europe to probe claims of killing for transplants <http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/22913> Exposed: how Kosovo Serbs were butchered for organs <http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/9271> Carla Del Ponte to make last report http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/35306
