Organ Trafficking in Kosovo

I made the work-week commute in the late afternoon yesterday. The occasion was a retirement party for the business manager of the local where I work.

Riding the train out to SeaTac on a Saturday -- the party was held at the local's first-floor meeting hall -- was not something to which I was particularly looking forward. But the weather was perfect and the change of pace turned out to be enjoyable. The train was chock full of weekend shoppers and sightseers. Fathers out with their families and single women carrying bags from the department stores. I used the hour trip to read the lengthy The New Yorker piece by Nicholas Schmidle on Kosovo's criminal organ-harvesting enterprise. It's a sordid tale but one that needs to be learned. Too many supposedly knowledgeable people point to Bill Clinton's NATO war on Yugoslavia as a successful example of Western military intervention. But it must be remembered that during the spring of 1999 when the United States was leading the attack, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed and Wesley Clark almost fired on Russian forces in Pristina. Both incidents could have led to a much wider and more devastating conflict. Today Kosovo is not a viable state absent United Nations assistance; it is an Albanian criminal enterprise.

Schmidle spends the first half of his story constructing a rigorous brief on the criminal nature of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Then he pisses in his own punch bowl the second half by speculating that Serbs have suborned perjury in their obsession to secure convictions of former KLA leaders at the ICTY. He concludes his essay with a sympathetic account of Hashim Thaci.

In the end, Schmidle can't break out of the official mindset: evil Serbs, innocent "Kosovars." At the time Schmidle's article appeared in April he made the following blog post, "An Organ-Trafficking Conviction in Kosovo":

In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, I investigate allegations that, around the time of the 1999 Kosovo war, the Kosovo Liberation Army trafficked prisoners across the border into Albania, killed them, and harvested their organs. Hashim Thaci, the current Prime Minister of Kosovo, is among those accused of being responsible; a 2010 report, published by the Council of Europe, accused him of being the “boss” of a “network of unlawful activity,” which included prisoner abuse and organ harvesting. Thaci strongly denies the allegations and, despite all of these nasty insinuations, not a single case of suspected organ trafficking has gone before a judge and yielded a verdict.

That changed Monday, when an international panel of judges from the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo issued multiple convictions of human trafficking and organized crime. The charges don’t relate directly to the war years, or include Thaci or his close associates; they are centered on Medicus, a transplant clinic in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. The prosecution argued that, in 2008, a urologist named Lutfi Dervishi began performing kidney transplants there for money. (The sale of organs is outlawed everywhere in the world except Iran.) In its 2010 report, the Council of Europe cited Dervishi’s clinic as evidence of an organ trade that began during the war and continued afterward, “albeit in other forms.”

The investigation continues. So expect more revelations of the true nature of the state created out of the smoke of Bill Clinton's stunning military-intervention success story.