[Carla] Del Ponte remained in her position [as Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia] until the end of 2007, leaving to become the Swiss ambassador to Argentina; at the same time writing a book about her time with the Tribunal — “The Hunt: Me and War Criminals”, published two months ago but available at the moment only in Italian. It hasn’t been much reported yet what del Ponte has said about NATO, but the book has already created a scandal in Europe, for in it she reveals how the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) abducted hundreds of Serbs in 1999, and took them to Kosovo’s fellow Muslims in Albania where they were killed, their kidneys and other body parts then removed and sold for transplant in other countries…
On February 17 of this year, in a move of highly questionable international legality, the KLA declared the independence of Kosovo from Serbia. The next day the United States recognized this new “nation”, thus affirming the unilateral declaration of independence of a part of another country’s territory. The new country has as its prime minister a gentleman named Hashim Thaci, described in Del Ponte’s book as the brain behind the abductions of Serbs and the sale of their organs.
Some of the relevant parts of del Ponte’s book are here. This is so lurid, and so similar to standard war atrocity rumors, that the evidence del Ponte provides doesn’t seem anywhere near conclusive. (Recall the blockbuster Turkish movie Valley of the Wolves was about US troops doing this with Iraqis.) In any case, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know for sure; given the position of the US, it will never be seriously investigated.
Here’s Hillary Clinton on Kosovo in June, 1999, right when this was purportedly happening:
This has been possible because our nations—our leaders and our citizens—stood up against evil. Now there are some who I know who would quibble with my use of that word, but I think it fully describes the conflict we have been waging these last few months…we will not turn away when human beings are cruelly expelled, or when they are denied basic rights and dignities because of how they look or how they worship. When crimes against humanity rear their ugly heads, we have to send such a message as an international community.
