Organ Theft in Kosovo: Initiatives, Failures and New Opportunities for the International Community
Abstract
After the withdrawal of Serbian units from Kosovo in the second half of 1999, we could witness Kosovo being transformed into an unstable area while the KLA became the informal ruler of the country with de facto unrestricted authority. Several originally classified documents leaked into the public domain in the last two years. These were authored by various international institutions, and they indicate the involvement of former KLA high officers and current leading Kosovar politicians in the illegal trade with organs of Serbian POWs. During the unofficial investigation of the whole issue, there appeared several obscurities and controversies that cast a bad light on the passive and often rather opportunistic approach of the international community, which has, moreover, repeatedly failed to protect key secret witnesses. However, the report of Dick Marty and the establishment of the EULEX Special Investigation Team headed by Clint Williamson give us some hope that the investigation will bring tangible results and the whole case will be legitimately closed.
Keywords
Kosovo, the KLA, international community, organ trade, investigation, ICTY, UNMIK, EULEX, protected witness
Author Biography
Michal Hrušík
Born in 1984, he completed a doctoral program at the Institute of Political Science at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague under the supervision of Prof. Pavel Barša, Ph.D. His dissertation focused on the influence of the international community on ethnic conflicts in the Western Balkans and state-building processes in the region. During his studies, he completed an internship at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, at the Third Territorial Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Slovakia, and, with the support of the Council for International Relations, a study visit to Kosovo and Macedonia. Later, he worked as a program coordinator at the Pontis Foundation and led a Balkan Studies course at the Department of Political Science at the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University in Bratislava and at the Faculty of Arts at Trnava University. He manages the website balkan.mzf.cz.