MOSCOW, September 12 – RAPSI, Ingrid Burke. War crimes prosecutors for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) lack any authority or mandate such that would allow them to launch a new investigation or revive an old one into allegations that ethnic Albanian rebels harvested the organs of prisoners of war in the aftermath of the Kosovo conflict, ICTY Public Information Assistant Ljiljana Pitesa told RAPSI Wednesday.

RIA Novosti reported Tuesday that the Serbian authorities had planned to speak with ICTY Prosecutor Serge Brammertz about the organ-trafficking investigation during his upcoming visit to Belgrade. According to the report, Rasim Ljaljic, head of Serbia’s national council for ICTY cooperation, announced his plans to spearhead the talks against the backdrop of claims that Serbian war crimes prosecutors had secured as a witness a former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighter with firsthand experience in the rumored organ extraction.

Pitesa confirmed Brammertz’s plans to travel to Belgrade in October in order to meet with relevant government and judicial authorities in order to hold routine talks of regional cooperation with the tribunal, but denied the existence of any plans to discuss the organ-trafficking allegations: “As the [Office of the Prosecutor (OTP)] is not in charge of and has no mandate for the investigation of the organ trafficking allegations, we do not expect this topic to be on the agenda of meetings in Belgrade.”

The ICTY did consider organ-trafficking claims early on, but passed on initiating legal action based on a lack of relevant evidence. In 2004 under the guidance of former ICTY Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, the ICTY OTP assisted in the UN Mission in Kosovo’s (UNMIK) investigative efforts in a limited capacity, but by the following year, “the OTP decided to halt investigative work as no connection could be established with ongoing cases against Kosovo Albanian officials indicted by the Tribunal…. The OTP has provided all relevant information on this matter in its possession to the competent authorities in Serbia, in particular, the Office of the Prosecutor for War Crimes, and [European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX)].” In accordance with its completion strategy, the ICTY has not launched any new investigations after the end of 2004.

As RAPSI reported earlier, a EULEX investigation into the matter is currently underway. Spokesman for the EULEX Special Investigative Task Force [SITF] Juri Laas told RAPSI that while it is too early to state with confidence what will arise from the investigations, the findings may lead either to prosecution in front of the international judges already serving EULEX in Kosovo, or to the creation of a special tribunal.

Although organ-harvesting theories have endured for as long as the conflict itself, Del Ponte breathed new life into the allegations through her personal memoir, which was published in 2008.

The notoriously outspoken Del Ponte explained that while serving in her official capacity with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), her office received information “from a team of credible journalists” claiming that in the summer of 1999, between 100 and 300 KLA abductees were transported into northern Albania. The memoir explains, “some of the younger, fitter captives, who were kept well fed, examined by doctors and never beaten, were transferred to other holding facilities.”

The abductees were then allegedly taken to a room where journalists reported that doctors extracted vital organs in an improvised clinic, which were in turn transported to Tirana’s airport for sale on the black market.

According to the memoir, these prisoners were made aware of what lay ahead while in detention: “Victims deprived of only their first kidney were sewn up and confined again inside the shack until they were killed for their other vital organs; in this way, the other captives in the shack learned of their approaching fate; and they reportedly pleaded in terror to be killed immediately.”

The SITF emerged under the competence of EULEX from the fallout of a report released by the Council of Europe’s Dick Marty chastising the relevant international authorities for failing to act, despite the purported existence of evidence, that “serious crimes had been committed during the conflict in Kosovo, including trafficking in human organs, crimes which had gone unpunished hitherto and had not been the subject of any serious investigation.” Marty referenced the memoir on numerous occasions in the course of his report.