Blair's Kosovo triumph turns sour

Dick Marty, the bespectacled and bearded Swiss senator who has been investigating some of the darkest corners of recent European history, doesn't look like a natural crowd-puller. 

But in Paris on Thursday, officials and journalists poured into a room on the plush Avenue Kleber to hear him formally present a document which delivered a devastating blow against Europe's newest state.

In a report for the Council of Europe which took two years to compile, he has accused Hashim Thaci, the prime minister of newly independent Kosovo, not only of being a mafia boss, a murderer and a drug dealer - but of having been involved with a group that in 1999 killed prisoners to sell their kidneys.

In Kosovo, which was already reeling from allegations that Mr Thaci's party had indulged in what a senior diplomat called "industrial scale" fraud during last Sunday's elections, the report has been greeted with dismay. Not because of what is contained in it, little of which is really new, but rather because these are allegations which have been made before, remain unproven, and meanwhile sap the credibility of the country which declared independence in 2008.

In 1999 British troops took the high road to Pristina, Kosovo's capital, after a punishing 78 day Nato-led bombardment of the remains of what still then called Yugoslavia.

It was one of the first planned military interventions by Tony Blair. Haunted by Europe's failure to prevent the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica - and other horrors of the Bosnian war - he was determined to act when it was feared that Serbian forces were about to do it again in Kosovo.

Some 90 per cent of the population here was ethnic Albanian, and in the previous year the Kosovo Liberation Army had begun to battle for the province's freedom from Serbian rule.

Massacres and ethnic cleansing followed. Serbian police units killed Albanian civilians and the KLA murdered Serbs, Roma and Albanians whom they accused of collaborating with the Serbs.

Neither side was innocent as Mr Blair well knew, but in his view it was essential to act. Kosovo was arguably more wronged than wrong and after Bosnia, no Western electorate would stomach supporting the Serbs. Britain enlisted the US and Mr Blair went to work on his friend Bill Clinton, eventually winning not just American participation in a Nato air offensive but the threat that US would, if necessary, send ground troops against Serb forces.

That threat, after a campaign that went on longer than anybody had expected, finally led Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb leader, to throw in towel.

But then, as Serbia capitulated and its police and army pulled out, the boot was on the other foot. As hundreds of thousands of ethnically cleansed Albanian refugees returned, they exacted revenge on the minority Serb enclaves in their own territory, with the KLA playing a leading role. Moreover, Nato troops were effectively told to turn a blind eye to some of what went on.

Today Mr Clinton is immortalised in a bronze statue in Pristina, and last summer Mr Blair was greeted by thousands when he visited. He was also introduced to a group of "Toniblers", boys named in his honour. Hobnobbing with Mr Thaci, it was smiles all round.

If ever it is proved that the KLA leader whom Mr Blair backed was really a mafia boss, a murderer and traded in human organs, then the history of that campaign will have to be rewritten - and the gloss put on it by Mr Blair will vanish.

The most damning of Mr Marty's claims is that a number of Serb and other prisoners who had been moved to Albania in the wake of the war were executed and their organs sold. The claim was first made publicly by Carla Del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor of the UN's Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague in a book in 2008. Subsequent investigations have failed to prove the claims, which Mr Thaci says are defamatory.

The EU's police and justice mission in Kosovo, known as EULEX, has also looked at the case of the so-called "Yellow house" in Albania where some of the organ-harvesting operations are said to have taken place. But unlike Mr Marty, it notes that "to date, our prosecutors have found no evidence or intelligence that would lead us to believe that 'organ harvesting' took place at this location."

There are, however, other allegations that are very real and very current. A courthouse in Pristina heard last week how seven Kosovars were part of an elaborate international "organs for cash" network, in which donors from poor countries such as Moldova, Turkey and Kazakhstan donated their body parts to wealthy patients on the promise of payments of up to EU 15,000 at a time.

Prosecutors named a Turkish surgeon, Yusuf Sonmez, as a conduit between the donors and the patients, with the racket operating from the Medicus clinic in a run-down suburb of Pristina until late 2008. Mr Sonmez, who has been nicknamed "Doctor Vulture", is currently the subject of an international manhunt, although he denies the allegations against him. While no connection has yet been found between the current trafficking allegations and the "organ harvesting" claims of a decade ago, some doubt whether it can be purely coincidence.

Defending his report on Thursday, Mr Marty added that he often seen "terror" in the eyes of witnesses he had talked to. "We discovered that these things were known by intelligence services from the different countries," he said. "It was known by police services. It was known by numerous people who, in private, would say 'Yes we know, but for political reasons we made the choice or we have the duty to remain silent.'"

The allegation is that in the volatile Balkans, Western governments decided that peace and stability in Kosovo were all-important, and therefore turned a blind eye to past crimes by Kosovo's new leaders, and tolerated their involvement in organised crime.

Today Pristina is a different city from the one entered by British troops in the dusty summer of 1999. On the road they took to enter the city, gleaming glass shopping centres sit astride a new highway. In the centre of town, Christmas decorations adorn the street now named in honour of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the Albanian nun who was born in neighbouring Macedonia.

But, despite new buildings everywhere most Kosovars remain poor, a huge number are jobless, and many depend on money sent by families from abroad. Like many other parts of the western Balkans, it might be far more prosperous were it not for corruption. A representative of a major Scandinavian company engaged in talks on a privatisation deal recounted how local officials bluntly told him that he would have to pay for his company to be in the running. He decided not to bother.

On Wednesday, Bosnians and Albanians gained the right to travel visa free to the EU's 25 country Schengen zone. On Friday, neighbouring Montenegro became an official candidate for EU membership. Croatia is already close to EU membership. Only one Balkan country is making no progress, instead falling ever further behind the rest of the region: Kosovo.

Mr Marty's allegations will only serve to reinforce Kosovo's isolation, argues one diplomat in Pristina. Who will want to let Kosovars travel freely in Europe now, he asks? As to the report itself, he says it contains a mishmash of "very serious cases, already under investigation, past or rumoured cases that have yet to lead anywhere, and possibly valid aspersions about the connections and business practices of the Prime Minister."

Crucially though, he does not believe that there is a smoking gun "with Mr Thaci's finger prints on it." If, however, Mr Thaci were ever arrested, he would not be the first Kosovar prime minister to end up behind bars.

In 2005 Ramush Haradinaj, who like Mr Thaci, was also a top KLA member, was indicted and put on trial for war crimes in The Hague. He was acquitted, but is now back on trial because of concerns that the original trial was marred by witness intimidation.

Across Kosovo, Mr Thaci and Mr Haradinaj look statesmanlike in electoral bill boards. But the week's events have served to fuel speculation in Kosovo, prone like the rest of the Balkans to conspiracy theories, that Mr Marty working for Serbian interests, and that the timing of his report, just after the poll, was a plot to affect the forming of the new government.

"Why now?" asked a businessman, who asks not to be named. "I don't support Thaci, but you have to ask why they published it now."

The danger for Kosovo is that it has not yet achieved all the trappings of full statehood since it seceded from Serbia with overwhelming Kosovo Albanian support.

Today, 72 countries including Britain and the US recognise Kosovo, but Russia, China, India and five of 27 EU states including Spain do not acknowledge the existence of what the Serbs call a "fake state".

If Mr Marty's claims are proven, says Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, presumably relishing the discomfort of Kosovo's Western backers, then they are "equal to crimes against humanity".

The problem is that here, nothing ever seems to proven, one way or the other, and so Kosovo's people seem destined to remain locked in limbo - poor, and increasingly isolated.