The families of victims of crimes committed in Kosovo wait too long for the justice and the truth about the fate of their loved ones, said in an interview for Tanjug Michael Montgomery, an American journalist who discovered “Yellow House” in Albania, where, according to the report of the Special Rapporteur of the Council of Europe, Dick Marty, the organs of abducted people were harvested.
“Clint Williamson is a serious prosecutor and he led a serious investigation”, said Montgomery, referring to the report of a three-year investigation into Marty’s allegations that the EULEX Special Prosecutor presented yesterday in Brussels. However, he added that the results of the investigation did not reveal anything essentially new.
UNMIK knew about the allegations on organ harvesting since 2003, but never conducted a serious investigation about it. Till the formation of Williamson’s team in 2011, EULEX neither conducted an investigation.
He added that the information about the secret camps in Albania, where members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) kept abducted civilians, were mentioned in the reports of numerous media and organizations for human rights, long time ago.
Montgomery, as a reporter of British Daily Telegraph, together with his colleague Stephen Smith, investigated war crimes in Kosovo after the conflict in 1999, and among the first drew the attention of investigators in the United Nations and the ICTY to the existence of the “Yellow house” in Burrel, in central Albania.
“Victims’ families waited too long for truth and justice,” says Montgomery, adding that the trial, based on the results of the Williamson’s investigation, will be a major challenge for the international justice.
“Williamson certainly encountered many obstacles, as we encountered,” says Montgomery, who during the journalistic investigation into the crimes of the KLA faced with the threats and the intimidation of witnesses.
“How to prove the crime that happened 15 years ago, and you don’t know the names of the victims and perpetrators and you don’t have serious physical evidence,” he asked, noting that the international community reacted unacceptably late.
Montgomery, who now works for the U.S. National Public Radio (NPR) in San Francisco, pointed out that the story on organ trafficking (which represents only a small fraction of crimes against civilians in Kosovo after the war) distracted the public attention from a numerous cases of kidnapping, torture and murders, which were directed by the KLA.
“The motive for our investigation, which has not been concluded, was the fate of hundreds of people who disappeared after NATO troops and UN entered Kosovo,” said Montgomery, and pointed out that the international community for years ignored the KLA crimes. As a consequence, bringing criminals to justice 15 years after the war remains a challenge.
