A Place to Stand

I have previously listed this letter about the dissection by our Kosovo "police" as being unpublished by the entire British media. I apologise to the Scotsman newspaper who did indeed publish it on 9th April 2008 & have no idea how I missed it.

Buried deep in Carla del Ponte's book of her role as Yugoslav war crimes prosecutor, The Hunt: Me and My War Criminals, published last week, is an admission that, that because of information supplied by "reliable journalists" (ie western ones) she has known for years of the KLA, under the authority of the NATO occupiers, kidnapping at least 300 Serb teenagers and perhaps 1,300 of them, dissecting them and selling the parts to hospitals in the NATO countries. She did a very {cursory investigation which proved it happened & immediately stopped.}

Had this happened under the rule of Adolf Hitler, it would, correctly, be excoriated annually as one of the worst obscenities of the Holocaust. Had anything even remotely comparable been happening under Chinese rule in Tibet it would have had banner headlines in every western newspaper.

Though this has been reported by Pravda, among others and on the net, western written and broadcast coverage has been essentially limited to one small item on Fox news and a couple of mentions in the Italian press. The fact that this was carried out under the authority of our government and allies, with the knowledge of journalists and funded by western health services does not make it less newsworthy. The monolithic decision of our media not to report this is not to be commended.

The Scotsman thus becomes not merely one of the 3 British media entities to have, as far as I know, reported this but the first to do so. The others are a Guardian article written in a manner remarkably sympathetic manner to the owner of the building where this particular atrocity took place & one sentence by Mr John Pilger.

I would like to thank the Scotsman letter editor, Douglas Steele, for running this, which, as can be seen, makes him close to unique in the British media.

I remain of the opinion that, since the total number of Serbs missing & assumed murdered like this is, officially (Serb estimates are considerably higher), 1,300 this should by any objective standards, have received & be still achieving headlines far larger than the entire recent Gaza conflict for which Hamas claim fewer deaths (& the Israelis much fewer again though Hamas figure is usually reported).

By appointing the KLA as our "police" under their command authority & sending them out to carry out such atrocities our own & other NATO political leaders have, all, committed crimes against humanity in a way which del Ponte's "court" never approached being able to demonstrate against Milosevic. Since the body organs were flown out from Tirana airport & paid for I do not for a second believe that there would be any serious problem in tracing which hospitals received them & who they, in turn, paid.

This is one of the original reports of this (not in UK media.