Washington Post: U.S. should feel betrayed

8 January 2011 | 12:10 | Source: Tanjug

WASHINGTON -- Americans should feel betrayed by the contents of the Council of Europe's report on organized crime in Kosovo, the Washington Post reported on Saturday. The article titled “U.S. must seek the truth about wrongdoing in Kosovo” adds that Kosovo is a country that owes its existence to the U.S. Noting that the report, authored by Swiss prosecutor Dick Marty, includes allegations that Kosovo leaders have committed heinous crimes and allegations that American and European diplomats and UN officials in Kosovo overlooked wrongdoing to preserve “political stability,” the daily states that Kosovo's leaders have waged an ugly media campaign to discredit Marty and his findings and have threatened to launch a witch hunt against Albanians who aided the inquiry. “Washington's voice is needed now to stop the incitement in Kosovo and to turn public opinion toward an international criminal investigation and, if necessary, prosecutions,” states the article authored by Chuck Sudetic, a journalist who reported from the Balkans during the '90s and worked for the Hague Tribunal in the period from 2001 to 2005. The article points out that Washington knew of the kidnappings weeks after NATO occupied Kosovo in June 1999 and that, according to Albanian and U.S. sources, during the spring of 2008 - after former Hague Tribunal Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte published a memoir that mentioned these killings and reported credible assertions of organ harvesting - “senior U.S. diplomats in Kosovo advised Thaci and other Kosovo leaders to do nothing except wait out the storm.” “Kosovo's and Albania's governments have since issued only blanket denials of wrongdoing,” the daily states and notes that on Christmas Day, Kosovo's press reported a threat by Thaci to name every Albanian who assisted Marty. “In a land where witnesses to crimes are killed to silence them, Thaci's words could incite attacks on members of minority groups, political opponents, journalists and foreigners,” the article warns and points out that this danger and the long-term need to foster rule of law in Kosovo and Albania make it incumbent upon the U.S. to make “a forceful public statement and conduct tough closed-door diplomacy.”