The Strange Case of the Serb Plot to Kill a Top Swiss Prosecutor To Blacken Name of Young Kosovar Leader who Worked with Robin Cook and Madeleine Albright to End Terror in West Balkans
This is a longer piece than I usually write but articles on West Balkan politics are not easy to confine to the standard op-ed length.
It’s hardly news that Vladimir Putin now and then sends hit men abroad to kill opponents. But Serbia, a candidate country for EU membership? It seems so. The main Swiss TV channel recently broadcast an extraordinary documentary about a former Swiss prosecutor and politician who lives in permanent fear of assassination by a Serbian hit squad controlled by Belgrade’s state apparatus.
The story is part of the long saga about why there is no stability in the West Balkans and why this small corner of Europe seems as far away from EU membership as ever.
At the end of March the EU’s Foreign Policy chief, Josep Borrell announced he had persuaded the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo to sign a peace agreement to allow Kosovo to join international organisations and support cooperation between Belgrade and Pristina.
But the Serb president, Aleksander Vučić, just laughed in face of the EU’s Borrell as he refused to sign the agreement. Vucic added that Serbia would continue to oppose Kosovo’s hopes for recognition by the United Nations, UN agencies and the Council of Europe.
Thus the poisonous hate that infects a small corner of Europe drips by drip into the politics of the region blocking all hopes of progress to bring an end to the politics that stops the EU bringing European normality to the region.
But this is not just a failure of diplomacy and politics. Darker forces are in play that are rarely if ever discussed. Here is one example that so far has not been reported in the Brussels, Paris, Berlin or Rome media.
Dick Marty is a jurist who worked as a prosecutor in Ticino, the Italian speaking region of Switzerland. He was also an ambitious politician with the main Swiss centre-right liberal party. He didn’t rise high in politics and switched his interest to the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly.
Before we go further a word on the Council of Europe. I served as a UK member of its Parliamentary Assembly where fifteen years ago I met Dick Marty, a good man but obsessed with dislike of the United States.
The Council of Europe was set up by Winston Churchill upon his return to Government in 1951. It has nothing to do with the EU. Its main task is upholding the European Convention on Human Right and the European Court of Human Rights. Parliaments from 47 countries send a quota of MPs, senators, and peers from Britain to meet four times a year to discuss almost anything they like if it’s loosely related to human rights.
This story begins 25 years ago when Europe finally decided that the mass killings and torture off non-Serb citizens of the former Yugoslavia launched by the Belgrade strong man Slobodan Milosevic had to end. Milosevic was a left-over communist who watched with anger as the component nations and republics of Tito’s Yugoslavia – Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia even tiny Montenegro dissolved into separate nation states.
Milosevic desperately tried to maintain Serb control from Belgrade over the new smaller nations that sought an independent existence. Wars of medieval cruelty took place in Croatia, and Bosnia. Serb tanks rolled into the Kosovo capital Prishtina to enforce Serb rule.
The newly formed European Union created by the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 seemed helpless. The United Kingdom was led by a weak prime minister, John Major. The British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, opposed taking action against Milosevic. Later it was revealed that in a new job working for the global UK bank NatWest Hurd brokered a multi-billion deal to privatise Serbia’s telecom firm selling it to Italian and Greek financiers. Milosevic creamed off a huge part of the money from the deal which helped finance his death squad operations in Kosovo.
Milosevic and his chief associates hid millions of dollars in secret Swiss banks accounts so hopes that Switzerland might put pressure on the Serb strongman were fruitless.
The EU it was said wanted to be a Greater Switzerland refusing to take sides let alone exercise any real pressure on a murderous criminal like Slobodan Milosevic and his warlords, propaganda experts, and consultants from the West who flooded into Belgrade to make money.
After the Dayton agreement of 1995 which ended the Serb assault on Sarajevo Milosevic turned his attention to Kosovo. As a UK House of Commons report noted “Milosevic dismissed thousands of Kosovan Albanians from their jobs as doctors, police officers and key employees in state-owned firms, replacing them with Serbs. Kosovan Albanian students were barred from entering university buildings and a new curriculum—using the Serbian language and Serbian versions of history—was introduced. Meanwhile arbitrary arrest and police became routine earning Kosovo distinction as the region with some of the worst human rights violations in all of Europe.”
The Kosovan exiles, mainly young men, formed what they called the Kosovan Liberation Army in exile in Switzerland. The Serbs went on the rampage in March 1998 against Adem Jashari, a KLA leader who stayed in Kosovo. The Serbs killed him, his two brothers, his wife and children and others - a total of 58 men, women and children murdered in cold blood. The Serb butchery gave Kosovo the martys that led hundreds to join or offer support to the KLA.
In Switzerland, an exiled student, Hashim Thaci, left his studies to become a KLA activist. He never took up arms but focused on political strategy, a genius at propaganda and communications which drove Belgrade mad with anger as his statements started to pick up foreign media attention. He glided between different groups in Kosovo to bring the latest news and information.
Serb retribution, simply killing anyone suspected of supporting the campaign for freedom and self-government continued in 1998 and 1999. The United Nations found that there had been "a systematic campaign of terror, including murders, rapes, arsons and severe maltreatments” leading to over 13,500 people being killed or who went missing during the two years of actual armed conflict.]Between 1.2 million to 1.45 million Kosovo Albanians fled as refugees to seek sanctuary outside Kosovo.
In the south Yorkshire town where I was the MP we suddenly found a group of a few dozen Kosovars allocated by the London government to be housed and looked after in a poor mining community. The men huddled in jeans and leather jackets in the town centre by day, smoking cigarettes and looking miserable. It was an early wave of successive refugee immigrant crises. Propaganda pictures about columns of refugees snaking through the Balkans were used by pro-Brexit campaigners in the 2016 plebiscite which led to Britain quitting Europe.
From the UK, Tony Blair and Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, came out to see for themselves. They returned to London resolved to act in contrast to the appeasement of Milosevic under the weak and ineffectual Conservative government of John Major.
Hashim Thachi had long argued with his KLA colleagues that Kosovo could only be liberated from Serb rule if the conflict was fully internationalised. Milosevic and his young press chief, Alexander Vucic, were playing into Thachi’s hands. There was violence on the Kosovar side. Like the scenes in France after the Liberation in late summer 1944, there were undoubtedly some Kosovars seeking revenge of what had been done to their homes and relatives.
Nato air and cruise missile attacks on Serb troops and government-military targets in Belgrade frightened Milosevic who like all bullies couldn’t handle being opposed by force. He agreed to talk with Kosovo at Rambouillet, a former royal residence outside Paris. The talks were chaired by Robin Cook.
The key figure was the young Kosovan leader Hashim Thaci. Contrary to the later depiction of him promoted by Serb propaganda as a blood-stained killer, Thaci spent his time earnestly trying to persuade his fellow Kosovan delegates who came from all parties to accept compromise on an immediate referendum which would have produced the result of calling for an immediate total rupture from Serb occupation and the declaration of Kosovo as an independent state which had to wait until nearly decade later in 2008.
Thaci undertook the dangerous task of returning to Kosovo, crossing mountainous trails from Albania patrolled by Serb soldiers. He saw all the key KLA leaders and persuaded them to accept a de facto truce which included the presence of Nato troops in the country.
This was too much for Milosevic who restarted his war of terror against Kosovans.
Milosevic was not interested in coming to an agreement with the Kosovars, and especially his young nemesis, Hashim Thaci. But now he faced Tony Blair and the social democratic leader of Germany, Gerhard Schröder together with his radical Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer.
When Tony Blair said in addition to air attacks a ground force entry into Kosovo would be needed Bill Clinton agreed. The British, German, French, and American troops were not numerous enough to stop the continuing hate by Serbs who dominated in the north of Kosovo and Kosovars who has scores to settle after the mass killings unleashed by Milosevic.
For Belgrade and Serbs, Hashim Thaci became the man they hated the most as he had wrested Kosovo from their control. There were also journalists and politicians of the same age of as Thaci but from an urban educated class unlike Thaci was very much a farmer’s son from a modest rural background. More radical Kosovars accused Thaci of having compromised too much and had not secured the full independence and autonomy Kosovans hoped for.
Belgrade used its sophisticated well-honed propaganda and communications networks to depict Kosovo and Thachi in particular as a criminal illegal breakaway operation which had conned the European Union and the United States into using its military puissance into separating Kosovo from its place as a Serb controlled colony.
Belgrade seized upon the scandal of the Medicus Clinic in Prishtina which paid poor people from the region €15,000 to sell a kidney then sold to rich people in other regions of the world who had the money to buy a healthy kidney as their own had stopped functioning. A consortium of a Turks, Israelis, Albaniana and Ukrainians opened the clinic which was closed down in 2008 with its owners sent to prison later after court cases.
The trade in organs is sadly one of the most disturbing aspects of modern international crime. The Prishtina Medicus clinic performed 30 operations removing a kidney from a “donor” who was paid and transferring it to usually a much older person who needed a new kidney and had the cash to pay for the operation.
The clinic’s operations did not last long. A Turkish donor was found unwell at Prishtina Airport and told the medical staff who helped him about Medicus and it was shut down.
But Belgrade propagandists seized upon the Medicus story to create a carefully fabricated story about Kosovo fighters involved in the liberation struggle of 1998-99 raising money for buying arms by kidnapping Serbs, removing their organs for sale and then killing the unwilling donors. The allegations were horrifying. They had the advantage of being impossible to prove or disprove.
Stories started to appear naming Hashim Thaci who had been elected prime minister of Kosovo in 2008 as being involved in organ trafficking. Lurid reports about a so-called “Yellow House” were published in the Sunday Times and other reputable papers about a secret location where Thaci’s KLA men took prisoners during the 1998-99 war and extracted their organs for sale to mafia networks. A farm-house was named across the border in Albania as the site for these operations. But when investigators went there they found a poor peasants’ dwelling with an outhouse in which traces of chicken blood were found.
Surgeons confirm that an operation to extract a kidney requires a surgical team of 8-10 highly qualified experts including anaesthetists, a completely sterile operating theatre and recovery room with nursing care, a full operating theatre set of medical technology, and drivers ready to transport the extracted organ sometimes by air to another country.
The idea that Thaci in the middle of fast-moving guerrilla war against the Serb Army when he as a political leader and communications strategist was moving from village to village or leaving Kosovo to meet with Nato ministers and generals was also supervising sophisticated medical surgery in mountain hovels seems implausible. But Serbs and Kosovan political propagandists keen to do down Thaci especially after he announced Kosovo’s independence in 2008 were happy to blacken his name. That’s politics.
I was the UK minister in charge of the West Balkans 2001-2005. I received regular reports from the British intelligence services about secret information on what was happening on the ground. Never once was there any reference to organ transplant operations carried out in the field.
The Kosovo organ extracting story resurfaced when I after 2005 I went as a UK delegate to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe which met four times a year in a handsome semi-circular parliamentary assembly in Strasbourg.
I enjoyed working with fellow European parliamentarian especially those from outside the EU. Neutral, non-EU Switzerland which has activist politicians at communal, cantonal and federal – what elsewhere might be called national level sent high quality delegates. One of them was Dick Marty who had been a member of the Swiss Parliament (National Council) for the Radical Party which despite its name was a pro-business, pro-free market party, with occasional liberal tendencies.
I worked in Switzerland after I had to go into exile when Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979. Making sense of Swiss politics was tricky. Everything was based on compromise, coalition, and caution. This was necessary to hold together communities with different languages, different religions – no Catholic bishop is today allowed in Calvin’s Geneva despite its mainly catholic immigrant population - different languages with few French speaking Swiss mastering the impenetrable variations of Schwyzerdütsch used in German speaking cantons – and different politics.
In this calm landscape which had many hidden tensions the Swiss produced a number of ultra moralising campaigners. The best known was a sociology professor and MP, Jean Ziegler, who taught at Geneva university and the Sorbonne. A pure-blood 1968er Ziegler wrote a book almost every year between 1975 and 2005 denouncing the multinationals headquartered in Switzerland, Swiss banking secrecy or the Nazi gold stolen from Jews which were held in Swiss bank vaults.
Like a modern Calvin denouncing the sins and corruption of the Catholic Church and the Pope in Rome in the 16th century Ziegler also thundered out his sermons castigating the dominance of American money-making as the cause of all the ills in the world.
Dick Marty is not in Jean Ziegler’s league of global preachers against capitalism. I recorded in my diary an exchange I had with him at the Council of Europe in January 2008. I argued that “the best contribution the Swiss could make to resolving tensions around the world would be to make their bank accounts transparent.
“Dick Marty comes back and made the bizarre statement that when he was a prosecutor he never had any difficulties with the Swiss banking system.”
Marty had a reputation as tenacious public prosecutor for the Swiss Italian canton of Ticino so I was surprised at his bland assurance he had not had any problems with Swiss banking secrecy in contrast to Jean Ziegler’s half century of writing that Swiss banks have protected ill-gotten money, including of course from Milosevic and his ruling clique who stashed money corruptly obtained in Swiss bank accounts.
But one political point Marty does shares with Ziegler is his fellow Swiss moralist’s contempt and dislike of the United States. In September 2001 more Americans were killed in the Islamist attack on New York than died as a result of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour.
Dick Marty became an outspoken critic of the response launched by George W Bush. He denounced detention centres for suspected Al Qaeda terrorists in Poland and Romania, initially revealed in US and European media. By contrast Marty took little interest in the Serb atrocities, the transfer of bodies to mass graves of victims Belgrade, or the thousands killed in Milosevic’s last desperate attempt to maintain Belgrade’s colonial rule over Kosovo much closer to Switzerland than Middle East centres of Islamist killers. Instead he decided that the worst criminals of the Kosovo war of liberation were the resistance fighters who took up arms in a limited way against the butchers of Srebrenica and Rajak.
He produced a report accusing Hashim Thaci of extracting organs from Serbs during the 18 month struggle that culminated in European soldiers including Russians arriving in Kosovo to stop the Milosevic murder machine.
In his Council of Europe report produced in 2010 Marty was unable to produce any direct witness evidence, a confession, forensic proof from the alleged site of the legendary “Yellow House” of the very grave crimes he accused Hashim Thachi of committing.
I had left the Council of Europe after the change of government in Britain in 2010. The existing members of the Council of Europe led by Russian, Serbia and their allies did all in their power to deny Kosovo membership of the Council of Europe. Kosovo was alone amongst the small nation-states of Europe not allowed a seat open all 47 members of the Council of Europe. (The figure today is 46 as Russia a relentless opponent of any international recognition of Kosovo was expelled after its invasion of Ukraine). This meant there were no delegates from Kosovo able to challenge or critique the Marty report. Thaci has many enemies and opponents in Kosovo politics and media. But no-one believes Marty’s slur that he or any of those who struggled for the liberation of Kosovo would have carried out kidney extraction operations in the field.
In 2020 Thaci was indicted for responsibility of the deaths of Serb soldiers carried out by Kosovo Liberation Army operatives in the 1998-99 war. He immediately resigned as president and went to the Hague. Since then there seems to be no proof of the charges.
The decisions of who to bring to the Hague seemed to many to be a political ping-pong. The vast majority were Serbs but Kosovans and before them Croats were undoubtedly guilty of brutal revenge killings and treatment of Serb prisoners. 161 men were indicted by the different Hague courts examining Balkans war crimes.
The charges against Thaci did not include Marty’s lurid organ extraction claims. So far there have been no witnesses able to say Thaci killed or tortured anyone. He faces a generalised accusation of command responsibility which could laid against any political leader whose men take part in warfare and in some cases behave brutally.
So why then should anyone want the death of Dick Marty now retired in his home in the woods of the Swiss countryside? The story exploded when the main Swiss TV channel RTS broadcast a long, detailed report about a Serb plot to kill Marty but to pin the blame on Kosovans.
It sounded implausible. Marty is loathed by all the veterans of the Kosovo struggle to free their country from Milosevic and his thuggish killers. They know atrocities were committed, revenge attacks by villagers against the Serb army of occupation, took place but the accusation that men who lay in ditches risking their lives as Serb soldiers and death squads, helicopters with searchlights hunted them down, were taking time out to commit the evil crime of organ extraction is deeply hurtful. Like the Irish who fought against the English in 1920 to win independence for Ireland or the French resistants who sacrificed themselves fighting against Nazi occupiers, the Kosovar liberation fighters see themselves as men who took huge risks to end Serb occupation and oppression.
The Swiss government informed Marty of the plot to kill him. He was given police protection by the Swiss authorities. The sober Swiss TV journalists reported the plot to kill Marty was all orchestrated in Belgrade. RTS found one of the would-be killers who had been born in Kosovo and worked for the Serb secret intelligence services recruiting criminals willing to commit murder on orders and payment from the Serb secret police. Milosevic had been willing to finance and use para-military death squads in Bosnia and Kosovo to kill opponents. So it seems plausible that such executions carried out in the name of state interest were well within the remit of the activities of the Serb secret intelligence agencies.
Unbelievably the Swiss secret police sent a request to their comrades in the Serb secret police about the case in which they revealed the name of their double agent informer. The blundering mistake of the Federal police in Berne threw the efforts of the Swiss to find out the truth into disarray. The Swiss informer was given police protection and an identity change for himself and his family. He insisted that the idea was to blame Marty’s killing on Kosovars angry about his unproven accusations against Hashim Thaci of organ extractions which did enormous damage to all those who fought to rid Kosovo of Serb occupation.
Belgrade of course angrily denied they were up to such dirty tricks. Yet the Swiss TV RTS interviews are detailed and correspond to what is known, namely that Marty feared for his life and lived separately from the rest of his family to protect them.
The EU and US together with Germany and France recently proposed a plan to bring Serbs and Kosovans together and reduce tensions in the West Balkans. It was undermined when the president of Serbia said his country would never recognise Kosovo – thus taking the problems straight back to the Milosevic era conflict between Belgrade and Pristina. The Kremlin is delighted to see the EU and US made to look foolish by the pro-Russian Serbs.
Meanwhile the hopes of the EU to bring the Western Balkans closer to full European partnership seem as forlorn as ever. The English writer, Rebecca West, in her 1942 masterpiece Black Lamb and Grey Falcon about the West Balkans wrote: “The agony of Kosovo … must have been purely itself, pain upon pain, newly born in acuteness for each generation throughout the five centuries.” Kosovo no longer lives an agony. But Belgrade and Moscow stop it living as a normal state and the EU is unwilling to take decisions that allow this to happen.
Denis MacShane is the UK’s former Minister of Europe. His book “Why Kosovo Still Matters” was published by Haus Publishing in 2011.