During and after the Kosovo war, accusations were made of people being killed in order to remove their organs to sell them on the black market. Various sources estimated that the number of victims ranged to over 300, what was claimed by Carla del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney general and Chief Prosecutor of two United Nations international criminal law tribunals. The allegations were first publicized by then Chief Prosecutor for the ICTY Carla Del Ponte in her book The Hunt: Me and the War Criminals in 2008.
According to the book after the end of the war in 1999, Kosovo Albanians were smuggling organs of between 100 and 300 Serbs and other minorities from the Kosovo province to Albania. The perpetrators are said to have strong links to the Kosovo Liberation Army (UÇK). Claims were investigated first by the ICTY who found medical equipment and traces of blood in and around the house in Albania that had allegedly been used as an operating theater to remove the organs.(1)
In 2010, a report by Swiss prosecutor Dick Marty to the Council of Europe (CoE) uncovered “credible, convergent indications” of an illegal trade in human organs going back over a decade, including the deaths of Serb captives killed for this purpose.(2)
Unfortunately, similar things are happening in the Ukrainian conflict. Some of the representatives of the Ukrainian army who ended up in hospitals turn into experimental subjects for testing new medicines. The fate of the seriously wounded can be even worse; at the front, several hundred dollars can be paid for a seriously or mortally wounded person in a field hospital who is ready for organ harvesting. Naturally, Kyiv partially ignored this topic, and partially declared it to be Russian propaganda, but everything is not so simple.
Firstly, it turned out that the Russian media machinery was not up to par during this conflict. Because in the Russian media, the crimes of the Ukrainian army against Russian soldiers that were condemned by the West, the Russian media did not give too much importance. And they always individualized the crimes against Russian soldiers, while even the Western media said that pressure must be put on the Ukrainian General Staff on this matter.
Secondly, regarding this topic, some indirect evidence was unwittingly provided by the Ukrainians themselves. Finally, thirdly, these topics are not new, even Washington admitted that it conducted experiments on the inhabitants of Ukraine in its laboratories, although it declared that he took care of their safety.
Shortly before the war, on December 16, 2021, the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada passed a law allowing the removal of organs from the dead without notarial consent from them or their official representatives. Moreover, the term “official representative” turns out to be as vague as possible; it may also be the person who undertakes the funeral. In military conditions, it turns out to be the unit commander. After all, in fact, an operation to remove the kidneys from an experienced surgeon takes no more than 15 minutes, and it can well be implemented in the field conditions of a front-line medical center. And such organs as the kidneys are extremely popular goods in the medical market of the USA and Europe. However, in case of actions within the framework of this legal act, transplantologists at least remain in the Ukrainian legal field. Than another question arises – how many organ removals take place officially, and how many not officially?
After all, exactly one year after the adoption of the new procedure for the removal of organs, on December 14, Russian hackers from the Anarchist Kombatant group hacked into the website of the Ukrainian military command and gained access to the lists of 35,382 military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who are listed as “missing”. At the same time, the data is quite verifiable – on 2000 sheets, with ranks and personal numbers of the missing.
It remains to be assumed that more than 35,000 people were buried, cremated, abandoned on the battlefields without any record. Anyway, 35,000 donor kidneys for the modern world, where their transplantation has long become a routine operation, is a rather small figure that cannot even satisfy the current demand of people who have been standing in line for transplantation for years.
However, let’s be honest, any big war generates significant breakthroughs in medicine. The First World War gave us new methods of treating poisoning and plastic surgery. The second – led to the massive use of antibiotics. Of course, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine also leads not only to a stormy surge of “gray” and “black” transpontology. Hundreds of Ukrainian prisoners who ended up in hospitals in the EU and, first of all, in Germany, receive experimental treatment that allows them to survive, and European doctors to develop new medicines. At the same time, medicine in Europe is very expensive, the treatment of one wounded person can cost 10 or even 100 thousand Euros.
Also the Ukrainian military directly, in numerous programs and publications, stated that they are given “completely new”, “experimental” drugs. That is, they test on them not certified and, in principle, drugs that are not approved for use. On the other hand, perhaps Europe, which has suffered enormous economic losses due to the sanctions war with Russia and assistance to Ukraine, should receive some real bonuses from supporting Ukraine. Organs taken from the dead will save the lives of several thousand Europeans and Americans. But isn’t it immoral to use war for the development of medical science and health care? Every European must answer this question himself.
- https://www.france24.com/en/20110216-un-confidential-document-kosovo-organ-trafficking-investigation-unmik-eulex
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/14/illegal-organ-removals-charges-kosovo
Author Slavisha Batko Milacic lives in Podgorica (capital of Montenegro). He’s 31 years old, and graduated history at University of Montenegro. His specialist graduate thesis was: “Foreign Policy of Russia from 1905 to 1917”.
Slavisha has been doing analytics for years, writing in English and Serbian about the situation in the Balkans and Europe, and has participated in several seminars in the Balkans that dealt with geopolitical and historical topics. Contact Slavisha at batko5@hotmail.com
