The economist

Is the mud sticking?

Feb 24th 2011, by T.J. | TIRANA

KOSOVO marked the third anniversary of its independence on February 17th in sombre mood. Only last July the country's leaders were riding high last year in the wake of an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice that its declaration of independence had not been illegal.

Now their reputations are in tatters. First came allegations of fraud in last December’s elections, which angered its strongest supporter, the United States. Soon afterwards, a report produced by Dick Marty, a Swiss politician and former prosecutor, made lurid claims about the involvement of Kosovo's leadership in organised crime. In the last few days two new documents [PDF: download site] have come to light that appear to bolster the most nightmarish of those allegations.

First, a disclaimer. In Balkan politics, the dictum, “if you are not with us, you are against us” usually applies. Some readers have attacked this blog simply for reporting on the Marty affair. As a fog of confusion, claims and counter-claims swirls over the allegations laid against Kosovo's leaders, we lay out here what is already known about the issue, and what is new.

The allegations Last December, Mr Marty delivered a report to the Council of Europe that alleged that Hashim Thaçi, who has just begun a second term as Kosovo's prime minister, was close to people who, after the 1999 Kosovo war, had kidnapped some 500 Serbs, Albanians and others, all of whom were eventually killed. Some of them, the report claimed, were murdered so that their organs could be harvested and sold. Mr Thaçi has vigorously denied the claims.

Mr Marty's allegations were not new. Their first public outing was in a 2008 book by Carla Del Ponte, the former prosecutor of the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague (ICTY), and Chuck Sudetic, a former ICTY analyst...... .......http://www.economist.com/node/21016145