White House on Obama-Papandreou meeting
The White House released a statement on Saturday announcing a March 9 meeting here between US President Barack Obama and Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou.
The White House also referred to Greece as the "birthplace of democracy" and its standing as a US ally in joint efforts aimed at stability and prosperity in the latter's region and throughout the world, as well as to deep historical and cultural bonds between the two countries.
DANIEL McLAUGHLIN
A UN official has urged Albania to stop hampering efforts to investigate claims that hundreds of Serbs were tortured and murdered for their organs in the country during the Kosovo war.
Belgrade says the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) abducted up to 500 Serb civilians and took them to neighbouring Albania for organ removal during the 1998-9 conflict with Slobodan Milosevic’s forces.
The allegations were first made public in a memoir by Carla Del Ponte, the former chief UN war crimes prosecutor, who said her office had received information about a possible Albanian trafficking network selling human organs abroad for transplanting.
She wrote that her colleagues did not find enough evidence to proceed with the case, but Serbia has demanded an inquiry, and advocacy group Human Rights Watch has reviewed the information referred to by Ms Del Ponte and said it merits investigation. “The bottom line appears to be that the issue is definitively stalled,” said UN special rapporteur Philip Alston at the end of a week-long visit to Albania.“None of the efforts to investigate have received meaningful co-operation on the side of the government of Albania.
“While various explanations were offered to me, they amounted in practice to a game of bureaucratic and diplomatic ping-pong . . . ,” he said. Mr Alston said it would be in Albania’s interest to have the claims investigated. “Given the strength of the belief . . . that allegations of hundreds of people killed in Albania after June 1999 are unfounded, it would be in the government’s best interest to facilitate an independent and objective investigation by one or other of the international entities currently focused on the issue,” he said.
Ms del Ponte wrote that UN investigators found medical equipment and evidence of extensive bloodstains at a house in Albania where witnesses said the organ removals took place.Human Rights Watch says it has seen an official UN report that largely corroborates those claims. Officials in Kosovo insist the allegations are part of Serb efforts to discredit their new state.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/0225/1224265142248.html
Posted on 24 February 2010 by Apostolos Papapostolou
Petsalnikos was responding to two articles – one in Stern magazine in the form of an open letter to Greeks from disgruntled German taxpayers, which also appeared in the February 19 issue of Athens Plus, and the other featured in an issue of Focus magazine whose front page depicts a statue of the Venus de Milo making an obscene gesture under the title “Greek cheats.” The House speaker condemned the two reports as “anything but objective” and containing “inaccuracies and false information.”
Petsalnikos accused Stern of offering an “oversimplified and populist take” on Greece’s financial crisis by lambasting Greeks for frittering away German taxpayers’ savings. In a letter sent to the magazine, Petsalnikos argued that Germany too had reaped benefits from European Union membership, stressing also that it was Greece’s main arms supplier. He noted that Germany was one of the countries that benefited most from EU membership, with more than 60 percent of its exports going to member states in 2007.
The provocative German press reports, and in particular the manipulated depiction of the Venus de Milo, prompted more angry comments from Athens Mayor Nikitas Kaklamanis. The mayor urged “men of culture across the world to protest” against the “shameful” front-page cover. He also called on Germany to pay Greece reparations for losses suffered by the country during World War II. “You owe us 70 billion euros for the ruins you left behind,” he said.
(source: kathimerini)
 February 17 marks two years since that day, the Albanian government of Kosovo declared independence. Since then, the department recognized the province from Serbia, only 65 of the 192 UN member countries.But many Albanians, however, believe the region's independence a foregone conclusion. And the first step towards the creation of Greater Albania, which, except for Albania and Kosovo should enter some areas of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia proper, and Greece. Preparing for the separation region was long. In 2006, the UN special envoy for Kosovo Martti Ahtisaari presented a plan whereby the edge received "managed independence, the Albanians would restrict the power of the representatives of EU missions, the OSCE and the UN. A year later, there were elections, not recognized by Belgrade and were rejected by local Serbs. Premier Hashim Thaci has become - a man accused of ex-prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal Carla Del Ponte's involvement in the illegal trade in organs of murdered Serbs. February 17, 2008 Parliament edge in the absence of Serb deputies adopted a declaration of independence. Several days later, it acknowledged the United States and most EU states. Russia, China, India, Brazil, as well as Greece, Spain, Romania and Slovakia have refused to do so, declaring the action of Kosovo Albanians flagrant violation of international law... more see (in Russian) : http://www.pravda.ru/world/europe/balkans/20-02-2010/1017648-alban-0/ |
TIRANA (Reuters) - A United Nations expert accused Albania on Tuesday of stalling an international investigation into allegations of torture, killing and organ trading during the 1999 Kosovo conflict.
"None of the efforts to investigate have received meaningful cooperation on the side of the government of Albania," Philip Alston told a news conference.
Explanations offered to him by officials "amounted in practice to a game of bureaucratic and diplomatic ping pong in which the responsibility for not responding to requests was moved from one office to the next."
"Each insisted that if requested by the right authorities and under proper conditions they would not hesitate to cooperate. But the bottom line is that the issue is definitely stalled."
Former U.N. War Crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said in a book published in 2008 her team had investigated reports that around 300 Serbs held in Albania had had organs removed, apparently for trafficking.
Alston, a U.N. Special Rapporteur mandated by the Human Rights Council to monitor extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said Albanian authorities had told him the allegations were politically motivated and baseless.
He said there were investigations in progress by the Council of Europe, Serbia's war crimes prosecutor, and EULEX, the European Union police and justice mission in Kosovo.
"The (Albanian) government should do everything it can to facilitate an independent and objective investigation by the international entities investigating abuses," he added.
Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha has dismissed Del Ponte's charges as fiction. However, claims persist that either Serbs or Kosovo Albanians seen as spies were tortured or killed in Albania in the camps of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army.
Serbia welcomed Alston's comments. Bruno Vekaric, a spokesman for Serbia's war crimes prosecutor, said Serbia would support an independent international investigation. "That would be the right path to find out the truth and achieve full regional cooperation," he said by telephone from The Hague.
In 2004, U.N. investigators searched a house belonging to an Albanian family after allegations ethnic Albanian guerrillas in Kosovo had removed body organs from Serbs seized during NATO's 1999 air campaign against Serbia to stop ethnic killings.
Investigators said they found bloodstains, gauze in the garbage area and syringes but not enough evidence for a case.
(Additional reporting by Ivana Sekularac in Belgrade; editing by Adam Tanner and Andrew Roche)
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| World Security Network reporting from Washington D.C., February 22, 2010 | |||
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By George Soros
Published: February 21 2010 18:40 | Last updated: February 21 2010 18:46
Otmar Issing, one of the fathers of the euro, correctly states the principle on which the single currency was founded. As he wrote in the FT last week, the euro was meant to be a monetary union but not a political one. Participating states established a common central bank but refused to surrender the right to tax their citizens to a common authority. This principle was enshrined in the Maastricht treaty and has since been rigorously interpreted by the German constitutional court. The euro was a unique and unusual construction whose viability is now being tested.
The construction is patently flawed. A fully fledged currency requires both a central bank and a Treasury. The Treasury need not be used to tax citizens on an everyday basis but it needs to be available in times of crisis. When the financial system is in danger of collapsing, the central bank can provide liquidity, but only a Treasury can deal with problems of solvency. This is a well-known fact that should have been clear to everyone involved in the creation of the euro. Mr Issing admits that he was among those who believed that “starting monetary union without having established a political union was putting the cart before the horse”......
more see: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/88790e8e-1f16-11df-9584-00144feab49a.html
The head prosecutor of the city of Lecce, Cataldo Motta, and Albanian general prosecutor Ina Rama presented the results of the five year investigation at a press conference on Friday in the southern Italian town.
“This is a demonstration of the good cooperation between the authorities in the two countries,” Motta told reporters in Lecce.
Albania’s top prosecutor told the media that the war against drug traffickers needed teamwork and that cooperation would continue.
“We have the good will to continue to cooperate in the [war against drugs] as this is the only way to achieve good results,” Rama said. “If we continue to cooperate it will certainly achieve other similar results,” she added.
During the investigation, which was launched in March 2005, Italy’s financial police were able to sequester over 1.3 tonnes of marijuana, trafficked from Albania into Italy across the Otranto channel in the Adriatic Sea, and 10 kilograms of heroin.
Motta told reporters that the narcotics syndicate is believed to have trafficked at least one more tonne of marijuana into Italy.
According to the Italian media 23 suspects have been arrested in Italy, Albania, Greece and Belgium. Five of the arrests were carried out on Friday in Albania, while the majority of the suspects detained in other countries are also Albanian citizens. The operation represented the first case of direct cooperation between Italian anti-mafia authorities and Albanian prosecutors.
