Epilogue

In 1991 Laura was just eleven years old when her home country of Yugoslavia started to disintegrate into chaos as a result of disorder in several autonomous regions. Groups, mobs, self-proclaimed and elected leaders as well as individuals paraded under the flags of nationalism and sought independence from Yugoslavia, which prompted the president to send armed security forces to the regions effected, initially Bosnia and Hercegovina.

On 25th June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence from Yugoslavia, which resulted in more troops being sent to secure international borders. The problem across the entire Slavic states and autonomous regions was perfectly demonstrated in Bosnia and Hercegovina where the population was made up of Bosniaks, Serbs, Croats, Yugoslavs, Montenegrins and Albanians. The region was also diverse in religious practices with Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Muslims all practicing and preaching that their particular religion was God’s chosen one.

It was a recipe for disaster, which was exactly what happened. Like the vast majority of the population in the land known as the former Yugoslavia, Laura Aslan had a mixture of blood flowing through her veins. With Turkish grandparents and Yugoslavian parents as well as links to Macedonia, Albania and Serbia, there were times she could be forgiven for not knowing who was fighting who or indeed which side she actually belonged to. It was the same right across Yugoslavia, from Slovenia and Croatia in the north to Kosovo and Macedonia in the south.

During the mid-nineties the conflict spiralled out of control, which prompted the UN, NATO and the EC to take a hand and diplomatic solutions such as The Vance Owen peace plan were unveiled to the waiting world. The agreements appeared to achieve little as large scale fighting broke out between Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats and the Markale Market in Sarajevo was mortared in February 1994 in a scene reminiscent of Guernica at the beginning of The Spanish Civil War. It was also in early 1994 that NATO war planes first conducted air strikes in the region.

In 1995 Laura and her family heard about the horrendous massacre in Srebrenica where 7000 Muslim men were massacred and in the following year the war came dangerously close to her home town of Veliki Trnovac as the Kosovo Liberation Army declared open hostility towards Serbia and in particular soldiers of the Serb Army.

After the near massacre of Laura’s home town towards the end of the war in Kosovo her father took the heart-wrenching decision to send her to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo believing hostilities there were almost over and that NATO troops were in control of the peaceful city streets.

Laura was caught up in the aftermath of the Kosovo war, a war that claimed nearly 12000 deaths with another 4000 reported missing and unaccounted for some twelve months after the hostilities ceased.

When Laura arrived in Pristina an estimated 800,000 Kosovo Albanians were either displaced, unaccounted for, or had simply fled their homes. According to the Yugoslav Red Cross 200,000 Serbian refugees had also left the country to escape anti-Serb attacks and riots.

It was the perfect formula for the would be criminals and lawless gangs to step in and make a killing, where not only life was cheap, it was almost impossible to identify a murder from an accident, an execution from a genuine casualty of war. As one leading war prosecutor described - “It was one vast crime scene.”

Azem Kupi disappeared from the radar after Laura’s ill-fated return to Veliki Trnovac preferring to keep a low profile but his name cropped up again and again with people accusing him of many crimes perpetrated during the course of the conflict. There were many accusations levelled against him from residents from the town of Kukes in North-eastern Albania where in his role as a commander of the KLA, he allegedly mistreated and tortured ethnic Albanian prisoners at the detention facility there. But altogether more sinister accusations were being levelled at Kupi relating to a concentration camp in Daphne in Drenica, where it was said he participated in the executions and torture of prisoners and removed their organs where he sold them on the black market for up to $40000 at a time.

Azem Kupi was not arrested until October 2000 and it was only by a stroke of luck that he was. He was detained by the UN Mission in Kosovo, following a shooting incident at one of Pristina’s nightclubs after which he was charged with involvement in organized crime networks and extortion under the pretence of financing KLA activities.

Kupi was tried in April 2001, and sentenced to 5 years and 6 months in jail by the UNMIK Tribunal for endangering security and damaging the property of others through extortion.

In 2002 the EU Rule of Law Mission (EULEX) began an investigation into Kupi for mistreatment of persons held in KLA facilities during the conflict.

It was not until the summer of 2011 that Kupi was found guilty of committing war crimes against civilians and sentenced to 15 years in prison by the Mitrovica district court. Three accomplices were also found guilty of torturing civilians to obtain information and confessions. In court it was revealed that Kupi was a close associate of the Prime Minister during the war which showed just how far Kupi’s influence over the region stretched.

There are many who say that Kupi escaped lightly after the 2011 conviction and that his worst atrocities were never detailed during either trial. Several thousand people remain missing in Kosovo, a country that José Pablo Baraybar, a Peruvian who headed the U.N.’s Office on Missing Persons described as “one of the most exhumed places on earth.”

An American journalist Michael Montgomery began amassing troubling stories involving the K.L.A. claiming multiple sources told him that, in the days after Milosevic’s defeat, the K.L.A. had shipped accused traitors to camps in Albania. A former K.L.A. driver said that he had been given orders not to hurt anyone. Once his captives were in Albania, they were taken to a house where doctors were present. The driver heard that the doctors sampled the prisoners’ blood and assessed their health. Several sources implied that this caretaking had a sinister purpose. The K.L.A. was harvesting the prisoners’ organs and selling them on the black market.

He sent a memo to the U.N.’s missing-persons office in Kosovo, asserting that, in 1999 and 2000, between one hundred and three hundred prisoners were taken to Albania where some were dispatched to a makeshift clinic that extracted body organs from the captives. The U.N. forwarded the memo to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, or I.C.T.Y. The tribunal, established in The Hague in 1993, was designed to bring a measure of justice to those who had suffered horrors in the Balkans.

As the years passed there was never any shortage of accusations and official investigations and reports in which organ harvesting and the name of Azem Kupi were strongly linked.

Former K.L.A. officials had long denied the existence of detention camps in Albania, but the Kupi trial proved otherwise and marked one of the most prominent convictions to date of a K.L.A. leader. The judges rendered their verdict after sixteen witnesses, most of them former captives, testified to scenes of depravity. One Kosovo Albanian testified about being detained in Kukes, along with his brother. They had been accused of being spies - charges that they denied. One night, the guards took the two brothers into an interrogation room and made the two brothers watch as guards beat another prisoner, clubbed him with a rubber-wrapped baseball bat, and rubbed salt into his wounds. Kupi himself beat the prisoner with a crutch and then ordered his men to beat one brother with metal bars. He repeatedly lost consciousness and they tortured him further by dunking his head in water. On another occasion, the guards at Kukes fitted him and his brother into bulletproof jackets and fired Kalashnikovs at their stomachs until they collapsed. Later, a guard shot one brother in the knee. His sibling begged the guards for help, but his brother bled all night and died the next day.

What isn’t in doubt is that Laura Aslan had a lucky escape at the hands of Azem Kupi. His power and influence and downright ruthlessness and barbarity made him a formidable opponent. Just to survive her captivity was a minor miracle, to escape and find it within herself to pen this remarkable book is testimony to her fortitude and courage.

The Serbian soldiers who held Laura captive for six months have not been identified or held to account.

Peter O’Brien And Brian Reeves, Pristina, circa 1999