The Devil Couldn't Break Me

by Laura Aslan

  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

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