Vermeende orgaanhandel werpt schaduw over gesprekken Kosovo en Servië (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Serbia and Kosovo will hold direct bilateral discussions in Brussels this week, the first of their kind since Pristina's unilateral declaration of independence three years ago.
The EU-mediated talks, starting Tuesday (8 March), will initially focus on nuts-and-bolts issues such as border crossings and personal documents, rather than tackle the big questions of recognition and official apologies.
Serbia refuses to acknowledge its former territory as independent, while Kosovar Albanians remain bitter about Serbia's unwillingness to apologise for the deaths of thousands of Albanians prior to Nato intervention in 1999.
Both sides are keen to join the EU however, providing Brussels with sufficient leverage to get the ground-breaking face-to-face discussions up and running.
A recent Council of Europe (CoE) report alleging senior Kosovo politicians were involved in an operation to harvest organs from former Serbian prisoners has added to tensions between the two sides.
On Sunday Serbia's foreign minister Vuk Jeremic said an investigation into the allegations was a "moral imperative".
"Serbia will not renounce this case. It is for us a moral imperative of the first order," Mr Jeremic said following a meeting with the visiting Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) president Mevlyut Cavusoglu.
The CoE report published by investigator Dick Marty in December sent shockwaves through the international community when it linked Kosovo's current prime minister, Hashim Thaci, to a crime ring which carried out organ harvesting and heroin smuggling in the region.
In the document and subsequent statements, Mr Marty said Western governments had known about the criminal activities in Kosovo for years but simply turned a blind eye.
A former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), Mr Thaci's name was frequently cited in intelligence and diplomatic reports from Kosovo sent by Western information agencies such as the FBI and MI6, claims the Swiss politician.
The EU has called on Mr Marty to make all make all his information available to the EU's rule of law mission in Kosovo, EULEX .
Last month Serbia said an investigation by the EU mission was insufficient however, calling on the United Nations to launch an independent probe into whether Kosovo's prime minister was part of an organ trafficking network during the Kosovo War in the late 1990s.
But the UN has also faced criticism over its failure to act in the past.
Ethnic Albanian rebels in Kosovo gave detailed testimony to the international organisation in 2003 on an alleged programme to kill Serb captives and sell their organs, according to a UN document obtained by The Associated Press last month.