Whistleblower urges external probe into EU mission in Kosovo

BRUSSELS - Maria Bamieh, a British prosecutor at the heart of Eulex corruption revelations, says the only way to restore faith in the EU rule of law mission in Kosovo is by holding an external enquiry.

The scandal erupted on Monday (27 October) when Kosovo daily Koha Ditore wrote, citing evidence from leaked Eulex documents, that senior officials colluded with suspects in criminal cases, took bribes to shut down investigations, and quashed internal Eulex probes.

It wrote on Friday, citing more leaked papers, that Eulex officials also gave confidential information to Serbian intelligence services.

Bamieh, who until recently worked for Eulex, wrote some of the internal letters obtained by Koha Ditore when she tried to alert her superiors to wrongdoing.

She told EUobserver on Thursday the EU body is also guilty of turning a blind eye to miscarriages of justice, failure to protect witnesses, and lying to press.

She said two Kosovo men - who are in jail for a bombing in 2007 and for murdering three other people the same year - were convicted on the triple murder on evidence “that would never stand up in a British court”.

They agreed to give Eulex information on the Kosovo mafia in return for a promise that Eulex would re-examine the triple-murder case and guarantee their safety.

But Bamieh said neither promise was kept.

“They’ve been spilling their guts out, telling Eulex police everything that’s happening [in Kosovo] … now they’re saying: 'When Eulex goes [its mandate expires] everybody knows we’ve been talking and we’re going to get killed' and Eulex is doing nothing for them, there is no lasting protection offered to these individuals”.

Referring to the bribery cases in the Koha Ditore revelations, she noted: “I don’t know whether I touched on the tip of an iceberg or not, whether things [Eulex corruption cases] run a lot deeper … I can only speak about what I found”.

But she added that some EU states’ seconded judges or policemen are more prone to temptation than others’.

“Everywhere you look in Kosovo there is corruption. If you bring in senior people [to Eulex] from poor countries, or countries which also have endemic corruption, they end up colluding with the locals”, she said.

“I’m not saying all Italians, all Greeks, or all Romanians are bad, but people who have come from other parts of Europe … are maybe not so susceptible”.

When the Koha Ditore story broke, the EU foreign service, which runs Eulex, said: “Since 2013, Eulex and Kosovo judicial authorities have been pursuing a joint investigation into these allegations. Due diligence has therefore been applied thoroughly”.

Bamieh said one of the allegedly corrupt Eulex officials named in her letters to superiors - Italian Francesco Florit - is under internal investigation.

But she said a second one - the Czech Republic’s Jaroslava Novotna - is not.

She also accused Eulex of deleting a cache of emails pertaining to her complaints against Novotna back in 2012 in an attempt to “bury” any probe.

Lies and jokes

“It’s a lie - there’s an investigation into Florit but not into Novotna”, Bamieh said of the EU statement on “due diligence”.

“It’s a complete joke. I do think there should be an independent investigation and I’ve been saying this from day one”.

“How can the people of Kosovo trust them when they keep lying? … What hope is there for SITF to be able to guarantee safety for its witnesses if Eulex doesn’t change?”, she added, referring to the Special Investigative Task Force (SITF), an Eulex unit looking into allegations of war crimes against top Kosovo politicians.

The British prosecutor said Fernando Gentilini, the EU foreign service’s top official on the Western Balkans, should be held responsible for the mess.

“I name him because at the end of the day, Eulex is run by the EEAS [the EU foreign service]. But they always try to pass the buck … they say: ‘It’s not us. It’s the [EU] Council’. The Council says: ‘It’s not us. It’s the EEAS’. Nobody takes responsibility. But the EEAS should have some kind of transparency and accountability mechanism for its missions”.

Bamieh is not alone in believing Eulex needs external oversight.

Ulrike Lunacek, an Austrian Green MEP, said in a statement on Friday that Eulex “must be duly investigated by an external and independent body”, leading to a potential “reconfiguration and redefinition of the mandate of the whole mission”.

Her idea was put on the agenda of a session of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee next Monday by its chairman, German centre-right MEP Elmar Brok i.

“We’ll have to listen to the people responsible and decide how to proceed”, he told this website.

The Lunacek idea was also endorsed by Doris Pack i, a German centre-right politician and former MEP who has worked on Kosovo since the break-up of former Yugoslavia.

“There should be a total check on Eulex, otherwise there will no longer be any trust in it and we will totally lose the right to teach others on it [how to apply rule of law]”, she told EUobserver.

Internal affairs

EU countries are for the time being reluctant to let outsiders look behind the scenes, however.

The EU foreign service gave a confidential briefing on the scandal to member states’ ambassadors on the Political and Security Committee (PSC) on Tuesday.

A diplomatic contact familiar with the talks voiced support for whistleblowers in general, saying: “It is important to needle EU bureaucracy”.

But he added: “The general conviction [in the PSC] was that it [the affair] should be handled by an internal process, not by external people. We’ve created internal structures to deal with problems like this so we should use them”.

The UK, which seconded Bamieh to Eulex after a distinguished career in the British Crown Prosecution Service, is also toeing the line.

On Friday, a foreign office spokesman told this website: “We are aware of the allegations in the press about the Eulex mission. This is a matter for the mission to respond to.”

The same day, the British embassy in Pristina ordered Bamieh to stop speaking to press.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the SITF, Joao Sousa, shrugged off Bamieh’s concern that Eulex malpractice will make war crimes witnesses reluctant to co-operate.

He said the SITF, which is based in Brussels and which is to hold trials in The Hague, is “fully autonomous” from Eulex and has “adopted special safeguards to ensure the confidentiality of its documents and the safety of its witnesses”.

Bamieh is currently stuck in Pristina after Eulex on Friday launched an investigation into whether she is the source of the Koha Ditore leak.

She is being protected by Eulex bodyguards after getting death threats from the Kosovo underworld.

Both she and the editor-in-chief of Koha Ditore say she was not the source of the leak.

But Eulex suspended her saying that she was before it even launched the probe into the information security breach, while keeping the people named in the allegations - such as Novotna - in their posts.

“I am going to Eulex tomorrow to receive my charges [on the leak investigation]”, she told EUobserver on Thursday.

Reluctant whistleblower

Bamieh says she never intended to go public until she was “frog-marched” out of her office by two Eulex guards in front of colleagues like a criminal.

“They [Eulex] keep telling the press I’m a crazy woman, a disgruntled employee who wants revenge”.

“I don’t want revenge - there are plenty of decent, hard-working people in Eulex”, she said.

“I’m not mad. How dare they attack my mental health?”, she added.

“It’s really awful to suffer all this stress - at times you begin to doubt yourself. Then you say: ‘But those are the facts. These are the intercepts [transcripts of Novotna’s illicit conversations with criminal suspects]. These are the texts’.”