Score One....for the Good Guys

Hello and Happy New Year! Much has happened over the past several months and much will be written over the coming days however I wanted to make you aware of a great victory for those of us combatting human trafficking across the globe. 

I usually do not "post" previous articles but this bears reading by all of us. My hat goes off to the men and women of the US Customs and Immigration Enforcement. In New York City, a federal indictment depicts Deme Nikqi, 53, of Kosovo, as the leader of an international criminal network dedicated to smuggling ethnic Albanians from the Balkans into the U.S. across the Mexican and Canadian borders using fraudulent passports and visas. Although "different" from the work the Life On Point Team is doing in Asia… it is still human smuggling and trafficking nonetheless.

From the Press Reports:

His arrest was the result of a joint investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Nikqi pleaded not guilty to all 28 felony counts. The most serious criminal charge in the indictment stems from a fatal accident near the Mexican border in Feb. 2010, when a car carrying undocumented immigrants crashed while being pursued by the Texas Highway Patrol. Prosecutors allege that Nikqi was responsible for arranging for the group's transit across the border. Federal law allows a sentence of up to life in prison for traffickers found to be directly or indirectly responsible for the death of a migrant being smuggled across the border.

In court documents, Loretta E. Lynch, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said the alleged smuggling network exploited undocumented immigrants and exposed them to danger. According to Lynch, Nikqi charged Kosovars more than $15,000 for illegal transport to the U.S., including the production of fraudulent passports and visas.

Nikqi allegedly facilitated the transport of migrants overland through Central America and Mexico and then across the U.S. border, often hiding them in luggage compartments of buses and inside locked trailers with little or no food or water, prosecutors said. Lynch added that Nikqi's alleged smuggling network not only placed migrants at risk, but represented a "grave threat to our nation's borders."

"Transnational smuggling organizations such as those headed by Deme Nikqi are rightly viewed as a threat to national security, and will be vigorously prosecuted," she said. Lynch requested that Nikqi be denied bail, arguing that he represented an "extraordinary risk of flight."

"If anyone in the world could quickly and easily obtain a fake passport to flee the United States, it is Deme Nikqi," she said. Judge Viktor V. Pohorelsky, of U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, agreed, ordering Nikqi detained until trial.

PART II ..... War Crimes...and my personal history

This is Part II of a Blog that I initiated earlier last week - several had commented and wanted to hear more about this sad and tragic period in history. Make sure you watch the movie via the link at the end of this posting  It was originally published on The WITNESS Blog and can bee seen at the following link:
http://blog.witness.org/2010/06/srebrenica-a-forensic-reconstruction-now-on-exhibit-at-open-society-archive/

Thanks

Brian

In July 1995, over 8,000 Muslim men and boys were systematically slaughtered on grounds of ethnicity in and around Srebrenica in roughly 72 hours by units of the Bosnian Serb Army. Since then, more than 6,000 victims exhumed from eighty mass graves have been identified. In a lingering atmosphere of denial, which allows for the chief executioner of the genocide, General Ratko Mladić, to remain still at large, the Open Society Archive decided to give an answer to the “who did what to whom” question, without which it is impossible to come to terms with a human failure of such magnitude. The exhibit, Srebrenica-Exhumation, opened June 2 at the OSA Archivum in Budapest.

The true scale and the predetermined and careful organization of the genocide are best revealed in the documents which have been produced as the result of the meticulous investigative work of police officers, homicide detectives, and federal agents employed by the Office of the Prosecutor of International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The map of war crimes created with the help of these “exhibits” provides compelling evidence as to the identity of the perpetrators and serves as a basis for their indictment and judgment. For example, part of the documents exhibited, including military orders, transcripts of intercepted radio communication, and fuel logs seized from various units of the Bosnian Serb Army, were used in the trial of General Radislav Krstic, the Commander of the Drina Corps, who was the first perpetrator in a Srebrenica-related ICTY case to be sentenced (to 35 years in prison) for aiding and abetting genocide. A precise yet somewhat detached analysis of documents and data, however, reveals that it is as important for the victims, who were given only codes and numbers in the various exhumation records, to regain their identities and have a proper burial and final rest.

Consequently, OSA’s reconstruction (see video) builds primarily on forensic reports, autopsies, military maps, site sketches and photos, aerial images from spy satellites, reflections of the investigators and forensic experts, testimonies by survivors and excerpts from films, which are presented partly in traditional forms and partly in computer installations in a reconstructed model of a mass grave, created with the tools of land art. The procedure is somewhat similar to that of a courtroom’s, where, as one observer noted, “The case is fleshed out with [documents], photographs taken from many angles and video evidence whose contemporaneous commentary is clinical and relentless.”

Additional archival sources offering an insight into the prehistory and afterlife of Srebrenica are also available: documents, books and audiovisual material from OSA’s extensive relevant collections are displayed for consultation in a research room attached to the main installation. Thus visitors, who wish to continue the exhumation by doing their own archival research, will become part of the exhibition themselves. A series of carefully selected documentary films on Srebrenica are being screened in conjunction with the exhibition.

And this evidence continues to support the ongoing struggle towards justice: just this month two of Mladić’s high-ranking officers were convicted by the ICTY of genocide, extermination, murder and persecution, for their role in the Srebrenica massacre.

The video can be found at the following address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id4wtBJHMdU