‘Smaller Version of Guantanamo” in Kosovo

The EC’s human rights commissioner called the prison within the U.S. base in Kosovo ‘a smaller version of Guantanamo’.

That the case of Guantanamo is not unique was proven by human rights activists who claim that prisons similar to the one in Cuba also existed in Bosnia and Kosovo. 

The British Telegraph writes about two contentious locations, which is Eagle, near Tuzla in Bosnia, and Bondsteel in Kosovo. Both prisons were part of U.S. military bases. According to the most recent information, alleged members of Al-Qaeda were tortured and questioned there and then transferred to Afghanistan and then into Guantanamo.

After the attack on the WTC in New York, the German intelligence service (BND) was commanded to send an interpreter together with two intelligence officers to Tuzla to help interrogate prisoners who were suspected of terrorism, Germany’s weekly Stern reported last week.

A smaller version of Guantanamo 

The news arrived after Barack Obama on January 23 ordered the closing down of secret prisons, known as CIA’s black sites in which an unknown number of “ghost detainees” were held.

Together with the new information about the number of prisoners who had been kept in such locations without any rights or legal remedy, locations used by the CIA have began to be revealed.

Apart from Bosnia and Kosovo, many prisoners were also held in Thailand. Some data reveal that an unknown number of people had also been imprisoned in Poland and Rumania. But the branched-out network of black sites reached all the way to the cape of Africa, which includes “Kamp Lemonier”, a former French base intended for the legionnaires.

As far as the U.S. army base Bondsteel is concerned, the British Guardian was the first to state the words of the European Commission’s human rights commissioner who dubbed the location “A smaller version of Guantanamo”.