SIRIUS:
The Strategic Issues Research Institute
Benjamin C. Works, Director
718 937-2092; www.siri-us.com;
E-mail: Benworks@AOL.Com
--Celebrating Chaos Theory Since 1987--
July 26, 1999
Subject: Articles
on KLA-Kosovo-Drugs-Mafia and Fundraising
NOTE: Dragan Ivetic, 3rd-year law student at University
of Illinois College of Law, collected and contributed the majority of articles
(#1, 16-17, 19-28, 34) in this file and Stephanie Niketic provided #6-9.
NOTE: This archive, intended as a research resource,
contains copyrighted material, included herein for "fair use only."
Index
Introduction:
These articles demonstrate the widely understood connection
between the Kosovo Albanians, their heroin Mafia and the KLA insurrection in
Kosovo of 1997-99. Articles date back to a 1985 Wall Street Journal
account of Rudy Giuliani --then Federal prosecutor in NYC-- prosecuting the
Kosovo Mafia. That article predates Mr. Milosevic's crackdown on the Kosovo
Albanians by four years.
These articles are not yet in perfect chronological order; they
start with a 1985 piece, continue with 1998-99 pieces, then add articles from
the period between 1990-97. One piece, #18, by Bob Djurdjevic, is a commentary
on a Washington Post piece from the vantage of an expert Serb-American skeptic
of both US and Yugoslav policies, depending on the issue. Finally, recent
articles including those dating during the recent air war (March 24- June 12,
1999) and from the NATO occupation are included to document the ongoing illegal
activity, conducted under the noses of the armies of the West.
Note that I have also included an article (#15) from The
Guardian, dated Sept. 30, 1998, on Albanian vendetta murder as practiced
today in Albania and Kosovo. Here are some real "human rights abuses"
not relating to "Serb oppression."
In February 1998, when the Yugoslav police crackdown on the KLA
began, the US State Department recognized the KLA as an international terrorist
organization. This means, among other things, that US residents are not allowed
to contribute funds, trade weapons or in any way support such organizations.
Not all fundraising is done through Drugs and robberies as a
recent Agence France Presse article of Feb. 20, 1999 reports.
Articles about the alliance between the KLA and Osama bin Laden
are now in a companion archive "KLA-Osama" at the SIRIUS website,
along with an archive "KLA-Alb-Crime."
Readers with a further interest in this subject are referred to a
scholarly article also filed in the archives:
Gus Xhudo; MEN OF PURPOSE: THE GROWTH OF ALBANIAN CRIMINAL
ACTIVITY, published in TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME; Published by
Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. (London) and The Ridgway Center for International
Security Studies, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA to be
available through: (www.pitt.edu/~rcss/ridgway.html). Volume
2, Spring 1996, Number 1, pp. 1-20 (ISSN 1357-7387). This article is posted as
a separate archive, Albanian-Mafia.
Benjamin C. Works
The Articles:
1. The Wall Street Journal, Monday,
September 9, 1985, pp.1,18
By Anthony M. DeStefano
NEW YORK - The informant who visited the office of U.S. Attorney
Rudolph W. Giuliani last December had a chilling story to tell:
A defendant in a drug racketeering case that Mr. Giuliani was
prosecuting was offering $400.000 to anyone who would kill a certain assistant
U.S. attorney and a federal drug enforcement agent.
For 45 minutes Mr. Giuliani and his chief assistant, William
Tendy, listened to and evaluated the tale. Five other informants later
corroborated it. The threatened lawmen-assistant prosecutor Alan M. Cohen and
narcotics agent Jack Delmore-were given 24-hour-a-day protection by federal
marshals.
For years police and court officials in Italy have had to deal
with Maffia attempts on their lives, some of which have succeeded. American
gangsters have rarely dared such crimes. But certain criminal groups in the
U.S. now seem less restrained. Mr. Giuliani says he has recently heard of more
threats against law-enforcement officers and judges around the country than at
any other time in his 15 years as a prosecutor. A number of his colleagues
share that perception. Mr. Giuliani says that he himself has heen threatened.
The "Balkan Connection"
The drug case that brought forth the threats Mr. Giuliani is
concerned about involved the disruption of the so-called "Balkan
connectlon" heroin trade conducted by among others a loosely orginised
group of ethnic Albanians, centered in New York. A federal probe into this drug
traffic and other posslble crimes, including the alleged plot to kill
officials, is in progress. The drug investigation and the criminal activities
of small group of Albanian-Americans have attracted little publicity.
Many Albanians came to the U.S. after World War II via Yugoslavia.
Others before the war, came directly from Albania. A small, mountainous Balkan
country, communist Albania is bordered on the west by the Adriatic Sea and on
its other boundries by Yugoslavia and Greece.
Conservative and industrious, many Albanian-Americans manage real
estate and run small businesses, living and working in decent obscurity. An
estimated 100,000 live in the New York City area. Other Albanian communities
are found in Michigan, Massachusetts and Illinois.
But the small minority of Albanians who take to crime have created
new and unique problems for some law-enforcement officers around the country.
Language and a code of silence have protected the Albanian-American crime
factions from outside penetration. "They are real secretive" says a
detective in Hamtramck, Mich., a Detroit suburb where many Albanians live. He
says police have tried but failed to infiltrate Albanian gangs here.
Various Crimes
Albanian-Americans criminals, police say, are involved in
everything from gun-running to counterfeiting. In New York City, a police
intelligence analyst says, some ethnic Albanians living in the Bronx are
involved in extortion and robbery. Federal officials believe that Albanians run
gambling in certain New York ethnic clubs.
Violence within the Albanian community can be particularly brutal,
whether related to orginized crime or not. In Hamtramck, an Albanian,
reportedly enraged by the belief that his wife had contracted a veneral
disease, shot three people at a clinic and then killed himself. In some
attacks, women have been slashed with knives: crowded restaurants and bars have
been raked with gunfire. "They're a wild bunch of people," says Capt.
Glen McAlpine of the Shelby Township, Mich., police. During an investigation of
Albanian crime in Shelby, a bomb exploded next to the police station. A police
officer also was threatened, Capt. McAlpine says.
But it is drug trafficking that has gained Albanian organized
crime the most notoriety. Some Albanians, according to federal Drug Enforcement
Agency officials, are key traders in the "Balkan connection," the
Istanbul-to-Belgrade heroin route. While less well known than the so-called
Sicilian and French connections, the Balkan route in some years may move 25% to
40% of the U.S. heroin supply, official say.
Ties to Turks
Once serving only as couriers, some ethnic Albanians and Yugoslavs
now are taking over more command of the traffic, says Andrew Fenrich, a DEA
spokesman in New York. Federal agents say that Balkan crime groups are well
suited for trafficking because of close historical and religious ties with the
Turks, some of whom are sources of heroin.
DEA agents say the heroin flows from Turkey through Bulgaria and
Greece into Yugoslavia. From there it can wind up in Rome, Brussels, The Hague
and the U.S.. Once in America, the Balkan heroin is believed by officials to be
distributed by some ethnic Albanians and Turks. (Albania itself, long cut off
from the most of the world by its recently deceased leader Enver Hoxha, isn't
believed by the U.S. to be involved in the drug trade.)
On the surface, at least, Skender Fici seemed to be a law-abiding
businessman. He ran a Staten Island travel agency, Theresa Worldwide, which
made a specialty of booking trips to Yugoslavia, where many Albanlans live.
He became a specialist in handling immigration paper work, and he
sponsored a local ethnic Albanian soccer team.
According to federal prosecutors and a sentencing memorandum they
filed in Manhattan's Federal District Cortt, Mr. Fici's travel agency made a
perfect vehicle for arranging quick trips for drug dealers and couriers working
the Balkan connection. One of Mr. Fici's first shipments arrived in New York in
February 1979, according to the prosecutors' memo. A kilogram of heroin was
distributed in New York partly through the efforts of Xhevedet Lika, known as
Joey Lik, who made his base on New York City's polyglot Lower East Side.
There, according to the sentencing memorandum, Mr. Lika sold the
drug to other dealers from a social club located in the midst of Judaica shops and
Chinese clothing stores.
By 1980, according to federal court testimony and the sentencing
report, Mr. Lika was importing heroin as well as distributing it, traveling to
Turkey and Yugoslavia to arrange shipments. He also allegedly dealt in cocaine
with Xhevedet Mustafa, who disappeared in 1982. Mr. Mustafa had been a
supporter, of the late, deposed Albanian monarch King Zog, who died in 1961.
Mr. Mustafa skipped out before his own federal trial on drug
charges could take place in 1982. In September 1982, be reportedly led an
unsuccesslul invasion of Albania aimed at restoring the monarchy. Mr. Hoxha
said the invaders all were "liquidated" but Mr. Mustafa still is
listed as a fugitive in federal court records.
Mr. Lika, meanwhile, was expanding his heroin business In New York
with other associates, according to federal prosecutors. He had fallen out with
one of his old partners, Dujo Saljanin, who in 1991 had agreed to import
several kilos of heroin for Mr. Llka and others but short-weighted the delivery
by a kilo. To resolve the descrepancy, a January 1981 meeting was held at a
Park Avenue South restaurant Mr. Saljanin operated. Joey Lika and two other
men, Mehmet Bici and Vuksan Vulaj, were present. Mr. Bici later testified in
federal court that Mr. Vulaj pulled a gun and shot Mr. Saljanin.
"Mr. Lika had a gun, and he shot him, too," Mr. Bici
testified. "I was there, too, and I shot him too. And then we just left,
crossed the street," he testified.
Even with 13 bullet wounds, Mr. Saljanin lived a short while, long
enough to talk. Mr. Vulaj was later shotgunned to death. Hampered by lack of
cooperation in the Albanian community, as well as by difficultles with the
Albanlan language that made electronic surveillance useless, police and federal
agents worked about three years belore they broke the case in 1984.
Federal officials estimate that the group had imported more than
110 pounds of heroin with a retall or "street" value of $125 million
through the Balkan connection before the ring was broken up. Federal agents
believe the drugs had been sold in New York, California, Texas and Illinois.
The trail that Mr. Delmore, the DEA agent, followed led to Mr.
Bici, who was then serving a sentence in a New York state prison for attempted
manslaughter of his wife. Questioned by Mr. Delmore, Mr. Bici at first denied
having any knowledge of drug dealing or the Saljanin murder but ultimately
decided to cooperate. He was indicted along wlth Joey Llka, Mr. Llka's brother
Luan, Mr. Fici and others on federal charges of drug dealing and racketeering.
Luan Lika was never arrested and remains a fugitive. Mr. Bici pleaded guilty to
transporting heroin and to racketeering. He was sentenced to eight years and is
serving time under guard in the "prisoner witness" protection
program.
The atmosphere at the trial, which began late last year, was
highly charged. Early in the proceeding, Mr, Cohen, the prosecutor, mentioned
that a witness claimed to have been threatened with death by Mr. Lika's father.
(Judge Vincent Broderick kept Lika family spectators seated near
the back of the courtroom.)
Another witness reported that a man outside the Manhattan
courthouse had threatened her. Gjon Barisha, a prospective witness, fled before
the trial, after claiming that he had been fired at. He evaded federal agents
for months before being arrested on a material witness warrant last month.
Others who were to be called as witnesses hid out or refused to testify,
prosecutor Cohen says, because they feared, as one of them put it, "a
bullet in the head." Prosecutors allege that some witnesses perjured
themselves at the trial.
Judge Broderick remarked during the trial that the case involved
the most reckless disregard for human life that he had ever seen. The message
wasn't lost on federal officials, who took the threats against them seriously.
Since World War II, there have been more than 800 revenge killings
by Albanians in Yugoslavia and several in New York,
according to Dushan Kosovich, a scholar who has studied Albanlan mores. Mr.
Giuliani says of the threat against Mr. Cohen: "This was the most serious
threat I have seen yet to an assistant U.S. attorney."
For three months from late 1984 into early 1985, Mr. Cohen and Mr.
Delmore and their wives shared their homes with federal marshals acting as
bodyguards. "You can't believe what it is like" says Mr. Cohen, who
was guarded in court-even when he went to the men's room.
A Jury this year convicted Joey Lika and Mr. Fici on charges of
racketeering conspiracy. Mr. Lika was also convicted of the more serious charge
of running a criminal enterprise. To emphasize to the defendants that their
opponent was the government, and not just Mr. Cohen, U S. Attorney Giuliani
himself appeared in court for the sentencing in March. Mr, Lika denied in court
as sentence was about to be rendered that he wanted anyone killed, and his
attorney protested the government's use of evidence from unnamed informants
about the alleged threats. Nevertheless, Mr. Lika was sentenced to life in
prison, Mr. Fici to 80 years. They are appealing their convictions.
Mr. Giuliani refuses to discuss detalls, but he says he has
learned recently that there had been an effort to fulflll an assassination
contract against him and Messrs. Cohen and Delmore. "After you have been
convicted," he says, "there is no rational reason to klll a
prosecutor, except revenge."
While Mr. Giuliani says he now considers the threat against
himself "minor," DEA agent Delmore and his famlly have moved-away
from New York. Prosecutor Cohen is still investigating other drug dealers in
New York but he, too, has a new residence.
Federal officials aren't sure how much lasting damage they have
done to the Balkan connection. Mr. Cohen says the Lika case and others,
prosecuted by local authorities, have resulted in the conviction of more than
10 Albanian-American drug traffickers, and that has got to have some impact.
Mr. Fenrich, the DEA spokesman, says that the Lika case made it
clear that vendettas against law enforcers won's be tolerated.
As for Joey Llka, prison may be the safest place for him. Because
he testified about his part in the Saljanin killing, federal agents say he now
is "in the blood" - that is, the object of a vendetta - with
relatives of Mr. Saljanin.
* * * *
2. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
13th January 1999, page 13
Crisis talks as Milan is hit by wave of killings
Italy's Prime Minister, Massimo D'Alema held crisis talks with
police and local officials in Milan yesterday to try to restore order to a city
that has seen nine murders so far this year.
The government has deployed an extra 800 police and 90 patrol cars
to Milan as a stopgap measure to ease the "crime emergency".
Diego Masi, an Interior Ministry under-secretary, blamed the
Albanian mafia, which has entered the city on a tide of illegal immigrants. An
official report puts the Albanians top among foreign crime organizations. It
says they concentrate on drugs and prostitution. Their lack of Western moral
values allows them to settle scores with appalling coldness, often murdering
people in crowded streets and bars.
Bruce Johnston, Rome........"
* * * *
Translated from Italian.
3. Corriere della Sera (Milan)
15 October 1998
Albanian Mafia, This Is How It Helps The Kosovo Guerrilla Fighters
Report by Roberto Ruscica
Drugs traffickers in Italy, in Germany, in Spain, in France, and
in Norway: Kosovo Albanians. The men from the Special Operations Section [ROS]
of the carabinieri, under the leadership of General Mario Mori, have succeeded
in neutralizing a fully fledged network of Albanian drugs traffickers. The
leader of this network is a certain Gashi Agim, aged 33, originally from
Pristina, the capital of the small region that is being torn apart by the
struggle between on the one hand the local population, 90 percent of whom are
of Albanian ethnic origin and who are calling for independence from Serbia, and
[Yugoslav government] on the other... Married to an Italian girl, Gashi Agim
was living in a luxurious villa just outside Milan. The owner of a chain of
beauty parlors and of perfume shops in London, Gashi was arrested early this
summer along with 124 drugs traffickers.
"Milan at this juncture has become a crossroads of interests
for many fighting groups," a detective with the ROS explained. "These
groups include also the Albanians from Kosovo who are among the most dangerous
traffickers in drugs and in arms. They are determined men, violent and prepared
to go to any lengths. They are capable of coming up with men and arms in a
matter of hours. They have deep roots in civil society. They love luxury,
fashionable clubs, and restaurants. They have an astonishing amount of ready
cash at their disposal. Every night, to keep in practice, they burgle
apartments and businesses, moving from one city in Lombardy to the next."
Investigations have shown that Italy is the most important base
for these organizations and it is precisely in Milan that negotiations between
the Kosovar bosses and those of the Tirana- based Albanian gangs take place.
And Milan, again, is the theater in which exchanges with our own domestic crime
bosses take place. According to detectives, the 'Ndrangheta receives and
parcels out some 50 kilograms of heroin every day. And it is precisely by
following this drug trail that the detectives have succeeded in discovering a
fully fledged organization with ramifications throughout Europe: Groups have
been identified that operate in France, in Switzerland, in Spain, in Germany,
and in Norway. But the real brains behind this network are reportedly located
in Italy.
The ROS officer, who is unable to reveal his identity, told me:
"In Bratislava and in Budapest we have pinpointed storehouses capable of
containing thousands of kilograms of heroin. Also, we recently seized a huge
quantity of very pure cocaine. That means that the Albanian traffickers
may well have refineries available to them and that therefore the drugs do not
arrive ready prepared from Latin America. In certain East European countries
the drugs traffickers can act undisturbed, and in some cases they actually
enjoy the protection of the authorities and of the police forces. It is
precisely for that reason," the detective concluded, "that a number
of our missions have ended in real failure."
But many names, links, and operative methods have, on the other
hand, been discovered. The transportation of the drugs, for example, is
habitually entrusted to German organizations: cars with tanks capable of
containing 20 kilograms of drugs, or long-haul trucks with "cover"
loads that cross the Austrian border to reach Milan.
The war in Kosovo has partly slowed down the criminals' business
because many Albanians have been forced to take care of their families. Some of
them are activists in the armed movement of the KLA fighters and have gone home
to fight. They feel Albanian. They are fighting to achieve annexation to
Albania. And it is precisely there that at least a part of the sea of money
that the Albanian drugs traffickers have amassed is reported to have ended up,
to support the families and to fund both certain political personalities and
the anti-Serb movement. In spring, a number of Albanian drugs traffickers
actually went as far as to take part in the organization of a rally in favor of
independence for Kosovo.
And quite a number of people wanted for ordinary offenses marched
past the US Embassy in Rome waving their banners and handing out leaflets.
Drugs, arms, and the Koran: Could this be the murderous crime mix
of the next few years? "That is the picture that one can draw on the basis
of our investigations," the ROS agents maintain. "A few years ago the
Milan drugs market was run by the Turks. They were unscrupulous traffickers who
would go to any lengths to satisfy the 'Ndrangheta bosses. Then, in 1996, the
torch passed to the Albanians without any bloodshed." They share the
Islamic religion with their Turkish confreres. An unmistakable sign is the
month of Ramadan: In those weeks the traffickers close down the drug market.
"That is exactly right. But the Albanians have a particularly
aggressive attitude. On the basis of phone calls that we have intercepted, we
have discovered that the drugs are not only a source of wealth but also a tool
in the struggle to weaken Christendom."
General Mori's men got to the Albanian drugs traffickers by
following the 'Ndrangheta. And they maintain that the headquarters of the
criminal operations is located in Calabria. Milan is apparently only an
important business center. But it is seemingly the bosses in Africo, in Plati,
and in Bovalino who order the purchase of drugs and of arms. And organized
crime's arsenal is said to be located in the Aspromonte region of Calabria:
bazookas rifles with telescopic sights, submachine-guns, hand grenades.
"The 'Ndrangheta is different from other Mafia-style organizations,"
the ROS agents maintain. "It has only one objective: business. And in
order to make the biggest profit it is prepared to forge alliances with
anybody: with the Moroccans, with the Egyptians, with the Turks. The Calabrian
bosses are not interested in controlling the Milanese territory. And sure
enough the Albanian gangs are free to run the prostitution racket without any
interference."
* * * *
4. Corriere della Sera
(Milan) Janury 19, 1999
CRIMES COMMITTED IN ITALY PROVIDE FUNDS FOR KOSOVO
GUERRILLAS By C. B.
Milan -- As long as he was able, until the Milan district
Anti-Mafia Directorate and the Carabinieri ROS [Special Operations Group]
locked him in a solitary isolation cell, Agim Gashi -- the 35-year-old
criminal boss from Pristina, king of the Milan drugs market -- supplied his
brothers in Kosovo with Kalashnikov rifles, bazookas, and hand grenades. He
controlled the heroin market, and at least part of the billions of lire he
made from it was used to buy weapons for the "resistance" movement of
the Albanian Kosovo community.
Conversations monitored by ROS, on file with so-called
"Operation Africa," contain recollections of his established reign.
Gashi spoke in Serbo-Croat with his men and with the Turkish-route heroin
suppliers. That is, the language of the Serbian "enemy," of the hated
Orthodox religion. The one against which he rallied his Muslim brothers. He is
known to have made a telephone call to encourage Turkish heroin suppliers
during Ramadan -- a violation of religious rules for the sake of a more
important cause: "to submerge Christian infidels in drugs."
With Gashi's arrest, the ethnic Albanian Kosovar clans' rule in
Milan has apparently not come to an end. The old 'Ndrangheta families, the
Mafia "dozens" ["decine" -- traditional groupings], and the
old Egyptian "lords" depend on the new masters of the drug market,
acknowledging their authority. In any case, the route is secure. From Turkey,
via Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania, it reaches Germany, and from there, Italy.
On board trucks or regular cars, it supplies heroin from East to West. On the
return trip it has to ensure the invisibility of profits totaling billions of
lire. These are needed to buy weapons in Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania for the
Kosovo resistance.
http://www.rcs.it/corriere
* * * *
5. Albanian Gang Recaptures Boats Seized by Police
Reuters 23-JAN-99
VLORE, Albania, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Albanian gang members involved
in the smuggling of illegal immigrants to Italy recaptured six speedboats on
Saturday after police had seized them the previous day, witnesses said.
Albanian and Italian police had mounted a joint operation to bring the boats to
an island off the port of Vlore on Friday night as part of efforts to stem a
steady flow of migrants across the Adriatic Sea. Six men were arrested.
Angry gang-members blocked the main road along the coast on
Saturday morning and, when Vlore police chief Sokol Kociu came to negotiate
with them, he was roughed up and taken to Sazan island where the boats were
moored.
"A group of armed smugglers blocked the main road by the
coast this morning," a Vlore resident told Reuters by telephone. "The
Vlore police chief tried to negotiate with them but they insulted and assaulted
him." Once on Sazan, the gang members reclaimed their property and
released the police chief.
Albania, Europe's poorest country, has experienced periodic
violence since the collapse of communism in 1991. At least half a million
weapons were looted from army barracks during months of chaos in 1997 and many
outlying regions are completely lawless.
Vlore was the centre of a 1997 revolt that followed the collapse
of fraudulent pyramid investment schemes, which eventually toppled the former
Democratic Party government and brought to power a Socialist-led coalition.
Police, who were backed by troops, did not intervene in Saturday's
standoff. The situation in the town was otherwise quiet.
Ethnic Albanians fleeing the conflict in Yugoslavia's Kosovo
province, as well as Kurdish refugees, use Albania as a springboard for
entering southern Italy.
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited.All rights reserved.
* * * *
6. Major Italian drug bust breaks Kosovo arms trafficking
Tue, 9 Jun 1998 14:16:15 PDT
Copyright 1998 by Agence France-Presse
MILAN, Italy, June 9 (AFP) - A group of Kosovo Albanians smuggling
arms back to their troubled province were among 100 people arrested in a
massive, countrywide anti-drug operation in Italy, police here said Tuesday.
All the 100 -- 90 of whom were arrested in Italy, the rest in
other European countries -- face weapons charges related to international drug
trafficking.
Anti-Mafia prosecutors in Milan, who conducted the operation with
paramilitary police units, identified eight criminal structures active on an
international scale.
One hundred kilos (220 pounds) of heroin and cocaine was seized in
the bust across several Italian regions. Investigators said the groups used
Milan as a base, with cafes, restaurants, garages and other firms acting as
fronts.
The Kosovar Albanian gang allegedly used drug money to buy the
weapons in Italy, which were then sent to Kosovo where a three-month conflict
is pitting Serbian forces against armed ethnic Albanians seeking independence.
Another separate group of Egyptians with links to Calabrian and
Albanian gangs were arrested on suspicions of laundering money through
Switzerland for use by fundamentalists in Egypt.
One of the arrest warrants was issued against Assan Ashraf, an
Egyptian businessman who owns a textile company in Milan and a mineral water
export firm in Egypt.
He had been previously arrested in 1996 by the Italian secret
service for suspected terrorist activities but was released three days later
after diplomats intervened, the investigators said.
* * * *
7. Subject: Kosovo Albanians arrested in
Spain after hundreds of break-ins
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 13:35:21 PDT
Copyright 1998 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
MADRID, June 16 (AFP) - More than 50 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo
were arrested Tuesday on suspicion of membership in an international ring of
robbers, Spanish police said. The arrested are suspected of having committed
nearly 1,000 break-ins and robberies in apartments and companies in a number of
Spanish regions and of laundering money from the robberies in Germany.
Police arrested 58 people including three suspected ringleaders in
Madrid and Barcelona. German police detained another suspect in Berlin and was
said to have asked for three bank accounts to be blocked. The identity of those
arrested was not immediately known. The suspects face charges of forming a criminal
gang, illegal residence, money laundering, drug trafficking and fraud.
Police would not rule out that more arrests would be made as the
swoop continued Tuesday afternoon.
* * * *
8. AP: MADRID, SPAIN, 16-JUN-1998: In this
image taken from police video, an unidentified suspect of a criminal gang
member from the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo is placed into a police vehicle
in Madrid Tuesday, June 16, 1998. Spanish police on Tuesday arrested over 70
members of the criminal gang they believed to be from the embattled Yugoslavian
province. Most of the suspects, arrested on suspicion of drug smuggling, money
laundering and robbery, carried false identity documents but were known to be
from Kosovo, a police spokesman said.
[Photo by Police, AP]
* * * *
9. Albanian Americans Funding Rebels' Cause
By Stacy Sullivan
Special to The Washington Post Tuesday, May 26, 1998; Page A12
BROOKLYN, N.Y.-A photograph hanging above the entrance to a
Brooklyn construction company shows a young man in a white T-shirt with an
AK-47 assault rifle slung across his chest and a pistol tucked into his pants.
The young man, Adrian Krasniqi, 25, was a member of the Kosovo
Liberation Army, a group of Albanian rebels fighting for independence in Kosovo,
a Serbian province whose inhabitants are 90 percent ethnic Albanian. According
to his uncle, who owns the construction company here, Krasniqi was killed last
October during an attack on a Serbian police position in Kosovo.
The company owner, a 32-year-old Albanian American who emigrated
to the United States in 1989, has been supporting the rebel group part-time
since 1994, before most of the world knew of its existence. But since his
nephew's death, he said, he spends almost all his time organizing Albanian
American support for the guerrilla movement, which he hopes will turn into a
force capable of fighting the Yugoslav Army.
The contractor, who also is named Krasniqi but who did not want
his first name used, is not alone in his quest. His fund-raising efforts in the
United States, as well as those of Albania immigrants in Europe, have increased
steadily over the past few months. According to diplomatic and other observers
with experience in the region, the money thus assembled has helped the rebels get
arms and smuggle them into Kosovo over routes through Albania, Macedonia and
Montenegro.
Partly as a result, the once obscure group of rural militants has
become an increasingly visible guerrilla insurgency that Western diplomats fear
could erupt into a war with the potential to engulf the southern Balkans.
Krasniqi said his efforts to raise money for the KLA in the United
States were not very successful at first. Between 300,000 and 500,000 Albanian
Americans live in the United States, clustered mainly in New York, Detroit,
Chicago and Boston. But almost all supported Ibrahim Rugova, who leads a
peaceful independence movement and has set up a shadow government.
After the Dayton peace accords for Bosnia were signed, however,
more and more Albanians in Europe and the United States became disillusioned
with Rugova's peaceful struggle and began shifting their support to the Kosovo
Liberation Army. Now many of Rugova's biggest donors are supporting the KLA.
Their support ranges from contributing money, to signing up volunteers to
fight, to arranging shipments of humanitarian aid and weapons.
"I loved Rugova and his ideals," said Ramiz Hoti, 33, a
waiter in a New York restaurant who came to the United States in 1983.
"But what has it brought us? Nothing! The only way now is to fight."
Hoti, a former prisoner in Kosovo, said he has registered as a
volunteer to fight with the KLA and gives the group $300 a week. His brother,
Hariz Hoti, a 36-year-old construction worker from the Bronx, has already left
for Kosovo to join the KLA, he added.
Supporters of the Kosovo rebels have set up a fund, "Home
Land Calling," which has a bank account at People's Bank in Bridgeport,
Conn. KLA supporters in Europe have set up "Home Land Calling"
accounts in Sweden, Italy, Belgium and Canada. The bank names and account
numbers are advertised in Albanian newspapers printed in Europe.
"There is absolutely no doubt that the fund-raising of the
KLA supporters in the U.S. and Europe is funding the KLA. All the money in
Kosovo, not only for the arms, but for everything, comes from abroad,"
said Tiho Loza, associate editor of Transitions, a monthly journal specializing
in east European affairs.
KLA meetings and fund-raisers mostly take place in Albanian-run
restaurants. They are emotional and well-attended events. On April 20, the KLA
held a fund-raiser at Bruno's, a restaurant in midtown Manhattan where a
teenager from Drenice gave an emotional speech about the deaths of his teacher
and several students, who were killed in a Serbian attack on his village. More
than 150 Albanians from all over the country attended the event.
Many wrote checks; others donated in cash. One young Albanian, who
asked that his name be withheld for fear his contribution might hurt his
private business, donated $50,000.
"Everything I've got, I'll give to these guys," said
Jesse Musliu, a 45-year-old mechanic who flew in from Alaska for the event.
"I'll mortgage my house again if I have to."
The once secret fund-raisers are now held openly and advertised in
the weekly Albanian American newspaper Illyria, based in the Bronx. The most
recent issue advertised a kick-boxing tournament in Waterbury, Conn., at an
Albanian-run martial arts studio. The $10 entrance fees were earmarked for the
KLA.
Krasniqi said that from $3 million to $4 million has been raised
in the United States. Albanians who support the rebel army displayed receipts
of money transfers of more than $500,000 to banks and individuals in Albania
since December, as well as several briefcases of cash they said was bound for
Albania.
According to John Russell, a Justice Department spokesman, U.S.
law does not bar contributing money to an insurgent army, or fighting in one,
unless that army is listed as a terrorist group by the State Department.
State Department officials pointed out, however, that any
Americans caught smuggling arms into Kosovo would be violating an international
arms embargo against Yugoslavia.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
* * * *
10.From: thomas coonan
<tcoonan@EMAIL.UNC.EDU
To: ALBANIAN@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU
Subj: [ALBANIAN] $ for KLA
Date: 7 ???? 1998 ?. 18:50 [Albanian characters]
______________Albanian Discussion List________________________
Archives: http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/archives/albanian.html
__________________________________________________________________________
Dear Listmembers,
Because of recent developments on the battlefield, I believe that,
of necessity, the KLA (UCK) will conduct a more guerrilla-style campaign from
now on. It is nearly impossible to hold onto territory if you are fighting an
enemy armed with all kinds of heavy weapons while you have mainly just light
ones. But, as we learned in Vietnam, guerilla fighters can often be victorious.
Serbia is so weak financially that it cannot sustain a protracted guerrilla
war.
The main thing is to keep the money flowing to the KLA. Since
Germany and Switzerland have cracked down (shamelessly) on KLA bank accounts
there, it is imperative that people in America increase their financial support
on this side. For those new, English-speaking members of the List who may not
have heard, the organizatioin known as "Vendlindja therret" is
collecting funds for the KLA.
Their US account number is: 0617008215. Check can be mailed to: People's
Bank, 328 Shippan Ave., Stamford, CT 06902-6014. Remember, the KLA is the ONLY
one standing between the Albanian population and the Serb-government killing
machine!
Sincerely, Thomas Coonan
* * * *
11. NATIONAL NARCOTICS INTELLIGENCE
CONSUMERS COMMITTEE (NNICC) THE NNICC REPORT 1996
The Supply of Illicit Drugs to the United States
The NNICC Report is produced annually for the use of NNICC member
agencies and other entities and individuals interested in this subject.
Comments and queries are welcome and may be addressed to the:
Drug Enforcement Administration
ATTN: Intelligence Division
Washington, DC 20537
(202) 307-8111
[...]
Heroin was shipped from Turkey primarily to European countries
and, to a much smaller extent, the United States. Bulk heroin shipments
destined for European markets were transported along a combination of numerous
land and sea routes collectively known as the Balkan Route. Smaller quantities
destined for the United States were shipped directly, or transshipped through
Europe. The Balkan Route encompasses highways running from Turkey through
Greece, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Romania, the Czech and Slovak
Republics, and Hungary, to Austria, Germany, and Italy, as well as ferry routes
between Greece and Italy. From Italy, heroin shipments were routed to markets
elsewhere in Western Europe.
Nigerian heroin smugglers in Italy sought out U.S. servicemen
based there to act as couriers bringing heroin from Turkey to Italy or
distribution there and elsewhere in Europe. Seventy-five percent of the heroin
seized in Europe in recent years, however, was transported by way of the Balkan
Route. Significant 1996 seizures of heroin en route from Turkey to Western
Europe included 190 kilograms seized in January by Turkish police from a tractor-trailer
bound for Germany; 217 kilograms of heroin seized in May by Italian authorities
from a truck aboard a passenger ferry that arrived in Venice, Italy, from
Izmir; and 65 kilograms seized in June by German customs authorities from a
truck that had arrived from Turkey by way of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and
Austria.
Drug trafficking organizations composed of ethnic Albanians from
Serbia's Kosovo Province were considered to be second only to Turkish groups as
the predominant heroin smugglers along the Balkan Route. These groups were
particularly active in Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
(FYROM), and Serbia. Kosovan traffickers were noted for their use of violence
and for their involvement in international weapons trafficking. There is
increasing evidence that ethnic criminals from the Balkans are engaged in
criminal activities in the United States and some of that activity involves
theft of licit pharmaceutical products for illicit street distribution.
[...]
* * * *
12. Subj: Albanian Terrorists of KLA Pay
Weapon in Heroin
Date: 99-02-02 17:14:11
EST
Romania Libera"
July 30, 1998.
ALBANIAN TERRORISTS OF KLA PAY WEAPON IN HEROIN
By Vladimir Alexe
The weapon traffic routes
According to the experts, the region of Kosovo has in the last
years become the real stepping stone of the weapon traffic, not only for the
Balkans, but also for the entire Europe. Prishtina, Podujevo, Pec and other
places are the centre of the international routes' cross-roads used by the
traders. The experienced weapon traffickers consider the
Albanians from Kosovo and Metohija as the people with whom big
deals can be closed. The first "channel" used by the Albanian weapon
traffickers was, as understood, the Yugoslav route, the surplus of weapon from
the former Yugoslav republics to be more precise. But the Albanians from Kosovo
had soon formed several other secret channels for the weapon traffic, in the
direction of Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Denmark.
The Slovenian border crossing "Sentilj" was proclaimed by
the weapon traffickers as the "ideal border crossing". Albania
provides a special channel for smuggling the weapon into Kosovo, but the
traffickers consider it "risky" because of the numerous Serbian Army
units stationed at the border between the two countries and the (counter)
attack of the snipers or Serbian guns, well camouflaged within the zone. The
latest addition to the weapon market is China, practising the
"dumping" policy in this field and, for example, offers rifles for
just 200 DM at the black market. Turk's Mafia and Albanian's heroin
In principle, the weapon black market in Kosovo is in stable
"mobility". So, the traditional "kalashnykov" can be bought
at the prices of 700 to 1700 DM (the only acceptable currency).
"Papovka" costs 600-800 DM and the revolvers could be bought at 400
to 700 DM. Grenades and mines are 30 DM a piece, almost a symbolic price. In
the recent years the European Union recorded the fact that the Turk's Mafia is
bringing in weapon galore to Kosovo and Sandzak, through Bulgaria and Skopje
(Macedonia).
The interesting matter is that the Albanian terrorists grouped
into the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, pay for the weapon not only in
German marks but in heroin, as well. In 1994, the European Union seated in
Brussels, published a report based upon a study of drug traffic routes in
Europe, identifying the well-organised Albanian traffickers from Macedonia and
from Kosovo, who paid for the smuggling of weapon in heroin. The weapons
provided in this matter were handed over to the Albanian terrorist groups,
fighting for the separation of Kosovo from the FR of Yugoslavia. The European
Union report stated:" The recent larger quantities of heroin were recorded
in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Greece, and the investigation proved that
these quantities come from the centers like Prishtina (Kosovo), Skopje
(Macedonia) and Shkoder (Albania). The Yugoslav army storage of weapons did not
go unnoticed by the Albanian traffickers from Kosovo. The Albanians-Moslems
broke into the weapon storages in Raska and Novi Pazar, and took out (as in
September 1997) automatic guns large quantities of explosives, tens of mortars
and thousands of ammunition. Just one of these "breakings in" the
quantity of weapon taken was worth about 1000 DM in the black market.
"Those in possession of the Balkans, especially Kosovo and
Metohija, control the stability of the entire Europe"
The Albanian terrorism and separatism obscures the geopolitical and
the strategic dimension known only by some. In the offices of the Great, the
Balkans is considered to have the deciding role of the stability or instability
of Europe. Within this context, Kosovo and Macedonia seem to be in possession
of keys of stability in the Balkans. The date of origin of the Albanian
separatist terrorism is not, as believed, recent. In 1991 in Kosovo and
Metohija around 200 Albanian terrorist attacks were registered, against the
police officers but against the civilians as well. Since the very beginning,
among the terrorists' civilians-victims were the Albanians, too, their only
guilt being their respect of law and not supporting the terrorist actions. But
all the terrorist actions are not committed by the Albanians from the "Kosovo
Liberation Army" and "The National Movement for Kosovo". Both
terrorist organisations are positioned in Switzerland and both are considered
by the experts as the main sponsors of the terrorist operations in Kosovo and
Metohija. The main goal of the Albanian terrorist is not only the separation of
the Kosovo Province from the FR of Yugoslavia, but the "ethnic
cleansing" particularly. Ibrahim Rugova himself, seen as a moderate and
opponent of the secessionist ideas, says to Spiegel: "Kosovo will belong
to those ones who will stay there", and thus discreetly creating, beside
terrorism and separatism, a deceitful geopolitical and geostrategical design.
It gives the control Kosovo a different dimension: the Province is the
"key" of stability in the Balkans, and the Balkans are the
"Key" to the stability of the entire Europe (and not only the south
east Europe, as perceived).
Those ones in possession of Kosovo and Metohija, control the
stability or the instability of Europe. The involvement of all the great powers
in the zone (including China) not seems quite justified. To own the
"key" to peace or war in the Old Continent is not a small matter.
"Phantom Government" of the so-called Kosovo Republic -still
unrecognised by any state - has its seat in Ulm near Bonn, in Germany. The
leader of this phantom "republic" - Buyar Bukoshi - receives
significant "donations", later to be deposited in the Swiss banks or
secret safes. Bukoshi himself, with his family, lives in Ulm. Meaning, far away
from the bloodshed in Kosovo. Contrary to the leader, Ibrahim Rugova, who has
not left the region and is looking forward to the US State Department support.
In 1997, the Carnegie Foundation" invited Rugova to USA and introduced him
to the public through mass media in the right way. If Bukoshi is "the
Germany man", Rugova is "the American man". In practice, in the
background of the bloody scene of Kosovo protagonists, the interests of one or
the other great power can be discerned. The region of Kosovo being the geostrategic
area of extreme importance to Europe, the "former Kosovo" could be
later mentioned in other cases as well in connection with the ethnic separatism
in Europe. Renowned cases.
from "Kosovo.net"
* * * *
13. HEROIN ROADS
On 2 April 1998, police control at the Gosevo border crossing
point revealed 11 kilos of heroin worth 14 million Deutschmarks on the street
(on aggregate), hidden in the boot of the car of a 53-year old Albanian woman.
In May 1998, Lausanne police arrested one Musa Rifat Salemani of
Pozarenje village in Kosovo. His group of criminals imported as much as half a
tonne of heroine into Switzerland between 1992 and 1995.
What happens to millions of Deutschmarks and Swiss franks earned
by the Albanian mafia from this death trade throughout Europe?
ROUTES OF TERRORISM, NARCOTIC DRUGS AND ARMS ARE CLOSELY
INTERTWINED - BEHIND IT ALL STANDS MONEY AND POWER THAT MONEY CAN BUY
The main drug routes connecting Turkey with Western Europe go
through the Balkan region. These routes have always been "busy", but
not as busy as in the last couple of years. Police are well aware of the key
points on the "Balkan drug route", such as Gostivar (Macedonia) and
Tropoia (Albania), transit points for scores of international transport
(TIR-carnet) trucks. In Kumanovo, just beside the motorway, there is a barracks
housing a state-of the art heroin processing facility. The necessary inputs
come from a factory near the border with Greece that was built by the Germans.
The main headquarters of drug dealers is a trendy spot - Grand Hotel in Skopje
(Macedonia).
However, Albania is the biggest Balkan money laundering and
illicit drugs centre. The pyramid schemes, which triggered the bloody political
riots in Albania in 1997, were, in fact, a front to channel in the drug money
legally (State Department Report). a political mess in that country has made it
possible for the drug mafia to develop the business on an unprecedented scale.
Last year alone, about 200 kilos of pure heroin entered Albania. The Albanian
drug mafia is in close contact with many Albanian expatriates throughout Europe
and the United States, precisely through the Kosovo Albanian drug mafia.
Indeed, Kosovo is the seat of one of the most powerful drug cartels in the
world - the Camilla drug cartel which is responsible for drug dealing across
Western Europe. A huge chunk of the proceeds of the drug business goes to
Kosovo to meet the needs of the "Kosovo Liberation Army"
("KLA") terrorist organization, namely to buy weapons for them.
According to police sources, the Albanians of Kosovo and Metohija
hold sway over 80 per cent of drug (heroin) trade in Europe. At least half the
countries of Europe have a network of individual drug dealers connected to the
suppliers in Kosovo. The largest quantities of heroin confiscated in Germany, Switzerland,
Italy and Greece come in via Skopje (Macedonia), Shkoder (Albania) and
Prishtina (Kosovo). Several groups of Kosovo Albanians work together with
Turkish Kurds and jointly acquire drugs coming to Turkey from Afghanistan. This
involves huge amounts of this deadly powder from which dealers reap millions of
Deutschmarks.
[The] Albanian mafia is one of the most powerful drug mafias
worldwide, primarily thanks to its clan-like organization and an infinite
brutality of its members that ensures an absolute unity. Fear makes the tissue
of this lethal organism. Terrible fear ensures silence and an unquestionable
loyalty in the mafia ranks. Albanian mafia members live modestly and in awe.
Only the top bosses live in grand style. Where does all that money go? The
Albanian mafia spends the bulk of its drug money in Italy on arms intended for
Albanian and Kurdish separatists. According to European criminal police
authorities, the money earned from heroin in Western Europe is transferred to
Kosovo, notably to Veliki Trnovac, a place considered to be the drug peddling
centre. Heads of Kosovo dealer groups are all men coming from the same area and
directly working for the terrorist Kosovo National Front, whose armed wing is
"KLA". They use the heroin money and the "laundered" money
to fund "KLA" terrorist actions and the separatist Albanian parties
in Kosovo.
http://www.kosovo.net/terrorism/heroin.html
* * * *
14. THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Monday,
November 9, 1998 International News; p. A14
UNREPENTANT KLA DISMISSES ACCUSATIONS
Kosovo rebels unlikely to co-operate with probe by Canadian
war-crimes prosecutor
Tom Walker
Special to The Globe and Mail
Pristina, Yugoslavia
The Kosovo Liberation Army does not consider itself guilty
of war crimes, and is unlikely to co-operate with the International War Crimes
Tribunal in The Hague, sources in the rebel group say.
The issue of bringing to justice those responsible for the
hundreds of deaths in the fractious Serbian province this year stalled last
week when Yugoslav authorities in Belgrade barred the tribunal’s chief
prosecutor, Canada’s Louise Arbour, from visiting Kosovo. The KLA warned over
the weekend that it, too, is equally unlikely to help Ms. Arbour and her
investigators.
Sources in the rebel group, who asked not to be identified, have
admitted that many of the KLA’s victims – both Serb and ethnic Albanians deemed
loyal to Belgrade – endured brutal deaths. One fighter said that two Serb
police officers captured in the western village of Glogane were executed by
being dragged behind cars, and that bodies of Yugoslav army soldiers were
gratuitously mutilated.
Although the ethnic Albanians generally encourage international
involvement in the Kosovo crisis, the KLA sources said there was little point
in trying to bring the often ill-disciplined local command structure of the KLA
to heel. "In a way I think what we did was helpful – it made the Serbs
think again before repeating their massacres," said one man, who described
how the police officers’ bodies were decapitated as they were dragged behind
cars driven by young rebels "in some sort of show" organized by a
village rebel chief.
"It’s not something the KLA favours and not something that is
usually done," he said. "But you must understand that these policemen
had a long history of physically mistreating local people. People involved in
conflicts like this know the risks they run."
Belgrade has argued that Kosovo is an internal crisis, not a war,
so there is no reason for Ms. Arbour and her investigators to become involved.
Observers suspect that behind the refusal to let the Hague team in (and one of
the reasons international sanctions against Yugoslavia remain) is a fear that
senior police and army personnel could face indictments, and that even Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic might be vulnerable.
U.S. war-crimes envoy David Scheffer criticized the visa decision,
which also bars the tribunal’s president, Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, from
travelling to Kosovo. "In the UN Security Council, there is unanimous
consent of all its members that investigators have full authority to do their
job in Kosovo," Mr. Scheffer noted Saturday.
So far, Belgrade has only allowed a team of Finnish forensic
experts to examine grave sites in Kosovo. One of Serbia’s senior forensic
pathologists, however, has publicly advocated that international teams be
allowed to investigate all deaths in Kosovo, and the evidence they gather be
sent to The Hague.
"I’ll continue to ask for experts to come," said Zoran Stankovic,
senior pathologist at Belgrade’s military hospital and Yugoslavia’s only
UN-accredited forensic scientist.
Mr. Stankovic accused the Serbian media of grossly distorting some
incidents where Serbs have been killed, but also said authorities had failed to
bring home the brutality of the KLA and its methods to the foreign press.
* * * *
15. The Guardian 30th
September 1998; Main Section page 15
Thousands of Albanian children in hiding to escape blood feuds.
Vengeance of the most direct kind is making a comeback in the wild
north of Albania, Owen Bowcott in Shkoder reports
GJIN Mekshi is a school teacher and a man of "good
reputation". His flat is decorated with icons of the Virgin Mary. His
calling involves reconciling vendettas and bloodfeuds.
In a cramped fifth floor flat looking out on Albania's
semi-lawless northern mountains, he deplores the spread of violence and the
lack of respect for traditional codes of behaviour.
As a leading member of the Shkoder-based Committee for Blood
Reconciliation, he works within a moral framework devised by a tribal chieftain
excommunicated for his "most un-Christian code".
The 15th century kanun (code) of Lek Dukagjini which
regulates revenge killings to preserve the honour of the clan, or fis
has been revived in northern Albania since the demise of communism. Up to 6,000
children are said to be in hiding from blood feuds.
But the code's harsh justice is no longer being respected.
"The kanun is a good way for resolving arguments, but not in the
way most people interpret it as always ending in killings,'! Mr Mekshi
explains.
"The code doesn't allow women to be killed, but there have
been cases in Tropoje [on the Kosovo border] this year where women have been
forced into hiding by death threats.
"In some families there are no men left. So far no women have
been killed."
Modern reproductions of the kanun are on sale in the
Tirana's kiosks. Its author is thought to be Lek Dukagjin, Lord of Dagmo and Zadrima,
who fought the Turks until 1472, then fled to Italy. His intention was to limit
the cycles of bloodletting among the mountain tribps which sometimes destroyed
entire communities by enabling a council of tribal elders to arrange a besa,
or truce once honour had been obtained.
Enver Hoxha's regime suppressed it. But the privatisation of land,
which reopened ancient disputes, and the breakdown of law and order last year,
when Albania's armouries were looted, have encouraged direct retribution.
"Since the committee was set up in 1991 we have resolved 365
cases in Albania and 38 feuds abroad," Mr Mekshi records. "One feud
has been running for more than 80 years.
"Sometimes the vendettas start through killings or land
disputes but they also begin with a fight over a drink or a car accident.
Usually it's a killing for a killing, a beating for a beating. The kanun
doesn't specify how killings should be carried out, but if you mutilate a
victim's face, attack him from behind or kill him after you gave your word not
to, the bad blood comes back to you.
"Within the first 24 hours you may kill anyone from the clan
to which the person who carried out the initial killing belonged-but not a
woman. After that you can kill a member of the family. After a year, it must be
only the murderer or whoever lives in his house."
The Committee of Blood Reconciliation has 3,000 members in Albania
and is pressing the government to accept its arbitrations as part of the legal
process.
"I have a good reputation and my father was a man of good
reputation, too," says Mr Mekshi. "I am approached to arrange truces
by those who are in hiding and dare not go out during the day. When we agree a
deal, we sanctify the arrangement with a procession led by the local priest."
* * * *
Mr. Works,
A mutual friend informed me that you are seeking detailed
information on the KLA and it's roots in the Drug cartels and ideology. I am
enclosing some articles which I have researched for another project, in the
hope that they will be of some use to you. They involve the KLA's link to
terrorism and the Osama Bin Laden connection, as well as the Drug Mafia links…
regards,
Dragan Ivetic - University of Illinois, College of Law
* * * *
16. The Guardian (London)
November 1, 1994
THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 12
ALBANIAN DRUG BARONS FIND THEIR WAY AROUND THE WAR;
The Yugoslavian conflict disrupted the heroin trade all too
briefly, reports Yigal Chazan in Belgrade
DRUG trafficking across the Balkans, disrupted by the Yugoslavian
conflict, is making a comeback. Albanian mafia barons are carving out a new
route to western Europe bypassing the peninsula's war zones, according to
United Nations narcotics experts.
With its source in Turkey and the Caucasus, the channel runs the
length of the southern Balkans, via Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. The drugs
are then shipped to Italy, the gateway to Albanian -controlled heroin markets
in Switzerland and Germany.
"We are talking about a new route between the Black Sea and
the Adriatic coast," said Bernard Frahi, of the UN's drug control
programme, set up to help governments crack down on the trade.
European police chiefs fear the conduit will strengthen Kosovo
Albanian drug syndicates, among the most powerful on the continent, whose
tentacles have stretched to the east coast of the United States.
Kosovars - Albanians from the Serbian province of Kosovo -
dominate the Albanian narcotics trade in Europe. Doors are opened because they
are regarded as political refugees fleeing Serbian repression, and Albanian
communities in Germany and Switzerland provide perfect cover.
From their base in Veliki Trnovac in southern Serbia, dubbed the
"Medellin of the Balkans", Albanian mafia chiefs oversee their
European drug operation.
Balkan governments are struggling to staunch the flow of heroin,
marijuana and raw opium along the emerging conduit. Over the past year,
Macedonian police have seized millions of pounds worth of drugs and arrested
scores of couriers.
Increasingly, Macedonia's anti-drug force has sought the
co-operation of its Italian counterparts. A 10-month joint operation ended in
May with the seizure of 42 kg of heroin in Skopje. Nevertheless, the
authorities there admit they are a long way from smashing the network.
In Albania, a chronic lack of anti-trafficking expertise has given
the smugglers a free rein. "Albania is now a priority for us," said
Mr Frahi, whose agency plans to offer Tirana technical assistance.
Before Yugoslavia's descent into bloodshed, heroin was funnelled
from Turkey via Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia to western Europe. The violent
break-up of the federation shut the traditional Balkan route.
Other channels quickly proliferated through eastern Europe.
According to the UN, drugs were routed through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary,
Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
But anti-trafficking measures have been stepped up in eastern
Europe in the past two years. Just 6.4 kg of narcotics were seized by Hungarian
police in 1990, but by this August the figure had risen to 1,300 kg.
According to a senior official of the Macedonian interior
ministry: "The Albanian mafia found that now it's not so easy to smuggle
through eastern Europe and are now switching back to the Balkans."
The UN blockade of Serbia to the north and, more recently, the
Greek embargo against Macedonia to the south have been gifts to the smugglers,
who have taken advantage of the increased truck traffic from the Black Sea to
the Adriatic coast which must now cross the southern Balkans, east to west.
Tirana admits that smugglers are active, but denies Albania sits
astride the new Balkan route.
"We can't deny there's some drug trafficking but it's not of
the dimensions that are being suggested," said Genc Pollo, the
presidential spokesman, in Tirana.
Most of the drugs seized in Macedonia come from Turkey, according
to the state police. Opium base from the Golden Crescent - Pakistan, Iran and
Afghanistan - has traditionally been refined into pure heroin in Turkey for the
western European market.
But the Albanian mafia is also being fed by the rapidly expanding
Caucasian heroin industry, which has flourished in an environment of political
instability and corruption, according to the Paris -based Observatoire
Geopolitique Des Drogues (OGD) which monitors drug smuggling worldwide.
Albanians have two main advantages: Georgian and Armenian mafias
are hostile to their Turkish counterparts, and xenophobia towards Turks in
Germany is such that they are automatically suspected of trafficking, say OGD
officials.
In Switzerland, the Albanian mafia has already supplanted the
Turkish syndicates.
"We have enormous problems with Kosovars and Albanians,"
said Bernard Soldini, the deputy head of the Lausanne anti-drug force.
"Seventy per cent of the heroin coming to Switzerland comes through the
Albanian route."
* * * *
17. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts
May 15, 1992, Friday
Yugoslav police catch ethnic Albanians smuggling heroin
Yugoslav News Agency in English 1145 gmt 11 May 92
Belgrade, 11th May --The Federal police uncovered 12 kg of heroin
in a truck with Turkish licence plates parked close to Belgrade's Hotel
National, Belgrade daily 'Politika' said on Monday [11th May] . The black
market value of the shipment exceeds DM 1.8m, 'Politika' said. The names of the
four persons captured in the truck are being kept secret in the interest of the
investigation, but it is certain, 'Politika' said, that two of them are ethnic
Albanians from Serbia's southern Kosovo province and the others from Belgrade.
According to the paper, everything started a few months ago when Becir Kadriju
of Podujevo (Kosovo) was caught at the Bulgarian-Yugoslav border while
attempting to smuggle a kilogram of heroin in his car. This revealed an entire
drug smuggling chain which, operating under the protection of the powerful
Albanian narco-mafia, sent shipments to Western Europe via Kosovo and the
former Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia. weapons for the ethnic
Albanians in Kosovo are paid for by the funds obtained abroad by the Albanian
narco-mafia...
* * * *
18. Washington Post Writes About Kosovo Albanian Drug Clans
By Bob Djurdjevic --the Truth in Media Newsletter, Nov. 1995
PHOENIX - The November 15-21, 1993 WASHINGTON POST national weekly
edition contained a revealing story filed by a WP reporter from Amsterdam
entitled "The Balkan Heroin." The story traces the drug trails which
lead through Kosovo, the southern Serbian province which is populated 90% by
ethnic Albanians.
"According to Pierre Duc, head of the anti-drug force in
Lausanne, Switzerland, ethnic Albanians from the Serbian province of Kosovo
have captured up to 70 percent of the heroin market in Switzerland. About 2,000
Albanians from Kosovo are being held in Swiss jails on charges of arms and drug
smuggling," writes William Drozdiak.
The WP story provides a detailed map of heroin drug routes, which
originate in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, and lead through Turkey into
Kosovo.
Editorial Comment. What's particularly interesting to us about
this WP story is that the Albanian drug weapons trafficking is not a recent
phenomenon. The Serbian President Milosevic told this writer in a January 1990
meeting at his office in Belgrade, for example, that Kosovo was a major part of
the drug trade into Western Europe, and that the Serbian police had been
capturing large quantities of smuggled drugs and arms. Yet, instead of exposing
such criminal activities to the public, the Western politicians who have been
visiting Kosovo (in 1990), such as Senators Bob Dole or Dennis DeConcini, for
example, only complained publicly about the alleged human rights violations
against ethnic Albanians. Why did they stay mum on drug trafficking by the
Kosovo Albanians? Why did the WP choose to write about an old news story - NOW?
The WP story quotes the Swiss anti-drug official as saying that
the Kosovo clans had sold heroin and bought Kalashnikov assault rifles and the
Uzi submachine guns over the past three years. "We know that a lot of
money is now leaving Switzerland for the former Yugoslavia," Duc says. "But
we don't know exactly who is getting it, or where the weapons have ended up.
These Albanians in jail rarely talk with us and seem to be a part of the
disciplined mafia."
In view of these remarks, isn't it interesting that the WP editors
chose to headline the story "The Balkan Heroin," rather than
"The Albanian Kosovo Heroin," or "The Albanian Kosovo
Mafia," as might have been more appropriate by the copy?
We've also found it amusing that the WP calls Ibrahim Rugova, a
Kosovo Albanian separatist leader, a "pacifist." Yet, in the same
paragraph, the WP story points out that the Hungarian police have recently
intercepted trucks full of small arms that experts believe were bound for
Kosovo.
Editorial comment. And all this arms and drug smuggling is
happening at a time of the world's tightest U.N. sanctions? Mr. Fuerth, would
you care to explain where on your priority list for import approvals the
Kalashnikovs and heroin rank? Are they above or below aspirin, for example? We
already suspect that they are above bread and below cigarettes. You see, we've
just learned that the U.N. Sanctions Committee has just approved a large
quantity of cigarettes for import into Serbia.
Meanwhile, poison and death aren't just the commodities in demand
in the Balkans. The WP story reported that, the glut of drugs in Western Europe
"is raising fears among police and social workers about a generation of
addicts becoming victims of.. a United Nations of drug smugglers involved in
the trade into Europe."
Editorial Comment. Anybody still wondering why even our friends in
Western Europe resent our pro-Muslim, pro-Albanian foreign policy?
* * * *
19. The Christian Science Monitor
October 20, 1994, Thursday ; Pg. 6
Albanian Mafias Find New Drug Routes Around Yugoslavia
Yigal Chazan, Special to The Christian Science Monitor
DISRUPTED by the Yugoslav conflict, drug trafficking across the
Balkans is making a comeback as Albanian mafia barons carve out a new smuggling
route to Western Europe, bypassing the peninsula's war zones, according to
United Nations and other narcotics experts.
Before Yugoslavia's descent into war, heroin was funneled from
Turkey via Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia to Western Europe. Yugoslavia's
turbulent fragmentation shut that traditional Balkan route.
Other channels quickly proliferated through Eastern Europe,
exploiting lax controls and desperate cash needs. According to the UN, the main
conduit now runs through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech
Republic.
Antitrafficking measures along this route have been stepped up,
pressuring the traffickers to change their route. For example, just 14 pounds
of hard drugs were seized by Hungarian police in 1990, but by August this year,
the figure had risen to 1,302 pounds.
International drug-control organizations are again honing in on
this area in an effort to stanch the flow of drugs through eastern Europe.
According to the East European office of the Brussels-based
Customs Cooperation Council - an international customs authority - a quarter of
the heroin sold in West Europe passes through East Europe. It says just 10
percent of the drug destined for West European markets is seized. In 1993,
police in East Europe seized 5,000 pounds of heroin, 4,000 pounds of cocaine,
and 50,000 pounds of cannabis.
With its supply in Turkey and the Caucasus, the channel now runs
the length of the southern Balkans, via Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania. The
drugs are then shipped to Italy, the gateway to Albanian-controlled heroin
markets in Switzerland and Germany, according to Observatoire Geopolitique Des
Drogues (OGD), which monitors drug smuggling worldwide in Paris.
Crackdown on traffickers
The tougher measures are one of the main reasons for the
development of the new drugs artery, according to a senior Macedonian Interior
Ministry official.
''The Albanian mafia found that now it's not so easy to smuggle
through Eastern Europe and are now switching back to the Balkans,'' says
Bernard Frahi, of the UN Drug Control Program in Vienna, set up to help
governments crack down on trafficking.
The UN blockade of Serbia to the north and, more recently,
Greece's embargo against Macedonia to the south, has been a gift to the
smugglers. They have taken advantage of the upsurge in truck traffic from the
Black Sea to the Adriatic coast.
And UN narcotics experts say a lack of antidrug legislation,
poorly equipped police forces, a cash-based economy, and weak banking
regulations create optimum conditions for traffickers.
Tirana admits that smugglers are active, but refutes that Albania
sits astride the new Balkan route. ''We can't deny there's some drug
trafficking, but it's not of the dimensions that are being suggested,'' says
Genz Pollo, presidential spokesman in Tirana.
But European police chiefs fear the conduit will strengthen Kosovo
Albanian drug syndicates - some of the most powerful on the continent - whose
tentacles have stretched as far as the East coast of the United States, UN drug
agents say.
Kosovars, Albanians from the Serbian province of Kosovo, dominate
the Albanian narcotics trade in Europe. Doors are opened because they are
regarded as political refugees fleeing Serbian repression, and existing
Albanian communities in Germany and Switzerland provide perfect cover,
according to the ODG.
The Medellin of the Balkans
From their base in Veliki Trnovac in southern Serbia, dubbed the
''Medellin of the Balkans,'' Albanian mafia chiefs oversee their European drug
operation and are suspected of masterminding the new Balkan route.
Balkan governments are struggling to staunch the flow of drugs
along the emerging conduit. Over the past year, Macedonian police have seized
millions of dollars worth of drugs and arrested scores of couriers.
Increasingly, Macedonia's antidrug force has sought the
cooperation of its Italian counterparts. A 10-month-old joint operation ended
in May with the seizure of 93 pounds of heroin in Skopje, Macedonia's capital.
Nevertheless, the authorities there admit they're a long way from smashing the
network.
In Albania, a chronic lack of antitrafficking expertise combined
with an apparent ignorance of the Balkan pipeline has effectively given the
smugglers a free rein.
''Albania is now a priority for us,'' says Mr. Frahi, whose agency
plans to offer Tirana technical assistance to combat the drug scourge.
Most of the drugs seized in Macedonia come from Turkey according
to state police officials. Opium base from the Golden Crescent - Pakistan,
Iran, and Afghanistan - has traditionally been refined into pure heroin in
Turkey for the Western European market.
Albanians benefit from two main advantages: Georgian and Armenian
mafias are hostile to their Turkish counterparts, and xenophobia towards Turks
in Germany is such that they are automatically suspected of trafficking, OGD
officials say.
* * * *
CTK National News Wire
August 5, 1995
20. CTK: TWO KILOGRAMMES OF PURE HEROIN DETAINED BY CZECH POLICE
Two kilogrammes of pure heroin detained by Czech police Two
kilogrammes of highly pure heroin worth 2,000,000 crowns (about $80,000) were
detained by National Anti-Drug Centre policemen on Tuesday, director of the
centre Jiri Komorous told CTK today.
According to experts six kilogrammes of the so-called street
heroin could have been produced from this amount by consumers.
Two men - a Czech courier (23) and an Albanian from Kosovo,
Serbia, (36), the organiser of the deal - were detained, Komorous said. The
police action was the result of a long-term operation by the Czech, German and
Swiss police. Other men were arrested in Germany and Switzerland in connection
with the case.
The Albanian was detained by the police in Prague's Merlyn bar
whose owners, Komorous said, were members of the Kosovo-Albanian crime group.
Albanians from Kosovo have managed to turn the Czech Republic into one of the
goal stations of trade in heroin and flooded the whole republic with this drug.
Since 1993 the Czech, German and Swiss anti-Drug Centre has
arrested already 102 members of this mafia, Komorous said.
* * * *
21. Defense & Foreign Affairs' Strategic Policy
August 31, 1994
" Albanian Role in Drug Trade "
Reliable sources indicate that Albanian nationals and locations
are increasingly being involved in the international heroin trade. Much of the
heroin is being traded for arms. Italian police led an operation, codenamed
Macedonia, on May 18, 1994, seizing 49kg of heron, uncovering a local
mafia-Albanian connection. The trade is being focused around Albanians in
Albania itself, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYRM) and the Kosovo
province of Yugoslavia.
A significant number of drug dealers have been arrested in recent
months in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Greece. Most were Albanians from
Skopje, (Macedonia), Pristina (Serbia, Yugoslavia), and Shkoder (Albania). Two
key towns of the present drug route are situated on the border between
Macedonia and Serbia. They are Vratnica on the Macedonian side of the border
and Blastica on the Serbian side. The residents of both towns are predominantly
Albanian. In FYRM, the main heroin route is the town of Gostivar; in Albania itself,
it is Tropoia. Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy has the name
of the company whose trucks are used for international transport of the heroin.
On the outskirts of Mumanovo, FYRM, a barracks beside the highway
houses a modern heroin processing plant, sources said. Precursors are supplied
by another plant in FYRM, somewhere on the border with Greece; the plant was
built with German help.
Top floors of the Skopje Grand Hotel are, according to the
sources, all booked by those involved in one way or another with the drug or
arms trade. Meanwhile, Albanians living in Switzerland, Germany and the US are
slowly pushing Turks out of the business. Much of this is because the Caucasus
heroin trade is in the hands of Georgians and Armenians who do not want to deal
with the Turks. They do, however, accept Albanians as the middlemen and agree
to be paid in arms which are controlled by the Albanians. In Germany, the
Albanians have been largely using expatriate Croatians as their dealers. The
Turks, meanwhile, are getting most of the blame for the drug trafficking.
In Georgia, local traffickers are well-connected with the
authorities. One very senior minister was reported to Defense & Foreign
Affairs as being "one of the bosses" of the trade. The minister in
question has his own police, known locally as "centurions" and
nicknamed the "Gucci boys". Now, the port of Sukhumi, Georgia, is
taking over from Batumi, Georgia, as the main heroin transshipment port. The
drugs come mostly from Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Leaders in the
trade are Kosovo Albanians. The port of Batumi is controlled by Adjara,
collaborating with Turks. This was formerly the main port for the transshipment
of the heroin cargoes, until the rise of Sukhumi, from whence drugs are ferried
to the Balkans and other European destinations.
In and around Shkoder, the paramilitary organisations of the
Albanian drug and weapons dealers are equipped with more sophisticated weapons
than the Albanian Army. At present, the Albanian Government seems to be
ignoring the rise of the drug and arms phenomenon, largely because it supports
broader Albanian strategic objectives with regard to Yugoslavia, but there is
some concern that the drug operators will soon -- if they do not already --
pose a problem similar to that which has plagued Colombia. The drug-arms
traffic, coupled with international support for the expatriate Albanian groups
in Kosovo and other parts of the former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, is
seen /by the Albanian leadership as the means to achieving a "greater
Albania". In the absence of a coherent domestic political and economic
plan to transform Albania, geographic expansion is seen by many Albanians as
the key to their future.
US officials are aware of the trade but reportedly ignore it
because many of the weapons traded are going to anti-Serbian groups and the
heroin is going to European markets, not the US. Defense & Foreign
Affairs Strategic Policy has, however, been receiving reports that some US
nationals are becoming involved in the trade in Albania and Macedonia.
* * * *
BBC Summary of World Broadcasts
October 14, 1991, Monday
22. Drugs and weapons seized; murders committed in Kosovo in
January- August
SOURCE: Yugoslav News Agency in Serbo-Croat 1323 gmt 9 Oct 91
Yugoslav News Agency in English 1807 gmt 10 Oct 91
Pristina, 9th October During the first eight months of this year
members of the special militia units of the [Serbian] Ministry of Internal
Affairs [MUP] in Kosovo and Metohija uncovered and seized 13.5 kg of heroin,
854 pistols, 482 rifles, four automatic weapons and the same number of
carbines, 12 bombs and about 11,400 rounds of ammunition of assorted calibres.
According to Obrad Stevanovic, commander of the HQ of special Serbian
MUP militia units, it is mainly members of Albanian nationality who indulge in
drug and weapon smuggling and the assets acquired in this way are used to
finance separatist activity.
According to information by the special units' HQ, the number of
murders among the Albanians for blood feud reasons has recently gone up. During
the first eight months last year 69 murders for blood feud reasons were
committed; during the comparable period this year there were 97 such murders.
(Tanjug in Serbo-Croat 1323 gmt 9 Oct 91)
* * * *
23. IN BALKANS, ARMS FOR DRUGS
By Barry James
The International Herald Tribune, Paris,
June 6, 1994
Albanian groups in Macedonia and Kosovo province in Serbia are
trading heroin for large quantities of weapons for use in a brewing conflict in
Kosovo, according to a report to be published monday by a Paris-based
narcotics-monitoring group.
In recent months, significant quantities of heroin have been
seized in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Greece from traffickers based in
Kosovo's capital, Pristina, as well as the Macedonian capital, Skopje, and the
northern Albanian town of Skodra, the report said.
Italian policemen recently dismantled a major Italian-Macedonian
connection, seizing 40 kilograms of heroin shipped via the Balkans, it said.
It said Albanian traffickers were supplied with heroin and weapons
by Mafia-like groups in Georgia and Armenia. The Albanians then pay for the
supplies by reselling the heroin in the west. The report said the Albanian
dealers also traded directly with Russian soldiers for weapons in exchange for
heroin.
The report was drawn up by the "Observatire
Geopolitique Des Drogues", which said it conducted an investigation
lasting nearly a year. The organization carries out research on behalf of the
European Commission in Brussels, as well as publishing and an annual survey of
the narcotics trade.
Albanian Muslims from a restive minority in independent Macedonia
but make up the bulk of the population in Kosovo. In Kosovo, the Albanians are
repressed by the Serbian army and Serbian nationalists and have been out off
from most economic activities. Nevertheless, the report said, many families
survive with funds euphemistically described as "Swiss."
Kosovo, on the southern frontier of Serbia, is a potential flash
point because of conflicting Serbian and Albanian nationalism and religion.
Although in the minority, the Serbs consider the province part of Greater
Serbia. The drug report said that a large influx of weapons "is fueling
geopolitical hopes and fears," and adding to the power of Albanian Mafia
Godfathers. Albanian leaders, it added, "are inherently in favour of an
uprising in Kosovo."
In Macedonia, about 2,000 U.S. troops are stationed under United
Nations mandate.
In western Europe, particularly in Germany, the Albanian
traffickers compete with Turkish criminals, the report said. They are not so
well known to the police and have forged close links with Georgians and
Armenians, who distrust the Turks.
Abkhazi separatists in northern Georgia have set up yet another
connection for arms and narcotics traffic toward the Balkans, according to the
monitoring organization.
The report said Albanian mafiosi, who wear expensive suits and who
travel ostentatiously in mercedes cars accompanied by bodyguards, have taken
over a floor of one of Skopje's best hotels. It said a suspected heroin
refinery was in operation near the town of Kumanovo in Macedonia.
* * * *
24. The Independent (London)
December 10, 1993, Friday
INTERNATIONAL NEWS PAGE; Page 14
Drug profits fund weapons for Balkans; After
yesterday's disclosures in the 'Independent'
on Europe's heroin trade, Robert Block and Leonard Doyle examine
links with arms smuggling
BYLINE: ROBERT BLOCK and LEONARD DOYLE
WEAPONS are pouring into the Balkans despite an arms embargo,
which the international community doggedly maintains in the belief that it will
prevent the Bosnian war from spreading to other flashpoints in the region.
Some of the weapons are paid for by wealthy expatriates in North
America and Australia. Others are bankrolled with the profits of the heroin
trade to Western Europe. More often, sympathetic governments, including Iran,
fund the purchase of arms.
Some heavy weapons get through the Nato screen to the Balkans, but
the trafficking is mostly in machine-guns, automatic rifles, mortars, grenades
and explosives.
As in most of the 30 present conflicts in the world, light weapons
are the cause of most military and civilian casualties, according to Aaron
Karp, an expert in the way weapons reach insurgent groups. He calculates that
it costs about $ 75m ( pounds 51m) a year to equip a militia army of 10,000
troops with light arms.
Serbia is almost immune to the arms embargo and, says Jane's
Defence Weekly, has completely reconstructed its formidable defence industry.
To get sophisticated equipment, such as the eight Hind helicopters
the Bosnian army recently acquired, requires state sponsorship, arms experts
say, in this case probably Iran. Another Bosnian arms deal linked to Iran
surfaced with the seizure earlier this year of a Panamanian-flagged ship with
surface-to-surface missiles, 25,000 machine-guns and 7 million rounds of
ammunition. The previous year, after a CIA tipoff, an Iranian Boeing 747 at
Zagreb airport was found to be carrying thousands of machine-guns and 40
Iranian volunteers.
The trend towards the use of drug profits to buy weapons for the
Balkans - for present use or stockpiling for future conflicts - first came to
light in 1991 when the Swiss police uncovered a large network of Albanians from
the Serbian province of Kosovo buying semi- automatic weapons in Berne and
Basle with proceeds of heroin sold in Switzerland.
Albanians now control up to 70 per cent of the Swiss heroin market
and there are more than 2,000 Albanians from Kosovo in the country's jails on
drugs- and arms-smuggling charges. Bearing the brunt of Serbian aggression, and
desperately poor, Kosovo's Albanian clans have turned to heroin smuggling to
finance weapons deals, according to European police sources. Recently eight
Albanians, including a Macedonian deputy defence minister of Albanian origin,
were arrested for smuggling arms into Macedonia, sparking fears of the Bosnian
war spreading.
Macedonia's Foreign Minister, Ljubomir Frekovski, has described four
channels through which arms flow - two routes across Bulgaria for weapons bound
for Bosnia and Croatia, one through Thessaloniki in Greece and another through
Albania.
''It is easier to buy a modern machine-gun in the Balkans today
than a Toblerone chocolate bar,'' one expert noted.
Despite the three-year-old arms embargo on all six republics of
the former Yugoslavia, arms - even large weapons such as tanks, fighter planes
and helicopters - have made their way to Bosnia and Croatia from a variety of sources.
These include East European arsenals, Islamic countries, the Italian Mafia and
Russian mobsters.
Most of the arms flowing to the Balkans originate in the bulging
inventories of the old Warsaw Pact. ''But by the time they arrive at their
destinations they are usually covered with the fingerprints of criminals,''
said Daniel Nelson of Old Dominion University in Norfolk Virginia, who has
published a study of the arms trade to former Yugoslavia. He says Russian and
other East European mafias are the middlemen in the trade.
Investigators in Florence, Italy, last summer began prosecuting 43
people on charges of smuggling weapons to and from East Europe, Belgium and
former Yugoslavia. They point to the Mafia's growing links to criminal groups
in arms-rich but cash-poor East European countries.
United Nations sources say the Bosnian army has taken delivery of
at least eight former Warsaw Pact helicopters over the last six months. The
helicopters, based in Zenica, are used to ferry arms, soldiers and the wounded.
By far the biggest beneficiary of the illict arms trade has been
Croatia. Zagreb now boasts at least 16 Russian MI-17 utility helicopters that
it did not possess before the war, and in the past few months, the HVO has
suddenly started flying its own helicopter missions in western Herzegovina.
* * * *
25. Jane's Intelligence Review; February
1, 1995
SECTION: EUROPE; Vol. 7; No. 2; Pg. 68
The 'Balkan Medellin'
BYLINE: Marko Milivojevic
Introduction
The Albanian-dominated region of western Macedonia accounts for a
disproportionate share of the Macedonia's (FYROM) shrinking GDP. This situation
has strengthened Albanophobic sentiments among the ethnic Macedonian majority,
especially as a great deal of revenue is thought to derive from Albanian narco-terrorism
as well as associated gun-running and cross-border smuggling to and from
Albania, Bulgaria and the Kosovo province of Serbia. Although its extent and
forms remain in dispute, this rising Albanian economic power is helping to turn
the Balkans into a hub of criminality.
Albanian Narco-Terrorism
Previously transported to Western Europe through former
Yugoslavia, heroin from Turkey, the Transcaucasus and points further east is
now being increasingly routed to Italy via the Black Sea, Albania, Bulgaria and
Macedonia. This is a development that has strengthened the Albanian mafia which
is now thought to control 70 per cent of the illegal heroin market in Germany
and Switzerland. Closely allied to the powerful Sicilian mafia, the Albanian
associates have also greatly benefitted from the presence of large numbers of
mainly Kosovar Albanians in a number of West European countries; Switzerland
alone now has over 100000 ethnic Albanian residents. As well as providing a
perfect cover for Albanian criminals, this diaspora is also a useful source of
income for racketeers.
Socially organized in extended families bound together in clan
alliances, Kosovar Albanians dominate the Albanian mafia in the southern Balkans.
Other than Kosovo, the Albanian mafia is also active in northern Albania and
western Macedonia. In this context, the so-called 'Balkan Medellin' is made up
of a number of geographically connected border towns, namely Veliki Trnovac and
Blastica in Serbia, Vratnica in Macedonia, and Gostivar in Albania. Further
afield, the Albanian mafia also has a strong presence in: Pristina, the capital
of Kosovo; Skopje, the capital of Macedonia; Shkoder, the second largest city
in Albania and its northern provincial capital; and Durres, Albania's main port
and maritime link to nearby Italy across the Adriatic Sea.
As for heroin processing locally, the Albanian mafia now
reportedly runs at least two secret facilities in Macedonia, which is also the
key regional transportation crossroads for the trans-shipment of heroin from
Bulgaria to Albania. Heroin shipments are thought to be mostly moved overland
by a number of seemingly legitimate international trucking and
freight-forwarding companies in Albania, Bulgaria and Macedonia.
High-level corruption, widespread local poverty, a tradition of
cross-border smuggling and poor policing throughout the region have all aided
the recent rise of the Albanian mafia. In Macedonia, local drug-trafficking is
now out of control, a fact which no doubt explains why the Macedonian police
have recently turned to Italy for assistance in this area of law enforcement.
In this context, the Italian national police mounted a major 10-month joint
operation with their Macedonian counterparts in Skopje in 1993-94. Codenamed
'Macedonia', this operation reportedly involved intensive surveillance of known
Kosovar Albanian drug-traffickers in the Macedonian capital. Here, a joint
Italian-Macedonian police swoop resulted in the seizure of 42 kg of pure heroin
in May 1994. In terms of the quantity of heroin now routinely transiting
Macedonia, however, the Skopje seizure was insignificant. Operationally, larger
seizures of such controlled substances are ultimately dependent on co-operation
from the police in nearby Serbia and Albania. To date, they have proved
remarkably unhelpful.
If left unchecked, this growing Albanian narco-terrorism could
lead to a Colombian syndrome in the southern Balkans, or the emergence of a
situation in which the Albanian mafia becomes powerful enough to control one or
more states in the region. In practical terms, this will involve either Albania
or Macedonia, or both. Politically, this is now being done by channelling
growing foreign exchange (forex) profits from narco-terrorism into local
governments and political parties. In Albania, the ruling Democratic Party (DP)
led by President Sali Berisha is now widely suspected of tacitly tolerating and
even directly profiting from drug-trafficking for wider politico-economic reasons,
namely the financing of secessionist political parties and other groupings in
Kosovo and Macedonia.
In Macedonia, the Party for Democratic Prosperity (PDP) and other
ethnic Albanian political parties, such as the ultra-nationalistic National
Democratic Party (NDP), are almost certainly in receipt of laundered Albanian
forex profits from narco-terrorism. These have also been reportedly used for
the bribing of corrupt Macedonian government officials and police. More
generally, Kosovo and western Macedonia are both suspiciously well endowed in
forex. This can only realistically have come from criminal enterprises, given
the widespread poverty of these two connected areas in the Yugoslav period.
A similar state of affairs exists in nearby Albania, which is not
as poor in forex as its government likes to pretend. In all three cases, this
criminally generated forex is often disguised as emigree remittances; these
totalled over US$500 million in Albania alone in 1993. If Kosovo and Macedonia
are included, then total Albanian forex from narco-terrorism going into the
southern Balkans in 1993 could have been as high as US$1 billion. Other than
buying the Albanian mafia political protection and influence, and a certain
spurious popular legitimacy for its alleged patriotism, this laundered drug
money is now being increasingly used in an associated activity, namely
gun-running among the region's ethnic Albanians.
Balkan Arms Bazaar
Bizarre even by the murky standards of the Balkans, the recent
trial in Skopje of 10 ethnic Albanians charged with 'conspiracy to form
military formations' revealed the extent of illegal gun-running at the highest
levels in Macedonia. Politically, what made this trial significant was the
public standing of some of its defendants. In this context, the then Macedonian
interior minister, Ljubomir Frckovski, ordered the arrest in late 1993 of two
leading members of the PDP, which was in government in Skopje. The two alleged
high-level gun-runners were Midhat Emini, the then president of the PDP, and
Husein Haskaj, the then deputy defence minister in the government of Premier
Branko Crvenkovski. Given the immense political implications of these arrests
and the trial that followed on from them in 1994, Frckovski could only have
acted in the way that he did for the most compelling of reasons.
All of this meant that top PDP leaders were then involved in the
illegal importation of armaments purchased in Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia and the
West. These activities must have involved the local Albanian mafia, which is
itself heavily armed with sophisticated weaponry purchased with the profits
from narco-terrorism. This may have indicated that the PDP and the NDP were
tiring of parliamentary politics in Skopje and preparing other options to
advance their cause, namely an armed uprising of some sort. In the case of the
main ethnic Albanian political party in Macedonia, the PDP, this interpretation
was later given added credence when its formally relatively moderate leadership
was ousted by a radical ultra-nationalist faction in a palace revolution
orchestrated by the DP government in Albania. Significantly, this development
took place just after the public trial of the two top PDP leaders charged with
illegal gun-running.
Currently led by two noted ultra-nationalists, Abdurahman Haliti
and Medhuh Thaci, the PDP can thus no longer be regarded as a purely
constitutional party. In practice, it is also a secret party-militia, tainted
with Albanian narco-terrorist connections. This is even more true of the NDP which
is now close to becoming a terrorist organization. In addition, both these
parties are now also directly controlled by nearby Albania where the SHIK
secret police is known to be heavily implicated in both working with the
Albanian mafia and cross-border gun-running into Macedonia and Kosovo. For all
these reasons, the PDP and the NDP may eventually be formally proscribed by the
Skopje government.
Despite its recent poor performance in the October 1994 elections
(see article on pp 64-67), the VMRO-DPMNE aims to profit from such worsening
inter-ethnic tensions in the future. Already, it is openly advocating the use
of repressive and violent options against the ethnic Albanian minority. In this
context, the VMRO-DPMNE is itself suspected of secretly arming its
ultra-nationalistic membership with the assistance of influential VMRO
irredentist forces in nearby Bulgaria. Sofia has a notorious reputation for
selling armaments to anybody who can pay for them, including virtually all the
parties in the ongoing civil war in the former Yugoslavia.
Regional Sanctions Breaking
Effectively trapped between two stronger anti-Macedonian states,
namely Serbia and Greece, Macedonia has effectively been compelled to break the
trade embargo imposed by the UN against rump Yugoslavia in 1992. In the case of
Serbia, Macedonia was closely bound to it economically during the Yugoslav
period. Breaking all these economic links, as demanded by the UN Security
Council, has proved impossible in practice.
Initially tolerated by the international community, the Macedonian
sanctions-breaking has recently reached significant levels, particularly after
the UN lifted some of its non-economic sanctions against rump Yugoslavia in
1994. For all practical purposes, there is no longer even the pretence of
Macedonian compliance with the UN's sanctions regime against rump Yugoslavia.
Other than Greece, Albania and Bulgaria also reportedly make extensive use of
Macedonia for their own sanctions-breaking activities in relation to rump
Yugoslavia. Economically, it is now an open secret in Skopje that Macedonia
would have completely collapsed long ago had it attempted to avoid such
regional sanctions-busting.
In this context, matters became critical for Macedonia when
Greece, in a move clearly closely co-ordinated with Serbia, imposed an economic
blockade against the country in March 1994. This immediately cut off Macedonia
from the Greek port of Thessaloniki, thereby increasing its economic dependence
on Serbia. The only alternative link to the outside world, via nearby Albania
and Bulgaria, was also uncertain. In the case of Albania, this was mainly due
to a worsening of relations between Skopje and Tirane over the issue of the
ethnic Albanians in western Macedonia.
As regards Bulgaria, there were also political problems, notably
those pertaining to Sofia's ambivalent recognition of Macedonia as a separate
Macedonian state but not as the homeland of a separate Macedonian nation
distinct from Bulgaria. In addition, the main east-west communications routes
to Albania and Bulgaria are very poorly developed, thereby limiting the amount
of freight traffic they can handle.
Politically, this illegal Greco-Serbian economic pressure against
Macedonia has resulted in a more conciliatory stance by the Skopje government
towards Athens and Belgrade. Officials in these capitals would like to see
Macedonia reincorporated into a third and Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.
Domestically, such a scenario is now being made more probable by local
socio-economic collapse and the worsening conflict between the ethnic
Macedonian majority and the ethnic Albanian minority population in western
Macedonia. Longer term, this could conceivably lead to local participation in a
proposed regional anti-Albanian and anti-Muslim 'Orthodox Alliance' between
Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia and Serbia. Already openly advocated by VMRO-DPMNE,
such a scenario would become more probable if Macedonia descends into an
inter-ethnic civil war or outright partition furthered by its stronger and
hostile neighbours.
Marko Milivojevic is member of the Research Unit in South East
European Studies at the University of Bradford, UK.
GRAPHIC: Photograph 1, UN soldiers patrol a queue of vehicles
which are waiting to be checked for embargoed goods prior to entering Serbia
from Macedonia.; (Photograph 2, AP)
* * * *
26. The San Francisco Chronicle
JUNE 10, 1994, FRIDAY, FINAL EDITION
Drugs Paying for Conflict in Europe
Separatists supporting themselves with traffic in narcotics
By Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer
Narcotics smuggling has become a prime source of financing for
civil wars already under way -- or rapidly brewing -- in southern Europe and
the eastern Mediterranean, according to a report issued here this week.
The report, by the Paris-based Observatoire Geopolitique des
Drogues, or Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs, identifies belligerents in the
former Yugoslav republics and Turkey as key players in the region's
accelerating drugs-for-arms traffic.
Albanian nationalists in ethnically tense Macedonia and the
Serbian province of Kosovo have built a vast heroin network, leading from the
opium fields of Pakistan to black-market arms dealers in Switzerland, which
transports up to $ 2 billion worth of the drug annually into the heart of
Europe, the report says.
More than 500 Kosovo or Macedonian Albanians are in prison in
Switzerland for drug- orarms-trafficking offenses, and more than 1,000 others
are under indictment.
The arms are reportedly stockpiled in Kosovo for eventual use
against the Serbian government in Belgrade, which imposed a violent crackdown
on Albanian autonomy advocates in the province five years ago.
For its part, Belgrade is also believed to have engineered arms
purchases for Serb rebels in Bosnia -- sidestepping the U.N. embargo against
the rump Yugoslavia -- with the payoffs it receives for laundering the profits
of Western European drug rings.
Law enforcement authorities in Western Europe have become
increasingly concerned about the trend, which has helped boost growing illicit
drug sales in such countries as Germany and Austria.
''The Serbs have financed a part of the war in ex-Yugoslavia
thanks to counterfeiting, and also through the laundering of drug money
deposited in more than 200 private banks or currency exchange offices,'' German
secret services coordinator Bernd Schmid Bauer declared earlier this year,
after an extensive inquiry into the sources of narcotics entering Germany.
Bauer estimated that $ 1.5 billion in drug profits annually is
being laundered in Serbia.
Vienna Police Commissioner M. Gunter Bogl has gone even further
than Bauer, publicly charging after an official visit to Holland that ''the
drug syndicates in Rotterdam and Amsterdam are playing a dominant role in the
financing of the war.''
Their profits, he said, ''are filling a war chest that is managed
in ex-Yugoslavia by members of the Italian and Russian Mafias,'' he said.
In southeastern Turkey, Kurdish rebels have similarly financed
their uprising against the central government in Ankara through drug
operations, investigators say.
''The growth of (drug) production and trafficking in Turkey also
has its origins in a bloody war -- with more than 10,000 dead since 1984,'' the
report notes.
Last year, the Turkish authorities seized 30 tons of hashish and
2.2 tons of processed heroin in the country, nearly double the figure for 1992.
In Turkey and the former Yugoslav republics alike, the report
suggests, the failure of the United States and Western European governments to
aid suppressed minority groups -- such as the Kurds and the Kosovo Albanians --
has exacerbated the drug problem.
These groups ''have been obliged to find other means of financing
themselves. Drug money is one means,'' the report concludes.
The Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues, which compiles research
from 80 countries, is regarded as Europe's most authoritative monitor of the
international drug economy. Although it operates independently of government
agencies, its efforts are conducted in partnership with several national police
agencies and underwritten by grants from the European Union in Brussels.
Times Newspapers Limited, October 18, 1994
Copyright 1994 Times Newspapers Limited
* * * *
27. The Times
October 18, 1994, Tuesday
Albanian mafias target drug routes
From Tim Judah in Belgrade
FROM the lawless shores of the Black Sea to the placid waters of
Lake Geneva, the ''Albanian connection'' is rapidly establishing itself as a
key new drugs-smuggling route into Western Europe.
Crime syndicates from Kosovo, the southern Serbian province with
an overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian population, have already taken control of 70
per cent of the Swiss heroin market, and police sources across Europe say
Albanian gangs are now second only to Turks in controlling the Balkan routes.
Albanian mafia bosses have been able to take advantage of large
communities of their compatriots in Switzerland and Germany whom they exploit
as couriers. Increasingly these Kosovo drug barons are using Albania as a drug
route. According to the Paris drugs watchdog Observatoire Geopolitique des
Drogues (ODG), they are also using Albanians from Albania by giving them false
Yugoslav passports. With these they can apply for asylum in Germany or
Switzerland, saying they are fleeing Serb repression in Kosovo. Before 1991,
much of the heroin from the ''golden crescent'' countries of Iran, Pakistan and
Afghanistan reached Europe via Turkey and then across Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.
The war cut this route and diverted it northwards. The Albanian mafias are establishing
a new route across Albania and Macedonia, where there is a large ethnic
Albanian population.
A senior source in the Macedonian Interior Ministry confirmed that
a new route is emerging. In 1993 and the first nine months of this year, the
Macedonian police arrested 189 people, mostly ethnic Albanians, on charges
related to drugs trafficking. A big network was also broken up with the help of
the Italian police.
The ODG believes that drug trafficking by Albanian mafias is
directly related to the smuggling of arms for an uprising in Kosovo. There
appears to be little supplementary evidence to support this claim, however.
Genc Pollo, spokesman for President Berisha of Albania, accuses the ODG of
fabrication and exaggeration. He does not deny that there is drugs trafficking
across his country but says: ''The problem is under control.''
* * * *
28. The Washington Post/Houston Chronicle
November 14, 1993, Sunday, 2 STAR Edition
Merchants of death and drugs; Porous borders, Balkan war bring epidemics
of heroin smuggling, arms sales
WILLIAM DROZDIAK; Washington Post
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- More porous borders in Eastern Europe
and the war in Yugoslavia's former republics have spawned an epidemic of drug
smuggling through a half-dozen new routes that are conveying record amounts of
heroin to West European markets, according to U.S. and European investigators.
The alarming rise in heroin traffic has coincided with a jump in
clandestine weapons sales in Europe that officials fear may sustain and
possibly expand the Balkan wars. ""Merchants of death and merchants
of drugs go hand in hand, and never has it been more true than now,'' a senior
European drug intelligence officer said.
The heroin influx is reflected in plummeting street prices here in
Amsterdam, which has long served as a major drug distribution point because of
its accessibility and tolerant culture. Police say heroin that cost as much as
$ 100 a gram a couple of years ago is now being sold for as little as $ 25 a
gram.
The glut of hard drugs is raising fears among police and social
workers about a generation of addicts becoming victims of what Werner Keuth,
head of Austria's central narcotics division, calls ""a United
Nations of drug smugglers involved in the trade into Europe. ''
Powerful Turkish clans that controlled Europe's heroin market now
find their turf being invaded by Russian and East European mafias. These
include Serb, Croat and Albanian criminals who are seeking a slice of the
action and are also sending money -- and in some cases weapons -- back to the
Balkan war zone, police officials say.
According to Pierre Duc, head of the anti-drug force in Lausanne,
Switzerland, ethnic Albanians from the Serbian province of Kosovo have captured
up to 70 percent of the heroin market in Switzerland. About 2,000 Albanians
from Kosovo are being held in Swiss jails on charges of arms and drug
smuggling. ""The situation has gotten out of control,'' Duc said.
When war broke out in the former Yugoslav republic of Croatia two
years ago, Western drug agents hoped the conflict might shatter the Balkan
smuggling route that funneled heroin from the ""Golden Crescent'' --
parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran -- to markets in Western Europe.
For years, Turkish dealers refined opium base from fertile poppy
fields in the Golden Crescent and delivered purified heroin into Western Europe
on trucks plying the E5 highway through Yugoslavia. Breaking the Belgrade link,
officials believed, could dry up overland supplies and force the Turks to take
more vulnerable routes.
Far from constricting the flow of hard drugs, however, wars in
Croatia and later Bosnia have caused new channels to proliferate, mainly
because of lax controls and desperate cash needs in Eastern and Central Europe.
""It's the black side of open borders and political change,'' Keuth
said.
Lausanne's Duc said Kosovo clans have sold heroin and bought
Kalashnikov assault rifles and Uzi submachine guns in Switzerland over the past
three years. He said Swiss police have staunched the weapons purchases but not
drug profiteering by the Albanians.
""We know a lot of money is now leaving Switzerland for
the former Yugoslavia,'' Duc said. ""But we don't know exactly who is
getting it, or where the weapons have ended up. These Albanians in jail rarely
talk with us and seem to be part of a very disciplined mafia. ''
Duc said a few prisoners have spoken of buying arms "for
patriotic reasons'' to defend their people in Kosovo.
Ibrahim Rugova, the pacifist leader of Kosovo's Albanian majority,
says he wants to find a political solution to the province's problems that
would avoid another Balkan war. But European specialists fear the guns acquired
by the Kosovo mafia may foreshadow guerrilla warfare. Hungarian police have
recently intercepted trucks full of small arms that experts believe were bound
for Kosovo.
Alain Labrousse, director of a Paris-based research group that
monitors global drug trafficking, said the Albanians have enlisted assistance
from Serbs in neighboring villages along the Kosovo frontier to help with their
smuggling operations. "It reminds me of the Lebanese civil war, when
Shiites and Sunnis and Maronites were all fighting each other but continued to
cooperate in drug traffic. It shows again that money is more important than war
and ethnic hatred. ''
Investigators say the heroin is shipped from Turkey into Albanian
ports, then overland to small Albanian-populated villages in Serbia such as
Veliki Trnovac.
The Albanian connection, however, is just one of several pipelines
bringing heroin to the West.
Richard Weijenburg, deputy chief of international narcotics
control in the Netherlands, said ""80 to 85 percent'' of the heroin
seized comes from the Balkan route, now fragmented into at least six known
"major canals'' leading to Western markets.
"A big part of the problem is (the) rise of the Slavic mafias
and the lack of law enforcement in the East,'' Weijenburg said. "Police
are not appreciated there because of their role in past communist regimes, and
their salaries are so low that they are easily tempted by corruption. So the
drugs can move freely through those countries. ''
An unprecedented level of cooperation among international police
forces has resulted in a number of major drug seizures. Just last week,
Amsterdam police seized a record 650 pounds of heroin hidden in a truck, and
captured a dozen suspected big-time Turkish smugglers.
* * * *
29. UN, EU Launch $7.6 Anti-Drug Project in Balkans
SOFIA, Feb. 12, 1999 -- (Reuters) The United Nations and the
European Union launched a $7.6 million project on Thursday to combat drug
traffic through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Romania, three countries on the
notorious Balkan route.
"Drug trafficking in Europe is growing. It was realized no
country could defeat it on its own. The only way to stop it is to work
together," Joem Kristensen, U.N. Drug Control Program (UNDCP) senior
program manager, told reporters.
In its first phase the project will include Bulgaria, Macedonia
and Romania, which lie on a drug trafficking route for smuggling heroin and
hashish from southwest Asia, particularly Afghanistan, to Western Europe,
Kristensen said.
Some 80 percent of drugs supplied to Europe originate in
Afghanistan and are mostly smuggled along this route, he said.
Kristensen said the three-year project could later include other
countries in the region, such as Turkey and Yugoslavia.
Kristensen said the war in former Yugoslavia had forced
traffickers to find alternatives to the more direct route through Turkey,
Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia, such as the route via Romania.
"The peace that followed the war in Yugoslavia re-established
the old routes, but previous one still continue to exist, so there are now more
smuggling groups, more routes, and maybe the challenge we are now facing is bigger,"
he said.
"The situation has now become more difficult and we have to
undertake new opportunities to fight drug trafficking."
The project will offer police and customs officials in the three
Balkan states advanced training in profiling techniques and provide them with
modern drug detection equipment and drug-sniffing dogs.
The project also provides for setting up sophisticated criminal
data analysis systems to aid police investigations.
Two thirds of the project's budget will come from the European
Commission while the remainder is expected from UNDCP donors.
According to UNDCP data, an average of more than a tonne of heroin
and over 10 tonnes of hashish are seized along the Balkan route each year.
Bulgaria, which lies between Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and
Romania, seized 220 lbs (100 kg) of heroin last year, compared to 688 lbs (312
kg) in 1997, figures collated by the country's Chief Customs Directorate
showed. ( (c) 1999 Reuters)
* * * *
30. Chronicles (A Magazine of American Culture)
December 1998
"Cultural Revolutions" by Srdja
Trifkovic
KOSOVO ALBANIANS have been well supplied with arms and money. Some
of the support has come from Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East, and
some from the extensive heroin trade controlled by Albanians. More recently, as
Germany's Social Democrats and their Green coalition partners prepared to take
over the reins of government in Bonn, evidence came to light that German secret
services have been instrumental for years in helping the Albanian separatist
movement in Kosovo.
While the government of ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl had officially
backed the Western policy of seeking a negotiated solution (before that policy
gave way to yet another wave of "bomb-the-Serbs" euphoria), the Bonn
government was undermining that policy on the ground. Behind the scenes, German
civil and military intelligence services have been involved in training and
equipping the Kosovo rebels for years. Their objective was to foment armed
rebellion against Serbia and thus strengthen Germany' s autonomous sphere of
influence in the Balkans, where Bonn has conducted a remarkably active policy -
quite independently of its European partners - ever since Yugoslavia started
breaking up almost a decade ago.
Plus ca change, plus la meme chose. Germany's policy in the region
traditionally has been anti-Serb; it remains so today, no less than in 1914 or
1941. In December 1991, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, then-foreign minister of the
Federal Republic, insisted on what the rest of the European Union subsequently
came to regard as the "mistaken and premature" (in the words of Lord
Carrington) recognition of Croatia. It is also noteworthy that the
self-proclaimed government of the Republic of Kosovo is based in Germany, where
approximately 400,000 Kosovo Albanians now live.
According to a report from Paris by Roger Faligot, published in
the "European" (September 21-27), Germany's role in arming the Kosovo
militants has led to a serious rift between the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND),
the German intelligence service, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Faligot quotes French diplomatic sources and General Pierre-Marie Gallois, a
specialist in geopolitics, who maintains that some decision-making circles in
Germany wish to destabilize the Serbs regardless of the consequences for
regional stability: "The Kosovo crisis has initiated a rift between
Germany and the United States. Washington realized that pushing the Kosovo
Albanians towards a military confrontation with Milosevic, as the Germans wanted
to do, would have a boomerang effect on the Balkans. The United States put
pressure on Germany to stop supporting the KLA behind the scenes, as did the
other European countries such as Britain and France."
The founding of the KLA, the armed wing of the Albanian separatist
movement in Kosovo, coincided with the appointment of Hansjoerg Geiger as the
new head of the BND in 1996. One of the first operational decisions was to set
up in Tirana one of the largest BND regional stations. BND operatives
collaborated closely with the top brass of the Shik, the Albanian secret
service and the successor to the notorious communist Sigurimi. The BND men were
in charge of selecting recruits for the KLA command structure from among tens
of thousands of Kosovo Albanians living in Albania. Meanwhile, the BND Rome
bureau provided political intelligence back-up, including recruitment work in
Trieste and Bari, two of the principal entry points into Italy for Albanians.
The German Militaerabschirmdienst (MAD), the intelligence arm of the
military, and special commando units such as the Kommandos Spezialkraefte (KSK)
were involved in training and the provision of uniforms and communications
equipment. Reporters covering Kosovo were surprised to find some KLA fighters
clad in current issue Bundeswehr combat jackets with identifiable German
insignia. The training was subsidized through an Albanian foundation know as
"The Fatherland's Call," with branches in Duesseldorf, Bonn,
Stockholm, Bern, and other European capitals.
These findings were corroborated in a recent German television
documentary program, Monitor (September 24). The network's team of
investigators, Jo Angerer and Volker Happe, have unearthed a wealth of data
proving the link between the KLA and German intelligence services. The report
opened with a shipment of arms seized as they were being smuggled into Kosovo
from Albania, including high-tech Armbrust anti-tank grenade launchers.
"They were developed by the Germany company MBB for the Bundeswehr, and
built in Singapore under German license," the report stated, adding that
Albanian rebels were also using radio communications and military monitoring
equipment of German origin.
Monitor confirmed that immediately after the communist regime in
Tirana collapsed, the BND resident in Tirana was involved in "several
illegal arms supplies" which had been arranged by MAD headquarters in
Cologne. A former MAD official said that the arms supplies were ordered
"by the very top" and that the operation is still treated as strictly
confidential. According to a written statement by another informer involved in
this operation, "In 1990 and 1991, the MAD supplied electronic and optical
monitoring devices and other equipment such as radios to the Albanian
intelligence service. The monitoring equipment came from the former East German
ministry for state security - the Bundeswehr took it over after unification -
and from MAD supplies. MAD officials trained Albanian intelligence service
personnel in Tirana to use this equipment."
Contrary to the expected denials from the Federal Defense
Ministry, BND and MAD sources confirm that members of the Bundeswehr's school
for communications in Bad Ems visited the Albanian capital Tirana on several
occasions, as did member of the MAD in Cologne, to arrange deliveries and
training.
All of this is against the law - both international law, and
Germany's domestic legislation regulating its intelligence agencies, according
to Dr. Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, a Munich-based expert on intelligence-related
questions. It remains to be seen whether the new coalition in Bonn will be less
adventurous in its Balkan policy and more inclined to observe the law of
nations and to pursue consensus- building within Europe.
* * * *
31. Analysis-West
Has Little Leverage Over Kosovo Guerrillas
Reuters 14-FEB-99
PRISTINA, Serbia, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Separatist guerrillas in
Kosovo lie beyond the easy reach of NATO, making it hard for the West to
threaten military consequences if the insurgents reject an autonomy deal on
offer in peace talks.
That's the assessment of western diplomats posted in Kosovo, who
worry about the imbalance between threats to bomb Yugoslavia if the Serbian
side scuttles the peace deal and the lack of an equivalent stick to punish ethnic
Albanian intransigence.
"There's an asymmetry in the talks because so much more
direct military pressure can be brought to bear on Belgrade to force them to
make the deal the West wants," a Western diplomat, who asked not to be
named, told Reuters in Kosovo on Sunday.
"The Serbian side has joined-up forces and a military
infrastructure that NATO can bomb with devastating effect."
"The KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) is everywhere and nowhere,
like any guerrilla force. To attack them you have to attack the civilian
population of which they are a part. The Serbs did that and killed a lot of
civilians. NATO won't make that mistake."
The Kosovo peace talks in Rambouillet, southwest of Paris, entered
their second week on Sunday without agreement.
NATO sabres are being rattled to get Belgrade's attention, as has
happened before with the former Yugoslavia this decade.
But what good would NATO's military might be if the ethnic
Albanians, rather than the Serbs, say "no" at Rambouillet?
What could the West threaten if the KLA refuses to disarm and
settle for autonomy, rather than independence, as the peace deal requires of
them?
A U.S. official said on Saturday in France that if ethnic
Albanians dragged their feet they would be told the international community is
no longer interested in their problem. That was code for warning them not to
expect the West to intervene to save them from Serbian security forces again.
Asked how Western leaders could sustain such a position in the
face of television pictures of slaughtered civilians, one senior American
official said last month:
"We'll just ignore them (the pictures). The 'CNN factor' is
over-rated. It's only when we respond to the pictures that there's a
consequence to them. We create the CNN factor, not CNN or the public or the
warring parties."
The official spoke on January 12. Three days later 45 ethnic
Albanians were shot dead in the village of Racak in what
was immediately described by the ranking international diplomat in Kosovo -- an
American -- as a massacre by Serbian forces.
Television pictures of that alleged massacre produced such an
uproar in the United States and Europe that days later Western officials
ordered Serbians and ethnic Albanians to Rambouillet at the point of a NATO
gun.
The KLA does have pressure points, but they have proved elusive in
the past.
Using NATO troops to seal the border between Kosovo and
neighbouring Albania, over which the guerrillas receive shipments of men, arms
and ammunition, has been much discussed.
But NATO operations in the rugged, lawless mountains of northern
Albania would be expensive, difficult and treacherous, involving interdiction
of not just KLA cadres but of the spectacularly violent criminal gangs who
supply them.
What is more, analysts and observers on the ground report that the
KLA is getting more and more of its weaponry from black market sources inside
Serbia, making cross-border shipments less important than they were even six
months ago.
Since ethnic Albanians make up 90 per cent of Kosovo's two million
people there is no shortage of manpower. The challenge has been training and
equipping fighters, not importing them.
Western officials also discuss freezing and even seizing the bank
accounts through which the ethnic Albanian diaspora funnel money to the KLA.
That would be but a temporary inconvenience since most donations are collected
in hard currencies in cash.
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited.All rights reserved.
* * * *
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 99 10:07:25 EST
32. Subject: [KDN] AFP: Albanian-Americans
help fund the KLA
NEW YORK, Feb 20 (AFP) - Two hundred Albanian men file into a
Brooklyn restaurant, throwing money as they enter at tables manned by men in
traditional white dome Balkan caps. They take a seat in the ballroom-turned
auditorium. They aren't here to eat. They are here to meet Dina, a soldier with
the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
The KLA has grown from villagers toting hunting rifles to a
sizable armed force, with the help of volunteer donations, in large part raised
by New York's Albanian community.
"What do they expect?," Izet, Tafilaj asks. After losing
his aunt, uncle and nephew in the fighting, the 40-year-old sold his real
estate business in New Jersey and is leaving for Kosovo to help refugees.
"If they won't help us, at least let us help ourselves," he said.
The lights go down, and the men bow their heads. A minute of
silence is followed by a video presentation. The butchered mother and child
lying between a pair of leveled homes bring home the reality of Kosovo, the
Yugoslav province quickly eclipsing Bosnia as the Balkan's most violent human
catastrophe.
Speakers are interrupted every few minutes by the young men
breaking out in chant and punching their arms in unison. "Ooh Che Ke. Ooh
Che Ke" (UCK is the Albanian acronym for KLA)
Dina takes the stand. "The time is now," he yells.
"Ooh Che Ke. Ooh Che Ke," "Let's finish the war, then talk
politics."
After three hours of chanting, the room is cleared for a party
being held later that day. Five men remain at one of the tables, each counting
a pile of bills. The total is just over 30,000 dollars.
Manager Agron Qosja thinks it's a small sum, compared to other
meetings, which he holds often. "We all have an obligation to do all we
can," he says evoking a favorite Albanian saying. "Luga Luga e ben
lumin." (Spoon by spoon you build a lake.)
The KLA's guerrilla movement has flourished among these
blue-collar workers, who make up nearly two-thirds of the country's 400,000
Albanian-Americans. Many are recent immigrants, with the strongest family ties
to Kosovo.
For years they supported elected president of Kosovo, Ibrahim
Rugova. But after a well-publicized massacre last March left over 80 people
dead in the town of Drenecia, Rugova's credibility among many
Albanian-Americans took a dive, and the group Homeland is Calling was
officially formed to coordinate fundraising for the army.
Chapters of Homeland in Europe and throughout the world seek to
furnish the KLA with the means to gain independence for Kosovo. "We raise
money here," Florin Krasniqi, 34, says. "They fight over there.
That's how we get rid of the Serbs."
The comptroller of KLA's New York donations, Florin started in
October 1997 to raise money for the KLA after the murder of his cousin Adrian, the
ninth member of this family killed by Serb forces.
He has made over 20 trips to Kosovo in the past year, providing
KLA soldiers with a steady stream of money, radios, night vision equipment and
bullet-proof vests: all, he says, ordered from a catalogue on the open market.
While Homeland's estimate of 10 million dollars raised over the
past year seems exaggerated to increase the KLA's perception of power (military
experts believe it is closer to half that), the fund and equipment coming from
the United States are taken seriously by military analysts.
According to Paul Beaver of Jane's Defence Weekly, a leading
publication on the military industry, the funds pouring in from around the
world are making a difference.
"They have upgraded the war," says Beaver. "It
makes a tremendous difference against the Serbian army."
Florin expresses mild amusement that the US government is watching
his comings and goings. But he finds the system laughably lax enough to
continue unnerved. "They think we are just a bunch of crazy
Albanians," he acknowledges. "But I told (US envoy Richard)
Holbrooke, if you want to go 10 years, we will. Too much blood has been
spilled. We are never going to live side by side with Serbs. Period."
* * * *
33. CTK(Prague) 11 March 1999; Albanian
Drug Lord and confederates arrested
PRAGUE, March 11, 1999 (CTK) -- Prague police have succeeded in
arresting a man alleged to be one of the top bosses of the Kosovo Albanian drug
mafia Princ Dobros [Prince Dobroshi], 35, representatives of Czech and
Norwegian police said today.
The man was arrested outside the Hilton hotel in Prague on
February 23 by a rapid reaction unit of the Czech police. His arrest was the
culmination of an operation of two years called Cage, in which Czech police
cooperated with Swedish, Danish and especially Norwegian police. During the
operation 42 members of the gang led by Dobros were arrested by police in
various countries in Scandinavia and Western Europe. On the same day Dobros's
aide was caught by police in a Prague flat. Dobros's gang was apparently
entrusted with the operation of the so called northern branch of the Balkan
route, by which drugs were smuggled from the Balkans, through the Czech
Republic, and to the Scandinavian countries.
Drugs Squad chief Jiri Komorous said police had evidence that
Dobros had bought weapons from the proceeds. He said there was no proof that
the weapons, which included rocket systems, were bound for Kosovo. Police are
convinced that Dobros's gang was one of the biggest Kosovar Albanian drugs
gangs in Europe. Ninety percent of the heroin bound for Scandinavia travelled
via the Czech Republic, said Komorous. Dobros was sentenced to 14 years in
prison by a Norwegian court in 1994. He managed to escape in January 1997,
however, by bribing one of the guards. He then fled to Croatia, where he
underwent plastic surgery to disguise himself.
Dobros was seized by a Czech Police rapid deployment squad on the
afternoon of February 23 as his car was waiting at a set of traffic lights in
front of Prague's Hotel Hilton. Komorous claimed his officers had acted so
quickly that Dobros was in handcuffs before the lights had changed. Dobros's
right-hand man Limani Murati was arrested at his Prague 4 flat on the same day.
Police seized a machine-gun, a Chinese rifle and a pistol. Dobros will be
extradited to Norway to serve the remainder of his sentence. The Czech
authorities have still to decide whether Murati will be extradited to Norway or
tried in the Czech Republic.
--------------------------------
Subj: Rugova meets with Albanian narco boss in Prague
From Radio B 92, March 12, 1999; Rugova Met with Kosovo-Albanian
Mafia boss
The leader of the Kosovo's Albanian's Ibrahim Rugova, met in
December last year, during his visit to Prague, with the boss of the Kosovo-Albanian
narco-mafia Prince Dobroshi, who was arrested at the end of the last month in
that city [Prague], claims the respectable Czech daily today 'Lidove Novini'
(LN), reports FoNet [independent news agency from Belgrade].
Rugova met Dobroshi during the banquet that followed after he
received the award for peace from the Czech foundation 'A Man in Need', LN
learned from a member of the BIS (Security & Intelligence Agency), who
asked his name not to be mentioned. Rugova's secretary of protocol, Adnan Merovci,
claims, on the other hand, that his boss during his stay in Prague did not meet
any of the Kosovo Albanians who live in Prague.
'Celebration', as he says, 'was attended by several Albanians who
we did not know and who we have never met', he added. When this statement was
presented to LN's sources, they kept their previous position that 'Rugova
really spent time talking to Dobroshi'.
`Celebration,' organized by the Fond close to Czech TV's 'A Man in
Need", was sponsored by, reminds LN, the Fund for the Development of the
Civic Society, with financial aid from the European Union. People who organized
the event did not know that the Mafia boss would take part in that conference.
The daily also claims that according to the anonymous sources from the BIS,
that the weapons that Dobroshi bought from the heroin money went to Kosovo and
into the hands of the illegal KLA.
---end of the translation
* * * *
34. The Philadelphia Inquirer, March
15, 1999
Italy battling a new wave of criminals -- Albanians
Refugees are cutting into the Mafia turf.
By Jeffrey Fleishman
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
MILAN, Italy -- Agim Gashi left his family's crime business in
Kosovo, Yugoslavia, in 1992 and ended up in this fashion mecca, where police
say he became a boss in prostitution and heroin rings stretching from the ports
of Albania to the poppy fields of Turkey.
He is one of hundreds of Balkan bad guys -- mainly ethnic
Albanians -- reportedly moving onto turf long controlled by the Italian Mafia.
Most of Gashi's illicit profits fueled criminal enterprises across Europe. But
some, according to Western drug-enforcement agencies, were siphoned off to buy
night-vision glasses, Kalashnikovs and bullet-proof vests for the Kosovo
Liberation Army's war against Yugoslav troops.
Gashi's crook-and-patriot tale will unfold this month in a Milan
courtroom. He is charged with conspiracy and trafficking in hundreds of
millions of dollars' worth of heroin. Italian authorities say Gashi -- arrested
last fall in an international bust -- represents Milan's newest scourge:
well-armed and ruthless Albanian thugs.
"The Albanian criminals were special from the
beginning," said Francesca
Marcelli, an organized-crime investigator for the Italian
government. "When they started appearing here in 1993, they were much
different than other immigrants. They have strong motivations and are very
violent.
Some of them actually pulled machine guns on the son of an Italian
Mafioso. "To do that in Italy is unbelievable."
It is that kind of tenacity, according to Italian officials, that
allowed Albanians to wrest a slice of the heroin-trafficking network in Europe
from the Turks and Kurds. It has also gained them respect among the stronger
Italian Mafia gangs, who now collaborate with Albanians on everything from
numbers running to smuggling refugees.
Crime in Milan is daily punctuated by the big and small deeds of
Albanian gangs. Police recently broke up a child-slavery ring run from an
abandoned warehouse. Crime bosses had bought 20 children for $1,000 each from
their parents in Albania. The children, according to police, were hustled onto
rubber rafts and whisked to Italy, where they were beaten and forced to work
petty street scams, turning over earnings to their masters. "It's
unrefined criminality and it's brutal," said Massimo Mazza, a Milan police
commander.
The Albanian criminals prowling Milan have their roots in Albania
and the neighboring Yugoslav province of Kosovo. They are poor places with few
opportunities, and for generations, men left their families to work across
Europe and send money home. Many of the one million-strong diaspora found jobs
such as bricklayers, waiters and laborers. Others dabbled in stolen cars, petty
thievery and prostitution.
The tenor grew more desperate in the early 1990s as communism
collapsed and the region spiraled into lawlessness. In 1997, Albania, the
poorest country in Europe, erupted into nationwide riots over failed pyramid
schemes that bankrupted most families. Thousands of citizens stormed police
stations and looted one million guns. The ensuing chaos fed Albania's criminal
gangs. They were already expanding across the continent while at home the
corrupt regime of President Sali Berisha permitted drug trafficking to
flourish.
In neighboring Yugoslavia, ethnic Albanian crime families were
also looking to widen their drug, prostitution and weapons-smuggling rings.
Some clans, including Gashi's, dispatched their lieutenants to countries such
as Italy, Germany and Slovakia. Their criminal endeavors, according to Italian
police and prosecutors, would eventually intersect with activities of the KLA,
whose guerrillas have fought since 1998 for independence for Kosovo's 1.8
million ethnic Albanians.
Police say some Albanian crime clans, although primarily motivated
by personal greed, also funneled money and supplies to the rebels.
"When the war started in Kosovo, we noticed that some of the
Kosovar crime gangs in Italy, who were only interested in drug trafficking,
suddenly became interested in running weapons," said Carlo De Donno, a
major with the special Carabinieri undercover police forces.
De Donno's unit headed a two-year investigation, including
extensive wiretaps, on a heroin-smuggling network that led to the arrest of
Gashi and 124 other Albanians, Italians, Germans, Tunisians, Spaniards and
Turks over several days last fall.
"Turkish [drug] trafficking groups are using Albanians,
Yugoslavs and elements of criminal groups from Kosovo to sell and distribute
their heroin," according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
office in Rome. "These groups are believed to be a part of the financial
arm of the [KLA's] war against Serbia. These Kosovars are financing their war
through drug trafficking activities, weapons trafficking and the trafficking of
other illegal goods as well as contributions of their countrymen working
abroad."
But war was years away on Jan. 22, 1992. That is when Gashi, whose
clan in Pristina, Kosovo, ran a drug-running business fronted by beauty salons
and real estate offices, arrived in Italy. He married an Italian woman and
settled in Bisceglie, a neighborhood controlled by the Calabria Mafia on the
outskirts of Milan. Other Albanians eventually followed, many crossing the
Adriatic Sea in rubber rafts with kilos of marijuana wrapped in plastic. They
joined a population of about 100,000 illegal immigrants entering northern Italy
in recent years from Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans.
"What really impressed us was Gashi's rapport with the
Ndrangheta [ the Calabria Mafia ] ," De Donno said. "He was a
foreigner, but he stayed on very good terms with them. Gashi began buying
drugs, and his market widened. He was much like the Turkish criminals who moved
into Milan in the 1980s."
But Gashi did not limit himself to Italy, according to police and
prosecutors. He opened a beauty salon in London to launder money and had
interests in Hungary, Germany and Norway, said De Donno, adding that
authorities from each of these countries cooperated in his investigation. As Gashi
was expanding his enterprises in the mid-1990s, other Albanian names began
appearing on Milan's police blotters.
Two of them were Kosovar brothers Adem and Avni Igrhista, who in
1995 began a shipping business with the cover of importing nuts and cotton T-shirts
from Turkey.
"Hidden inside their imported crates were packets of
heroin," said Marcelli, the Italian investigator. "This case showed
us that the Albanians were becoming stronger. For example, the brothers used
Italians as their runners to pick up the crates at Leonardo da Vinci Airport [
in Rome ] . Before, it was the Albanians who were the runners."
Authorities say Gashi controlled Milan's most powerful Albanian
gang and stayed connected to Ekrem Gashi, another relative of the Gashi clan in
Kosovo. Ekrem, who ran drugs throughout the Balkans, was murdered two weeks ago
when several men brandishing Kalashnikovs sprayed his Mercedes with bullets in
front of a Pristina cafe. Police say the murder was ordered by a rival clan.
Special undercover police forces and court records say Agim Gashi
was part of a network that operated like this: Albanians acquired heroin and
cocaine from clans inside Turkey. The cache would move west to the capitals of
Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary. From there it was dispersed into smaller
amounts and sent across Europe by couriers -- mostly Germans driving BMWs and
Mercedeses.
"Every day cars with 10 to 15 kilos [ 22 to 33 pounds ] of
heroin would cross the border into Italy," De Donno said. Much of the
heroin fell under the domain of the Ndrangheta and other Italian gangs.
Cooperation between small Albanian gangs and the powerful Italian Mafia has run
smoothly, but some investigators say the Albanians' penchant for control may
upset things.
"What we're seeing now," said Maurizio Romanelli, an
anti-Mafia prosecutor, "is North Africans and other immigrants selling
heroin on the street for Albanian bosses. It shows a hierarchy is developing
among the immigrants."
The Albanians have been fighting among themselves over the last
two years for larger shares of the drug and prostitution markets. In August
1997, Albanian boss Naim Zyberi was killed execution-style.
Zyberi, who ran drug and extortion rackets in the Albanian
capital, Tirana, had come to Milan to get a stake in the heroin trade. "He
tried to impose his rules, but the clans opposed him, so he tried to find his
own gang," homicide detective Nicola Lupidi said. "He then went to
another Albanian group and stole 50 million lire [ $28,100 ] The group came
after him, and there was a shoot-out. Zyberi was shot in the leg and taken to a
hospital. Days later, two hit men were sent from Albania and they finished him
off in his hospital bed."
"It was amazing," investigator Marcelli said. "Like
something out of a Scorsese movie." By the spring of last year, however,
the battles among the Albanian clans cooled when they united behind -- and took
advantage of -- the KLA's war against the Serb forces in Yugoslavia. When the
war began 13 months ago, many KLA rebels carried only single-shot rifles. They
are armed today with everything from satellite phones to antitank weapons.
"When the war started, these feuding clans came
together," De Donno said. "They became unified. All they ever talked
about was weapons and money. They were very interested in night-vision glasses
and bulletproof vests. All the things you'd need to fight a guerrilla war. . .
. Some of them were even motivated by patriotism."
Gashi was sending money and materials back to Kosovo for other
endeavors, too. "He built a big villa in Pristina," De Donno said.
"All the marble and stone was imported directly from Italy."
© 1998 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.
* * * *
35. The Times: Drugs Money Linked to Kosovo Rebels
The Times of London
March 24 1999
The KLA Drugs money linked to the Kosovo rebels
FROM ROGER BOYES AND ESKE WRIGHT IN BONN
THE Kosovo Liberation Army, which has won the support of the West
for its guerrilla struggle against the heavy armour of the Serbs, is a
Marxist-led force funded by dubious sources, including drug money.
That is the judgment of senior police officers across Europe. An
investigation by The Times has established that police forces in three Western
European countries, together with Europol, the European police authority, are
separately investigating growing evidence that drug money is funding the KLA's
leap from obscurity to power.
The financing of the Kosovo guerrilla war poses critical questions
and it sorely tests claims to an "ethical" foreign policy. Should the
West back a guerrilla army that appears to be partly financed by organised
crime? Could the KLA's need for funds be fuelling the heroin trade across
Europe?
The KLA has become an essential component of the Kosovo peace
agreement; without it, there would be no equal negotiating partner for the
Belgrade Government.
In military terms, it is in no sense equal to the Serb forces. But
it has grown from a theoretical notion to an often successful, very mobile and
very visible guerrilla grouping in a remarkably short time.
Much of the money funding the KLA is believed to come from
legitimate sources - raised by the People's Movement of Kosovo, which is the
political wing of the resistance movement. There are about 500,000 Kosovan
Albanians in Western Europe who send money back home because it funds
healthcare for their cousins. However, some of this cash is believed to be
siphoned off for the military.
As well as diverting charit-able donations from exiled Kosovans,
some of the KLA money is thought to come from drug dealing.
Sweden is investigating suspicions of a KLA drug connection.
"We have intelligence leading us to believe that there could be a
connection between drug money and the Kosovo Liberation Army," said Walter
Kege, head of the drug enforcement unit in the Swedish police intelligence
service.
Supporting intelligence has come from other states. "We have
yet to find direct evidence, but our experience tells us that the channels for
trading hard drugs are also used for weapons," said one Swiss police
commander.
An official in the Bavarian Interior Ministry also told The Times
of a recent fundraising meeting involving some 200 Kosovans in southern
Germany. "At the end of the session they raised DM100,000 [about
£40,000]."
This represents a huge sum for ordinary Kosovans and fuels
speculation that apparently legitimate fundraising activities are used to
launder dirty money.
One Western intelligence report quoted by Berliner Zeitung says
that DM900 million has reached Kosovo since the guerrillas began operations and
half the sum is said to be illegal drug money.
In particular, European countries are investigating the Albanian
connection: whether Kosovan Albanians living primarily in Germany and
Switzerland are creaming off the profits from inner-city heroin dealing and
sending the cash to the KLA.
Albania - which plays a key role in channelling money to the
Kosovans - is at the hub of Europe's drug trade. An intelligence report which
was prepared by Germany's Federal Criminal Agency concluded: "Ethnic
Albanians are now the most prominent group in the distribution of heroin in
Western consumer countries."
Europol, which is based in The Hague, is preparing a report for
European interior and justice ministers on a connection between the KLA and
Albanian drug gangs.
Police in the Czech Republic recently tracked down a Kosovo
Albanian drug dealer named Doboshi who had escaped from a Norwegian prison
where he was serving 12 years for heroin trading. A raid on Doboshi's apartment
turned up documents linking him with arms purchases for the KLA.
Police sources in Germany have made plain their suspicions: the
sudden ascendancy of Kosovan Albanians in the heroin trade in Switzerland,
Germany and Scandinavia coincides with the sudden growth of the KLA from a
ragamuffin peasants' army two years ago to a 30,000-strong force equipped with
grenade launchers, anti-tank weapons and AK47s.
* * * *
36. "KLA Funding Tied To Heroin Profits"
By Jerry Seper, The Washington Times
Washington Times, May 3, 1999, Pg. 1
The Kosovo Liberation Army, which the Clinton administration has
embraced and some members of Congress want to arm as part of the NATO bombing
campaign, is a terrorist organization that has financed much of its war effort
with profits from the sale of heroin.
Recently obtained intelligence documents show that drug agents in
five countries, including the United States, believe the KLA has aligned itself
with an extensive organized crime network centered in Albania that smuggles
heroin and some cocaine to buyers throughout Western Europe and, to a lesser
extent, the United States.
The documents tie members of the Albanian Mafia to a drug
smuggling cartel based in Kosovo's provincial capital, Pristina. The cartel is
manned by ethic Albanians who are members of the Kosovo National Front, whose
armed wing is the KLA. The documents show it is one of the most powerful heroin
smuggling organizations in the world, with much of its profits being diverted
to the KLA to buy weapons.
The clandestine movement of drugs over a collection of land and
sea routes from Turkey through Bulgaria, Greece and Yugoslavia to Western
Europe and elsewhere is so frequent and massive that intelligence officials
have dubbed the circuit the "Balkan Route." Mr. Clinton has committed
air power and is considering the use of ground troops to support the Kosovo
rebels against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Last week, Sen. Mitch
McConnell, Kentucky Republican, and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, Connecticut
Democrat, called on the United States to arm the KLA so ethnic Albanians in
Kosovo could defend themselves against the Serbs.
Mr. McConnell and Mr. Lieberman introduced a bill that would
provide $25 million to equip 10,000 men or 10 battalions with small arms and anti-tank
weapons for up to 18 months. In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA
-- formally known as the Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves, or UCK -- as an
international terrorist organization, saying it had bankrolled its operations
with proceeds from the international heroin trade and from loans from known
terrorists like Osama bin Laden.
"They were terrorists in 1998 and now, because of politics,
they're freedom fighters," said one top drug official who asked not to be
identified.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, in a recent report, said
the heroin is smuggled along the Balkan Route in cars, trucks and boats
initially to Austria, Germany and Italy, where it is routed to eager buyers in
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Great
Britain. Some of the white powder, the DEA report said, finds its way to the
United States.
The DEA report, prepared for the National Narcotics Intelligence
Consumer's Committee (NNICC), said a majority of the heroin seized in Europe is
transported over the Balkan Route. It said drug smuggling organizations
composed of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians were considered "second only to
Turkish gangs as the predominant heroin smugglers along the Balkan Route."
The NNICC is a coalition of federal agencies involved in the war on drugs.
"Kosovo traffickers were noted for their use of violence and
for their involvement in international weapons trafficking," the DEA
report said.
A separate DEA document, written last month by U.S. drug agents in
Austria, said that while the war in the former Yugoslavia had reduced the drug
flow to Western Europe along the Balkan Route, new land routes have opened
across Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The report said, however, the
diversion appeared to be only temporary. The DEA estimated that between four
and six metric tons of heroin leaves each month from Turkey bound for Western
Europe, the bulk of it traveling over the Balkan Route.
A second high-ranking U.S. drug official, who also requested
anonymity, said government and police corruption in Kosovo, along with
widespread poverty throughout the region, had contributed to an increase in
heroin trafficking by the KLA and other ethnic Albanians. The official said
drug smuggling is "out of control" and little is being done by
neighboring states to get a handle on it. "This is the definition of the
wild, wild West," said the official. "The bombing has slowed it down,
but has not brought it to a halt. And, eventually, it will pick up where it left
off." The heroin trade along the Balkan Route has been of concern to
several countries:
*The Greek representative of Interpol reported in 1998 that
Kosovo's ethnic Albanians were "the primary sources of supply for cocaine
and heroin in that country."
*Intelligence officials in France said in a recent report the KLA
was among several organizations in southern Europe that had built a vast
drug-smuggling network. France's Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs said in the
report that the KLA was a key player in the rapidly expanding drugs-for-arms
business and helped transport $2 billion worth of drugs annually into Western
Europe.
*German drug agents have estimated that $1.5 billion in drug
profits is laundered annually by Kosovo smugglers, through as many as 200
private banks or currency-exchange offices. They noted in a recent report that
ethnic Albanians had established one of the most prominent drug smuggling
organizations in Europe.
Jane's Intelligence Review estimated in March that drug sales
could have netted the KLA profits in the "high tens of millions of
dollars." The highly regarded British-based journal noted at the time that
the KLA had rearmed itself for a spring offensive with the aid of drug money,
along with donations from Albanians in Western Europe and the United States.
Several leading intelligence officials said the KLA has, in part,
financed its purchase of AK-47s, semiautomatic rifles, shotguns, handguns,
grenade launchers, ammunition, artillery shells, explosives, detonators and
anti-personnel mines through drug profits -- cash laundered through banks in
Italy, Germany and Switzerland. They also said KLA rebels have paid for weapons
using the heroin itself as currency. The profits, according to the officials,
also have been used to purchase anti-aircraft and anti-armor rockets, along
with electronic surveillance equipment.
* * * *
The London Telegraph, May 5,
1999
37, Money Laundering: MI6 "Investigates" Crime Links to
KLA
THE secret support network across Europe and America providing
help to the Kosovo Liberation Army is being investigated by MI6 and other
intelligence agencies after allegations that organised crime plays a central
role.
Most of the investigation work has been focused on Switzerland
where the KLA is known to have set up a complex network of accounts to channel
funds raised from the Albanian and Kosovar diaspora. Some accounts have been
found to breach Swiss banking standards and have been closed down.
Support comes from shadowy groups known mainly by their acronyms.
The KLA is supported by the LPK and LNCK but challenged by the LDK and
tolerated by the LBD, formed out of the LDS. Each group has a clear interest in
the future of Kosovo and there is intense rivalry as they try to build large
fighting funds to help to pay for the political battle that will follow the
war.
It is not known whether links with organised crime were proven and
some accounts were found to be legal. The investigations have forced the KLA to
be even more cunning in concealing its financial trail.
The investigations were launched after repeated accusations,
mainly from Belgrade, that the KLA was funded largely by organised crime
including drugs trafficking and the smuggling of non-Europeans into the EU.
Belgrade repeatedly said the KLA was a terrorist organisation with similarities
to the IRA, which has criminal backers.
The West's attitude is equivocal. State Department spokesmen are
holding back from giving absolute backing to the KLA. Current investigations
will go a long way to establishing whether the KLA is a genuine, popular
freedom fighting group or a front for criminals.
Since Albania's Cold War isolation ended in 1991, the country's
large and rapidly growing diaspora has begun to challenge the Sicilian Mafia
for control of large-scale crime in the West. While it is true that Albanian
criminals are proliferating in some parts of the West, the connection between
them and the KLA is not so clear, notwithstanding Belgrade's propaganda.
What the Western agencies, including the Secret Intelligence
Service, have found is a sophisticated network of accounts and companies set up
to process funds that the KLA says were raised legally as voluntary
contributions from supporters in the ethnic Albanian diaspora. Western
investigators first had to distinguish between funds raised for the KLA and
funds raised for rival Kosovo support groups.
The KLA's precursor was a secretive party known as the Popular
Movement for Kosovo (LPK) set up in Germany after the 1982 assassination of
three Kosovar Albanians in Bonn. The LPK was known to have Marxist-Leninist
pretences in the early days but those are believed to have been diluted since
the armed struggle began on a large scale last year with the KLA appearing in
uniform in Kosovo.
The KLA's main rival was the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK),
the party of Ibrahim Rugova, which stood on a ticket of peaceful, Gandhi-style,
non co-operation in Kosovo. The LDK is more politically sophisticated and in
1992 it organised what it called free and fair elections in Kosovo, still
subject to strict Serb control, and elected a government which was forced to
operate in exile in western Europe. Kosovars were encouraged to provide funds
for the LDK through voluntary donations.
The KLA soon learnt the same trick and letters went round to the
Kosovar diaspora asking for funds. Some of the methods of persuasion were
believed to be erring on the strong side.
* * * *
The London Times; July 24 1999 BALKANS
38. Kosovo is Mafia's 'heroin gateway to West'
FROM EVE-ANN PRENTICE IN BELGRADE
THE Kosovo conflict has turned the province into a magnet for many
of the world's notorious drug barons, according to a director of the
International Narcotics Enforcement Officers' Association.
More than 40 per cent of the heroin reaching Western Europe comes
through the Serb province because of a lack of border controls, says Marko
Nicovic.
"Kosovo is now the Colombia of Europe. There is no border
between Kosovo and Albania or between Macedonia and Kosovo," he said
yesterday. "For the Turkish, Russian, Italian and Albanian mafias,"
Kosovo really had become a paradise.
Mr Nicovic is a former Belgrade police chief and drug squad
detective who worked for years in co-operation with police in Britain and the
US. He says he began to notice Albanian gangs dealing in drugs in the
mid-1980s.
Heroin trafficking increased, he says, after Yugoslavia lost its
membership of Interpol with the imposition of international sanctions in 1993.
"Our police had great expertise and experience with this," Mr Nicovic
says. The Kosovo conflict has left the province without police or customs
controls and "Kfor soldiers are not criminal investigators".
Mr Nicovic said drugs were being brought into Kosovo from Asia and
Turkey, then taken on to Western Europe by road and sea by drug barons from
Italy and Albania.
Mr Nicovic says many Kosovo Albanians have bought harbourside
sites in Albania in the past few years. Much of the heroin shipped from there
to small ports in southeastern Italy are run by Italian Mafiosi. Other
favourite routes are by road, north through Serbia to Hungary, the Czech
Republic and Germany, he says.
The former Yugoslav drugs squad chief says the Albanian drugs and
arms mafia is particularly hard to penetrate. Albanians have strong family ties
and it is hard to find informers. "They have a brotherhood which gives
them a far greater ability to form a mafia than even the Sicilians."
Mr Nicovic says hundreds of pounds of heroin are being stored in
the village of Veliki Trnovac, near Gnjiliane, in the southeast of Kosovo, and
Djakovica in the west. "The criminals have found the one country between
Asia and Europe which is not a member of Interpol," he says.
"This is a cancer area for Europe as Western Europe will very
soon discover. As each day passes the Albanian mafia becomes richer and more
powerful."
http://www.siri-us.com/backgrounders/Archives_Kosovo/KLA-Drugs.html