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-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: KLA in the news
Date: 05-May-99 at 19:42
From: INTERNET:jeffsnap.com, INTERNET:jeffsnap.com
TO: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK,INTERNET:wsnsf.colorado.edu
Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
I think that this article offers some interesting information not often
brought up this early or by a major, mainstream news source.
This was published in today's San Francisco (CA) Chronicle.
KLA Linked To Enormous Heroin Trade
Police suspect drugs helped finance revolt
Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 5, 1999
Officers of the Kosovo Liberation Army and their
backers, according to law enforcement authorities in
Western Europe and the United States, are a major force in
international organized crime, moving staggering amounts of
narcotics
through an underworld network that reaches into
the heart of Europe.
In the words of a November 1997 statement issued
by Interpol, the international police agency,
``Kosovo Albanians hold the largest share of the
heroin market in Switzerland, in Austria, in Belgium,
in Germany, in Hungary, in the Czech Republic, in
Norway and in Sweden.''
That the Albanians of Kosovo are victims of a
conscious, ethnic- cleansing campaign set in motion
by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is clear.
But the credentials of some who claim to represent
them are profoundly disturbing, say highly placed
sources on both sides of the Atlantic.
On March 25 -- the day after NATO's
bombardment of Serb forces began -- drug
enforcement experts from the Hague-based
European Office of Police (EUROPOL), met in an
emergency closed session devoted to ``Kosovar
Narcotics Trafficking Networks.''
EUROPOL is preparing an extensive report for
European justice and interior ministers on the
KLA's role in heroin smuggling. Independent
investigations of the charges are also under way in
Sweden, Germany and Switzerland.
``We have intelligence leading us to believe that
there could be a connection between drug money
and the Kosovo Liberation Army,'' Walter Kege,
head of the drug enforcement unit in the Swedish
police intelligence service, told the London Times in
late March.
As long as four years ago, U.S. officials were
concerned about alleged ties between narcotics
syndicates and the People's Movement of Kosovo,
a dissident political organization founded in 1982
that is now the KLA's political wing.
A 1995 advisory by the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration warned of the possibility ``that
certain members of the ethnic Albanian community
in the Serbian region of Kosovo have turned to drug
trafficking in order to finance their separatist
activities.''
If the drug-running allegations against the KLA are
accurate, the group could join a rogues' gallery of
former U.S. allies whose interests outside the
battlefield brought deep embarrassment and
domestic political turmoil to Washington.
In 1944, the invading U.S. Army handed the reins
of power in Sicily to local ``anti-fascists'' who were
in fact Mafia leaders. During the next half century,
American governments also turned a blind eye to,
or collaborated with, the narcotics operations of
Southeast Asian drug lords and Nicaraguan Contras
who were allied with the United States in Indochina
and Central America.
In each case, the legacy of these partnerships
ranged from global expansion of the power wielded
by criminal syndicates, to divisive congressional
inquiries at home and lasting suspicion of American
intentions overseas.
The involvement of ethnic Albanians in the drug
trade is not exclusively Kosovar. It includes
members of Albanian communities in Europe's three
poorest countries or regions -- Kosovo, Macedonia
and Albania -- where the appeal of narcotics
trafficking is self-explanatory, even without a
separatist war to fund.
The average 1997 monthly salary in all three
communities was less than $200. In Albania, it was
less than $50.
According to the Paris-based Geopolitical Drug
Watch, which advises the governments of Britain
and France on illegal narcotics operations, one
kilogram (2.2 pounds) of heroin costs $8,300 in
Albania, which lies at the western terminus of a
``Balkan Route'' that today accounts for up to 90
percent of the drug's exports to Europe from
Southeast Asia and Turkey.
Across the border from Albania in Greece, the
same kilo of heroin can be sold for $30,000,
yielding an instant profit equal to nine years' normal
income in Macedonia and more than a third of a
century in Albania or prebombardment Kosovo.
The Balkan Route is a principal thoroughfare for an
illicit drug traffic worth $400 billion annually,
according to Interpol.
Although only a small number of ethnic Albanian
clans profit directly from the trade, their activities
have cast a dark shadow on the entire Albanian
world.
There is a growing tendency among foreign
observers, says former Albanian President Sali
Berisha, ``to identify the criminal with the honest,
the vandal with the civilized, the mafiosi with the
nation.''
Those ethnic Albanians who have embraced the
narcotics trade are extraordinarily aggressive.
Albanian speakers comprise roughly 1 percent of
Europe's 510 million people. In 1997, according to
Interpol, they made up 14 percent of all European
arrests for heroin trafficking.
The average quantity of heroin confiscated per
arrest, among all offenders, was less than two
grams. Among Albanian-speakers, the figure was
120 grams (4.2 ounces).
Until the war intervened, Kosovars were the
acknowledged masters of the trade, credited with
shoving aside the Turkish gangs that had long
dominated narcotics trafficking along the Balkan
Route, and effectively directing the ethnic Albanian
network.
Kosovar bosses ``orchestrated the traffic, regulated
the rate and set the prices,'' according to journalist
Leonardo Coen, who covers racketeering and
organized crime in the Balkans for the Italian daily
La Repubblica.
``The Kosovars had a 10-year head start on their
cousins across the border, simply because their
Yugoslav passports allowed them to travel earlier
and much more widely than someone from
communist Albania,'' said Michel Koutouzis, a
senior researcher at Geopolitical Drug Watch who
is regarded as Europe's leading expert on the
Balkan Route.
``That allowed them to establish very efficient
overseas networks through the worldwide Albanian
diaspora -- and in the process, to forge ties with
other underworld groups involved in the heroin
trade, such as Chinese triads in Vancouver and
Vietnamese in Australia,'' Koutouzis told The
Chronicle.
On assignments in Kosovo and Macedonia
between 1992 and 1996, a Chronicle reporter
frequently encountered groups of ethnic Albanian
men -- ostentatiously dressed in designer clothing
and driving luxury cars far beyond the normal means
of their community -- at restaurants in the
Macedonian capital of Skopje and near the Kosovo
frontier.
The men were quite willing to speak about politics,
confirming that they were Kosovar, and asserting
their determination to bring down Milosevic. But
when asked how they earned their livings, they
uniformly answered ``in business,'' declining to
provide any details.
The rise of Kosovar bosses to the pinnacle of the
drug trade -- and the sudden, simultaneous
appearance of the KLA -- dates from 1997, when
the Berisha government fell in Albania amid
nationwide rioting over a collapsed financial
pyramid scheme that destroyed the savings of
millions and wrecked the economy. In the
unchecked looting that followed, the nation's
armories were emptied of weapons, explosives and
ammunition.
In June 1997, Berisha was succeeded as president
by Rexhep Mejdani, who unlike Berisha was openly
sympathetic to a separatist rebellion in Kosovo.
Last year, a NATO official in Brussels quoted by
Radio Free Europe cited intelligence findings of
``the wholesale transfer of weapons to Kosovo'' in
1997, destabilizing the precarious balance between
ethnic Albanians and Serbs in the province and
undercutting the position of pacifist Kosovo leader
Ibrahim Rugova in autonomy negotiations with
Belgrade.
A U.N. study found that at least 200,000
Kalashnikov automatic assault weapons stolen from
Albanian military armories wound up in the KLA
arsenal. So many, according to reliable sources, that
KLA operatives were themselves exporting guns to
overseas black markets at the start of 1999.
In effect, the KLA's armed insurgency, escalating at
a time when U.S. and Western European diplomats
were seeking a peaceful solution to the crisis,
provided a pretext for Milosevic to press for a
nationalist solution to the Kosovo problem.
Then came the failed Rambouillet talks, the NATO
bombing decision, and with it what Koutouzis calls
``the militarization'' of the Kosovar drug trade.
``Narcotics trafficking has been a permanent part of
the Kosovo picture for a long time. The question is
where the profits go,'' Koutouzis said.
``When Rugova held sway and the object was a
peaceful settlement, the drug proceeds of Kosovo
clans were at least invested in growth, in things like
better housing and health care. It was a form of
social taxation in a sense, and the more illegal the
activities, the more that their `businessmen' were
expected to pay.''
But with the outbreak of war, Koutouzis adds, ``the
investment is only in destruction -- and the KLA's
first effort was to destroy the influence of Rugova,
and no one in the West did much to help him.''
Nonetheless, NATO military officers and diplomats
have always been troubled by the murky origins and
financing of the KLA, which materialized for the first
time in Kosovo on Nov. 28, 1997, outfitted in
expensive Swiss-manufactured uniforms and
equipped with the purloined Albanian Kalashnikovs.
The mistrust is reciprocated. According to Veton
Surroi, the widely respected editor of Kosovo's
Albanian-language daily newspaper Koha Ditore,
U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke had a
Kalashnikov held to his head when he arrived for a
meeting with KLA officers during one of his shuttle
missions to Kosovo.
As recently as February 25, U.S. Ambassador
Chris Hill, another of the negotiators, said, ``The
KLA must understand that its members have a
future as members of political parties or local police
forces, but not in the continuation of armed
struggle.''
The eruption of war changed almost everything.
Since the bombing campaign opened, NATO has
had little alternative but to rely on the KLA for
intelligence. Its guerrilla units inside Kosovo are the
only eyewitness sources of information on Serb
troop movements.
Solid intelligence about the KLA itself is nearly
impossible to nail down. NATO estimates put its
forces at 15,000. Avdija Ramadom, the
organization's official spokesman, claims that the
KLA has more than 50,000 men.
In addition to alleged drug receipts, the group is
said to be funded by a war tax of 3 percent
imposed by the People's Movement of Kosovo on
the earnings of 500,000 ethnic Albanian emigrants
in Western Europe, a population that is soaring with
the immense exodus of refugees. Half of the prewar
immigrants have settled in Germany, according to
the International Migration Organization, and a third
in Switzerland.
A single fund-raising evening in Switzerland earlier
this year is believed to have raised $7 million from
ethnic Albanian immigrants, much of it earmarked
for the KLA struggle against Serbia.
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