[Prishtina-l] Drug wars: Kosovo's new battle

[Dardan Blaku]

Nuk eshte hera e pare qe botohen artikuj te tille. Sa di une, artikujt e ketij lloji jane pjelle e Serbise. Mirepo diteve te fundit edhe disa gazeta me renome po i botojne...

Thursday, April 13, 2000 

Drug wars: Kosovo's new battle 
Kosovo Albanians control 40% of Europe's heroin. If they now return home, 
there is little the UN can do 

Patrick Graham 
National Post 


The Associated Press 
Police arrest a man suspected of being a member of a criminal gang in 
Kosovo.: (Photo ran in all editions except Toronto.) 


PRISTINA, Yugoslavia - Kosovo is a gangster's paradise. With few police, no 
effective judicial system and lots of guns, the internationally administered 
province is increasingly seen by European leaders as a base for organized 
crime, especially drug smuggling. 

Kosovo lies in the middle of the Balkan Route, a web of smuggling roads 
leading from Turkey and over which $400-billion (US) of heroin is moved into 
western Europe every year. Now there are growing fears the province could 
provide an important transit point. 

"We need riot police for crowd control, forensic experts to solve crimes and 
specialized units to fight drug trafficking and organized crime," Javier 
Solana, the European Union's representative for foreign and security policy, 
told European leaders in February. 

But the 2,500 United Nations police sent to the province are less than half 
that requested by Bernard Kouchner, the UN mission chief. KFOR soldiers, for 
their part, are likely to put as much effort into policing as their cohorts 
in Bosnia, which is not much. Bosnia is one of Europe's major conduits for 
drugs, arms, stolen cars and prostitution, despite a large international 
military presence. 

"Generals do not want to turn their troops into cops," an official at NATO 
headquarters said. "Especially, they don't want to get their troops shot 
pursuing black marketeers." 

The chaos created by 10 years of war in the Balkans has been a bonanza for 
the Kosovo Albanians, who control 40% of Europe's heroin trade -- their 
profits are thought to have helped fund last year's war. If they were to 
return home, there would be little the cash-starved and understaffed UN 
mission could do to control the movement of drugs and guns. 

"All of a sudden, there was a drastic void in Kosovo after the war," said 
Bruce Lloy, an RCMP officer and chief press spokesman with the UN police in 
Pristina. "I would have moved in too." 

Two to six tonnes of heroin are thought to move along the Balkan route every 
month, providing 80% of Europe's heroin supply. The drug originates in 
Taleban-controlled Afghanistan, Iran and eastern Turkey, from where it flows 
to western Turkey. From there it moves through Bulgaria, west to Albania via 
Macedonia and Kosovo or north through central Europe. The entire journey 
takes a week to 10 days. 

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency says that by 1998, Kosovo Albanians had 
become the second most important group on the Balkan route, after the 
Turkish mafia. "Kosovo Albanians make the perfect mafia -- even better than 
the Sicilians," said Marko Nicovic, vice-president of the New York-based 
International Narcotics Enforcement Agency. 

"They are a small ethnic group made up of clans or families that have very 
close to family relations. The brotherhood, or Fic, is impenetrable by 
outsiders. It is difficult to find translators to work with police and 
impossible to get an informer or agent inside the organizations." 

The Kosovo Albanian heroin dealers are typically made up of groups of fewer 
than 100 members of an extended family. Mr. Nicovic, former chief of the 
Belgrade narcotics squad, said they are ideally situated to benefit from the 
trade because, facing discrimination at home over the past few decades, 
members of the same families have settled in both Turkey and western Europe, 
at either end of the Balkan route. 

Since the mid-1980s, these connections have allowed them to begin taking 
over the heroin trade, especially in Switzerland and Scandinavia. 

According to Interpol, Albanian speakers accounted for 14% of those arrested 
for heroin smuggling in 1997. While the average quantity of the drug found 
on smugglers was two grams, ethnic Albanians were carrying an average of 120 
g. 

Last month, officials from the Czech Republic, Sweden, Norway and Denmark 
met to discuss stamping out the heroin trade between Southern Europe and 
European Union countries which they believe is controlled by a dozen Kosovo 
Albanian families. 

Although there is no evidence the Kosovo Liberation Army was directly 
involved in drug dealing, the British-based International Police Review 
reported it had become dependent on the mafia families, "which gives the 
criminals an influence over an armed force, almost 30,000 strong, which is 
likely to dominate post-war Kosovo." 

But the question facing UN police on the ground in Kosovo is whether the 
heroin trade through the province -- interrupted by last year's war -- has 
reappeared in large quantities. 

"I don't believe that's true," said Barry Graham, a UN officer working with 
Pristina's regional intelligence unit. "There are Kosovar Albanians dealing 
drugs in Switzerland and the Czech Republic, but their links with Kosovo are 
only family associations. I don't believe that Kosovo is providing a 
significant amount of heroin to Europe. What officials are saying is that 
40% of the heroin is provided by Kosovar Albanians -- but the heroin does 
not come from Kosovo." 

While he acknowledged heroin is coming into the province, the amount only 
supplies local needs, he said. Cocaine is also being brought in to satisfy 
the demands of the large numbers of international workers gathered for the 
humanitarian effort. 

"We are not seeing any intelligence that anybody is making large amounts of 
money here," he said. 

Mr. Graham argues that the established routes through Bulgaria and Albania 
are so successful the smugglers have no need to make use of the route 
through Kosovo. 

"Why would they change it to Kosovo and risk going through new international 
borders as well as random security checks by over 40,000 KFOR soldiers? 
Because the borders are now monitored, they have to use the mountain passes 
and the quantities are limited to two or three kilograms." 

Until last year, smugglers bribed their way past Yugoslav border guards into 
Kosovo, then moved north into Serbia. The war disrupted this route and the 
new international border guards are not so easily corrupted, he said. 

In Belgrade, there is no longer the large supply of heroin coming from 
Kosovo that there was a few years ago. "All the connections between Serbs 
and Albanians has stopped," a heroin dealer in Belgrade told the National 
Post. "Only people without character would have dealt with Albanians during 
the war." 

A middleman along the Balkan route, the 24-year-old dealer sells a kilogram 
in Belgrade for 20,000 German marks ($14,200), a quarter of the price in 
Italy. However, he said he did expect the route from Kosovo to reopen. 

UN police say they are monitoring the dozen or so low-level dealers in 
Pristina, but with the court system virtually non-existent there is little 
they can do to stop them. 

"If a guy is caught with 40 to 50 grams, he wouldn't be prosecuted," said 
Mr. Graham. 

He added that he is much more concerned by the large numbers of guns coming 
into the country from Albania, a growing arsenal for the KLA, which was to 
have been decomissioned last year. 

"Large trucks are being used to smuggle weapons and drugs from the Albanian 
port of Dures. Small amounts of cocaine, heroin and pot are hidden in the 
cab but weapons are the main item." 

The flow of weapons out of the Balkans may be as great a threat to European 
security as the heroin trade.