The Crime Syndicate Behind the KLA
The organized crime syndicate behind the KLA
illustrates the insatiable nationalism of ethnic
Albanians in Kosovo.
by Ken Layne
April 8, 1999
The news photos show tens of
thousands of villagers -- cold,
tired, hungry, and beaten --
crowding the borders of
Macedonia and Albania. Their
homes have been burned, their
shops looted, their young men
executed by Serb thugs. The sight
of those dirty green Eastern
European trains bursting with
refugees brings to mind the death
trains of Nazi Germany. As I type
these words, half of Kosovo's
population has been forced out.
Only a delusional nationalist in
Belgrade could look at these
images and feel anything but
sorrow and sympathy.
But very little has been done to
examine exactly who are these
Kosovo rebel fighters that the
U.S. and NATO are backing with
the collective firepower of the
West. They are, according to
those who began paying attention
to such things years ago, not the
huddled masses on the bleak
Kosovar borders, but rather a small, yet well-funded
army, of thugs bent on widespread civil war and fueled
by exactly the same kind of virulent nationalism of which
the West is so quick to accuse the Serbs.
The architects of this war are themselves ethnic
Albanians -- the extremist leaders of the Kosovo
Liberation Army are the same ethnic Albanians who
made fortunes by smuggling weapons, heroin, and illegal
immigrants in the chaotic years following the collapse of
Yugoslavia's and Albania's communist regimes. On this,
even the generally hawkish Republican Party seems to
agree.
This little-discussed fact has nonetheless been well
documented; the Federation of American Scientists --
successor to the Manhattan Project's Foundation of
Atomic Scientists -- has assembled a huge archive of
media and law-enforcement reports, along with internal
documents from secret meetings of the KLA's support
group in Switzerland, the Kosovo National Group.
Since the early 1990s, you could see them in the resort
towns of Montenegro and southern Albania, or poolside
at four-star hotels in Zurich, or driving luxurious Land
Rovers to hilltop villas in Tetovo, surrounded by satellite
dishes and young toughs brandishing Kalishnikov
machine guns, wearing nylon jackets advertising
non-existent U.S. sports teams like the San Diego
Pitchers and the Indiana Hawks. The patriarchs were
always big men with big Rolex watches and they always
paid for the drinks. They were Muslim the way I'm
Christian -- meaning they would not be considered
devout. And there were always plenty of young girls
around while the wives stayed at home.
This criminal upper crust runs an efficient continental
network based entirely on the Balkans' black economy.
Mother Jones correspondent Frank Viviano extensively
reported on the Balkan heroin route and its increasing
reliance on Kosovars back in 1995, and The Geopolitical
Drug Dispatch, in "Guns and Ammo for a Greater
Albania," illustrated the connection between ethnic
Albanian nationalism and the global drug trade as early as
1994:
"Heroin shipment and marketing networks are
taking root among ethnic Albanian
communities in Albania, Macedonia, and the
Kosovo province of Serbia, in order to finance
large purchases of weapons destined not only
for the current conflict in Bosnia but also for
the brewing war in Kosovo.... Hence on 18
May, as part of a ten-month-old operation
code-named 'Macedonia,' Italian police
dismantled a major Italian-Macedonian
network and seized 40 kilograms of heroin
produced in Turkey and shipped to Italy via
the Balkans. In recent months, significant
quantities of heroin have been seized in
Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Greece,
from traffickers who usually hail from Pristina
(the capital of Kosovo), Skopje (capital of
Macedonia), or Skorda (a large town in
northern Albania).
At Skopje's Grand Hotel, an entire floor is
reserved for new mafia kingpins who travel
ostentatiously in Mercedes, wear Armani
clothes, and are accompanied by discreet
bodyguards toting assault rifles and hand guns.
The Macedonian government officially
describes these young Albanians (whose flashy
wealth is all the more provocative at a time of
unprecedented economic crisis aggravated by
the Greek embargo) as 'traders' who are
obliged to defend themselves in hard times.
The war in Bosnia guarantees the Albanian
mafia an 'understanding attitude' on the part of
local Macedonian authorities, since the
struggle is now viewed by Macedonia's
Muslim Albanian population as a veritable holy
war."
But somehow the fact that the KLA is funded by
organized crime bosses slips through the cracks of most
U.S. reporting on the latest Balkan war. (An exception, as
usual, is the New York Times' Chris Hedges, who has
regularly filed detailed dispatches on the dirty laundry of
both Serbs and Albanians.)
Heroin travels easily from Turkey -- through Macedonia,
Kosovo, and Albania -- to Western Europe. Three years
ago, a Swiss narcotics agent told me that Switzerland's
jails were bulging with more than 2,000 Kosovar
smugglers. The Bosnian Muslims got many of their
weapons from the Kosovars, who bought them cheap
from the corrupt armies of the former Eastern Bloc. In
Macedonia, heroin was cheaper than beer and a
frighteningly large percentage of the city's smart kids
were hooked. And in Skopje, the local Albanian soccer
team has a fan club called The Smugglers.
These flashy, vulgar crime-lords are also family men,
dedicated to their people, and if a Kosovar family had
any money it was because a cousin or uncle or village
bigshot sent Western currency home. These smugglers
believed in Greater Albania -- a faith not limited to the
criminal rich. The way to get it? Organize the Western
European and American diaspora of ethnic Albanians,
fund the Kosovo Liberation Army, publicize the grim
living conditions and savage human-rights abuses in
Kosovo, dramatically disobey Milosevic's hateful racist
policies, start a war of terrorism on the Serb cops, and
demand NATO intervention.
Knowing the Serbian nostalgia for Kosovo and the
Milosevic-led aggression that started the wars in Slovenia,
Croatia, and Bosnia, these Kosovar patriarchs knew
Belgrade wouldn't back down. The West would
eventually come in, as it did when Sarajevo turned into a
Bosch painting of endless horror. Milosevic would be
crushed and Kosovo would become independent -- or
join again with the Motherland of Albania -- and the
ethnic-Albanian third of Macedonia would follow.
The nationalism which has wrought the KLA and the
current war over Kosovo isn't exclusive to the criminal
elite among ethnic Albanians in the Balkans. The
gruesome atrocities in Kosovo today are, to most ethnic
Albanians with ties to the land, seen as a necessary evil.
Even those suffering most, huddled against foreign
borders and grieving for the relatives they've lost to Serb
gunmen, speak strongly of someday going home. When
the Serbs are gone forever.
Meanwhile, the sleazy Kosovar mafia kings are left united
in their dream of an expanded Albanian nation, but God
only knows what sort of twisted internal chaos would
erupt should Greater Albania become a reality -- the
violent 1996-97 collapse of Albania proper provides a
dark hint of what the future may hold. |
