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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (46048)	5/5/1999 11:12:00 PM
From: Les H	Respond to of 67261

MI6 investigates crime links to KLA By Tim Butcher in Tirana telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000271261842766&rtmo=3qYBSKwM&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/99/5/5/wkos305.html Kosovo 'freedom fighters' financed by organised crime [10 Apr '99] - World Socialist Web Site Kosova Press [KLA site] Britain to take 1,000 refugees a week 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.