http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8182
CENTRE FOR RESEARCH ON GLOBALIZATION (CANADA)
Welcome to Kosovo! The World's Newest Narco State
by Tom Burghardt
Global Research, February 29, 2008
Antifascist-calling.blogspot.com - 2008-02-23
The unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim
Thaci, former warlord/commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), heralds
the birth of a new European narco state.
The illegal dismemberment of Serbia, completing the U.S./EU/NATO destruction
of Yugoslavia, is proclaimed by ruling elites and their sycophants as an
exemplary means to bring "peace and stability" to the region. This
provocative move, outside the framework of international law, threatens any
sovereign state with similar treatment should they deviate from the
"Washington consensus."
Far from bringing "peace" let alone "stability," an "independent" Kosovo
will serve as a militarized outpost for Western capitalist powers intent on
spreading their tentacles East, further encircling Russia by penetrating the
former spheres of influence of the Soviet Union.
Led by dodgy characters and war criminals such as Hashim Thaci and Agim
Ceku, "independent" Kosovo is a gangster state governed by thugs with ties
to Albanian drug trafficking syndicates and al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda, the KLA and Western Intelligence
Al-Qaeda's service to the CIA and other Western intelligence services is
well-documented. Beginning in 1998 and perhaps earlier, the London-based
cleric Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, the "emir" of the al-Qaeda-linked
Islamist group al-Muhajiroun began a recruitment drive for aspiring
mujahideen for the "holy war" in Kosovo at London's notorious Finsbury Park
Mosque.
On Friday, March 13, 1998 a London rally for the jihad was backed by some 50
local Islamist organizations. According to Christopher Deliso,
...the Albanian Islamic Society of London, headed by Kosovar Sheik
Muhammed Stubla, was lobbying and raising money for the KLA's campaign. ...
In contradiction to the KLA leadership's claims about secularism, the
Kosovar sheik specifically defined the militant group as "an Albanian
Islamic organisation which is determined to defend itself, its people, its
homeland, and its religion with all its capabilities and by all means." ...
The chief bank account for fundraising was in the London branch of
terrorist-linked Habibsons Bank of Pakistan. (The Coming Balkan Caliphate,
Westport: Praeger Security International, 2007, p. 43)
In 2005, in the wake of the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London, it was
revealed that Bakri, a probable asset of Britain's MI6, was the "spiritual"
force behind the deadly attacks.
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed reports that,
The reluctance to take decisive action against the leadership of the
extremist network in the UK has a long history. According to John Loftus, a
former Justice Department prosecutor, Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza, as well as
the suspected mastermind of the London bombings Haroon Aswat, were all
recruited by MI6 in the mid-1990s to draft up British Muslims to fight in
Kosovo. American and French security sources corroborate the revelation. The
MI6 connection raises questions about Bakri's relationship with British
authorities today. Exiled to Lebanon and outside British jurisdiction, he is
effectively immune to prosecution. ("Sources: August terror plot is a
'fiction' underscoring police failures," The Raw Story, Monday, September
18, 2006)
Before fleeing, Bakri defended the actions of his young dupes by
proclaiming, "We don't make a distinction between civilians and
non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and
unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value. It has no
sanctity."
The current "secular" Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, when he served as KLA
warlord was identified in media reports as having operational links to the
al-Qaeda network. Such reports are not surprising when one considers that
for earlier U.S./NATO "service" in Bosnia, bin Laden himself was rewarded a
Bosnian passport by the "democratic" government of former Nazi and Islamist
ideologue, Alija Izetbegovic.
As the Afghan-Arab database of disposable intelligence assets streamed into
Kosovo, often from Albania with the active assistance of narcotrafficking
gangsters under NATO supervision, they replenished the ranks of Thaci's
terrorist army.
Michel Chossudovsky writes,
Mercenaries financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had been fighting in
Bosnia. And the Bosnian pattern was replicated in Kosovo: Mujahadeen
mercenaries from various Islamic countries are reported to be fighting
alongside the KLA in Kosovo. German, Turkish and Afghan instructors were
reported to be training the KLA in guerrilla and diversion tactics. ...
According to a Deutsche Press-Agentur report, financial support from Islamic
countries to the KLA had been channelled through the former Albanian chief
of the National Information Service (NIS), Bashkim Gazidede. "Gazidede,
reportedly a devout Moslem who fled Albania in March of last year [1997], is
presently [1998] being investigated for his contacts with Islamic terrorist
organizations." ("Kosovo 'freedom fighters' financed by organised crime,"
World Socialist Web Site, 10 April 1999)
These links are hardly casual. On the contrary, as Peter Dale Scott avers,
The closeness of the KLA to al-Qaeda was acknowledged again in the Western
press, after Afghan-connected KLA guerrillas proceeded in 2001 to conduct
guerrilla warfare in Macedonia. Press accounts included an Interpol report
containing the allegation that one of bin Laden's senior lieutenants was the
commander of an elite KLA unit operating in Kosovo in 1999. This was
probably Mohammed al-Zawahiri. (The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the
Future of America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, p. 169)
Agim Ceku another "Prime Minister," committed massive war crimes in the
Croatian region of Krajina when employed by the Croatian army as a brigadier
general. As a key planner of Operation Storm, Ceku's forces massacred Serbs
and presided over the largest ethnic cleansing during NATO's Yugoslavian
destabilization campaign. Some 250,000 Serbs fled for their lives as Ceku's
black-uniformed shock troops, many adorned with symbols of the Nazi Ustasha
puppet regime during World War II were driven from Croatia.
According to Gregory Elich,
The invasion of Krajina was preceded by a thorough CIA and DIA analysis of
the region. According to Balkan specialist Ivo Banac, this "tactical and
intelligence support" was furnished to the Croatian Army at the beginning of
its offensive. ... Two months earlier, the Pentagon contracted Military
Professional Resources, Inc (MPRI) to train the Croatian military. According
to a Croatian officer, MPRI advisors "lecture us on tactics and big war
operations on the level of brigades, which is why we needed them for
Operation Storm when we took the Krajina." Croatian sources claim that U.S.
satellite intelligence was furnished to the Croatian military. Following the
invasion of Krajina, the U.S. rewarded Croatia with an agreement "broadening
existing cooperation" between MPRI and the Croatian military. U.S. advisors
assisted in the reorganization of the Croatian Army. Referring to this
reorganization in an interview with the newspaper Vecernji List, Croatian
General Tihomir Blaskic said, "We are building the foundations of our
organization on the traditions of the Croatian home guard" -- pro-Nazi
troops in World War II. ("The Invasion of Serbian Krajina," Emperors
Clothes, no date)
Following on the heels of this sterling "victory," Ceku became KLA commander
in 1999 and "Prime Minister" in 2006. There is an outstanding Interpol
warrant for his arrest according to Michel Chossudovsky.
The KLA: "Trained-up fierce" by Germany's KSK
As in Bosnia Herzegovina and Croatia, the Kosovo Liberation Army was
secretly armed by America and Germany and remains what it has always been, a
creature of Western intelligence services.
Christopher Deliso observes,
In 1996, Germany's BND established a major station in Tirana...and another
in Rome to select and train future KLA fighters. According to Le Monde
Diplomatique, "special forces in Berlin provided the operational training
and supplied arms and transmission equipment from ex-East German Stasi
stocks as well as Black uniforms." The Italian headquarters recruited
Albanian immigrants passing through ports such as Brindisi and Trieste,
while German military intelligence, the Militaramschirmdienst, and the
Kommando Spezialkräfte Special Forces (KSK), offered military training and
provisions to the KLA in the remote Mirdita Mountains of northern Albania
controlled by the deposed president, Sali Berisha.
In 1996, BND Chief Geiger's deputy, Rainer Kesselring, the son of the Nazi
Luftwaffe general responsible for the bombing of Belgrade in 1941 that left
17,000 dead, oversaw KSK training of Albanian recruits at a Turkish military
base near Izmir. (The Coming Balkan Caliphate, Westport: Praeger Security
International, 2007, pp. 37-38)
Hypocritically, while Washington had officially designated the KLA a
"terrorist organization" funded by the heroin trade, the Clinton
administration was complicit with their German allies in the division of the
Serb province along ethnic and religious lines.
By 1998, the KLA took control of between 25 to 40 percent of the province
before Serb forces wrested the KLA-held areas back. Facing imminent defeat,
the Kosovo Liberation Army and allied mujahideen fighters appealed to
Washington, citing the imminent danger of "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs.
Laughable on the face of it, Albanians constitute fully 90 percent of
Kosovo's population, and in fact, it was the Serbs, Roma and Jews who were
being brutalized by KLA hit squads, their homes torched, their churches and
synagogues sacked. It was the dismantling of the KLA's terrorist
infrastructure by the Yugoslav People's Army that was the trigger that
prompted direct military intervention by NATO in 1999.
As in Iraq, the 78 day U.S. bombing campaign targeted critical civilian
infrastructure in Serbia: bridges, factories, power plants, electrical
transmission hubs, communications centers. Throughout Serbia and Kosovo
itself, the U.S. scattered tons of radioactive depleted uranium munitions
and tens of thousands of cluster bombs. The U.S. attack, ostensibly to
"protect" Kosovo's population from Serb depredations caused some 800,000
civilians to flee NATO's devastating raids.
For Washington, drunk on the illusion that its policies had hastened the
collapse of a bureaucratized and rotten Soviet system, the dismemberment of
Yugoslavia would again represent the triumph of the so-called "free market"
and "democracy" under the umbrella of a new international order administered
by World Bank/IMF "reforms": Francis Fukuyama's short-lived "end of
history." While on the opposite pole of the same ideological dead end,
political Islam's tactical alliance with the West was a means to establish a
bridgehead for penetration into Europe via dodgy Saudi, Kuwaiti and Gulf
"charities" in pursuit of their quixotic quest of establishing a "divine"
(Islamicized) capitalist order rising from the ashes of a decadent West.
Two heads, same poisonous snake.
The KLA's Links to the International Heroin Trade
In Kosovo, Hashim Thaci's KLA served as the militarized vanguard for the
Albanian mafia whose "15 Families" control virtually every facet of the
Balkan heroin trade. Kosovar traffickers ship heroin originating exclusively
from Asia's Golden Crescent. At one end lies Afghanistan where poppy is
harvested for transshipment through Iran and Turkey; as morphine base it is
then refined into "product" for worldwide consumption. From there it passes
into the hands of the Albanian syndicates who control the Balkan Route.
As the San Francisco Chronicle reported,
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.
(Frank Viviano, "KLA Linked to Enormous Heroin Trade," Wednesday, May 5,
1999, Page A-1)
It is hardly an accident that the meteoric rise of the Kosovar families to
the top of the narcotrafficking hierarchy coincided with the KLA's sudden
appearance in the area in 1997.
As Peter Klebnikov observed,
As the war in Kosovo heated up, the drug traffickers began supplying the
KLA with weapons procured from Eastern European and Italian crime groups in
exchange for heroin. The 15 Families also lent their private armies to fight
alongside the KLA. Clad in new Swiss uniforms and equipped with modern
weaponry, these troops stood out among the ragtag irregulars of the KLA. In
all, this was a formidable aid package. It's therefore not surprising, say
European law enforcement officials, that the faction that ultimately seized
power in Kosovo -- the KLA under Hashim Thaci -- was the group that
maintained the closest links to traffickers. "As the biggest contributors,
the drug traffickers may have gotten the most influence in running the
country," says Koutouzis. ("Heroin Heroes," Mother Jones, January/February
2000)
As is well-known, U.S. destabilization programs and covert operations rely
on far-right provocateurs and drug lords (often interchangeable players) to
facilitate the dirty work. Throughout its Balkan operations the CIA made
liberal use of these preexisting narcotics networks to arm the KLA and
provide them with targets.
The rest is history, as they say.
Kosovo Today
Has anything changed in the intervening years? Hardly. In fact, the
vise-like grip of the Albanian mafia over narcotics, human trafficking and
arms smuggling has cemented the "15 Families" place atop Europe's hierarchy
of crime, an essential arm of the capitalist deep state.
Considering NATO and the UN's lofty mandate to bring "peace and stability"
to the region through "democracy promotion" and "institution building," what
does the balance sheet reveal?
According to regional experts the outlook for Kosovo is grim. The economy is
in shambles, unemployment hovers near 50 percent, a population of young
people with "criminality as the sole career choice" populate a society
tottering on the brink of collapse where the state is dominated by organized
crime.
According to former New York Times reporter David Binder, citing a 124-page
investigation by the Institute for European Policy commissioned by the
German Bundeswehr,
"It is a Mafia society" based on "capture of the state" by criminal
elements. ("State capture" is a term coined in 2000 by a group of World Bank
analysts to describe countries where government structures have been seized
by corrupt financial oligarchies. This study applied the term to
Montenegro's Milo Djukanovic, by way of his cigarette smuggling and to
Slovenia, with the arms smuggling conducted by Janez Jansa). In Kosovo, it
says, "There is a need for thorough change of the elite."
Fat chance that happening anytime soon! Binder reports:
In the authors' definition, Kosovan organized crime "consists of
multimillion-Euro organizations with guerrilla experience and espionage
expertise." They quote a German intelligence service report of "closest ties
between leading political decision makers and the dominant criminal class"
and name Ramush Haradinaj, Hashim Thaci and Xhavit Haliti as compromised
leaders who are "internally protected by parliamentary immunity and abroad
by international law." They scornfully quote the UNMIK chief from 2004-2006,
Soeren Jessen Petersen, calling Haradinaj "a close and personal friend."
UNMIK, they add "is in many respects an element of the local problem scene."
The study sharply criticizes the United States for "abetting the escape of
criminals" in Kosovo as well as "preventing European investigators from
working." This has made Americans "vulnerable to blackmail." It notes
"secret CIA detention centers" at Camp Bondsteel and assails American
military training for Kosovo (Albanian) police by Dyncorp, authorized by the
Pentagon. ("Kosovo Auf Deutsch," Balkan Analysis, November 18, 2007)
As we can readily observe in other climes, the interpenetration of the state
by criminal elites serve as the preferred mechanism to cement a
"public-private partnership" founded on corruption, maintained by brute
force solely for purposes of resource extraction, pipeline politics,
military bases and the geopolitical advantage gained over "market" rivals.
As the U.S. Embassy burns in Belgrade, all in all, its another "Mission
Accomplished" moment for the United States.
Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
CENTRE FOR RESEARCH ON GLOBALIZATION (CANADA)
Welcome to Kosovo! The World's Newest Narco State
by Tom Burghardt
Global Research, February 29, 2008
Antifascist-calling.blogspot.com - 2008-02-23
The unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim
Thaci, former warlord/commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), heralds
the birth of a new European narco state.
The illegal dismemberment of Serbia, completing the U.S./EU/NATO destruction
of Yugoslavia, is proclaimed by ruling elites and their sycophants as an
exemplary means to bring "peace and stability" to the region. This
provocative move, outside the framework of international law, threatens any
sovereign state with similar treatment should they deviate from the
"Washington consensus."
Far from bringing "peace" let alone "stability," an "independent" Kosovo
will serve as a militarized outpost for Western capitalist powers intent on
spreading their tentacles East, further encircling Russia by penetrating the
former spheres of influence of the Soviet Union.
Led by dodgy characters and war criminals such as Hashim Thaci and Agim
Ceku, "independent" Kosovo is a gangster state governed by thugs with ties
to Albanian drug trafficking syndicates and al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda, the KLA and Western Intelligence
Al-Qaeda's service to the CIA and other Western intelligence services is
well-documented. Beginning in 1998 and perhaps earlier, the London-based
cleric Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, the "emir" of the al-Qaeda-linked
Islamist group al-Muhajiroun began a recruitment drive for aspiring
mujahideen for the "holy war" in Kosovo at London's notorious Finsbury Park
Mosque.
On Friday, March 13, 1998 a London rally for the jihad was backed by some 50
local Islamist organizations. According to Christopher Deliso,
...the Albanian Islamic Society of London, headed by Kosovar Sheik
Muhammed Stubla, was lobbying and raising money for the KLA's campaign. ...
In contradiction to the KLA leadership's claims about secularism, the
Kosovar sheik specifically defined the militant group as "an Albanian
Islamic organisation which is determined to defend itself, its people, its
homeland, and its religion with all its capabilities and by all means." ...
The chief bank account for fundraising was in the London branch of
terrorist-linked Habibsons Bank of Pakistan. (The Coming Balkan Caliphate,
Westport: Praeger Security International, 2007, p. 43)
In 2005, in the wake of the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London, it was
revealed that Bakri, a probable asset of Britain's MI6, was the "spiritual"
force behind the deadly attacks.
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed reports that,
The reluctance to take decisive action against the leadership of the
extremist network in the UK has a long history. According to John Loftus, a
former Justice Department prosecutor, Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza, as well as
the suspected mastermind of the London bombings Haroon Aswat, were all
recruited by MI6 in the mid-1990s to draft up British Muslims to fight in
Kosovo. American and French security sources corroborate the revelation. The
MI6 connection raises questions about Bakri's relationship with British
authorities today. Exiled to Lebanon and outside British jurisdiction, he is
effectively immune to prosecution. ("Sources: August terror plot is a
'fiction' underscoring police failures," The Raw Story, Monday, September
18, 2006)
Before fleeing, Bakri defended the actions of his young dupes by
proclaiming, "We don't make a distinction between civilians and
non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and
unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value. It has no
sanctity."
The current "secular" Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, when he served as KLA
warlord was identified in media reports as having operational links to the
al-Qaeda network. Such reports are not surprising when one considers that
for earlier U.S./NATO "service" in Bosnia, bin Laden himself was rewarded a
Bosnian passport by the "democratic" government of former Nazi and Islamist
ideologue, Alija Izetbegovic.
As the Afghan-Arab database of disposable intelligence assets streamed into
Kosovo, often from Albania with the active assistance of narcotrafficking
gangsters under NATO supervision, they replenished the ranks of Thaci's
terrorist army.
Michel Chossudovsky writes,
Mercenaries financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had been fighting in
Bosnia. And the Bosnian pattern was replicated in Kosovo: Mujahadeen
mercenaries from various Islamic countries are reported to be fighting
alongside the KLA in Kosovo. German, Turkish and Afghan instructors were
reported to be training the KLA in guerrilla and diversion tactics. ...
According to a Deutsche Press-Agentur report, financial support from Islamic
countries to the KLA had been channelled through the former Albanian chief
of the National Information Service (NIS), Bashkim Gazidede. "Gazidede,
reportedly a devout Moslem who fled Albania in March of last year [1997], is
presently [1998] being investigated for his contacts with Islamic terrorist
organizations." ("Kosovo 'freedom fighters' financed by organised crime,"
World Socialist Web Site, 10 April 1999)
These links are hardly casual. On the contrary, as Peter Dale Scott avers,
The closeness of the KLA to al-Qaeda was acknowledged again in the Western
press, after Afghan-connected KLA guerrillas proceeded in 2001 to conduct
guerrilla warfare in Macedonia. Press accounts included an Interpol report
containing the allegation that one of bin Laden's senior lieutenants was the
commander of an elite KLA unit operating in Kosovo in 1999. This was
probably Mohammed al-Zawahiri. (The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the
Future of America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, p. 169)
Agim Ceku another "Prime Minister," committed massive war crimes in the
Croatian region of Krajina when employed by the Croatian army as a brigadier
general. As a key planner of Operation Storm, Ceku's forces massacred Serbs
and presided over the largest ethnic cleansing during NATO's Yugoslavian
destabilization campaign. Some 250,000 Serbs fled for their lives as Ceku's
black-uniformed shock troops, many adorned with symbols of the Nazi Ustasha
puppet regime during World War II were driven from Croatia.
According to Gregory Elich,
The invasion of Krajina was preceded by a thorough CIA and DIA analysis of
the region. According to Balkan specialist Ivo Banac, this "tactical and
intelligence support" was furnished to the Croatian Army at the beginning of
its offensive. ... Two months earlier, the Pentagon contracted Military
Professional Resources, Inc (MPRI) to train the Croatian military. According
to a Croatian officer, MPRI advisors "lecture us on tactics and big war
operations on the level of brigades, which is why we needed them for
Operation Storm when we took the Krajina." Croatian sources claim that U.S.
satellite intelligence was furnished to the Croatian military. Following the
invasion of Krajina, the U.S. rewarded Croatia with an agreement "broadening
existing cooperation" between MPRI and the Croatian military. U.S. advisors
assisted in the reorganization of the Croatian Army. Referring to this
reorganization in an interview with the newspaper Vecernji List, Croatian
General Tihomir Blaskic said, "We are building the foundations of our
organization on the traditions of the Croatian home guard" -- pro-Nazi
troops in World War II. ("The Invasion of Serbian Krajina," Emperors
Clothes, no date)
Following on the heels of this sterling "victory," Ceku became KLA commander
in 1999 and "Prime Minister" in 2006. There is an outstanding Interpol
warrant for his arrest according to Michel Chossudovsky.
The KLA: "Trained-up fierce" by Germany's KSK
As in Bosnia Herzegovina and Croatia, the Kosovo Liberation Army was
secretly armed by America and Germany and remains what it has always been, a
creature of Western intelligence services.
Christopher Deliso observes,
In 1996, Germany's BND established a major station in Tirana...and another
in Rome to select and train future KLA fighters. According to Le Monde
Diplomatique, "special forces in Berlin provided the operational training
and supplied arms and transmission equipment from ex-East German Stasi
stocks as well as Black uniforms." The Italian headquarters recruited
Albanian immigrants passing through ports such as Brindisi and Trieste,
while German military intelligence, the Militaramschirmdienst, and the
Kommando Spezialkräfte Special Forces (KSK), offered military training and
provisions to the KLA in the remote Mirdita Mountains of northern Albania
controlled by the deposed president, Sali Berisha.
In 1996, BND Chief Geiger's deputy, Rainer Kesselring, the son of the Nazi
Luftwaffe general responsible for the bombing of Belgrade in 1941 that left
17,000 dead, oversaw KSK training of Albanian recruits at a Turkish military
base near Izmir. (The Coming Balkan Caliphate, Westport: Praeger Security
International, 2007, pp. 37-38)
Hypocritically, while Washington had officially designated the KLA a
"terrorist organization" funded by the heroin trade, the Clinton
administration was complicit with their German allies in the division of the
Serb province along ethnic and religious lines.
By 1998, the KLA took control of between 25 to 40 percent of the province
before Serb forces wrested the KLA-held areas back. Facing imminent defeat,
the Kosovo Liberation Army and allied mujahideen fighters appealed to
Washington, citing the imminent danger of "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs.
Laughable on the face of it, Albanians constitute fully 90 percent of
Kosovo's population, and in fact, it was the Serbs, Roma and Jews who were
being brutalized by KLA hit squads, their homes torched, their churches and
synagogues sacked. It was the dismantling of the KLA's terrorist
infrastructure by the Yugoslav People's Army that was the trigger that
prompted direct military intervention by NATO in 1999.
As in Iraq, the 78 day U.S. bombing campaign targeted critical civilian
infrastructure in Serbia: bridges, factories, power plants, electrical
transmission hubs, communications centers. Throughout Serbia and Kosovo
itself, the U.S. scattered tons of radioactive depleted uranium munitions
and tens of thousands of cluster bombs. The U.S. attack, ostensibly to
"protect" Kosovo's population from Serb depredations caused some 800,000
civilians to flee NATO's devastating raids.
For Washington, drunk on the illusion that its policies had hastened the
collapse of a bureaucratized and rotten Soviet system, the dismemberment of
Yugoslavia would again represent the triumph of the so-called "free market"
and "democracy" under the umbrella of a new international order administered
by World Bank/IMF "reforms": Francis Fukuyama's short-lived "end of
history." While on the opposite pole of the same ideological dead end,
political Islam's tactical alliance with the West was a means to establish a
bridgehead for penetration into Europe via dodgy Saudi, Kuwaiti and Gulf
"charities" in pursuit of their quixotic quest of establishing a "divine"
(Islamicized) capitalist order rising from the ashes of a decadent West.
Two heads, same poisonous snake.
The KLA's Links to the International Heroin Trade
In Kosovo, Hashim Thaci's KLA served as the militarized vanguard for the
Albanian mafia whose "15 Families" control virtually every facet of the
Balkan heroin trade. Kosovar traffickers ship heroin originating exclusively
from Asia's Golden Crescent. At one end lies Afghanistan where poppy is
harvested for transshipment through Iran and Turkey; as morphine base it is
then refined into "product" for worldwide consumption. From there it passes
into the hands of the Albanian syndicates who control the Balkan Route.
As the San Francisco Chronicle reported,
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.
(Frank Viviano, "KLA Linked to Enormous Heroin Trade," Wednesday, May 5,
1999, Page A-1)
It is hardly an accident that the meteoric rise of the Kosovar families to
the top of the narcotrafficking hierarchy coincided with the KLA's sudden
appearance in the area in 1997.
As Peter Klebnikov observed,
As the war in Kosovo heated up, the drug traffickers began supplying the
KLA with weapons procured from Eastern European and Italian crime groups in
exchange for heroin. The 15 Families also lent their private armies to fight
alongside the KLA. Clad in new Swiss uniforms and equipped with modern
weaponry, these troops stood out among the ragtag irregulars of the KLA. In
all, this was a formidable aid package. It's therefore not surprising, say
European law enforcement officials, that the faction that ultimately seized
power in Kosovo -- the KLA under Hashim Thaci -- was the group that
maintained the closest links to traffickers. "As the biggest contributors,
the drug traffickers may have gotten the most influence in running the
country," says Koutouzis. ("Heroin Heroes," Mother Jones, January/February
2000)
As is well-known, U.S. destabilization programs and covert operations rely
on far-right provocateurs and drug lords (often interchangeable players) to
facilitate the dirty work. Throughout its Balkan operations the CIA made
liberal use of these preexisting narcotics networks to arm the KLA and
provide them with targets.
The rest is history, as they say.
Kosovo Today
Has anything changed in the intervening years? Hardly. In fact, the
vise-like grip of the Albanian mafia over narcotics, human trafficking and
arms smuggling has cemented the "15 Families" place atop Europe's hierarchy
of crime, an essential arm of the capitalist deep state.
Considering NATO and the UN's lofty mandate to bring "peace and stability"
to the region through "democracy promotion" and "institution building," what
does the balance sheet reveal?
According to regional experts the outlook for Kosovo is grim. The economy is
in shambles, unemployment hovers near 50 percent, a population of young
people with "criminality as the sole career choice" populate a society
tottering on the brink of collapse where the state is dominated by organized
crime.
According to former New York Times reporter David Binder, citing a 124-page
investigation by the Institute for European Policy commissioned by the
German Bundeswehr,
"It is a Mafia society" based on "capture of the state" by criminal
elements. ("State capture" is a term coined in 2000 by a group of World Bank
analysts to describe countries where government structures have been seized
by corrupt financial oligarchies. This study applied the term to
Montenegro's Milo Djukanovic, by way of his cigarette smuggling and to
Slovenia, with the arms smuggling conducted by Janez Jansa). In Kosovo, it
says, "There is a need for thorough change of the elite."
Fat chance that happening anytime soon! Binder reports:
In the authors' definition, Kosovan organized crime "consists of
multimillion-Euro organizations with guerrilla experience and espionage
expertise." They quote a German intelligence service report of "closest ties
between leading political decision makers and the dominant criminal class"
and name Ramush Haradinaj, Hashim Thaci and Xhavit Haliti as compromised
leaders who are "internally protected by parliamentary immunity and abroad
by international law." They scornfully quote the UNMIK chief from 2004-2006,
Soeren Jessen Petersen, calling Haradinaj "a close and personal friend."
UNMIK, they add "is in many respects an element of the local problem scene."
The study sharply criticizes the United States for "abetting the escape of
criminals" in Kosovo as well as "preventing European investigators from
working." This has made Americans "vulnerable to blackmail." It notes
"secret CIA detention centers" at Camp Bondsteel and assails American
military training for Kosovo (Albanian) police by Dyncorp, authorized by the
Pentagon. ("Kosovo Auf Deutsch," Balkan Analysis, November 18, 2007)
As we can readily observe in other climes, the interpenetration of the state
by criminal elites serve as the preferred mechanism to cement a
"public-private partnership" founded on corruption, maintained by brute
force solely for purposes of resource extraction, pipeline politics,
military bases and the geopolitical advantage gained over "market" rivals.
As the U.S. Embassy burns in Belgrade, all in all, its another "Mission
Accomplished" moment for the United States.
Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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