The Evisceration of Yugoslavia: Part IV: The Kosovo/Albania Golden Triangle
February 27, 2013 — Dean Henderson
(Part four of a five-part series excerpted from Chapter 15: Yugoslavia Bad, Greater Albania Good: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)
In 1996 the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) began training the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The Bundesnachrichtendienst had been launched in 1956 to succeed the Nazi Gehlen organization. The idea of a Greater Albania was a vision of the Nazis during their WWII occupation of Yugoslavia. That vision was now shared by NATO. BND was headed by Hasjorg Geiger, who set up a huge BND regional station in Tirana, Albania in 1995.
The CIA set up a large operation in Tirana a year earlier. President Sali Berisha had taken charge of the country of Albania earlier in the 1990's. Darling of the IMF, he opened Albania's economy to Western multinationals and banks and was rewarded with a huge IMF loan package.
In 1994, the same year the Company landed in Tirana, a bank pyramid scheme over which Berisha presided with his new IMF kitty suddenly collapsed, obliterating the life savings of thousands of Albanians. The scheme fit into a pattern of earlier IMF/BCCI coordinated rip-offs of Third World debtor nations. Berisha was ousted from Tirana, but fled to northern Albania and took control of this increasingly lawless region, which became a major smuggling route for Golden Crescent heroin and arms.
With help from the Albanian secret police (SHIK), CIA and BND recruited potential KLA fighters from the ranks of these smugglers, many of whom the CIA had helped get into the smack business in Peshawar, Pakistan a decade earlier[1]. German Kommandos Spezialkrafte (KSS) wearing black uniforms trained the KLA and armed them with East German weapons. Later in neighboring Kosovo there were many reports of men wearing black uniforms terrorizing Kosovo peasants. While the US claimed these were Yugoslav Special Forces they were likely members of the German KSS who were leading KLA raids inside Kosovo.
The KLA took to wearing Bundeshehr combat jackets with German insignia. Germany was the first country to recognize Croatia in 1990, even before Croatian separatists had begun their revolt against Belgrade. The Germans spearheaded the campaign that encouraged Croatia to secede from Yugoslavia. When the new government was established in Zagreb, it adopted the flag and national anthem of Hitler's puppet Utashe. In 1998 the KLA had been a small terrorist cell with only 300 members. After a year of steady arms shipments and training from the US, Britain and Germany; the KLA became a major guerrilla army with 30,000 members. Osama bin Laden senior lieutenant Mohammed al-Zawahiri served as a KLA commander.
KLA provocations served as the pretext for NATO aggression against Yugoslavia and for the partition of mineral and oil-rich Kosovo. Yugoslav security forces battled KLA terrorism while also clamping down on incidents of excessive Serb retaliation, arresting more than 500 Serbs for crimes against Albanian civilians. [2] President Milosevic had always advocated ethnic equality and harmony. His delegation to the Rambouillet peace talks in France consisted of people from every ethnic group in Yugoslavia, including Albanians. Serbs were actually a minority in the delegation.
A 1992 speech was typical of Milosevic's thinking on ethnic tensions in Kosovo, which Western intelligence agencies had historically exploited. He stated, "We know that there are many Albanians in Kosovo who do not approve of the separatist policy of their nationalist leaders. They are under pressure, intimidated and blackmailed. But we shall not respond with the like. We must respond by offering our hand, living with them in equality and not permitting that a single Albanian child, woman or man be discriminated against in Kosovo in any way. We must…insist on a policy of brotherhood, unity and ethnic equality in Kosovo. We shall persevere on this policy."[3]
By the end of its Yugoslav bombing campaign NATO had moved into Kosovo as an occupation force under the auspices of KFOR. NATO continued to turn a blind eye to renegade KLA bands who attacked Serb civilians under KFOR watch, while aiding and abetting NLA rebels now attempting to lop off a piece of Macedonia for the international banker cause. The US built its biggest military base since Vietnam in Kosovo. [4]
Meanwhile Albania was being turned into a CIA terrorist training camp, heroin production center and arms supermarket. A March 6, 1995 report from the Greek Athens News Agency quoted Greek Public Order Minister Sifis Valyrakis as saying that he believed the government of Albania was involved in the production and trafficking of narcotics from Skopje, Macedonia, where US and NATO troops massed during the war in Kosovo.
Valyrakis said opium was being grown in the Chimarra area of southern Albania where heroin labs had sprung up in a triangle area formed by the cities of Gevgeli, Prilep and Pristina in the countries of Albania, Macedonia and breakaway Kosovo. He cited involvement in the heroin traffic of the US-allied Macedonian military and the Turkish Gray Wolves mafia, long a CIA ally. He noted a flourishing arms trade developing in Macedonia and Kosovo and said Albanian separatists in Yugoslavia were at the center of both heroin and arms rings, which were being based out of Pristina, home to the NATO KFOR "peacekeeping" effort in Kosovo.
According to historian Alfred McCoy, "Albanian exiles used drug profits to ship Czech and Swiss arms back to Kosovo for the separatist guerrillas of the KLA. In 1997-1998, these Kosovar drug syndicates armed the KLA for a revolt against Belgrade's army… Even after the 1999 Kumanovo agreement settled the Kosovo conflict, the UN administration of the province… allowed thriving heroin traffic… Commanders of the KLA… continued to dominate the transit traffic through the Balkans."[5]
A report filed with Reuters on June 16, 1995 by Benet Koleka from Tirana charged the Albanian government with secretly dumping tons of weaponry into Rwanda prior to the genocide which occurred in that central African country. Albania's largest daily Koha Jone reported that several Antonov 122 cargo planes left Gjadri Airbase in Albania loaded with arms bound for Rwanda. Amnesty International interviewed four of the pilots who flew the Antonovs. All claimed they were working for a British company.
They said they flew the weapons to the Democratic Republic of Congo and unloaded them at Goma airport near the Rwandan border. They said they also flew loads of weapons to Goma from Israel and that there were Israeli Mossad agents working at Gjadri Airbase who supervised the Albanian operation. That same year a spooky US defense contractor known as RONCO was in Rwanda under the pretext of de-mining. Ronco was actually importing military hardware for the Pentagon and passing it out to Rwandan forces just before the Rwandan depopulation began. [6]
The Washington Times reported in 1999, "The Kosovo Liberation Army, which the Clinton Administration has embraced and some members of Congress want to arm as part of a NATO bombing campaign, is a terrorist organization that has financed much of its war effort with profits from the sale of heroin". [7]
In 1999 a Times of London expose found that the KLA was the world's main supplier of heroin, inheriting that claim from the last CIA surrogates – the mujahadeen. Europol joined the governments of Sweden, Switzerland and Germany in investigating KLA ties to the heroin trade. Walter Kege, head of the drug enforcement unit of Swedish police intelligence stated, "We have intelligence leading us to believe that there is a connection between drug money and the Kosovo Liberation Army." Germany's Berliner Zeitung quoted a Western intelligence report which stated that 900 million Deutsch marks had flowed into Kosovo since the KLA began attacking the Yugoslav government in 1997. Half was derived from drug proceeds.
German police noted a parallel between the rise of the KLA and an increase in ethnic Albanian heroin trafficking in Germany, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries. Police in Czechoslovakia tracked down an Albanian who escaped a Norwegian prison where he was serving 12 years for heroin trafficking. In his apartment they found documents linking him to several arms purchases made on behalf of the KLA. [8] Germany's Federal Criminal Agency concluded, "Ethnic Albanians are now the most prominent group in the distribution of heroin in Western consumer countries." Europol is preparing a detailed report on KLA/Albanian heroin trafficking for the World Court in The Hague. Many KLA fighters had been trained at the same heroin-infested camps in Pakistan from which the Afghan Taliban emerged.
In 1997 Chechen warlords trained at those same camps began buying large chunks of real estate in Kosovo. Saudi-born Chechen rebel leader Emir al-Khattab set up camps in Chechnya to train KLA troops. Both endeavors were financed through heroin sales, prostitution rings, arms dealing and counterfeiting. [9] After the KLA was unable to take Kosovo from what remained of Yugoslavia on their own, the US propaganda machine once again ratcheted up the pressure, accusing the Serb majority of conducting another ethnic cleansing campaign, this time against the Kosovo Albanian heroin mafia. Again the media parroted the CIA campaign to demonize the Serbs.
On March 24, 1999 US bombs rained down on Belgrade. Milosevic was stalked by Armenian contract killers hired by CIA. Schools, factories, hospitals, power plants, buses, trains and hay carts loaded with civilians were bombed. The economic infrastructure of Yugoslavia was decimated- Pink Plan-style. In a moment of historical irony NATO bombed the same Novi Sad Bridge over the Danube River where thousands of Serbs had died fighting during the Nazi invasion of 1941. The city of Novi Sad lost two other bridges and an oil refinery. Resident Jasminka Bajic told of how she lost her husband Milan, as he stood in the doorway of their Novi Sad house, "It was 12:20 AM on June 8, 1999. No one expected the bombs to hit that close to the houses. I had to sell all my cattle to buy the gravestone."[10]
The city of Pancevo near Belgrade was leveled along with numerous fertilizer and petrochemical plants and an oil refinery. Noxious gases filled the air. Ammonia, mercury and crude oil polluted the Danube. Pancevo mayor Borislava Kruska called the NATO bombing, "An environmental disaster…a crime against humanity. The international community is primarily concerned about Novi Sad bridges not because of our suffering but because they want their navigational route opened."[11] On May 7, 1999 a NATO bomb destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, provoking sharp rebukes from the Chinese government and its people. That same day NATO bombs destroyed a hospital and market in Nis killing fifteen people. Protestors in Belgrade took to calling NATO the Nazi American Terrorist Organization.
All told 2,000 Yugoslav civilians were killed by the NATO bombings and 10,000 more injured. Thousands more lost their homes and apartments, which were deliberately targeted by NATO bombs in an attempt to convince the Yugoslav people to cry "uncle". [12] At Stari Trg mine Director Novak Bjelic, who worked for the Yugoslav state-owned Trepca, said when the US bombing began, "The war in Kosovo is all about the mines, nothing else. In addition, Kosovo has seventeen billion tons of coal reserves".
One of the most publicized "massacres" purportedly carried out by the Yugoslav Army against Kosovo Albanians occurred at Racak. A group called Kosovo International Monitors spearheaded the hype. Its leader was William Walker, who earlier helped Oliver North's Enterprise arm the contras. While Walker spewed his version of the events at Racak to an eager US media, many European media outlets including the BBC, the German Die Welt, Radio France International and the French Le Figaro, began to question Walker's account, which of course blamed the Serbs.
A French TV crew in Racak when the alleged massacre occurred said the "massacre" had actually been a firefight between the Yugoslav Army and KLA ambushers. Later men in black uniforms came to the scene and redressed the KLA dead in civilian clothing. Yugoslav forensics experts agreed that the Racak Massacre was a hoax. It bore striking similarities to the Breadline Massacre in Bosnia, where it was later found that Muslim fighters had stage-managed a massacre for the Western media. [13] The incident led to UN sanctions against Yugoslavia. The French newspaper Le Monde reported from Pristina on January 21, 1999 that two AP journalists had contradicted Walker's account of the events at Racak. They said there were few empty rifle cartridges at the site and hardly any blood near the bodies.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe sent in a team of Finnish pathologists at the request of the Yugoslav government, which also invited a second team from Belarus. Both teams confirmed Yugoslav suspicions that the victims had died from long-range gunshots, with short-range bullet holes and knife wounds inflicted on the already dead bodies. They also found that bullet holes didn't match up with tears in the clothing on the bodies, indicating that the clothes had been changed by those black uniformed men- probably the same KSS German Special Forces who trained the KLA. Neither report was ever published in the US media. The incident was reminiscent of a maneuver that Adolf Hitler used in 1939 to justify his march into Poland. Hitler dressed dead prisoners in Polish Army uniforms and left them near a border radio station, which Hitler then claimed was attacked by the Polish Army. [14] Within a week 1.5 million Nazi troops marched into Poland.
BBC News reported in December 2004 that a $1.2 billion oil pipeline, south of that massive US Army base in Kosovo, was approved by the governments of Albania, Bulgaria and Macedonia. [15]
[1] "KLA a Creation of Western Intelligence". Anthony Wayne. http://www.lawgiver.org 4-11-99
[2] "Milosevic Defiantly Defends His Role in Kosovo Conflict". Fox News. 8-24-01
[3] "Milosevic Addresses Kosovo Polje Rally". Radio Belgrade. 12-17-92
[4] Escobar
[5] The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. Alfred W. McCoy. Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press. Chicago. 2001. p.517
[6] Silverstein
[7] Washington Times. 5-3-99
[8] "The KLA: Drug Money Linked to Kosovo Rebels". The Times of London. 3-24-99
[9] Chossudovsky
[10] "The Danube: Europe's River of Harmony and Discord". Cliff Tarpy. National Geographic. March 2002
[11] Ibid
[12] "War Criminals, Real and Imagined". Gregory Elich. Covert Action Quarterly. Winter 2001. p.22
[13] "Statement on Kosovo in Tandem with the Rockford Institute". Chronicles. 3-25-99
[14] Marrs. p.171
[15] "al-Qaeda, US Oil Companies and Central Asia". Peter Dale Scott. Nexus. May-June 2006. p.11-15
Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin' it to the Matrix. You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com
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