I forget to address Killing of Djindjic and claim that somehow Albanian mafia is the same as Serbian. First of all around 1000 people have been arrested in relation to Djindjic’s killing .It clearly shows the fact that Government and all others CONDEMN the attack and that priority is given to find the attackers! It’s called the rule of law, Serbia adheres too.
In its latest March 19 issue, Brussels weekly TeleMoustique offers an exclusive dossier about the mafia in Belgium where, according to the Belgian police department specialized for Albanian organized crime, Albanian mafia clans dominate, leading in the illegal trade, including human trafficking and the sale of cocaine and heroin.
The Albanian gangs are spread throughout the Europe, the report says, adding that Albanian brutality and networks of prostitution rings have made them notorious and dominant in the human trafficking in the West.
Belgium is regarded as the most important country in the Albanian human trafficking, being the last port before the entry to Great Britain, considered the “El Dorado of the illegal immigration”.
It is estimated that up to 100,000 illegal immigrants have been transferred to Belgium by the Albanians, while some observers warn that this number represents the illegal immigrants in Brussels alone, the city with some 1M residents, the report claims.
Albanian Clans Use Kosovo Province to Launder the Prostitution/Drugs Cash
Apart from human trafficking, Albanian clans are most involved in the drug trafficking—mainly cocaine and heroin—and thefts.
According to the TeleMoustique report, one of Albanian ‘specialties’ remains banditry, ranging from the cigarette theft on the gas stations, store thefts to the robberies of the trucks transporting goods, Belgian police commissar assigned to the department of Albanian organized crime said.
In the field of prostitution, Albanian clans have advanced to a new stage, becoming the ones who are now renting out the bars and buildings to Bulgarians for prostitution brothels.
The same inspector revealed that they are now witnessing massive laundering of the moneys Albanians are making through the organized crime in the Western Europe. Belgian police has found the Albanian mafia is most often sending this money by other expats to Albania and Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija, to be “invested” in the building of houses and gas pumps.
Btw, CNSNews.com reported back in 2005,Following five years of United Nations control and billions of dollars of international aid, Kosovo is a lawless region “owned” by the Albanian mafia. It is characterized by continuing ethnic cleansing and subject to increasing infiltration by al-Qaida-linked Muslim jihadists, according to a whistleblower.
First of all, relays the IHT:
“‘We are seeing a terrorist threat that keeps changing,’ Pierre de Bousquet, the head of France’s domestic intelligence service, said in an interview in Paris. ‘Often the groups are not homogenous, but a variety of blends.
“‘Hard-core Islamists are mixing with petty criminals. People of different backgrounds and nationalities are working together. Some are European-born or have dual nationalities that make it easier for them to travel. The networks are much less structured than we used to believe. Maybe it’s the mosque that brings them together, maybe it’s prison, maybe it’s the neighborhood. And that makes it much more difficult to identify them and uproot them.’”
As usual, what is news to Western Europe has long been known here. Yet a jittery “international community” has largely ignored it, being eager not to rock the boat of alleged ethnic “confidence-building” by pointing fingers. However, this public front does not mean that EU intelligence services have been ignoring the issue
IPS News reported on 25 July that in the wake of the London bombings, the powers that be are looking at the Balkans with renewed interest – and specifically, at the intersection of terrorism and crime here.
According to IPS, new CIA chief Porter Goss visited Sarajevo and Tirana last month, in the words of British military and defense analyst Paul Beaver, “to express grave concerns of Washington because of [these governments'] cooperation with radical Islamic groups.” According to Beaver, “a part of the investigation dealing with the London blasts is aimed at links between radical Islamists in Bosnia and Kosovo with international terrorist groups” in cahoots with powerful Albanian mafia clans. A Bosnian Serb news source added that Goss handed the government a list of 900 names of potential al-Qaeda-linked individuals.
The contention that the former Albanian paramilitary group that fought Milosevic in Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, UCK in Albanian) was connected with Islamic terrorist organizations has been fiercely contested. The pro-Albanian lobby denies it vehemently, whereas the pro-Serb faction upholds the thesis. The facts, however, lend at least partial support to the latter, for the period up to and during NATO’s 1999 intervention. The argument that the KLA has always been funded by organized crime is also beyond doubt.
Whether the post-1999 KLA continued to foster ties with foreign fundamentalists is a more difficult question. After all, with the war concluded victoriously, what use would the secular enough KLA have for such people?
After NATO, the KLA was officially “decommissioned.” A large number of these former “freedom fighters” were assimilated into the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), the heavy-handed police force that has served side-by-side with the UNMIK police. But behind it all were the powerful warlords from various clans, the most famous being Hasim Thaci and Ramush Haradinaj, the erstwhile Kosovo “prime minister” currently facing trial in the Hague. Even perceived peaceniks such as President Ibrahim Rugova were said to have their own “private armies,” or at least a very substantial security detail.
Still, as in every post-revolutionary situation, not everyone could be satisfied. Kosovo quickly descended into gangland murders as the numerous factions and interests staked out their turf. The events of 9/11, and the resulting crackdown on Islamic fundamentalists across the Balkans, only exacerbated this splintering process, which has heated up over the past few months.
By early 2002, the Albanian militant/criminal movement had divided into at least three different groups, says Thomas Gambill, a former OSCE security chief with responsibility for the eastern part of Kosovo. “You had the hardcore nationalists; the common criminals, and the Islamic fanatics,” says the burly, silver-haired former Marine, describing the groups he was tasked with monitoring.
A red-blooded American and spirited supporter of the “war on terror,” Gambill worked in Kosovo from October 1999 until a tense departure in spring 2004, not long after the March riots. Throughout his tenure, he believed that UNMIK was trying to avoid the escalating threat of terrorist attacks, the increasing chokehold of the Mafia, and their connections with Islamic fundamentalists. But when he started to blow the whistle, Gambill was ignored, then reprimanded. “They just didn’t want to hear it,” he says. “For them, I was a headache.”
When CNSNews.com with Tom Gambill in Pristina, just prior to his departure from the mission, he spoke with frustration of a series of e-mails he had sent back to a State Department staffer, which apparently had been received with little interest. Recently, Gambill repeated to me his claims that OSCE superiors had “warned” him repeatedly regarding his habit of “sending out ‘unsolicited’ reports to official sources concerning the Albanian extremists’ strategy, activity of the Islamic extremists, and other bits of information that I had confirmed concerning criminal activity.” While it’s difficult to prove, Gambill believes his whistleblowing had something to do with his OSCE contract not being extended.
Aside from fighting over the loot, the KLA split was also caused by candid assessments of what path would most satisfy common interests. But by early 2003, when the so-called Albanian National Army (ANA, or AKSH in Albanian) started up a high-profile series of bombings, the camps were defined.
The nationalists were split between diehard ANA supporters and those less keen on the “Greater Albania” project. Both sides were fearful of upsetting their relationship with the United States, and they sought to distance themselves from the Islamists, whom they correctly regarded as being unhelpful in respect to winning their ultimate goal of an independent Kosovo. The Islamists, however, were motivated by religion and supported by foreign governments and their NGOs – chiefly those of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Iran. Many of these charities were shut down in the aftermath of 9/11, though others hung on. The goal of these governments throughout has been to proliferate their own brands of Islam in Kosovo, under the guise of humanitarian relief and with the tangible result of mosque-building.
Both groups had a lot in common with the third, the armed common criminals; in fact, this bunch was spawned by and predated both (along with those recruits drawn by money and not ideologies). Now, the overlap is almost total. The powerful Albanian Mafia has long had a large share of the European heroin market and also trades in women, weapons, and stolen antiquities, among other goods. By necessity, maintaining such an operation in the global age involves “cooperation” with diverse and far-flung groups. Foreign Islamists make up merely one.
Contrary to what spirited defenders of the Serbs argue, it does not seem that Islamic ideology has played the key role in drawing most Albanians to fight. So why would the Albanians – nationalists, criminals, or otherwise – need the Islamists?
For the answer to this question, we must keep in mind three things: global trafficking routes; sustaining the rule of lawlessness; and unique services provided by foreign Islamic factions.
One of America’s enduring achievements in Afghanistan has been the renaissance of poppy cultivation there. Britain’s Sunday Telegraph revealed that while Britain has been tasked to lead the eradication of Afghanistan’s drug trade, instead, “after 18 months, the level of opium cultivation in Afghanistan has reached an all-time high of nearly half a million acres.”
The route of heroin trafficking continues strongly from that country through Central Asia and Turkey. Indeed, as a Turkish professor once described the country’s huge foreign debt to his students, “50 billion dollars worth of foreign debt is nothing – it is two lorry loads of heroin.”
However, once the drugs cross into the Balkans, there is lawless Kosovo – one of the epicenters of European heroin distribution and processing, with spillover operations in border areas of neighboring states.
Take Macedonia’s Albanian-populated village of Aracinovo, tucked into the hills of the Skopska Crna Gora mountain range just over the border with Kosovo. A former Macedonian special policeman involved in the botched raid on Aracinovo during the 2001 war says that he was amazed but what he saw: “there were heroin labs, a series of well-constructed tunnels, and better Western medical equipment than even we have in the State Clinic! To this day, I can’t believe what I saw there.”
The battle of Aracinovo descended into farce when NATO evacuated armed Albanian militants, who clambered aboard the “fun bus” along with foreign mujahedin and 17 American MPRI military advisors. While the U.S. denies this covert involvement, a Dutch intelligence report from 2002 affirmed it, claiming that the EU was furious. This damning 2001 report quotes another soldier involved, who provides details regarding not only American involvement but that of mujahedin on the Albanian side.
The second factor is that of lawlessness. Keeping Kosovo outside the rule of law is key for both the Mafia and the Islamists. As long as it remains a gray zone with indefinite borders, legislation, and competencies, not to mention an international administration too timid to exert much authority, organized crime can flourish. And, in the villages especially, the vendetta-based rule of the clans trumps any so-called “Western” style of governance.
Nevertheless, UNMIK, KFOR, and other international security organizations have fallen short repeatedly in their quest to stifle extremism in Kosovo. In some cases, they have shut down charities that were probably benign; in other cases, they have neglected potentially dangerous ones, despite the objections of security officers such as Tom Gambill, who lists some by name.
A failure to cultivate good ties with Serbian intelligence has also been a problem. Usually Serbian warnings of Islamic terrorist activities are met with suspicion by a cynical West. However, they incontestably have the experience, the knowledge, and the intelligence to make a contribution to the fight against terror – if the West really is sincere about that particular campaign.
A second major restriction on good policing efforts in the province is the poor quality and limited mandates of security personnel in Kosovo. Most U.S. personnel in the UNMIK police come on six-month to one-year contracts, hired through domestic security contractors, with the previous experience of being small-town, doughnut-shop cops. There are few Jean-Claude Van Dammes to be found amongst the UNMIK ranks. And, given the high turnover rate since 1999 (very few officials from that time still remain), there is also little chance for continuity or coordination of information-gathering, either in terms of technique or of content.
Says Gambill, “they [the UN] didn’t really understood what was going on – and they didn’t want to know. There was no continuity of mission, or pass-on intel.” According to him, despite repeated efforts to educate the American authorities about the presence of al-Qaeda-related groups and their connections with organized crime, “they weren’t interested.” However, before returning to America, where he has established a trucking firm, Gambill made sure to take his four-gigabyte collection of police reports, photos, and other incriminating evidence about the presence of Islamic terrorist factions in Kosovo. He is looking for a publisher for the book he is writing about his experiences there.
A third restriction is a quite obvious one, and it in part explains the timidity of most UN officials in Kosovo: that is, securing their own lives. All internationals in Kosovo are sitting ducks; they live in the apartments, frequent the restaurants, stay in the hotels, and shop in the stores owned by locals. At any given moment, any of them, from the lowliest secretary to the highest UN representative, can be killed. So where’s the incentive for these officials, waiting out their lavishly overpaid term before heading for yet another peacekeeping mission somewhere else, to take on the Albanian Mafia or the Islamic fundamentalists?
In one of those bizarre cases of blowback-in-waiting, celebrated illegal alien/KLA weapons smuggler Florin Krasniqi recently vowed from New York that if the UN does not vacate Kosovo and give it independence, “we will throw the United Nations out … we have a team of snipers here in the U.S. ready to be dispatched on very short notice.”
Note that this is the same man who donates heavily to the Democrats and who said, “with money, you can do amazing things in this country. … Senators and congressmen are looking for donations, and if you raise the money they need for their campaigns, they pay you back.”
in the end, one can’t blame all the intelligence failures and radical disconnects on American naiveté and their own unqualified staff. Even though they share a single currency, European states still watch protectively over their own intelligence services first. In this respect, the Balkans in 2005, and particularly UN-controlled Kosovo, remain a tower of Babel, a refuge for competing national and individual interests, a realm of unshared or ignored data.
In such an environment, it’s not hard to understand how terrorists and criminals have the upper hand – and why patriots like Tom Gambill feel so frustrated.
