[CTRL] Vlore, ALbania's Trafficking Port

[Mrs. Jela Jovanovic, Secretary General]

 -Caveat Lector-

The Committee for National Solidarity
Tolstojeva 34, 11000 Belgrade, YU

Le Point (Paris)
July 16, 1999-

VLORE, ALBANIA'S TRAFFICKING PORT

By Dominque Dunglas, special correspondent

Vlore, on the Adriatic Sea, is the organized crime capital of
Albania. On board their "scafi" (highly rapid and maneuverable
rubber boats), veteran fishermen also transport illegal immigrants and
drugs... The Italian police have their hands full fighting this
trafficking activity, because Vlore is a place where corruption is built
into the system...

In the streets of Vlore, practically empty after 2200 hours, the
"special forces" unit sent by Tirana do their patrolling in a Volkswagen
minibus, Kalachnikovs at the ready. Hooded, like Algerian policemen,
their tough reputation has earned them the epithet of "the razors."
However, despite the burst of automatic weapons fire coming from the
port, they branch off instead of going to the "Skela," the waterfront.

They know that here begins the domain of the "scafists": pirates of the
Adriatic, traffickers in anything, slave traders, highwaymen in their
spare time, and lords of Vlore.

Wearing track suits worthy of New York rappers, toting the latest-model
portable telephones, their brand-new Mercedes and BMW double-parked, the
scafists love to show off their prosperity in the bars of the Skela at
cocktail hour. At the Sun Beach, after a few rounds of beers, the talk
gets lively. The subject of concern: the Italian financial guard, which
has beefed up its operations and recently confiscated several of the
their "scafi" - the fast rubber boats, which sometimes reach as much as
12 meters in length, powered by two 150-horsepower motors and are able to
take 50 illegal immigrants across to the Italian coast in less than 2
hours. "They sank one of my boats last week," snarls Nari. "It's the
second time so far this year. I am more than 300,000 francs [Fr] in debt
and have four children to feed. Each of the 200 scafi in Vlore provides a
living for 10 families. If things continue like this, everyone will be
ruined."

Alongtime fisherman, Nari is a textbook "scafist." He's been surviving for
a

decade trafficking in one thing or another. Back in the days of dictator
Enver Hoxha, his father was already transporting cases of cigarettes
between Greece and Italy for the Sacra Corona Unita, the mafia based in
Apulia. But business really started picking up for him in 1991, when the
international community imposed an economic blockade on the former
Yugoslavia. Guns and gasoline begin to transit through Vlore on their way
to the Yugoslav Federation, while networks began to sprang up to smuggle
migrants via Athens and Istanbul.

Chinese, Sir Lankans, Indians, Kurds, and Africans began to haunt the
streets
of Vlore. Northern Albanians driven by destitution, then Kosovars
persecuted by the Serb militias, were added to the hundreds of thousands
of poor folk ready to pour all their life savings into a passage to the
European land of milk and honey. A voyage during which the illegals are
often stripped of their belongings at gunpoint, and sometimes thrown into
the sea when a landing on the Italian coast becomes dangerous for the
boatmen. At $400 (Fr2,400) per immigrant, a flood of money began to flow
into the streets of Vlore. The few industries that were clinging to life
shut their doors in the face of this mirage of easy money. Today, few
young people in Vlore are willing to work as a waiter or day-laborer for
less than Fr600 per month -- not when they can earn Fr3,500 for a single
trip to Italy.

So it's not by coincidence that the "pyramids" - a colossal swindle
which consists of offering interest rates in excess of 100 percent per
year when accommodation bills are the only foundation on which the
solvency of the institution rests - that ruined the country in 1997 were
born in Vlore. Scafists' money financed the operation from the start.
While Nari is ready to boast about his ferrying of illegal migrants, he is
less talkative about the other two main local sources of criminal
profits: prostitution and drugs. Because it's from Vlore that Albanian
prostitutes embark for Europe - willingly, or otherwise. The recent
arrival of thousands of Kosovar refugees has provided abundant raw
material for the procurers. "The scafists arrive at night," confides a
sister of Caritas who has been working the last 2 months at 2K, a Kosovar
refugee camp financed by the municipality. "Sometimes, in the morning, we
find that one or two young girls have disappeared. The family never wants
to say anything, but I'm certain not all the girls are consenting."

In the area of drugs, Albania is on the way to becoming a very big
producer of marijuana. Some villages in the "Vlore river" zone are under
military protection by traffickers, just like towns in the plain of
Bekaa. The scafists have a monopoly on the transport of "grass" to Italy.
When they know they are about to be arrested, they heave the cargo
overboard. The risks of being apprehended are rather modest compared to
the gains. Nari winds up by admitting he was arrested by the Italian
Coast Guard after having pitched several kilos of marijuana into the sea.
He served only 5 months in prison before being repatriated to Albania.
Italian authorities banned him for 5 years from setting foot on Italian
soil, but that certainly did not deter him from resuming his trafficking
to and from the peninsula.

The war in the Balkans has also changed heroin and cocaine routes.
Heroin from Bulgaria and Macedonia arrives in Vlore and Durres for onward
shipment to Europe. More than scafi, the traffickers use hidden
compartments in trucks transported by ferry boats. The same technique is
used for cocaine, which arrives from the Americas in the cargo holds of
airplanes landing at Tirana and passes without difficulty through the
security net of a corrupt customs service.

Innovation: Hostage-Taking

Narcotrafficking has given birth to a new criminal element, younger and
more violent, and the "score-settling" has claimed 26 victims so far
this year...  Skander, a 19-year-old bullet-headed, freckle-faced youth,
never takes his eyes off of his brand-new BMW (in Vlore, one can readily
deduce an interlocutor's "line" by his automobile: The big Mercedes belong
to "established" scafists who own several boats, while youths in the drug
business prefer BMW, and the real bosses - the ones who make deals with
the politicians - would rather wheel around in their 4X4). "I made two
100-kilo deliveries of grass," says Skander casually. "But I can
transport anything. The important thing is not to get busted in Italy. If
you get arrested in Albania, it's no big deal. With money, you can get
out of prison. I invested my dough in a the fast rubber boats, and I may
buy a hotel." After having offered a "little something," Skander gets up
to greet some companions at the next table. Three of them are
policemen...

The latest technique introduced into the repertoire of criminals in
Vlore: hostage-taking and ransom demands. Officially, there have been two
such abductions so far this year, one of which ended with the arrest of
the offenders. But in most cases, the hostage's family prefers to handle
the situation without informing the police.

Sokol Kociu had only been the police chief of Vlore for 3 months when he
became the unhappy hero of a story that demonstrates the impunity of the
scafists. Last February, with the help of the Italian financial guard,
this honest cop organized a night round-up that netted six boats. For
Vlore, this was an unprecedented event. But the response of the scafists
was equal to the outrage they felt had been inflicted on them. Some
twenty armed men overran the police station and took Kociu hostage. A
revolver at his temple, the police chief was forced to return the scafi
to the brigands.

Political Corruption

In Tirana, where he is waiting for reassignment, Sokol Kociu rails
against the bane of Albania: corruption. "Seventy percent of the police
in Vlore are accomplices of the scafists," he tells Le Point. "Some forty
of my men watched me being abducted by the brigands without lifting a
finger. It's hard to blame them when they are only earning Fr600 per
month and the traffickers can triple that offer, simply for closing their
eyes. But the worst part is the corruption of political leaders. The two
deputies from Vlore, who are also respectively the president of
Parliament and the military adviser of the chief of state, are
notoriously linked to the scafists. Even Pandeli Majko, our prime
minister, found he had nothing better to do, when he came to visit Vlore,
then to go tip a glass with Tozo, one of the town's most redoubtable
criminals."

Questioned on this subject, the prime minister responded that he is not
familiar with the police record of everyone he meets. Sokol Kociu can
rest easy, though, since there's no risk the episode will be repeated:
Tozo was "taken out" in April. An occupational hazard...

With Sokol Kociu ridiculed for excessive zeal, Giovanni Arpante has
become the new nemesis of the scafists. A lieutenant colonel in the
Italian financial guard (a gendarmerie unit that specializes in financial
crime and trafficking), he is based with his men and four coast guard
vessels at Saseno, an island at the entrance to the bay of Vlore. By the
terms of an Italo-Albanian treaty, the financial guard is only supposed
to support and train Albanian police. But in practice, the Italian
military has declared war against the scafists, taking care to always
have an Albanian police officer on board the coast guard ships.

"Until just recently," explains Lt. Col. Arpante, "our strategy consisted
of trying to stop the scafists as they leave the bay, forcing them back
to shore. That slowed things down, but we never seized a boat, and we
were powerless when some forty of them would simultaneously run the
blockade. Now we have gone with a more selective technique. We choose
particular boats, and communicate the routes they are taking to our units
in Italy. There, our men wait for them on boats which were previously
confiscated from the scafists and which are much more maneuverable than
our coast-guard ships. Finally, on equal terms, we approach them, then
one of us jumps aboard. It's risky, but it often works. We have seized
about thirty boats so far this year on the two sides of the Adriatic."
This, then, is the new boarding technique that so infuriates Nari and his
colleagues and costs them boats.

But the brigands of Vlore aren't lacking in imagination. To foil the
financial guard, they are beginning to vary the departure points of their
scafi. Another technique is to put several hundred illegals on an old
fishing trawler. Coming in sight of the Italian coast, the boatmen
abandon the old tub and slip away into a fast boat they have taken the
precaution of embarking on the trawler. The Italian authorities have no
choice but to collect the immigrants who have been cast adrift. Other
brigands have temporarily abandoned the sea to make a living selling
false identification papers and false visas. And it's on board regular
ferry boats that illegals by the thousands get into the Schengen area.
Lt. Col. Arpante and his men are perhaps on their way to winning a
battle, but the war against the brigands of Vlore will be a long one.

[begin inbox] The Albanian Mafia

The Albanian crime scene is divided into three big families.
First, the heirs of Enver Hoxha. The current chief is Gramoz Ruci, who was
interior minister in the government of Fatos Nano in 1997 and 1998.Very
influential in Gjirokaster, Sarande, and Delvine, they specialize in
smuggling cigarettes and guns, also deal in real estate.

Second, the "secret police." The clan's backbone is a group of former
agents

of Sigurimi, Hoxha's secret police. Its three chiefs are Pellumb Kapo,
the former number two of Sigurimi; his brother Besnik Kapo, who lived in
Beirut trafficking in weapons for many years before returning to Tirana;
and Sabit Brokaj, the deputy from Vlore. Weapons, drugs, migrant
smuggling, and prostitution are their fields of endeavor.

Third, the "northerners." Their chief is Agron Musaraj, former minister of
interior for [former Albanian president] Sali Berisha. Involved in
trafficking with drugs coming from Turkey and Lebanon, he is considered
the richest Albanian in the world. [end inbox]

[begin inbox] UCK: Drug Money [By Ian Hamel in Geneva]

Until autumn 1998, the two largest communities of Kosovars in Western
Europe (180,000 in Switzerland and 150,000 in Germany) were making
voluntary donations corresponding to 3 percent of their earnings to
Ibrahim Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK). These sums were
enough to fund 40 percent of the budget of the separatist "government" of
Pristina. Then, from one day to the next, the diaspora switched its
support to the UCK [Kosovo Liberation Army], which quickly proved to be
much more demanding.

In Switzerland, for example, every employee is supposed to donate the
equivalent of Fr4,000 per month to the cause. In late 1998, Bardhyl
Mahmuti, one of the leaders of UCK in Switzerland, was very open about
his intentions. "We don't have the right to tell people subject to being
massacred that they must buy flour, not guns, with that money," he said.

Does this dramatic influx of financial support come from drug
trafficking? Since the end of the 1980s, Kosovars have effectively owned
the heroin market in Germany, Belgium, Hungary, Poland, the Czech
Republic, and Switzerland. And they have not hesitated to use guns in
going after their principal rivals, the Turkish and Lebanese mafias.

"While these latter usually shipped hard drugs in quantities of a couple
of kilos, the Kosovar traffickers transport 20-kilo loads, which means
they can slash prices," says the Central Narcotics Office in Bern. In
November 1998, police in Lausanne laid hands on 44 kilos of heroin and
made 73 arrests, mostly asylum-seekers from Kosovo and northern Albania.
According to the Geopolitical Drugs Observatory (OGD), 14 percent of the
drug resellers arrested in Europe in 1997 were Kosovars.

Even though most of the traffickers arrested claim to be plying their
trade to support the "liberation" of Kosovo, Swiss and German authorities
have never been able to prove that the pro-independence movement itself
organized its financing on the basis of heroin trafficking. Nevertheless,
they note that the mafia organizations always take care to have "honest"
Kosovars participate in every new operation, right alongside the
experienced hooligans. "There is no distinguishing of 'legal' from
'illegal,' once the clan asks for action," explains Michel Koutouziz of
OGD. [end inbox]


Secretary General
Mrs. Jela Jovanovic
Art  historian

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