-Caveat Lector-
Chaos in Kosovo
Kosovar gangs pick up where the Serbs
left off.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Laura Rozen
August 3, 1999 | PRISTINA, Yugoslavia
-- With 37,000 NATO-led peacekeeping
troops patrolling it, Kosovo may not
be the first place one thinks of as a
smugglers' paradise.
But it is.
Two different worlds converge here in
Kosovo, utterly unrelated to each
other. Heroin and cocaine come cheap
at parties. Mercedes and BMWs,
sparkling new and without license
plates, cruise through the capital at
dusk, packed with young men talking on
cell phones. When they stop in
front of key office buildings, a
couple of men get out, crossing their arms
as if armed and not to be messed with,
while another goes inside to
conduct business. The rumbling
oversized tank of a British KFOR patrol
turns the corner at an intersection
less than 10 feet away.
Kosovo sits between two European
countries overrun with organized
crime. Albania, the poorest country in
Europe, sits along a well-trod drug
and arms trading route between Asia
and Europe. The northern part of
Albania, which borders Kosovo, is
almost entirely in the hands of armed
gangs.
To Kosovo's northeast, Serbia, after a
decade of international economic
sanctions and isolation, is also rife
with corruption, arms smuggling and
state-sanctioned theft of public funds
to private bank accounts (some 300
cronies of Yugoslav president Slobodan
Milosevic have recently had their
Swiss bank accounts frozen and been
banned from travel to the European
Union and the United States).
Organized crime loves a vacuum.
Interpol now estimates that 40 percent of
the heroin supply in Western Europe
travels through Kosovo.
In addition, Kosovo has a past which
makes it an ideal breeding ground
for organized crime. For the past 10
years, since Milosevic revoked the
province's autonomy, most Kosovo
Albanians have been pushed out of
the state sector, and forced to look
for work in private ventures and
abroad. Many Kosovo Albanian men went
abroad to work in Germany,
Switzerland, Scandinavia and the
United States -- some in construction
and other above-board professions,
others in the underworld of drug
trafficking -- to earn money to send
back to their extended families. An
extensive network of travel agencies
helped traffic money from Europe
and the United States back to
relatives in Kosovo.
But certain conditions of the post-war
period make Kosovo even more
ideal as a base for organized crime.
There is an almost complete lack of
civil authority here, despite the
presence of KFOR soldiers. Have your
apartment broken into, car stolen,
neighbor murdered, and there is no one
to call. KFOR soldiers dutifully come
to make a report if someone's been
killed. But you can call the police
emergency number in Kosovo all you
want, and no one comes, because for
the moment there are no functioning
police. To date, some 600 U.N.
international police have arrived, but the
international police commissioner does
not plan to deploy any of them
until he has most of his 3,000 men.
In the meantime, there are virtually
open borders. The fact that Serbian
police destroyed many Kosovo
Albanians' identity papers and license
plates as they were deporting them
means that KFOR allows almost
anyone back in, without or without a
passport. To date, there are no
functioning customs officers on
Kosovo's borders. KFOR soldiers check
cars for weapons, but do not prevent
entry for people who are, for
instance, importing an enormous supply
of cigarettes.
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