-Caveat Lector- This seems to coroborate earlier post claims of CIA-KLA-Drug connection. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Activist Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: The Crime Syndicate Behind the KLA Date: Tuesday, April 13, 1999 5:35 AM Activist Mailing List - http://get.to/activist http://www.motherjones.com/total_coverage/kosovo/layne2.html The Crime Syndicate Behind the KLA The organized crime syndicate behind the KLA illustrates the insatiable nationalism of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. by Ken Layne April 8, 1999 The news photos show tens of thousands of villagers -- cold, tired, hungry, and beaten -- crowding the borders of Macedonia and Albania. Their homes have been burned, their shops looted, their young men executed by Serb thugs. The sight of those dirty green Eastern European trains bursting with refugees brings to mind the death trains of Nazi Germany. As I type these words, half of Kosovo's population has been forced out. Only a delusional nationalist in Belgrade could look at these images and feel anything but sorrow and sympathy. But very little has been done to examine exactly who are these Kosovo rebel fighters that the U.S. and NATO are backing with the collective firepower of the West. They are, according to those who began paying attention to such things years ago, not the huddled masses on the bleak Kosovar borders, but rather a small, yet well-funded army, of thugs bent on widespread civil war and fueled by exactly the same kind of virulent nationalism of which the West is so quick to accuse the Serbs. The architects of this war are themselves ethnic Albanians -- the extremist leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army are the same ethnic Albanians who made fortunes by smuggling weapons, heroin, and illegal immigrants in the chaotic years following the collapse of Yugoslavia's and Albania's communist regimes. On this, even the generally hawkish Republican Party seems to agree. This little-discussed fact has nonetheless been well documented; the Federation of American Scientists -- successor to the Manhattan Project's Foundation of Atomic Scientists -- has assembled a huge archive of media and law-enforcement reports, along with internal documents from secret meetings of the KLA's support group in Switzerland, the Kosovo National Group. Since the early 1990s, you could see them in the resort towns of Montenegro and southern Albania, or poolside at four-star hotels in Zurich, or driving luxurious Land Rovers to hilltop villas in Tetovo, surrounded by satellite dishes and young toughs brandishing Kalishnikov machine guns, wearing nylon jackets advertising non-existent U.S. sports teams like the San Diego Pitchers and the Indiana Hawks. The patriarchs were always big men with big Rolex watches and they always paid for the drinks. They were Muslim the way I'm Christian -- meaning they would not be considered devout. And there were always plenty of young girls around while the wives stayed at home. This criminal upper crust runs an efficient continental network based entirely on the Balkans' black economy. Mother Jones correspondent Frank Viviano extensively reported on the Balkan heroin route and its increasing reliance on Kosovars back in 1995, and The Geopolitical Drug Dispatch, in "Guns and Ammo for a Greater Albania," illustrated the connection between ethnic Albanian nationalism and the global drug trade as early as 1994: "Heroin shipment and marketing networks are taking root among ethnic Albanian communities in Albania, Macedonia, and the Kosovo province of Serbia, in order to finance large purchases of weapons destined not only for the current conflict in Bosnia but also for the brewing war in Kosovo.... Hence on 18 May, as part of a ten-month-old operation code-named 'Macedonia,' Italian police dismantled a major Italian-Macedonian network and seized 40 kilograms of heroin produced in Turkey and shipped to Italy via the Balkans. In recent months, significant quantities of heroin have been seized in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Greece, from traffickers who usually hail from Pristina (the capital of Kosovo), Skopje (capital of Macedonia), or Skorda (a large town in northern Albania). At Skopje's Grand Hotel, an entire floor is reserved for new mafia kingpins who travel ostentatiously in Mercedes, wear Armani clothes, and are accompanied by discreet bodyguards toting assault rifles and hand guns. The Macedonian government officially describes these young Albanians (whose flashy wealth is all the more provocative at a time of unprecedented economic crisis aggravated by the Greek embargo) as 'traders' who are obliged to defend themselves in hard times. The war in Bosnia guarantees the Albanian mafia an 'understanding attitude' on the part of local Macedonian authorities, since the struggle is now viewed by Macedonia's Muslim Albanian population as a veritable holy war." But somehow the fact that the KLA is funded by organized crime bosses slips through the cracks of most U.S. reporting on the latest Balkan war. (An exception, as usual, is the New York Times' Chris Hedges, who has regularly filed detailed dispatches on the dirty laundry of both Serbs and Albanians.) Heroin travels easily from Turkey -- through Macedonia, Kosovo, and Albania -- to Western Europe. Three years ago, a Swiss narcotics agent told me that Switzerland's jails were bulging with more than 2,000 Kosovar smugglers. The Bosnian Muslims got many of their weapons from the Kosovars, who bought them cheap from the corrupt armies of the former Eastern Bloc. In Macedonia, heroin was cheaper than beer and a frighteningly large percentage of the city's smart kids were hooked. And in Skopje, the local Albanian soccer team has a fan club called The Smugglers. These flashy, vulgar crime-lords are also family men, dedicated to their people, and if a Kosovar family had any money it was because a cousin or uncle or village bigshot sent Western currency home. These smugglers believed in Greater Albania -- a faith not limited to the criminal rich. The way to get it? Organize the Western European and American diaspora of ethnic Albanians, fund the Kosovo Liberation Army, publicize the grim living conditions and savage human-rights abuses in Kosovo, dramatically disobey Milosevic's hateful racist policies, start a war of terrorism on the Serb cops, and demand NATO intervention. Knowing the Serbian nostalgia for Kosovo and the Milosevic-led aggression that started the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, these Kosovar patriarchs knew Belgrade wouldn't back down. The West would eventually come in, as it did when Sarajevo turned into a Bosch painting of endless horror. Milosevic would be crushed and Kosovo would become independent -- or join again with the Motherland of Albania -- and the ethnic-Albanian third of Macedonia would follow. The nationalism which has wrought the KLA and the current war over Kosovo isn't exclusive to the criminal elite among ethnic Albanians in the Balkans. The gruesome atrocities in Kosovo today are, to most ethnic Albanians with ties to the land, seen as a necessary evil. Even those suffering most, huddled against foreign borders and grieving for the relatives they've lost to Serb gunmen, speak strongly of someday going home. When the Serbs are gone forever. Meanwhile, the sleazy Kosovar mafia kings are left united in their dream of an expanded Albanian nation, but God only knows what sort of twisted internal chaos would erupt should Greater Albania become a reality -- the violent 1996-97 collapse of Albania proper provides a dark hint of what the future may hold. Ken Layne, a former freelance journalist in Yugoslavia, is now the editor of Tabloid.net, a tabloid-style, muckraking online magazine. He wrote the MoJo Wire feature "No Easy Answer" when the NATO bombings began. 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