KLA in the news

I think that this article offers some interesting information not often
brought up this early or by a major, mainstream news source. 
This was published in today's San Francisco (CA) Chronicle.

KLA Linked To Enormous Heroin Trade 
Police suspect drugs helped finance revolt 

Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer 
                  Wednesday, May 5, 1999 


	     Officers of the Kosovo Liberation Army and their
                 backers, according to law enforcement authorities in
                 Western Europe and the United States, are a major force in 
	     international organized crime, moving staggering amounts of
narcotics
                 through an underworld network that reaches into
                 the heart of Europe. 

                 In the words of a November 1997 statement issued
                 by Interpol, the international police agency,
                 ``Kosovo Albanians hold the largest share of the
                 heroin market in Switzerland, in Austria, in Belgium,
                 in Germany, in Hungary, in the Czech Republic, in
                 Norway and in Sweden.'' 

                 That the Albanians of Kosovo are victims of a
                 conscious, ethnic- cleansing campaign set in motion
                 by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is clear.
                 But the credentials of some who claim to represent
                 them are profoundly disturbing, say highly placed
                 sources on both sides of the Atlantic. 

                 On March 25 -- the day after NATO's
                 bombardment of Serb forces began -- drug
                 enforcement experts from the Hague-based
                 European Office of Police (EUROPOL), met in an
                 emergency closed session devoted to ``Kosovar
                 Narcotics Trafficking Networks.'' 

                 EUROPOL is preparing an extensive report for
                 European justice and interior ministers on the
                 KLA's role in heroin smuggling. Independent
                 investigations of the charges are also under way in
                 Sweden, Germany and Switzerland. 

                 ``We have intelligence leading us to believe that
                 there could be a connection between drug money
                 and the Kosovo Liberation Army,'' Walter Kege,
                 head of the drug enforcement unit in the Swedish
                 police intelligence service, told the London Times in
                 late March. 

                 As long as four years ago, U.S. officials were
                 concerned about alleged ties between narcotics
                 syndicates and the People's Movement of Kosovo,
                 a dissident political organization founded in 1982
                 that is now the KLA's political wing. 

                 A 1995 advisory by the federal Drug Enforcement
                 Administration warned of the possibility ``that
                 certain members of the ethnic Albanian community
                 in the Serbian region of Kosovo have turned to drug
                 trafficking in order to finance their separatist
                 activities.'' 

                 If the drug-running allegations against the KLA are
                 accurate, the group could join a rogues' gallery of
                 former U.S. allies whose interests outside the
                 battlefield brought deep embarrassment and
                 domestic political turmoil to Washington. 

                 In 1944, the invading U.S. Army handed the reins
                 of power in Sicily to local ``anti-fascists'' who were
                 in fact Mafia leaders. During the next half century,
                 American governments also turned a blind eye to,
                 or collaborated with, the narcotics operations of
                 Southeast Asian drug lords and Nicaraguan Contras
                 who were allied with the United States in Indochina
                 and Central America. 

                 In each case, the legacy of these partnerships
                 ranged from global expansion of the power wielded
                 by criminal syndicates, to divisive congressional
                 inquiries at home and lasting suspicion of American
                 intentions overseas. 

                 The involvement of ethnic Albanians in the drug
                 trade is not exclusively Kosovar. It includes
                 members of Albanian communities in Europe's three
                 poorest countries or regions -- Kosovo, Macedonia
                 and Albania -- where the appeal of narcotics
                 trafficking is self-explanatory, even without a
                 separatist war to fund. 

                 The average 1997 monthly salary in all three
                 communities was less than $200. In Albania, it was
                 less than $50. 

                 According to the Paris-based Geopolitical Drug
                 Watch, which advises the governments of Britain
                 and France on illegal narcotics operations, one
                 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of heroin costs $8,300 in
                 Albania, which lies at the western terminus of a
                 ``Balkan Route'' that today accounts for up to 90
                 percent of the drug's exports to Europe from
                 Southeast Asia and Turkey. 

                 Across the border from Albania in Greece, the
                 same kilo of heroin can be sold for $30,000,
                 yielding an instant profit equal to nine years' normal
                 income in Macedonia and more than a third of a
                 century in Albania or prebombardment Kosovo. 

                 The Balkan Route is a principal thoroughfare for an
                 illicit drug traffic worth $400 billion annually,
                 according to Interpol. 

                 Although only a small number of ethnic Albanian
                 clans profit directly from the trade, their activities
                 have cast a dark shadow on the entire Albanian
                 world. 

                 There is a growing tendency among foreign
                 observers, says former Albanian President Sali
                 Berisha, ``to identify the criminal with the honest,
                 the vandal with the civilized, the mafiosi with the
                 nation.'' 

                 Those ethnic Albanians who have embraced the
                 narcotics trade are extraordinarily aggressive. 

                 Albanian speakers comprise roughly 1 percent of
                 Europe's 510 million people. In 1997, according to
                 Interpol, they made up 14 percent of all European
                 arrests for heroin trafficking. 

                 The average quantity of heroin confiscated per
                 arrest, among all offenders, was less than two
                 grams. Among Albanian-speakers, the figure was
                 120 grams (4.2 ounces). 

                 Until the war intervened, Kosovars were the
                 acknowledged masters of the trade, credited with
                 shoving aside the Turkish gangs that had long
                 dominated narcotics trafficking along the Balkan
                 Route, and effectively directing the ethnic Albanian
                 network. 

                 Kosovar bosses ``orchestrated the traffic, regulated
                 the rate and set the prices,'' according to journalist
                 Leonardo Coen, who covers racketeering and
                 organized crime in the Balkans for the Italian daily
                 La Repubblica. 

                 ``The Kosovars had a 10-year head start on their
                 cousins across the border, simply because their
                 Yugoslav passports allowed them to travel earlier
                 and much more widely than someone from
                 communist Albania,'' said Michel Koutouzis, a
                 senior researcher at Geopolitical Drug Watch who
                 is regarded as Europe's leading expert on the
                 Balkan Route. 

                 ``That allowed them to establish very efficient
                 overseas networks through the worldwide Albanian
                 diaspora -- and in the process, to forge ties with
                 other underworld groups involved in the heroin
                 trade, such as Chinese triads in Vancouver and
                 Vietnamese in Australia,'' Koutouzis told The
                 Chronicle. 

                 On assignments in Kosovo and Macedonia
                 between 1992 and 1996, a Chronicle reporter
                 frequently encountered groups of ethnic Albanian
                 men -- ostentatiously dressed in designer clothing
                 and driving luxury cars far beyond the normal means
                 of their community -- at restaurants in the
                 Macedonian capital of Skopje and near the Kosovo
                 frontier. 

                 The men were quite willing to speak about politics,
                 confirming that they were Kosovar, and asserting
                 their determination to bring down Milosevic. But
                 when asked how they earned their livings, they
                 uniformly answered ``in business,'' declining to
                 provide any details. 

                 The rise of Kosovar bosses to the pinnacle of the
                 drug trade -- and the sudden, simultaneous
                 appearance of the KLA -- dates from 1997, when
                 the Berisha government fell in Albania amid
                 nationwide rioting over a collapsed financial
                 pyramid scheme that destroyed the savings of
                 millions and wrecked the economy. In the
                 unchecked looting that followed, the nation's
                 armories were emptied of weapons, explosives and
                 ammunition. 

                 In June 1997, Berisha was succeeded as president
                 by Rexhep Mejdani, who unlike Berisha was openly
                 sympathetic to a separatist rebellion in Kosovo. 

                 Last year, a NATO official in Brussels quoted by
                 Radio Free Europe cited intelligence findings of
                 ``the wholesale transfer of weapons to Kosovo'' in
                 1997, destabilizing the precarious balance between
                 ethnic Albanians and Serbs in the province and
                 undercutting the position of pacifist Kosovo leader
                 Ibrahim Rugova in autonomy negotiations with
                 Belgrade. 

                 A U.N. study found that at least 200,000
                 Kalashnikov automatic assault weapons stolen from
                 Albanian military armories wound up in the KLA
                 arsenal. So many, according to reliable sources, that
                 KLA operatives were themselves exporting guns to
                 overseas black markets at the start of 1999. 

                 In effect, the KLA's armed insurgency, escalating at
                 a time when U.S. and Western European diplomats
                 were seeking a peaceful solution to the crisis,
                 provided a pretext for Milosevic to press for a
                 nationalist solution to the Kosovo problem. 

                 Then came the failed Rambouillet talks, the NATO
                 bombing decision, and with it what Koutouzis calls
                 ``the militarization'' of the Kosovar drug trade. 

                 ``Narcotics trafficking has been a permanent part of
                 the Kosovo picture for a long time. The question is
                 where the profits go,'' Koutouzis said. 

                 ``When Rugova held sway and the object was a
                 peaceful settlement, the drug proceeds of Kosovo
                 clans were at least invested in growth, in things like
                 better housing and health care. It was a form of
                 social taxation in a sense, and the more illegal the
                 activities, the more that their `businessmen' were
                 expected to pay.'' 

                 But with the outbreak of war, Koutouzis adds, ``the
                 investment is only in destruction -- and the KLA's
                 first effort was to destroy the influence of Rugova,
                 and no one in the West did much to help him.'' 

                 Nonetheless, NATO military officers and diplomats
                 have always been troubled by the murky origins and
                 financing of the KLA, which materialized for the first
                 time in Kosovo on Nov. 28, 1997, outfitted in
                 expensive Swiss-manufactured uniforms and
                 equipped with the purloined Albanian Kalashnikovs.

                 The mistrust is reciprocated. According to Veton
                 Surroi, the widely respected editor of Kosovo's
                 Albanian-language daily newspaper Koha Ditore,
                 U.S. negotiator Richard Holbrooke had a
                 Kalashnikov held to his head when he arrived for a
                 meeting with KLA officers during one of his shuttle
                 missions to Kosovo. 

                 As recently as February 25, U.S. Ambassador
                 Chris Hill, another of the negotiators, said, ``The
                 KLA must understand that its members have a
                 future as members of political parties or local police
                 forces, but not in the continuation of armed
                 struggle.'' 

                 The eruption of war changed almost everything.
                 Since the bombing campaign opened, NATO has
                 had little alternative but to rely on the KLA for
                 intelligence. Its guerrilla units inside Kosovo are the
                 only eyewitness sources of information on Serb
                 troop movements. 

                 Solid intelligence about the KLA itself is nearly
                 impossible to nail down. NATO estimates put its
                 forces at 15,000. Avdija Ramadom, the
                 organization's official spokesman, claims that the
                 KLA has more than 50,000 men. 

                 In addition to alleged drug receipts, the group is
                 said to be funded by a war tax of 3 percent
                 imposed by the People's Movement of Kosovo on
                 the earnings of 500,000 ethnic Albanian emigrants
                 in Western Europe, a population that is soaring with
                 the immense exodus of refugees. Half of the prewar
                 immigrants have settled in Germany, according to
                 the International Migration Organization, and a third
                 in Switzerland. 

                 A single fund-raising evening in Switzerland earlier
                 this year is believed to have raised $7 million from
                 ethnic Albanian immigrants, much of it earmarked
                 for the KLA struggle against Serbia.