[News] Welcome to Kosovo! The World's Newest Narco State

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Saturday, February 23, 2008

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2008/02/welcome-to-kosovo-worlds-newest-narco.html



<http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2008/02/welcome-to-kosovo-worlds-newest-narco.html>Welcome 
to Kosovo! The World's Newest Narco State

Last Sunday's unilateral declaration of 
independence by Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim 
Thaci, former warlord/commander of the Kosovo 
Liberation Army (KLA), heralds the birth of a new European narco state.

The illegal dismemberment of Serbia, completing 
the U.S./EU/NATO destruction of Yugoslavia, is 
proclaimed by ruling elites and their sycophants 
as an exemplary means to bring "peace and 
stability" to the region. This provocative move, 
outside the framework of international law, 
threatens any sovereign state with similar 
treatment should they deviate from the "Washington consensus."

Far from bringing "peace" let alone "stability," 
an "independent" Kosovo will serve as a 
militarized outpost for Western capitalist powers 
intent on spreading their tentacles East, further 
encircling Russia by penetrating the former 
spheres of influence of the Soviet Union.

Led by dodgy characters and war criminals such as 
Hashim Thaci and Agim Ceku, "independent" Kosovo 
is a gangster state governed by thugs with ties 
to Albanian drug trafficking syndicates and al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda, the KLA and Western Intelligence

Al-Qaeda's service to the CIA and other Western 
intelligence services is well-documented. 
Beginning in 1998 and perhaps earlier, the 
London-based cleric Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, 
the "emir" of the al-Qaeda-linked Islamist group 
al-Muhajiroun began a recruitment drive for 
aspiring mujahideen for the "holy war" in Kosovo 
at London's notorious Finsbury Park Mosque.

On Friday, March 13, 1998 a London rally for the 
jihad was backed by some 50 local Islamist 
organizations. According to Christopher Deliso,

...the Albanian Islamic Society of London, headed 
by Kosovar Sheik Muhammed Stubla, was lobbying 
and raising money for the KLA's campaign. ... In 
contradiction to the KLA leadership's claims 
about secularism, the Kosovar sheik specifically 
defined the militant group as "an Albanian 
Islamic organisation which is determined to 
defend itself, its people, its homeland, and its 
religion with all its capabilities and by all 
means." ... The chief bank account for 
fundraising was in the London branch of 
terrorist-linked Habibsons Bank of Pakistan. (The 
Coming Balkan Caliphate, Westport: Praeger Security International, 2007, p. 43)


In 2005, in the wake of the July 7, 2005 
terrorist attacks in London, it was revealed that 
Bakri, a probable asset of Britain's MI6, was the 
"spiritual" force behind the deadly attacks.

<http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Sources_August_Terror_Plot_Fiction_Underscoring_0918.html>Nafeez 
Mosaddeq Ahmed reports that,

The reluctance to take decisive action against 
the leadership of the extremist network in the UK 
has a long history. According to John Loftus, a 
former Justice Department prosecutor, Omar Bakri 
and Abu Hamza, as well as the suspected 
mastermind of the London bombings Haroon Aswat, 
were all recruited by MI6 in the mid-1990s to 
draft up British Muslims to fight in Kosovo. 
American and French security sources corroborate 
the revelation. The MI6 connection raises 
questions about Bakri's relationship with British 
authorities today. Exiled to Lebanon and outside 
British jurisdiction, he is effectively immune to 
prosecution. ("Sources: August terror plot is a 
'fiction' underscoring police failures," The Raw 
Story, Monday, September 18, 2006)


Before fleeing, Bakri defended the actions of his 
young dupes by proclaiming, "We don't make a 
distinction between civilians and non-civilians, 
innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims 
and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever 
has no value. It has no sanctity."

The current "secular" Prime Minister Hashim 
Thaci, when he served as KLA warlord was 
identified in media reports as having operational 
links to the al-Qaeda network. Such reports are 
not surprising when one considers that for 
earlier U.S./NATO "service" in Bosnia, bin Laden 
himself was rewarded a Bosnian passport by the 
"democratic" government of former Nazi and 
Islamist ideologue, 
<http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=alate90alija#alate90alija>Alija 
Izetbegovic.

As the Afghan-Arab database of disposable 
intelligence assets streamed into Kosovo, often 
from Albania with the active assistance of 
narcotrafficking gangsters under NATO 
supervision, they replenished the ranks of Thaci's terrorist army.

<http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/apr1999/kla-a10.shtml>Michel 
Chossudovsky writes,

Mercenaries financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait 
had been fighting in Bosnia. And the Bosnian 
pattern was replicated in Kosovo: Mujahadeen 
mercenaries from various Islamic countries are 
reported to be fighting alongside the KLA in 
Kosovo. German, Turkish and Afghan instructors 
were reported to be training the KLA in guerrilla 
and diversion tactics. ... According to a 
Deutsche Press-Agentur report, financial support 
from Islamic countries to the KLA had been 
channelled through the former Albanian chief of 
the National Information Service (NIS), Bashkim 
Gazidede. "Gazidede, reportedly a devout Moslem 
who fled Albania in March of last year [1997], is 
presently [1998] being investigated for his 
contacts with Islamic terrorist organizations." 
("Kosovo 'freedom fighters' financed by organised 
crime," World Socialist Web Site, 10 April 1999)


These links are hardly casual. On the contrary, as Peter Dale Scott avers,

The closeness of the KLA to al-Qaeda was 
acknowledged again in the Western press, after 
Afghan-connected KLA guerrillas proceeded in 2001 
to conduct guerrilla warfare in Macedonia. Press 
accounts included an Interpol report containing 
the allegation that one of bin Laden's senior 
lieutenants was the commander of an elite KLA 
unit operating in Kosovo in 1999. This was 
probably Mohammed al-Zawahiri. (The Road to 9/11: 
Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, 
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, p. 169)


Agim Ceku another "Prime Minister," committed 
massive war crimes in the Croatian region of 
Krajina when employed by the Croatian army as a 
brigadier general. As a key planner of 
<http://cryptome.org/us-op-storm.htm>Operation 
Storm, Ceku's forces massacred Serbs and presided 
over the largest ethnic cleansing during NATO's 
Yugoslavian destabilization campaign. Some 
250,000 Serbs fled for their lives as Ceku's 
black-uniformed shock troops, many adorned with 
symbols of the Nazi Ustasha puppet regime during 
World War II were driven from Croatia.

According to <http://www.tenc.net/articles/elich/krajina.html>Gregory Elich,

The invasion of Krajina was preceded by a 
thorough CIA and DIA analysis of the region. 
According to Balkan specialist Ivo Banac, this 
"tactical and intelligence support" was furnished 
to the Croatian Army at the beginning of its 
offensive. ... Two months earlier, the Pentagon 
contracted Military Professional Resources, Inc 
(MPRI) to train the Croatian military. According 
to a Croatian officer, MPRI advisors "lecture us 
on tactics and big war operations on the level of 
brigades, which is why we needed them for 
Operation Storm when we took the Krajina." 
Croatian sources claim that U.S. satellite 
intelligence was furnished to the Croatian 
military. Following the invasion of Krajina, the 
U.S. rewarded Croatia with an agreement 
"broadening existing cooperation" between MPRI 
and the Croatian military. U.S. advisors assisted 
in the reorganization of the Croatian Army. 
Referring to this reorganization in an interview 
with the newspaper Vecernji List, Croatian 
General Tihomir Blaskic said, "We are building 
the foundations of our organization on the 
traditions of the Croatian home guard" -- 
pro-Nazi troops in World War II. ("The Invasion 
of Serbian Krajina," Emperors Clothes, no date)


Following on the heels of this sterling 
"victory," Ceku became KLA commander in 1999 and 
"Prime Minister" in 2006. There is an outstanding 
Interpol warrant for his arrest according to 
<http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8055>Michel Chossudovsky.

The KLA: "Trained-up fierce" by Germany's KSK

As in Bosnia Herzegovina and Croatia, the Kosovo 
Liberation Army was secretly armed by America and 
Germany and remains what it has always been, a 
creature of Western intelligence services.

Christopher Deliso observes,

In 1996, Germany's BND established a major 
station in Tirana...and another in Rome to select 
and train future KLA fighters. According to Le 
Monde Diplomatique, "special forces in Berlin 
provided the operational training and supplied 
arms and transmission equipment from ex-East 
German Stasi stocks as well as Black uniforms." 
The Italian headquarters recruited Albanian 
immigrants passing through ports such as Brindisi 
and Trieste, while German military intelligence, 
the Militaramschirmdienst, and the Kommando 
Spezialkräfte Special Forces (KSK), offered 
military training and provisions to the KLA in 
the remote Mirdita Mountains of northern Albania 
controlled by the deposed president, Sali Berisha.
In 1996, BND Chief Geiger's deputy, Rainer 
Kesselring, the son of the Nazi Luftwaffe general 
responsible for the bombing of Belgrade in 1941 
that left 17,000 dead, oversaw KSK training of 
Albanian recruits at a Turkish military base near 
Izmir. (The Coming Balkan Caliphate, Westport: 
Praeger Security International, 2007, pp. 37-38)


Hypocritically, while Washington had officially 
designated the KLA a "terrorist organization" 
funded by the heroin trade, the Clinton 
administration was complicit with their German 
allies in the division of the Serb province along ethnic and religious lines.

By 1998, the KLA took control of between 25 to 40 
percent of the province before Serb forces 
wrested the KLA-held areas back. Facing imminent 
defeat, the Kosovo Liberation Army and allied 
mujahideen fighters appealed to Washington, 
citing the imminent danger of "ethnic cleansing" 
by the Serbs. Laughable on the face of it, 
Albanians constitute fully 90 percent of Kosovo's 
population, and in fact, it was the 
<http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/kosov2/>Serbs, 
<http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_cronin/2008/02/bandoned_in_kosovo.html>Roma 
and <http://www.tenc.net/interviews/ceda.htm>Jews 
who were being brutalized by KLA hit squads, 
their homes torched, their churches and 
synagogues sacked. It was the dismantling of the 
KLA's terrorist infrastructure by the Yugoslav 
People's Army that was the trigger that prompted 
direct military intervention by NATO in 1999.

As in Iraq, the 78 day U.S. bombing campaign 
targeted critical civilian infrastructure in 
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/may1999/bomb-m20.shtml>Serbia: 
bridges, factories, power plants, electrical 
transmission hubs, communications centers. 
Throughout Serbia and Kosovo itself, the U.S. 
scattered tons of radioactive 
<http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/total_coverage/kosovo/reality_check/du.html>depleted 
uranium munitions and tens of thousands of 
<http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/kosovo98/cluster.shtml>cluster 
bombs. The U.S. attack, ostensibly to "protect" 
Kosovo's population from Serb depredations caused 
some 800,000 civilians to flee NATO's devastating raids.

For Washington, drunk on the illusion that its 
policies had hastened the collapse of a 
bureaucratized and rotten Soviet system, the 
dismemberment of Yugoslavia would again represent 
the triumph of the so-called "free market" and 
"democracy" under the umbrella of a new 
international order administered by World 
Bank/IMF "reforms": Francis Fukuyama's 
short-lived "end of history." While on the 
opposite pole of the same ideological dead end, 
political Islam's tactical alliance with the West 
was a means to establish a bridgehead for 
penetration into Europe via dodgy Saudi, Kuwaiti 
and Gulf "charities" in pursuit of their quixotic 
quest of establishing a "divine" (Islamicized) 
capitalist order rising from the ashes of a decadent West.

Two heads, same poisonous snake.

The KLA's Links to the International Heroin Trade

In Kosovo, Hashim Thaci's KLA served as the 
militarized vanguard for the Albanian mafia whose 
"15 Families" control virtually every facet of 
the Balkan heroin trade. Kosovar traffickers ship 
heroin originating exclusively from Asia's 
<http://www.unodc.org/pdf/research/wdr07/WDR_2007.pdf>Golden 
Crescent. At one end lies Afghanistan where poppy 
is harvested for transshipment through Iran and 
Turkey; as morphine base it is then refined into 
"product" for worldwide consumption. From there 
it passes into the hands of the Albanian 
syndicates who control the Balkan Route.

As the 
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1999/05/05/MN40517.DTL>San 
Francisco Chronicle reported,

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. (Frank Viviano, "KLA Linked to 
Enormous Heroin Trade," Wednesday, May 5, 1999, Page A-1)


It is hardly an accident that the meteoric rise 
of the Kosovar families to the top of the 
narcotrafficking hierarchy coincided with the 
KLA's sudden appearance in the area in 1997.

As 
<http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/01/heroin.html>Peter 
Klebnikov observed,

As the war in Kosovo heated up, the drug 
traffickers began supplying the KLA with weapons 
procured from Eastern European and Italian crime 
groups in exchange for heroin. The 15 Families 
also lent their private armies to fight alongside 
the KLA. Clad in new Swiss uniforms and equipped 
with modern weaponry, these troops stood out 
among the ragtag irregulars of the KLA. In all, 
this was a formidable aid package. It's therefore 
not surprising, say European law enforcement 
officials, that the faction that ultimately 
seized power in Kosovo -- the KLA under Hashim 
Thaci -- was the group that maintained the 
closest links to traffickers. "As the biggest 
contributors, the drug traffickers may have 
gotten the most influence in running the 
country," says Koutouzis. ("Heroin Heroes," 
Mother Jones, January/February 2000)


As is well-known, U.S. destabilization programs 
and covert operations rely on far-right 
provocateurs and drug lords (often 
<http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2008/02/cia-paramilitarism-narcotrafficking.html>interchangeable 
players) to facilitate the dirty work. Throughout 
its Balkan operations the CIA made liberal use of 
these preexisting narcotics networks to arm the 
KLA and provide them with targets.

The rest is history, as they say.

Kosovo Today

Has anything changed in the intervening years? 
Hardly. In fact, the vise-like grip of the 
Albanian mafia over narcotics, 
<http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=1559>human 
trafficking and arms smuggling has cemented the 
"15 Families" place atop Europe's hierarchy of 
crime, an essential arm of the capitalist deep state.

Considering NATO and the UN's lofty mandate to 
bring "peace and stability" to the region through 
"democracy promotion" and "institution building," 
what does the balance sheet reveal?

According to regional experts the outlook for 
Kosovo is grim. The 
<http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41267>economy 
is in shambles, unemployment hovers near 50 
percent, a population of young people with 
"criminality as the sole career choice" populate 
a society tottering on the brink of collapse 
where the state is dominated by organized crime.

According to former New York Times reporter 
<http://www.balkanalysis.com/2007/11/18/kosovo-auf-deutsch/>David 
Binder, citing a 124-page investigation by the 
Institute for European Policy commissioned by the German Bundeswehr,

"It is a Mafia society" based on "capture of the 
state" by criminal elements. ("State capture" is 
a term coined in 2000 by a group of World Bank 
analysts to describe countries where government 
structures have been seized by corrupt financial 
oligarchies. This study applied the term to 
Montenegro's Milo Djukanovic, by way of his 
cigarette smuggling and to Slovenia, with the 
arms smuggling conducted by Janez Jansa). In 
Kosovo, it says, "There is a need for thorough change of the elite."


Fat chance that happening anytime soon! Binder reports:

In the authors' definition, Kosovan organized 
crime "consists of multimillion-Euro 
organizations with guerrilla experience and 
espionage expertise." They quote a German 
intelligence service report of "closest ties 
between leading political decision makers and the 
dominant criminal class" and name Ramush 
Haradinaj, Hashim Thaci and Xhavit Haliti as 
compromised leaders who are "internally protected 
by parliamentary immunity and abroad by 
international law." They scornfully quote the 
UNMIK chief from 2004-2006, Soeren Jessen 
Petersen, calling Haradinaj "a close and personal 
friend." UNMIK, they add "is in many respects an 
element of the local problem scene."
The study sharply criticizes the United States 
for "abetting the escape of criminals" in Kosovo 
as well as "preventing European investigators 
from working." This has made Americans 
"vulnerable to blackmail." It notes "secret CIA 
detention centers" at Camp Bondsteel and assails 
American military training for Kosovo (Albanian) 
police by Dyncorp, authorized by the Pentagon. 
("Kosovo Auf Deutsch," Balkan Analysis, November 18, 2007)


As we can readily observe in other climes, the 
interpenetration of the state by criminal elites 
serve as the preferred mechanism to cement a 
"public-private partnership" founded on 
corruption, maintained by brute force solely for 
purposes of resource extraction, pipeline 
politics, military bases and the geopolitical 
advantage gained over "market" rivals.

As the U.S. Embassy 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/22/serbia.kosovo>burns 
in Belgrade, all in all, its another "Mission 
Accomplished" moment for the United States.




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415 863-9977

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