The Wretched of the Earth: Kosovo's Mafia

[I dannati della terra: la mafia del Kossovo]

May/June 1995

by Frank Viviano

[Nota editoriale:Questo articolo è un estratto da un ampio saggio della rivista Mother Jones

intitolato "Il nuovo Ordine della Mafia" di Frank Viviano.]

Pristina, the capital of Serbia's Kosovo Province, is a film noir set made real. Its most conspicuous landmark is a sinister hotel, the Pristina Grand, run by one of the freelance Serb warlords who descend into neighboring Bosnia whenever the mood strikes, burning Muslim villages to the ground and carrying off everything of value that is portable.

In the first-floor lounge, men gather to discuss terms and payments into the small hours of every morning. In addition to Serbia, they come from Sicily and Turkey, Russia and France, Germany and Austria; they converse in the same rough pidgin English that Aliya and Sergei speak.

The Grand is the Waldorf Astoria of the clandestine arms trade. The men in the lounge sell assault rifles, grenades, napalm, mines, handheld and surface-to-air missiles, which are shipped from Italian and Spanish ports directly to the harbors of Kotor, Montenegro, and Split, Croatia, for trans-shipment into Bosnia and Serbia.

As in Moscow, as in the Castellammare hills, discretion is pointless at the Grand. Everyone in Kosovo knows that there are only two commodities to discuss in the endless negotiations here: weapons and human beings. And two currencies to pay for them: dollars and drugs.

Kosovo is 90 percent ethnic Albanian, and mostly Muslim. Its people are under the heel of a government in Belgrade that appears ever-more determined to make the province Serbian and Orthodox Christian again, as it was in the Middle Ages. With good reason, the Kosovo Albanians see themselves as the next candidates for ethnic cleansing; and the Bosnian tragedy suggests that no one in the outside world will take the risks necessary to help them. No one, that is, except the masters of the Empire of Crime. In return for guns to defend themselves -- and the greenbacks necessary to smuggle their wives and children to safety abroad -- the Kosovo Albanians have become central players in the European drugs-for-arms trade. Organized crime reaps the profits. The wretched of the earth pay the price, which in the charnel house of ex-Yugoslavia already amounts to more than 250,000 dead and 3.7 million refugees.

These human numbers are mirrored in a vast flow of cash and contraband that keeps the armies on the march -- and the refugee figures mounting. "The Serbs have financed a part of the war in ex-Yugoslavia thanks to counterfeiting, and also through the laundering of drug money deposited in 200 private banks or currency exchange offices," said German Secret Services coordinator Bernd Schmid Bauer, following an inquiry into the sources of narcotics in his country. He estimates that $1.5 billion in drug profits were laundered in Serbia last year alone.

Vienna Police Commissioner M. Gunter Bogl says that "part" of the war is an understatement; he is convinced that international crime syndicates are playing "the dominant role" in the Balkan catastrophe. "Their profits are filling a war chest that is managed in ex-Yugoslavia by members of the Italian and Russian mafias," he recently told journalists.

The term used to describe the Kosovo Albanians' role in the drugs-for-guns trade is "camel." By the hundreds, they cross the mountains, lakes, and seas that comprise affluent Europe's outer frontiers -- usually in the dead of night -- carrying the mob's narcotics in one direction and its laundered money in the other.

Pascal Auchlin, a criminologist at Switzerland's National Center for Scientific Research, says, "Here and in half-a-dozen other Western countries, there is now an ant's trail of individual drug traffickers, a trail that leads right to Kosovo." Once inside the 15-nation European Union (or Switzerland, with which the Union has a free trade agreement), the camels and their cargo can move at will.

No one can be certain how many camels perish in this business. Empty boats often wash up, after howling Mediterranean storms, on the Spanish and Sicilian coasts. Decomposed bodies are discovered each spring in the Alps, when the seasonal thaw opens snowbound passes. Other camels are luckier -- they're caught. Currently, nearly 500 ethnic Albanians from ex-Yugoslavia are in prison on drug- or arms-trafficking charges in Switzerland, and more than 1,000 others are under indictment. "Law enforcement agencies are turning a blind eye on the big syndicates and focusing on the little people, the couriers -- they are expendable," says Bertil Lintner, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review who has traced the drugs-for-arms routes from Southeast Asia, through the former Soviet Union, to Europe.

In late November 1994, French judiciary police cracked a drug ring of Kosovo Albanians in Annecy. Swiss authorities believe the ring is connected to a group that has been operating in Switzerland for the last five years. According to the Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues, "It is suspected that a drugs-for-guns swap (heroin for Beretta submachineguns) was to take place in Italy."

The Kosovo Albanians have no monopoly on the lower, expendable ranks of the Empire. They are part of an immense tidal wave of desperation that will fuel organized crime recruiting long into the next century. Put simply, the world's stateless nations -- Kosovan Albanians, Kurds from Turkey and Iraq, Tamils from Sri Lanka, Chechens from Russia, Ibos and Ogoni from Nigeria, and hundreds of other tribes and ethnic groups whose names are not yet in the headlines -- are the army-in-waiting of the new criminal superstate. Or the army already in the field, altering its composition at a rate that befuddles law enforcement authorities.

"From 1986 to 1988, 80 percent of the heroin in Spain was carried here by Tamil Tiger guerrillas working with Pakistani residents in Barcelona or Madrid," says Julio Fernandez, chief of the Spanish national police's drug squad in the province of Catalonia. "As soon as we destroyed that network with arrests, it was replaced by Kurds from Turkey, who completely dominated for the next two years. We moved against them in the early 1990s -- and now it's Africans."

There are scores of stateless nations on the globe today, and at least 5,000 politically suppressed tribes, according to the Hague-based Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, a sort of United Nations of the dispossessed. Their population is in excess of 100 million. At least 20 of the 37 largest UNPO members are already at war against their nominal governments. Most of the rest are poised on the brink.