G&M
http://www.globeandmail.com/gam/Commentary/20000809/COKOSOVO.html
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Wednesday, August 9, 2000
NATO in Kosovo: in bed with a scorpion
The KLA is running drugs and refueling conflict. No wonder even innocent
tourists can get arrested
By SUNIL RAM
The arrest of two Canadians and two Britons in Montenegro last week has
caused the ire of the West to be directed, once again, against Serb
leader Slobodan Milosevic. But, as Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd
Axworthy decries his "thug" tactics, it is well to remember that there
is a dark side to NATO's ally in Kosovo as well. And peacekeeping forces
could soon be faced with enemies on two fronts if they hope to maintain
order in the Balkans.
As early as March of 1999, The Times of London reported links between
the KLA and narcotics trafficking. In the same month, the ITAR-Tass news
agency reported that the chief of the Russian Armed Forces, General
Anatoly Kvashnin, had sent a letter to the Supreme Commander of NATO
forces in Europe, General Wesley Clark and to the chairman of the NATO
Military Committee, Klaus Naumann, detailing the involvement of "Kosovo
terrorists" in the narcotics trade in Europe. The letter outlined the
"where, what, how, and why" of the KLA drug business. By ignoring these
warnings, NATO had created a formula for failure in Kosovo.
NATO planners chose to ignore this information in their haste to win
their "just war." A year after NATO intervention in Kosovo, the Alliance
has failed to meet its key objective of keeping the peace. Kosovo has
degraded to the point where crime, illegal weapons and drug trafficking
are rampant.
Ironically, KFOR (Kosovo Force) troops are now forced to defend
themselves against violent armed aggression from ethnic Albanians. NATO
troops were never intended to police a hostile population and, least of
all, deal with international drug and arms smuggling. As Army
Brigadier-General John Craddock noted in late June of 1999, after U.S.
troops had for the first time been forced to fire on hostile ethnic
Albanians, "We have become the targets of violent acts." Not exactly the
role NATO envisioned.
In an effort to end the threat of KLA attacks against NATO forces, in
June of this year, U.S. troops led a series of raids against
ethnic-Albanian strongholds to seize arms caches. A senior Pentagon
official had reported that the situation in Kosovo was deteriorating
rapidly, and that U.S. troops could be forced into armed conflict with
the Albanian guerrillas. Clearly, if NATO cannot control the KLA and its
drug trade there will be no peace to keep in Kosovo.
The KLA has bloomed in the NATO/UN sponsored power vacuum due to an
ineffective, or nonexistent, plan for the development of a governmental
structure in Kosovo. This resurgence has allowed key KLA leaders to
become power brokers in the region. Hashim Thaci, the leader of the
KLA's political wing, has become the key contact point for NATO, the UN
and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, making him
the most important ethnic-Albanian politician in Kosovo. In turn, the
former commander of the KLA's military wing, Agim Ceku, commands the new
Kosovo Protection Corps, which is mainly comprised of former KLA
fighters. Financing for these activities comes from heroin trafficking.
The KLA is heavily involved in the illicit Balkan drug trade, better
known as the Balkan Route. Balkan drug organizations helped the KLA
funnel arms and cash into Kosovo for the continuing guerrilla war
against Belgrade. With the tacit support of the KLA and its leadership,
Kosovo has become the primary conduit for heroin trafficking from
Afghanistan via Turkey and the Balkans into Western Europe. Clearly,
those organized-crime elements who helped the KLA now want to cash in on
their previous good will.
European police organizations estimate that, every month, two to six
tonnes of heroin, worth twelve times its weight in gold, moves through
Turkey toward Eastern Europe. This route originates in the Taliban-run
opium fields of Afghanistan and is worth an estimated $400-billion
(U.S.) a year. Kosovars (ethnic Albanians from Kosovo) now dominate the
Balkan Route which supplies 80 per cent of Europe's heroin. Interpol
figures indicate that Albanian speakers represent approximately 1 per
cent of Europe's population, yet in 1997 they made up 14 per cent of all
Europeans arrested for heroin smuggling, and on average they carried
substantially larger quantities of the drug.
Besides cash, the Balkan Route also acts as conduit for illegal arms to
the KLA. Arms are either smuggled in directly or money earned from the
illicit drug trade is used to purchase weapons in Albania, Bosnia,
Croatia, Cyprus, Italy, Montenegro, Switzerland and Turkey. NATO has
reported that weapons smuggled into Kosovo included: anti-aircraft
missiles, assault rifles, sniper rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers,
mortars, ammunition, antipersonnel mines and infrared night-vision gear.
In fact, regardless of their guilt or innocence on terrorism charges,
the detained Canadians likely ran afoul of increased Serbian border
surveillance aimed at deterring these activities.
The greatest irony of this situation is that the U.S. government has
been well aware of the Balkan Route and the KLA connection for some
years. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency reported in 1998 that
ethnic-Albanian organizations in Kosovo are "second only to Turkish
gangs as the predominant heroin smugglers along the Balkan route." NATO
and the United States ignored this for the political expediency of the
war in Kosovo.
Kosovo never represented a traditional UN peacekeeping scenario for
NATO. The role was more peace enforcement. Yet NATO personnel are simply
not equipped and trained to handle the policing of the drug trade that
is fuelling the violence in Kosovo.
The presence of NATO forces has created a clear social divide between
Serb and Kosovar, which has exacerbated the ethnic violence. The ethnic
violence is also escalating as the KLA moves for independence, as
indicated by its rearmament. Rearmament has been made possible due to
the ethnic-Albanian control of the Balkan Route. KFOR has become caught
in a snare where it is being forced to fight all sides in the conflict;
thus its role as peace enforcer has been lost and it has merely become
another combatant in Kosovo.
So NATO is left with only one realistic option -- it must militarily
face down the KLA to stop the rearmament process and in turn shut down
the drug trafficking that is not just affecting Kosovo, but all of
Europe. NATO, the saviour, may be forced to become the oppressor in
Kosovo.
Sunil Ram is a professor of Balkan military history at the American Military
University in Virginia and an associate of the Institute for UN and
International Affairs. He wrote a training program in peacekeeping
operations titled Peacekeeping in the Former Yugoslavia: From The Dayton
Accord to Kosovo.
Serbian News Network - SNN
news@antic.org
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