[PEN-L:6566] (Fwd) KLA LINKED TO ENORMOUS HEROIN TRADE; POLICE SUSPECT DRUG

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Subject:                KLA LINKED TO ENORMOUS HEROIN TRADE; POLICE SUSPECT DRUGS
        HELPED FINANCE REVOLT - San Francisco Chronicle

The San Francisco Chronicle                                             May 5, 1999 
 
KLA LINKED TO ENORMOUS HEROIN TRADE; POLICE SUSPECT DRUGS HELPED FINANCE
REVOLT  
 
        By Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer  
 
        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.