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Heroin and Sex Trade Fuel Albanian Nationalism
Insight on the News, August 13, 2001 by Jamie Dettmer
Two summers on and Kosovar Albanians remain a problem along the lines this magazine outlined when it cautioned against the U.S.-led NATO intervention in the Balkans.
While holding no brief for Serbia's thug in chief, Slobodan Milosevic, now in The Hague preparing for a deserved comeuppance, Insight warned there would be no closure and that the circumstances would be set for a destabilizing rise in demands for the establishment of a greater Albania that would lead to turmoil in neighboring Macedonia and possibly later threaten NATO ally Greece.
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Furthermore, there was ample evidence available on the ties of militant Kosovar Albanians to organized crime and how intertwined the Albanian mafia was -- and still is -- with the so-called national liberation struggle. U.S. sources dealing firsthand with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) reported their anxieties to their superiors on that score. They told Insight that intelligence detailing KLA links with heroin trafficking and syndicated prostitution were neglected at the time.
The intelligence so completely was ignored in fact that, to the horror of State Department officials, U.S. Army generals argued after the Serb withdrawal from Kosovo that the policing of the province should be handed over to the KLA -- lock, stock and barrel -- eliciting from one exasperated civilian the comment: "Yup, that's great. Let's put the criminals in charge of law enforcement."
Now, as predicted, NATO and Interpol are struggling with the twin challenges posed by the militant Albanian nationalist movement. The designs on Macedonia have received considerable media coverage following the outbreak of fighting there and NATO's efforts to broker a cease-fire. The organized-crime dimension has attracted less U.S. press attention, despite the fact that it involves enslavement and exploitation of thousands of young, vulnerable Balkan women.
According to a recent internal British-government briefing, Albanians or Kosovars now control more than two-thirds of the "massage parlors" in London. That estimate fits with another study completed last year by Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service. It noted a long-term threat from organized Albanian gangs, many linked with the KLA, that run prostitution and sex-trafficking rackets across Western Europe.
With law enforcement weak in the Balkans, more-open European borders and dire poverty afflicting the former Yugoslavia, the gangs are having a profitable time. In some cases women simply are abducted and pressed into carnal service, although the majority are lured overseas with the promise of jobs, only to find themselves starved, beaten and raped if they object to doing what they're told. London isn't the only European capital to have witnessed an astonishing rise in Albanian-run sexual-slavery rackets -- police in Rome, Milan, Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam, Athens and Stockholm, all cities with large Albanian emigre populations, also have reported an upsurge.
Italian authorities estimate that more than 8,000 Albanian girls are working as prostitutes in Italy and that nearly one-third of them are younger than age 18. Some sources maintain the Albanians have taken the prostitution racket in the north of the country away from one of Italy's toughest Mafia groups, "Ndrangheta."
According to leading French criminologist Xavier Raufer, mere is no difference between Albanian militant groups and the Albanian mafia -- they are the same he insists, arguing that conflict in the Balkans assists the Albanian mafia's criminal activities that, in turn, provide funds for the liberation struggle. The two feed on each other.
"There's no such thing as rebels and militias on the one hand and the Albanian mafia on the other. In the Albanian world -- in Albania and Kosovo and in the Albanian-populated part of Macedonia -- you have clans, and in those clans you have a mix of young men fighting for the cause of national liberation, young men belonging to the mafia, young men driving their cousins or other girls from the village into prostitution. The guys are liberation fighters by day and sell heroin by night or vice versa," Raufer says.
According to Italian prosecutor Catal do Motta, the Albanian mafia is especially violent. "We know how to fight against our own Mafia, but now we have a new one -- and it is a foreign culture we don't understand." He echoes counterparts in other Western European states who are facing a similar challenge, one that's already beginning to show up in the United States.
On the sexual-slavery side, while European police voice growing concern, policymakers appear less ready to combat the problem -- maybe because to do so could well provoke public disaffection with NATO's continued presence in Kosovo.
In many cases national-immigration laws play into the hands of the sex traffickers. The few prostitutes ready to come forward and bear witness against their exploiters tend to be deported before a prosecution can be mounted while the pimps and ringleaders remain virtually immune. Threats of reprisals against sex slaves' families back in the Balkans also militate against a determination to seek revenge on their oppressors. Until international cooperation is orchestrated to stop it, the Albanian-run slave trade will likely, and sadly, continue unabated.
COPYRIGHT 2001 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
