Kosovostan – An European Trafficking Point

Posted on 2018-06-152018-06-15 by Policraticus

In this Talking Point Dr Marcus Papadopoulos says that ordinary people in the West were not told that after Serbia lost control of Kosovo, following the Nato bombing campaign against Belgrade and other Serbian cities in 1999, the region became a centre-point in Europe for the trafficking of people, drugs and organs. When Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, Western politicians hailed the event.

The United States, which engineered the disputed act of independence, led the way in recognising the new Balkan state, with its allies quickly following suit.

Many of the leading figures in today’s Kosovan government are from the former Kosovo Liberation Army, which was backed by Nato during its bombing campaign against Serbia.

The KLA (or UCK as it is known in Albanian) was once categorised by the US government as a terrorist organisation. As the American special envoy to Bosnia Robert Gelbard said prior to the Kosovo war: “We condemn very strongly terrorist actions in Kosovo. The UCK is without any question a terrorist group.”

NATO intervention

Citing ‘humanitarianism’, the US, together with its allies, argued that as Serb forces were ‘slaughtering’ thousands of Kosovan Albanians, Nato had a moral duty to intervene to stop the ‘ethnic cleansing’. Western officials, together with Western journalists, cited the figure of 100,000 Kosovan Albanians murdered by the Serbs.

And so, Nato intervened and bombed civilian and military installations across Serbia.

Following the successful Nato campaign to drive Serb forces out of Kosovo and deliver the region to its proxy, the KLA, Spanish forensic experts, acting on behalf of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, exhumed 2,788 bodies in Kosovo, believed to be both Albanians and Serbs, who had died of various causes, including through combat.

Fabrications with current parallels

As in the case of Iraq and Libya, the West fabricated a story in Kosovo in order to achieve geo-strategic objectives.

And the parallel between how the West portrayed the fighting in Kosovo and how it is currently portraying the fighting in Syria should not be lost on anyone.

Today, Kosovo is an independent state (recognised by 105 countries) and has been “brought into the family of Europe”, as EU officials state.

However, by having torn Kosovo away from Serbia, and by having teamed up with the KLA, the West played an instrumental role in allowing Kosovo to be at the forefront in human, drug and organ trafficking in Europe today.

UK sex trade

According to a British Home Office report from a few years ago, 70 percent of the sex trade in London alone is run by Kosovan Albanians.

And British narcotics police have referred to Kosovo as the ‘Republic of Heroin”’.

Concerning the latter, it is reported that drugs from Afghanistan make their way through Turkey where they end up in the former KLA stronghold of the Drenica valley in Kosovo, from where they are smuggled to Western Europe.

Commenting on Kosovo’s status within the drug world, the head of the crime section of Serbia’s border police, Milenko Vukadinović,referred to Kosovo as the ‘biggest black hole’ for drug smuggling.

Further to that, this May, police in Kosovo arrested Naser Kelmendi, a Kosovan Albanian drug lord who is suspected of masterminding organised crime in the Balkans.

Organ trafficking

Coupled together with drug and human trafficking is the disturbing revelation that Kosovo is involved in organ trafficking.

Today, there are reports that impoverished people from Eastern Europe have been trafficked into Kosovo where they are paid a small amount of money for one of their organs.

However, the first case of organ trafficking in Kosovo actually occurred during the fighting between Serb forces and the KLA from 1998-1999.

According to the former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, evidence suggests that Serbs were systematically abducted by the KLA and transported to camps in northern Albania where they were killed for their organs.

Organised crime

What makes the issue of organised crime in Kosovo all the more potent is that senior Kosovan Albanian politicians have been implicated in it.

The main party in the ruling coalition in Kosovo today is the Democratic Party of Kosovo, which was the political wing of the KLA and is headed by Kosovan Prime Minister Hashim Thaci.

According to Michael Levine, a former official of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the KLA was “linked with every known narco-cartel in the Middle East and the Far East.” And The Observer newspaper in Britain reported that: “The PDK [Democratic Party of Kosovo] took control of many municipalities after the war [in Kosovo]. The party has close links with organised crime in the province.”

Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, whose nickname as a KLA commander was “The Snake”, and who is embraced by Western leaders, founded the infamous Drenica Group in the early 1990s, which continues to be one of the most powerful criminal organisations in the Balkans dealing in drug and human trafficking. A report by the Council of Europe corroborated Thaci’s links to the Drenica Group.

And recently, EU prosecutors announced that they are investigating eight senior government officials in Kosovo in connection to organ trafficking including, according to reports, Shaip Muja, a member of parliament and former health adviser to Prime Minister Thaci, and Alush Gashi, a former Minister of Health.

The geo-strategic objectives of Western policy-makers has created a situation where in Europe lies a country which is being run by politicians who have links to organised crime.

And judging by reports, it would seem that those links are still intact.

As ever, ordinary people are paying the price for the selfish folly of politicians who chose power and influence over protecting their publics from the scourge of organised crime.

Originally published 2013-08-09

About the author: Dr Marcus Papadopoulos is Editor of Politics First magazine. He writes here in a personal capacity.

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!

Donate to Support Us

We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

Source: Serbianna

READ MORE!

The Myth of “Aggressive Russia”

Recently I went on a 15 day visit to Russia organized by the Center for Citizen Initiatives. The group visited Moscow, the Crimean peninsula, Krasnodar (southern Russia) and St. Petersburg. In each location we met many locals and heard diverse viewpoints. CCI has a long history promoting friendship and trying to overcome false assumptions between citizens of the USA and Russia. The founder Sharon Tennison has focused on making people-people connections including the business community, Rotary clubs, etc.. This delegation was organized because of concern about escalating international tensions and the danger of a drift toward world threatening military conflict. We ...

The Painful Truth: War is a Racket on Behalf of Wall Street and the Bankers

“We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth…For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.” —Patrick Henry, Virginia Convention, 23 March, 1775 “The completeness of the victory is established by this fact: that of the six hundred Moros (Muslims living in the southern Philippines at the beginning of the 20th century) not one was left alive. The brilliancy of the victory is established by this other fact, to wit: that of our six hundred heroes only fifteen lost their ...

The Bush Administration’s Foreign Policy in Kosovo

In 2000, when George W. Bush was elected president in a controversial and hotly disputed election, all the experts and pundits predicted that there would be a philosophical sea change in US foreign policy in the Balkans, and in Kosovo in particular. In my 2000 analysis of the election of Bush and US foreign policy in Kosovo, however, I concluded that the George W. Bush Administration represented the same old same old and business as usual. In my viewpoint, absolutely nothing would change in the US foreign policy stance on Kosovo. In fact, I concluded that the new regime was ...

Déjà Vu in the Balkans

An eerily familiar sense of regional unease has crept over all the former republics of Yugoslavia. Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar echoed the Balkan zeitgeist when he warned at a press conference this week that: “If the migrant crisis is not adequately controlled as agreed at the summit in Brussels there is a possibility of conflict situations between the states of the Western Balkans. It is possible that a small conflict would initiate a wider reaction because of the very difficult recent history (of the region), which is why it is very important that we solve this crisis together as no country can solve this problem by itself.” It seems like everybody knows that ...

Why the Rise of Fascism is Again the Issue

The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazis iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism. “To initiate a war of aggression…,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other ...

Colour Revolutions: Made in?

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement! Donate to Support Us We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations. Save

Potential New EU Member is Jihad’s Trojan Horse

A real flag of Kosovostan Fourteen people were arrested last Friday in raids in the Austrian capital of Vienna and the city of Graz. Prosecutors said the coordinated action, which involved 800 officers, was part of an ongoing investigation into suspected membership in the terrorist organization ISIS. Police also reportedly raided unofficial mosques where supporters of ISIS, against which the Trump administration has declared war, may have been meeting. Among those arrested, at least four were from the Balkan country of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a former federal unit of Yugoslavia. They are suspected of being part of the so-called Bosnian Network, run by a preacher who received ...

Back to the 1930s: Hitler, Da’esh and the West

Whilst Da’esh are constantly being compared to the Nazis, the real parallel – the West’s willingness to build up fascism in order to cripple Russia – is often forgotten. The recent debate in the British House of Commons on bombing Syria saw the comparisons coming thick and fast. “Daesh are the fascists of our time”, said Labour MP Dan Jarvis; “this is the fascist war of our generation” opined Sarah Wollaston; whilst Hillary Benn rounded off the debate by explaining that “we are faced by fascists” and “what we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated”. The parallels are ...

The Myth of European Democracy

It’s an open secret that the “Soros network” has an extensive sphere of influence in the European Parliament and in other European Union institutions. The list of Soros has been made public recently. The document lists 226 MEPs from all sides of political spectrum, including former President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt, seven vice-presidents, and a number of committee heads, coordinators, and quaestors. These people promote the ideas of Soros, such as bringing in more migrants, same-sex marriages, integration of Ukraine into the EU, and countering Russia. There are 751 members of the European Parliament. It means ...

Permanent War against Humans and the Planet

War is evil; permanent war is permanent evil. It is evil to humans but also to other species and the planet; the weapons used destroy us but also contaminate and destroy nature. Despite a general knowledge of the evils of war and acceptance of peace and the rule of law, war has become a permanent feature of the 21st century -destructive, cruel, dehumanizing and vindictive. Its message: those who can kill and destroy the most have the upper hand. Major General Smedley Butler said it in a speech in 1933: “war is a racket.” Butler, who had joined the Marine ...

U.S. Crimes of Genocide Against North Korea

The crimes committed by the US against the people of Korea in the course of the Korean War but also in its aftermath are unprecedented in modern history. “We Killed Off – What – Twenty Percent of the Population. We Burned Down every Town in North Korea…” The above quotation is from General Curtis Lemay, who coordinated the bombing campaign (1950-53) Who is a Threat to Global Security? The US or the DPRK? The public perception of the entire population of North Korea is that the US is a threat to their national security. During the Korean War, the DPRK lost more than 25% of ...

Can the United States Own Up to Its War Crimes During the Korean War?

When I was living in San Francisco in 1981, I met and became friends with Chun Sun-Tae, a Korean immigrant who had come to the United States as a college student in the 1960s and ran a small luggage shop in Oakland. James, as he was known, had grown up in the 1940s in the city of Kaesong in what was then the northern frontier of South Korea. One warm day in June, 1950, he went camping with a group of friends at a nearby lake. The next morning, they woke to the sounds of artillery and gunfire: Kaesong had just ...

West Rules Macedonia (FYROM) as a US-EU Protectorate, To Put a Check on Russian Influence in the Balkans

A year ago, at a closed-doors meeting between the USA and EU officials and the leaders of the four major parties of FYROM in Strasbourg, a route map for the resolution of the protracted political crisis was agreed on (or rather imposed). The roots of this political crisis are to be found outside FYROM: it is actually more a confrontation by proxy between “the West”, which supports the opposition, and Russia, which is trying to maintain its influence in the region. In conjunction with the public discontent at government policies and the escalating corruption, the negotiations have contributed to sharpening ...

The ‘Post-Truth’ Mainstream Media

Exclusive: U.S. mainstream media sees itself as the definer of what’s true and what’s “propaganda,” but has gotten lost in a fog of self-delusion and is now the principal purveyor of “post-truth” news, writes Nicolas J S Davies. For several months, Western officials and media outlets repeated thousands of times that there were between 250,000 and 300,000 civilians trapped under Syrian and Russian bombardment in East Aleppo. Western reports rarely mentioned the Syrian government’s estimate that there were only one-third that number of civilians in the rebel-controlled enclave – nor that its estimates were solidly based on what it had found in Homs and other ...

The USA is No. 1 in the World!

Statistics from 2014 Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement! Donate to Support Us We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations. Save Save

Five, Still Alive US Warmongering Presidents

Syria: Should Turkey Trust the U.S. Gangsters?

Last week, the Turkish Armed Forces entered Afrin in Syria’s Aleppo. According to the Syria-based Kurdish Hawar News Agency, Turkey also intends to deploy troops near the Raju area and place its armored vehicles there. Many Syrian experts believe that Ankara cooperates with the U.S.-backed Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki. Earlier, Spokesman of the armed opposition group Abdulsalam Adbulrazaq reported that Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki had reached an agreement with the Turkish troops over the deployment of Turkish soldiers at monitoring positions in Western Aleppo. According to preliminary estimates, Turkey will provide opposition militants with all necessary weapons, and Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki ...

Is Political Islam Compatible with Democracy?

At the dawn of the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, diplomats, politicians, and intellectuals debated a fresh question: what role can Islamist political parties play in a fledgling democracy? It wasn’t an esoteric or academic debating point. In the tumult that followed the collapse of dictatorial governments in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia, groups of radical Islamists had organized themselves into political parties and attempting to use the ballot box to get them to where the cartridge box could never take them—control of national governments. This was a new strategy on the part of Islamists. Ever since their emergence in the 1940s and their ...

NATO’s War of Aggression Against Yugoslavia in 1999

Eighteen years ago in the early hours of March 24, 1999, NATO began the bombing the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. “The operation was code-named “Allied Force ” – a cold, uninspired and perfectly descriptive moniker” according to Nebosja Malic. This article was first written in May 1999 at the height of the bombing of Yugoslavia. The causes and consequences of this war have been the object of a vast media disinformation campaign, which has sought to camouflage NATO and US war crimes. It is important to note that a large segment of the “Progressive Left” in Western Europe and North America were part of this disinformation campaign, presenting ...

America’s Top Scientists Confirm: U.S. Goal Now is to Conquer Russia

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a study, on 1 March 2017, which opened as follows: “The US nuclear forces modernization program has been portrayed to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities. In reality, however, that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing — boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three — and ...