Heroin Route
(By Luan Qoraj)
18
kilos of heroin worth around 1 million Euro seized last week during an
operation by KPS and UNMIK police in a village near Ferizaj – the biggest haul
in Kosovo in several years. It was obvious from the way the heroin was
packaged, that Kosovo wasn’t the final destination. More likely, it was on its way from the Middle East to Western
Europe.
For
centuries, smugglers of all sorts used the Balkans as a transit route, and that
apparently still goes on. But UNMIK
police spokesman, Barry Fletcher seems to be satisfied with the results
achieved so far by Kosovo’s law enforcement agencies. Especially, he adds, in comparison with the situation just a few
years ago:
Cut
1 : Tr 03 (b.F) : People were able to take advantage of the situation in
Kosovo in 99’ , 2000 and smuggling of all types increased. Certainly that would
include illegal drugs. We believe though we have increased our performance and
our effectiveness and at least some of the drugs are going around Kosovo. And
in the last year, year and a half the Greek authorities have found a lot of
Heroin leaving Greece on it’s way to Albania and the Serbs, very recently have
been claiming to find a lot of Heroin crossing their border with Bulgaria.
LINK: Kosovo is not the only transit route in the
region. Most ex-Yugoslav countries have the same problem. According to
Dobrivoje Radovanovic the head of Belgrade’s Institute for criminological
studies the wars and criminal regimes of the 90’s set up solid criminal
connections that still function. After the fall of the Milosevic regime, over
800 kg of Heroin were found in safes belonging to the department of National
Security. Heroin was also used to finance paramilitary units during the wars in
Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. The only
positive aspect of the trade, says Radovanovic, is that the bulk of the drugs
was only passing through the Balkans:
Cut 2 : Drugs in the Balkans go through Bulgaria,
Macedonia and Greece, before arriving in Kosovo and Serbia. From Kosovo, the
drugs get sent either to Serbia, or through Bosnia and Croatia, to reach
Europe. A relatively small quantity of drugs remains in the Balkans – in
Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia …
LINK:
UNMIK police spokesman Barry Fletcher concurs. One of the reasons for that is
that this kind of trade depends essentially on trust between the smugglers.
That means, an original shipment has to remain untouched until it reaches its
destination, otherwise the smugglers would lose the trust of their colleagues:
Cut
3 : What we see is that organized
crime and smuggling is a result of cooperation between a lot of independent
operators and if, for example, a shipment of 18 Kg of heroin was delivered to
the original part of this chain of people in the destination in western Europe.
If 18 Kg appears at the beginning of the chain, for the people who are
involved, 18 kg better appear at the end of the chain.
LINK: And he adds that the biggest problem in stopping smuggling is the fact that drug trade is not something being done by one organization, but by several independent operators for whom the current turmoil in the Balkans has been a real blessing:
Cut
4 : They cooperate with each-other,
they cooperate across ethnic lines. Money has no ethnicity. They also trust
each other in a sense that they would do things on credit. And that’s why it
would be very important if those 18 kg of heroin were delivered to the first
person in the cahin, that the destination better get all 18. Unless there was
another agreement. And these sort of informal communications does work for
them.
LINK: Criminals have always cooperated with each other, says Serbian crime expert Radovanovic. It is well known that the drug-mafia from Kosovo works very well with their counterparts in Serbia, Montenegro, or Bosnia … but the governments in the region, and police and other institutions have yet to coordinate their activities and cooperate with each other actively because of the ongoing political conflicts and differences:
Cut 5 : It is well
known that even during the war in Bosnia and Croatia some Serbian criminal
organizations were cooperating very well with Muslim or Croatian criminal
organizations. That cooperation went so far that Serbs actually rented
arms to the Croats to fight against the Muslims. It’s one of the examples,
which shows that that kind of cooperation was far from any ethnic
prejudice.
LINK: So what can be done to stop drug trafiicking? Not much, according to Barry Fletcher. Even in the United States, which allocates a huge budget and resources to the war against drugs, only 10 percent of the drugs coming into the country manage to get intercepted. And in the Balkans, with every government having its own little problems, it becomes almost impossible to do anything without wider, regional cooperation. The problem with that says Fletcher, is that there is no guarantee against corruption in most Balkan countries, and this doesn’t depend on the police:
Some
things however will never change. The rules of supply and demand for
example. And until there is no more
demand for drugs in the West, the Balkans will remain a crossroads for this
trade.
Cut
7 : Organized crime has at least two parts, one is the business and
the other is the customer. And as long as there are customers who are willing
to pay, basically anything, whatever they have to get Heroin, there will be
businesses taking the risk to sell it to them.
Back announce: And on that gloomy prediction from UNMIK police spokesman Barry Fletcher, we close today’s edition of UNMIK on Air…..Thanks for listening.