Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Come far incazzare De Cesari: il KLA

Vi starete chiedendo: cosa fanno quei bravi ragazzi dell'Uck quando non sono
impegnati a PULIRE il Kosovo dalle impurita' serbe? Quali sono i loro
hobbies, le loro occupazioni preferite....?
Beh, naturalmente sempre occupazioni molto UMANITARIE: con simili maestri...
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http://www.softmakers.com/fry/default.htm
   :
What is the Kosovo Liberation Army?
Members of Kosovo Liberation Army trained by Bin Laden
WASHINGTON, May 4 (AFP) - Members of the Kosovo Liberation Army have been
trained by Osama bin Laden, wanted by the United States for the deadly
bombing of two US embassies in Africa, the Washington Times said Tuesday.
Some KLA members were "were trained in terrorist camps run by international
fugitive Osama bin Laden ... in secret camps in Afghanistan" and elsewhere,
the daily said, citing intelligence reports.
Bin Laden is wanted by the United States for masterminding the 1998 bombings
of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which killed 224 people and injured
thousands more.
According to the Times, intelligence documents also showed the KLA had
"aligned itself with an extensive crime network in Albania that smuggles
heroin to buyers throughout Western Europe and the United States."
The KLA has been fighting the government Yugoslavia for independence of
Kosovo province, made up largely of ethnic Albanians until Belgrade's
scorched-earth policy forced most to flee.
KLA Linked To Enormous Heroin Trade
Police suspect drugs helped finance revolt
Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 5, 1999
(c) 1999 San Francisco Chronicle
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.
THE WASHINGTON TIMES, Monday, May 3, 1999
KLA finances war with heroin sales
By Jerry Seper
The Kosovo Liberation Army, which the Clinton administration has embraced
and some members of Congress want to arm as part of the NATO bombing
campaign, is a terrorist organization that has financed much of its war
effort with profits from the sale of heroin.
Recently obtained intelligence documents show that drug agents in five
countries, including the United States, believe the KLA has aligned itself
with an extensive organized crime network centered in Albania that smuggles
heroin and some cocaine to buyers throughout Western Europe and, to a lesser
extent, the United States.
The documents tie members of the Albanian Mafia to a drug smuggling cartel
based in Kosovo's provincial capital, Pristina. The cartel is manned by
ethic Albanians who are members of the Kosovo National Front, whose armed
wing is the KLA. The documents show it is one of the most powerful heroin
smuggling organizations in the world, with much of its profits being
diverted to the KLA to buy weapons.
The clandestine movement of drugs over a collection of land and sea routes
from Turkey through Bulgaria, Greece and Yugoslavia to Western Europe and
elsewhere is so frequent and massive that intelligence officials have dubbed
the circuit the "Balkan Route."
Mr. Clinton has committed air power and is considering the use of ground
troops to support the Kosovo rebels against Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic. Last week, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, and Sen.
Joseph I. Lieberman, Connecticut Democrat, called on the United States to
arm the KLA so ethnic Albanians in Kosovo could defend themselves against
the Serbs.
Mr. McConnell and Mr. Lieberman introduced a bill that would provide $25
million to equip 10,000 men or 10 battalions with small arms and anti-tank
weapons for up to 18 months.
In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA -- formally known as the
Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves, or UCK -- as an international terrorist
organization, saying it had bankrolled its operations with proceeds from the
international heroin trade and from loans from known terrorists like Osama
bin Laden.
"They were terrorists in 1998 and now, because of politics, they're freedom
fighters," said one top drug official who asked not to be identified.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, in a recent report, said the
heroin is smuggled along the Balkan Route in cars, trucks and boats
initially to Austria, Germany and Italy, where it is routed to eager buyers
in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and
Great Britain. Some of the white powder, the DEA report said, finds its way
to the United States.
The DEA report, prepared for the National Narcotics Intelligence Consumer's
Committee (NNICC), said a majority of the heroin seized in Europe is
transported over the Balkan Route. It said drug smuggling organizations
composed of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians were considered "second only to
Turkish gangs as the predominant heroin smugglers along the Balkan Route."
The NNICC is a coalition of federal agencies involved in the war on drugs.
"Kosovo traffickers were noted for their use of violence and for their
involvement in international weapons trafficking," the DEA report said.
A separate DEA document, written last month by U.S. drug agents in Austria,
said that while the war in the former Yugoslavia had reduced the drug flow
to Western Europe along the Balkan Route, new land routes have opened across
Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The report said, however, the
diversion appeared to be only temporary.
The DEA estimated that between four and six metric tons of heroin leaves
each month from Turkey bound for Western Europe, the bulk of it traveling
over the Balkan Route.
A second high-ranking U.S. drug official, who also requested anonymity, said
government and police corruption in Kosovo, along with widespread poverty
throughout the region, had contributed to an increase in heroin trafficking
by the KLA and other ethnic Albanians. The official said drug smuggling is
"out of control" and little is being done by
neighboring states to get a handle on it.
"This is the definition of the wild, wild West," said the official. "The
bombing has slowed it down, but has not brought it to a halt. And,
eventually, it will pick up where it left off."
The heroin trade along the Balkan Route has been of concern to several
countries:
The Greek representative of Interpol reported in 1998 that Kosovo's ethnic
Albanians were "the primary sources of supply for cocaine and heroin in that
country." Intelligence officials in France said in a recent report the KLA
was among several organizations in southern Europe that had built a vast
drug-smuggling network. France's Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs said in
the report that the KLA was a key player in the rapidly expanding
drugs-for-arms business and helped transport $2 billion worth of drugs
annually into Western Europe. German drug agents have estimated that $1.5
billion in drug profits is laundered annually by Kosovo smugglers, through
as many as 200 private banks or currency-exchange offices. They noted in a
recent report that ethnic Albanians had established one of the most
prominent drug smuggling organizations in Europe. Jane's Intelligence Review
estimated in March that drug sales could have netted the KLA profits in the
"high tens of millions of dollars." The highly regarded British-based
journal noted at the time that the KLA had rearmed itself for a spring
offensive with the aid of drug money, along with donations from Albanians in
Western Europe
and the United States.
Several leading intelligence officials said the KLA has, in part, financed
its purchase of AK-47s, semiautomatic rifles, shotguns, handguns, grenade
launchers, ammunition, artillery shells, explosives, detonators and
anti-personnel mines through drug profits -- cash laundered through banks in
Italy, Germany and Switzerland. They also said KLA rebels have paid for
weapons using the heroin itself as currency.
The profits, according to the officials, also have been used to purchase
anti-aircraft and anti-armor rockets, along with electronic surveillance
equipment.

equipment.
Addirittura! :)
-Stefano

Laden? :) )
Povero De Cesari, sei L'unico che non sa che Osama bin Laden ha lavorato per
la CIA!
Ah gia' "le prove, portami le prove!"...

 -Stefano
   forse che non sai dell'esistenza della "disinformazione"?
dopo la guerra l'interesse principali di molte lobbies, anche italiane,
e` che slobo resti al potere e che alla Serbia vengano lo stesso
concessi gli aiuti internazionali.
secondo me ci sono parecchi soggetti economici parecchio coinvolti ed
esposti con il regime serbo e cercheranno di rientrare di queste
esposizioni.
pero` se a belgrado c'e` il cambio della guardia c'e` il rischio che
questi crediti si volatilizzino.
al tempo della P2 molte banche private ingozzarono di quattrini il
regime dei generali argentini e quando quel regime cadde  i crediti
divennero carta straccia.
ricordi per caso la vicenda dell'Ambrosiano?
chissa`, forse anche se cade slobo qualche banchiere nostrano finisce
appeso sotto il ponte dei frati neri (e sarebbe comunque un bellissimo
"effetto collaterale")
ciao luigi

 wrote:
Amo l'inglese. Particolarmente nella gerarchia it.*.
Ciao
        Augusto
-- 
Augusto Cagnani, 
acag...@libero.it

Sostiene 
acag...@mail.libero.it
 (Augusto Cagnani): 
#Amo l'inglese. Particolarmente nella gerarchia it.*.
Ti assicuro che a nessuno di noi piace particolarmente l'inglese...
;-)
Ma l'intento e' quello di riportare articoli e commenti di prima mano,
e non sempre c'e' il tempo di tradurre. Se aspettassimo di trovare un
commento del commento sui giornali italiani, magari sul manifesto, che
direste? 
-----signature-------------
Da quando chiamano intelligenti le bombe
preferisco che mi considerino un perfetto idiota

        Augusto
Ciao

 ricordi per caso la vicenda dell'Ambrosiano?
E hai prove di coinvolgimenti mai dimostrati?
-Stefano

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Mi pari tanto una copia di Chierico e Dolly: tante parole vuote senza
niente dietro. (tranne che per il fatto che ci sono moltissimi interessi
occidentali nella economia serba)
-Stefano

 Ah gia' "le prove, portami le prove!"...
Sono sicuro che ne sei piena. Con simili affermazioni come puoi non
essere piena di prove ;)  Non faresti mai stupide illazioni ;)
-Stefano


non hai capito
io intendevo dire che la relativa solidita` del regime di milosevic e`
dovuta al fatto che in questi anni e` stato aiutato con investimenti e
quattrini, nell'interesse di gruppi piu` o meno occulti ma facenti
comunque capo alla finanza "del salotto buono".
per questo non cade nonostante tutto, ha ancora amici potenti, che
parlano anche per bocca di chi si ammanta di bonta` per difenderlo.
la storia dell'ambrosiano e` piu` che vera. tu pensi che quella banca
sia fallita per aver finanziato qualche partito?
ciao luigi

posto; 
fai male ... il francese qualcuno lo conosce (io, un po') e poi lo spagnolo 
e` TALE E QUALE all'italiano, quindi conprensibilissimo ... POSTA!
PS No cagar el maricon qui fas el "networkbombing" ... es como pulir con el 
ranno la cabeza del burro ... ;-)

Sostiene 
vinc...@starmail.com
 (Vincent): 
#PS No cagar el maricon qui fas el "networkbombing" ... es como pulir con el 
#ranno la cabeza del burro ... ;-)
Da noi si dice: "A lavare l'asino si spreca tempo e sapone". Piu' o
meno. Ma non chiamarlo marico'n: lasciamo che siano i fascisti
riciclati di AN a prendersela coi gay :-)