by S. da Silva
With the exception of the U.S., there is no country in the world today whose connections to the international drug trade and international terrorism is more clearly documented than Kosovo. Type into google.com “heroin”, “terrorism”, and “K.L.A.” (Kosovo Liberation Army) and you get 18,000 web hits that detail the links of the corrupt Kosovar political elite to international drug trade, human trafficking, terrorism and al-Qaida – all of these illicit activities in a region that hosts a massive 1000-acre U.S. military base.
Yet, when the mafia-state of Kosovo and its Prime Minister Hashim Thaci declared independence from Serbia on February 17, countries like America, France, Britain, and Germany rushed to recognize Kosovo’s independence.
The movement towards Kosovo’s independence began back in the 1990s when the U.S., Canada, and the Europe were supporting a number of right-wing military organizations throughout Yugoslavia in order to break up the socialist federation and create a number of smaller capitalist states that the Americans and their allies could easily dominate. The formula was simple: to smash socialism, divide and conquer the multinational peoples of Yugoslavia.
The result of foreign destabilization in Yugoslavia resulted in a decade of “civil wars” and ethnic cleansing between Croatians and Serbians, Bosnians and Serbians, and Kosovar Albanians and Serbians.
In order to create many little nation-states out of the large multinational Socialist Yugoslavia, the Americans and Germans especically funded right-wing nationalist, religious, and criminal organizations in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo in order to drive Serbians out of the regions that they lived in. Meanwhile, to draw attention away from the bloodshed that the West was responsible for, everything was blamed on the Serbians and their elected leader Slobodan Milosevic. This is not to say that casualties and war crimes were not committed by people on all sides; however, the pertinent questions to ask are: ‘Who started these wars?’ and ‘Who stood to gain the most from them?’.
The Kosovo Liberation Army (of which current Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was once a commander of) was created in the 1990s to violently separate Kosovo from Yugoslavia. Important to note is how KLA fighters were shipped in from all around the world to fight for Kosovo’s liberation – just as the Americans did in Afghanistan with the mujahadin fighters (which became the Taliban). Not surprisingly, hundreds of these same mujahadin fighters from Afghanistan, alongside Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, were sent to Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s to dismantle socialist Yugoslavia. These fighters routinely attacked and raped Serbian civilians, which led to a spiral of retributive violence on all sides, but mostly against Serbians.
It is well documented that Osama bin Laden helped actually helped train some of these KLA fighters, which makes perfect sense: Afghanistan’s warlords produced the heroin whiled Kosovo’s mafias distributed it.
And when the KLA forces were almost completely wiped out in 1998 the response of the West was to intervene to beat back the Yugoslav army and punish the Serbian people. NATO bombed Serbia and regions of Kosovo for 78 days straight. Serbia was bombed back into the stone, with the complete destruction of Serbia’s civilian infrastructure, including bridges, hospitals, schools, and factories. Thousands of cluster bombs were laid down to terrorize the civilian population for years to come, as Israel did in 2006 in Lebanon. The Canadian Air Forces dropped 10% of all of NATO bombs in the aerial war.
The consequence in each of the country’s that broke away from the formerly socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s has been right-wing economic policies that has led to the mass privatization of the public wealth in those societies, often by Western companies. The Balkan wars made the rich richer and poor poorer.
The fact that Western countries rushed to recogize the independence of a state whose participation in the international heroine trade and the international terrorism shows that it is the Western countries themselves that are the biggest supporters of drugs and terrorism. Western countries talk about the War on Drugs and the War on Terror out of one side of their mouths; but they fund and support the drug trade and terrorism while the Western public is not looking.
Furthermore, what makes the independence of Kosovo so dangerous in today’s world is the geographical importance of the Balkan region to the superpowers. Russia, who has been staunchly opposed to the independence of Kosovo, has now declared that it is going to support the independence movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia. Georgia is currently governed by an extremely corrupt pro-American governemnt. So we see how imperialist governments, like the U.S. or Russia, stir-up “independence” movements through terrorist and criminal organizations.
All the while, legitimate and massively popular peoples’ liberation movements from Palestine to Philippines, from Six Nations to Kurdistan, are demonized as terrorist and extremist, but yet they struggle on unrecognized…
From Left to Right: Kosovo’s Mafioso
Prime Minister Hashim Thaci with France’s Bernard Kouchner, U.K.’s Sir Michael Jackson,
Former KLA Commander Agim Ceku,
and U.S. General Wesley Clarke
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