Kosovo a "Drug Smuggler’s Paradise"
Heroin heading for U.S./Europe…
By Web Today Staff Writers
BELGRADE, YUGOSLAVIA, March 15, 2000 (WT)—Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald is reporting the heroin pipeline is wide open in Kosovo, pumping up to 40 percent of all the illicit white powder consumed in North America and Europe.
Rumors have flown for years of the involvement of the Albanian-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the transport and sale of the outlawed narcotic. Those on the ground in Kosovo say the main drug runners consist of four Kosovo families who have helped underwrite expenses for the KLA but may not, themselves, be directly involved in the KLA.
Nonetheless, with the banishment of Serbian legal authority from Kosovo and the unwillingness of NATO K-FOR "peacekeepers" to play the role of narcotics cops, there’s no one left standing in the way of between 4.5 and 5 tons of heroin that highballs it through the region each month.
International law enforcement experts estimate that output has more than doubled since the end of fighting between NATO and the Serbs.
Increased supply means the street price of heroin is coming down and it’s becoming easier for addicts to obtain in the west. That’s why there are predictions of a coming heroin boom.
The value of the narcotic grows exponentially as heroin gets closer to its final point of sale. One drug middleman estimated the value of a heroin kilogram at 16 thousand dollars in Kosovo, 32 thousand in Belgrade and 64 thousand on the streets of London, Rome or Zurich.
Those tracking the heroin traffic say much of it takes an overland route through Afghanistan, the north of Iran, Russia’s southern states, Azerbaijan, then through Turkey and Kosovo into Europe and across the Atlantic to the U.S.
Since the Kosovo mafia has historically been built around a tightly structured family unit, authorities found it virtually impossible to infiltrate the group even when a local police force was in place. Now, there’s virtually no one left to make the effort.
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