Author: James "Ace" Lyons Jr.
Publication: The Washington Times
Date: May 9, 2006
URL: http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20060508-091537-7458r.htm
Among the most important priorities of U.S.
global policy is combating the international traffic in drugs and in persons
(often a euphemism for women and children forced into prostitution).
Because of the linkage and overlap among terrorist
networks and organized criminal gangs, the battle against trafficking is also
an integral part of the war on terror.
Fighting organized criminal activities is
difficult even in countries with a functioning legal system, honest police
and the rule of law. Think how much harder that would be when dealing with
an independent country where the authorities are an integral part of the criminal
enterprise.
Amazingly, that's what the international community
seems to want to help establish in the Serbian province of Kosovo. When Kosovo
was placed under United Nations administration and NATO military control at
the end of the 1999 war, some hoped the province soon would meet at least
minimum qualifications for some kind of independence, as demanded by Muslim
Albanians who greatly outnumber the remaining Christian Serbs.
That hasn't happened. Instead the drug, sex
slave, weapons, money-laundering, and other illicit trades that helped fuel
the conflicts of the 1990s have continued to grow. Just this month Marek Antoni
Nowicki, Poland's leading human-rights lawyer and the U.N.'s international
ombudsman for Kosovo until last year, denounced the "real criminal state
in power" in Kosovo, working right under the nose of the U.N. and NATO.
"Crime groups have been able to operate with impunity," said Mr.
Nowicki. "These networks can rely on the weakness of the public institutions
to sanction their operations." Mr. Nowicki's charges came on the heels
of a March 2006 report by the U.N.'s internal watchdog agency, the Office
of Internal Oversight, which found the head of U.N. Mission -- who holds virtually
dictatorial powers -- derelict for ignoring fraud and other abuses at the
airport in Kosovo's capital, Pristina.
None of this should come as any surprise.
Even in 1999, when the Clinton administration decided to take military action
in support of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), there were numerous
and credible intelligence and news reports of the KLA's criminal and terrorist
inclinations. Predictably, KLA veterans found even more opportunity to ply
their illicit trades when, ostensibly demobilized, they were recruited by
the UN into Kosovo's police, civil administration, and quasi-military "Kosovo
Protection Corps." The foxes were asked to guard the chicken coop --
another U.N. fiasco.
As described in reports issued by the NATO
Parliamentary Assembly, criminal activity in Kosovo continues to be closely
tied to operations of the Albanian mafia across Europe, from home bases in
Kosovo and adjacent areas of Albania and Macedonia. For example (from 2003):
"According to the International Organization for Migration and EUROPOL,
the principal supplier countries [i.e., for trafficked women] today are Moldova
(up to 80 percent: many Moldovan villages do not have any more women), Bulgaria,
Romania and Ukraine. The networks used various routes, including the route
that passes through Kosovo, Albania, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
(see the village of Veledze, the regional centre of prostitution) and Montenegro,
then through Italy. The Albanian mafia has set up a real cartel on prostitution.
It handles more than 65 percent of the trafficking in women in the Balkans."
From 2004: "In Kosovo, as many as 80 percent of internally trafficked
victims are children."
The response of international bureaucrats
to this disgrace is predictable: ignore it and hope nobody notices. Or even
better, pretend all is going well, declare the mission a success -- and hand
power over to the criminals as the new sovereign "government."
If that happens, even the minimal interference
in the Kosovo-based gangs' operations will be removed. A criminal state not
seen since the defunct Taliban regime in Afghanistan will be set up with easy
proximity to the rest of Europe.
Such an outcome would make a mockery of some
of the United States' most important global security priorities. While the
international community desires some sort of "closure" to the ongoing
mess in Kosovo (and this is understandable), it is hard to think of a supposed
solution worse than independence. Seven years after the 1999 war, this is
one Clinton legacy that demands urgent reconsideration.
James "Ace" Lyons Jr. is a retired
admiral in the U.S. Navy. He is a former commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific
Fleet (the largest single military command in the world), senior U.S. military
representative to the United Nations and as deputy chief of Naval operations
and was principal adviser on all Joint Chiefs of Staff matters.
