OBSERVATOIRE GEOPOLITIQUE DES DROGUES

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(Pages 61 and 62)

The Three Forms of Trafficking in Albania

After being in the hands of Kosovars for a long time, the heroin market in German-speaking countries has undergone dramatic changes during the last two years. Kosovo nationals used to buy drugs in Istanbul and sell them in the countries of the Schengen area at incredibly low prices: US $11,500 to $14,500 a kilogram. In Shijak, 20 kilometers away from Tirana, brand new houses, some with swimming pools, are flying Swiss flags. Over 600 "palaces" have mushroomed in the town in less than three years. Azem Ajdari, the local member of parliament, proudly shows off the mansions to visitors and presents his community as a model for the rest of Albania. The fact that several of Shijak's young people are inmates in German and Swiss prisons and that many others have become drug addicts is viewed as a regrettable accident, the price to be paid for modernity. But over the years, the northern networks ended up competing with the Turkish gangs who used to supply them. This endemic conflict between former suppliers and customers is not foreign to the recent increase in arrests of ethnic-Albanians along the Balkan route in Austria and Switzerland. Some 800 Albanian nationals and ethnic-Albanians from Kosovo were arrested for heroin trafficking in Germany in 1996 and took second place in the number of heroin arrests by nationality after Turks.

At the same time, Macedonia's heroin output, which although not huge is still significant, finally found outlets through the ports of southern Albania taking the place of oil trafficking through Pogradesh, albeit in the opposite direction. Thus, the fares of northern and southern Albania, the extended clans which "specialized" in various illicit trading activities, have now become competitors, especially as southern fares have become the partners of Italian criminal organizations, which are now strongly established in Albania. Thus, in Vlora, southern Albania's largest port, mansions similar to those in Shijak fly Italian flags. Vlora's smugglers, the owners of go-fast boats called "scafi" that have supposedly been seized by customs, are still coming and going between Albania and the coast of Apulia, Italy. Even though some of them earn as much as $100,000 for each trip carrying a mixed shipment of illegal immigrants and heroin, Vlora's smugglers consider themselves as "small operators" compared to northern criminal organizations. Their scafi can ferry up to 60 passengers, each paying at least $500 for entering Italy. The wages of Vlora's customs officers, who belong to the same family as the smugglers, hardly reach $100 a month. The Sacra Corona Unita, which is heavily involved in taking illegal Albanian immigrants to the Apulia coast, is now the Albanian criminal organizations' main partner. The Albanians also use their networks to get non-Albanians (Kurds, Pakistanis and Sri Lankans, for instance) into Italy. Like heroin, they travel via Macedonia. In March 1995, when "Operation Macedonia" took place in Italy, five members of the Sacra Corona Unita were arrested. Twenty-seven Italian, Macedonian and Albanian nationals from the same network had already been arrested in June 1994. Several dozen kilograms of heroin were confiscated during the same operation.

Further south on the Greek border business takes another form, which is shaped by the problematic relations between Athens and Tirana and stimulated by the problem posed by the Greek community from Epirus. Over in Delvina, Permetti and Saranda, the smugglers diversified into cannabis crops and have been manufacturing hashish for two years. More than a million illegal Albanian immigrants have been expelled from Greece over the last four years, most of them several times every year. While, in the beginning, they entered Greece by their own means, the increasing efficiency of Greek border surveillance resulted in the creation of a mafia of immigrant smugglers made up of Albanians as well as Greeks. The latter are often responsible for the "relocation" on Albanian soil of some cannabis plantations from the Peloponnese and Thessaly. Marijuana exports to Greece have reached such a scale that the Greek interior minister, Giorgos Romeos, felt the need to write a report to the European Union about cannabis cultivation in Albania and its connection with the immigrant smuggling mafia. Romeos's recent report noted that other drugs were involved besides marijuana. Indeed, the smugglers have strengthened their networks while forcing some illegal immigrants to become drug distributors so now they can deal in hashish as well as heroin and other substances.

(Page 64)

Some Albanians have been arrested in Italy, and recently in Germany, on cocaine trafficking charges. At least two significant hauls of several hundreds of kilos of cocaine in the Greek port of Patras in 1996 were destined for transiting through Albania. Therefore, it is not paradoxical to note that after indulging in trafficking activities stimulated by the disorder prevailing in neighboring countries during its early post-communist years, Albania now survives by importing this disorder on its own territory. This situation could upset the precarious balance that allowed the restoration of a semblance of normality in the areas occupied by the former Yugoslavia (Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia), and could pose serious problems to Greece and Italy.

The Theft of the Century

The "pyramid" savings banks whose collapse set off the current crisis in Albania benefited for a long time from the embargo imposed by the international community on Serbia and Montenegro and the blockade enforced by Greece against Macedonia. Anywhere else in the world, similar "pyramid" financial institutions paying interest with fresh money brought by new clients, such as M-M-M in Russia, were not able to hang on for more than two years. But in Albania a triangular trade in arms, drugs and illegal labor which relied on the smuggling of oil to neighboring countries under embargo, allowed the firms to enjoy an exceptionally long life. Italian mafiosi, especially members of the Sacra Corona Unita of Apulia and the Neapolitan Camorra, replaced the embargo as a major source of funds. The informal but nonetheless perfectly respectable Albanian savings banks seemed an ideal channel for laundering their profits. Indeed, the pyramid banks advertised on state television were guarded by the police force of the Tirana regime. They bankrolled the campaign of the "blue" Democratic Party of President Sali Berisha ahead of the June 1996 legislative election. Additionally, the banks channelled the investments of the party's officials into countries which were viewed as safer than Albania, especially Italy. Thus, hundreds of thousands of small Albanian investors were taken hostage while their savings served to cover a host of obscure financial dealings ranging from political activities to the laundering of money obtained from illicit and downright criminal activities.

The end of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the lifting of the blockades and the improved efficiency of Greek and Italian customs have made it far harder to supply the pyramid banks with dirty money. Although they were still solvent by the end of 1996 after two billion deutschmarks (about $1.5 billion) had transited through their accounts since their opening, they became a lot less safe for Italian and Albanian criminal organizations after the IMF expressed concern. Thus, instead of lowering their exorbitant interest rates, the pyramid banks, and especially those in the north of the country, raised them in order to entice an increasingly wary Albanian population. Then, the banks gradually emptied their coffers and transferred all the money deposited during the past six months, an estimated $500 to $800 million, to the accounts of Italian criminal organizations and their Albanian partners. These funds were then invested in western countries. The pyramid cooperatives of southern Albania mostly invested in medium-size Italian firms, establishing joint ventures some of which are being investigated by Italian authorities. Put together, all these operations undoubtedly amount to the theft of the century.

The IMF waited until October 1996 to raise the alarm. For four years, international institutions, American and European lenders and the foreign ministries of western countries had been content to back the activities of the Albanian political class, which are an offshoot of the "fares". The Guegue "families" of the north, who are also present in the Serbian province of Kosovo, and their Tosque counterparts in southern Albania were denounced in the OGD 1995 annual report as "benefiting from the ambient disorder and even counting on it, which hardly encourages efforts toward the modernization and restructuring of Albania".

(Page 65)

However, there is a big difference between northern and southern fares. The Guegue "families" in power use their control of state institution, which was undivided at least until the appointment of a Socialist prime minister from the south by President Berisha in March 1997 as a cover. Thus, following persistent pressure from the U.S. State Department, the Albanian interior minister, Agon Musaraj, was accused of systematically facilitating breaches of the international embargo imposed on Montenegro as well as supervising a drug network. Musaraj was forced to resign after the 1996 election. The defense minister, Safet Zhulali, had long been suspected of trafficking in arms, oil and cigarettes, but he kept his post until the 1997 collapse. Meanwhile, the fares of the south, which monopolized power during the 50 years of communist rule, saw their members who held high positions in the Sigurimi, the secret police, and the military being forced to retire and "work" on their own. This made their illicit activities more conspicuous. But the activities where "big bucks" are to be made, such as diverting money from pyramid banks, large arms and oil contracts and the quasi-institutional trade in contraband cigarettes were and still are carried out by the northern fares installed in the government.

The massive electoral fraud that took place during the 1996 election did not affect at all the good relations the international community maintained with the "administration" of President Sali Berisha. This is what Albanian intellectuals are saying today. To quote writer Prec Zogaj, who was among the first opponents of the communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha: "Europe gave us money without monitoring how it was spent. But more than money what we really need today is to build up civil society". Instead, what did happen was that the lack of lucidity from western financial backers – due to their fear, which is also patent in the case of Russia, of seeing a "former communist" replace a liberal and pro-western president – pushed the division between north and south to the limit.

Thus, while southern cities rose up in arms against Berisha's regime, northern mobsters, for instance those in Shijac and hani Hoti who are linked to the regime, received the president's guarantee that they would be "refunded" even though they had already collected part of the savings of the Albanian people through the pyramid banks under their control. By contrast, there was never any suggestion that the victims of southern pyramid firms, those preferred by smugglers of illegal immigrants, could receive compensation. The official excuse was that southern pyramid banks are cooperatives and therefore not covered by the guarantees provided under the law governing bankruptcy procedures.

In the south, this "legal" impediment was perceived as further discrimination. Hence it is little wonder that southern criminal organizations led the uprising, which has not been disarmed by recent sketchy attempts at establishing a government including all the parties in conflict. More than just the overthrow of President Berisha, the southern criminal organizations' objective is to put an end to the supremacy of the northern fares and become the only Albanian partners of the Italian maffia groups. Indeed, the southern clans supporting the popular uprising are demanding the resignation of both Berisha and the boss of SHIK, the new secret police officially established on March 13, 1997, primarily because they want to get rid of the Guegue mountain clans in control at SHIK and grab total power. Now SHIK agents are arming northern militiamen, but no longer in order to defend President Berisha. Rather, they are getting ready to impede at gun point the Tosques' taking control of Guegue territory. Following the army's dissolution into the armed insurrection in the south, SHIK agents have started to distribute arms to the northern fares even though President Berisha probably disagrees. Thus the diffuse territorial control of organized crime allows the continuation of a now less conspicuous disorder in Albania.

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(Pages 67 and 68)

Albanian Minorities and Heroin Geopolitics

Heroin production, processing and marketing are mainly the preserve of ethnic Albanians from Macedonia, where they are estimated to represent about 25% of the population, and those from the Serbian province of Kosovo. While it cannot be denied that the Albanian population is the most involved in heroin trafficking – but also the one most affected by heroin use – it is also true that any drug-related crime is amplified when the culprit is an Albanian and minimized or even hidden when s/he is a Macedonian. Albanian clans operate on mafia-like ethics based on the Leko Dukajdzini, or the clan's Code of Honor. The drug trade is often coordinated by Albanian political circles in Macedonia and Kosovo which oblige all Albanian criminal organizations to contribute a share of their profits. The traffickers are also obliged to buy and deliver arms. The Party for Democratic Prosperity based in Tetovo, the Kosovo Democratic Union based in Pristina, and especially armed militant groups like the Kosovo Liberation Army, thus find a significant and above all steady source of funding. For example, the Albanians' yearly narco-profits on the Swiss market alone are estimated to amount to close to US $3 million.

Ethnic Albanians from Macedonia and Kosovo hold a share of the drug markets of Austria, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Belgium. In 1996, they continue to be almost the sole suppliers of the Swiss market. The "friendly pressure" from the authorities of the Republic of Albania to modify the Macedonian constitution so that Albanians become a "constituent nation of this state", go hand in hand with their policy aimed at restoring Kosovo's autonomy within Serbia. The project includes the opening of the Independent Albanian University at Tetovo, which is funded almost exclusively by "gifts from the diaspora" (in fact, mainly the produce of narco-business). Although it is boycotted by the Macedonian authorities, the university is carrying on functioning. Little before the official opening of this university in February 1997, anti-Albanian demonstrations took place in Skopje. The slogans voiced by the demonstrators often referred to the dirty money which contributed to the university's creation, but they also pointed to another problem: while the government is juggling with geopolitical problems, the exasperation of average citizens is growing and they are increasingly tempted by nationalism. Another serious problem facing the young Macedonian republic is the Albanian minority's investments in real estate, especially large-scale land purchases aimed at giving ethnic-Albanians control over a vast territory on the border with Albania. To make matters worse, these investors seem to be the only people capable of investing large sums in an otherwise devastated economy.

Macedonia's economic situation, its policy of balancing power with its two "sister states" – Albania and Serbia – and the aftermath of the Greek embargo make it difficult to fight against drug trafficking. But the havoc wreaked in Macedonia by exploding drug use, a spillover from trafficking activities in the country, may in the long term become a factor spurring the authorities into action against the abuses of geopolitics and organized crime. The jolty normalization of Macedonia's relations with Greece and the end of the embargo imposed on the former Yugoslavia does slow down the growth of the informal sector which used to include drug-related activities. But at the same time these developments both facilitate the mobility and increase the space in which the multiple criminal organizations that got stronger under the embargo can move. Additionally, the organizations which benefit from it appear as an added obstacle to the normalization of diplomatic relations with neighboring countries and a permanent threat to the democratization of Macedonia itself. The economic and political crisis experienced today in neighboring countries such as Bulgaria and Albania further hinders efforts at finding a solution to the problem. Indeed, the embargo and the war in the former Yugoslavia led to criminal organizations joining together, which now allows the use of nationals on an ad-hoc basis according to the geopolitical changes to which law enforcement must submit each time. Thus, drugs travel with different couriers and on different means of transportation, depending on the instructions received by customs officers with a view to allow check-free passage to people of a given nationality and to given products according to the country's – and its militias' – changing needs.

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(Pages 74 and 75)

CZECH REPUBLIC

The geographical situation of its territory, a crossroads for the northern smuggling routes through Poland and the Balkans route via Slovakia in the southeast, make the Czech Republic a hub through which all sorts of drugs pass. It is also home to immigrants from the CIS, Central Europe and the Balkans, a melting-pot in which criminal gangs easily find recruits. Nigerian traffickers also have one of their most important bridgeheads in Central Europe. Drug-running problems are on the rise at the same time as its transition to a free-market economy is being held up as a model among the ex-communist countries. The threat also comes from the fact that the gangs are using neighboring Slovakia, which is much more vulnerable, as a transit and storage platform. These illegal activities are also starting to have serious effects on local consumption. More specifically, the Czech Republic has since the start of 1996 been facing the grave problem of a mushrooming domestic market in heroin.

Heroin Floods the Market

The intellectual influence of the former Czechoslovakia, and particularly its capital, Prague, put it at the center of academic research in Central Europe and also at the leading edge of experiments with articifial paradises. The first cases of morphine addition appeared in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. After World War I, when the country gained independence, cocaine from Vienna and Berlin enjoyed a huge vogue in Prague and all the other big cities, with some 10,000 users. After World War II, the fashion was to experiment with a combination of morphine and cocaine. Under the communist regime, with all its obstacles to contacts with the West and the general impoverishment of the country, sniffing solvents and abusing other legal products mushroomed, particularly among young people. In the 1980s drug users turned to pharmaceuticals, of which the country is a leading producer. The collapse of communism opened the Czech Republic up to networks based in Central Asia, the Middle East and even Latin America and Africa, either by direct air links or through neighboring countries. The influx of ex-Yugoslav citizens during the conflict there only made matters worse.

Until very recently, the country's drug users took pervitine, a methamphetamine manufactured locally from ephedrine on a large scale, and since the 1970s, "brown", a substance obtained from opiate medicines such as Solutan. Apart from a few isolated cases, heroin only really appeared on the market in 1992-1993. The drug was first marketed in the form of cigarettes containing heroin mixed with tobacco. But the price, 3000 kroner (about US $120) per gram (50% to 60% pure) remained high for the local purchasing power.

The typical user then was a businessman, around 25 years old, for whom heroin was a means to escape the stress of daily life. Heroin was distributed by "Yugoslav" gangs and Middle Eastern criminals in exclusive restaurants and clubs.

During 1994, the price of heroin fell to about $40 a gram, that is the price of pervitine. Heroin use quickly spread, affecting for instance discos, dance halls, etc. At the same time, the local underworld lost its place to criminal gangs with international connections. Thus, a significant share of the market was taken by gangs of Kosovo Albanians which are organized on a clanic base. They usually invest in legal businesses, such as restaurants and even small companies, and marry Czech women in order to be allowed to stay in the country. However, they are beginning to face stiff competition on the drug market from very dynamic and violent Bulgarian gangs, which up to now controlled the market for stolen cars and smuggling. Middle- eastern criminals, who hitherto specialized in the hashish trade, have just entered the heroin market, too. Some of them work for Russian and Ukrainian wholesalers. On the whole, Czech citizens are mere employees of these various organizations, as drivers, couriers, stock minders, etc. The arrival of unsophisticated heroin manufactured in Poland (called "the Pole") has also been noted. It is particularly popular among users in northern Moravia where it sells for half the price of "true" heroin. Drug use is not punishable under Czech law so it is extremely difficult to crack down on street dealers.