From Thieves to Nation-builders; the Nexus of

Banditry, Insurgency and State-Building in the

Balkans, 1804-2007

by Bobby Anderson

‘All over the world in liberation and resistance movements, patriotic ‘criminals’ have taken to the

front lines and made a great contribution such as only they, in such conditions, could make.’

– Djordje ‘Giška’ Božović1

1
Božović was a colleague of the late Serbian warlord-cum-politician Arkan. In 1983 he murdered
Stjepan Djureković, former director of the Croat Oil Company INA; this murder was apparently
carried out on behalf of the Yugoslav government. Božović was shot dead in Gospić, Croatia in 1991,
apparently by a fellow Serb. There were no arrests. See Judah 1997:256; also Petrović, Dragoljub.
Target of Unknown Assassins, in Naša Borba, Beograd, April 20 1997.

Anderson 1
 Introduction

"A bloody phenomenon cannot be explained by a bloodless theory."

- Horowitz 1985:140

Vračar, a grey, drab, working class neighborhood in Belgrade, Serbia, was showing

its age in the summer of 1993. As elsewhere in Serbia, the formal economy no longer

existed. In its place stood a regional combat economy, though no one in Vračar would

have articulated it as such. The neighborhood’s unemployed young men—boys,

really—spent that summer posturing, strutting, tattooing one another, and

occasionally firing Kalashnikovs from rooftops. Their younger brothers carried tear

gas pistols and flare guns; such children developed apocalyptic visions of the future

which their parents did not try to refute, because there existed, in Vračar, no contrary

evidence. Accompanying this was a moral degradation; it might have existed before

in Vračar, but I had no frame of reference for any normal time there. All I knew was

what I saw. Anything was to be had, and done; gunshots seemed as common as car

horns, and murders occurred over nothing, glances at the wrong girl, misinterpreted

words, arguments over the bill in a café. Hand grenades, available for 20 Marks, were

thrown onto nightclub dancefloors. Radio-Television Serbia announced that it was

legal to murder someone if you caught them attempting to steal your car; meanwhile,

the city police sold registrations for any car, without proof of ownership, for 50

Deutschmarks. The young and hungry profited while the old and hungry waited on

breadlines. Sanctions made boys richer than their incredulous parents could

comprehend. Heroin was cheap and plentiful, but for those not in the sanctions racket,

boiling the heads of locally-grown poppies and drinking the foul liquid sufficed.

Anderson 2
 Oglasnik advertised weekend trips to the then-static Croat front line, where

Beograders could take potshots at Papists. It was a long, hot summer, the year I

graduated from high school, and I lived in Vračar. My friends there believed that

they, personally, were at war, but their articulation was stale. And it was there,

through them, that I realised that the wars which were happening nearby—Srebrenica

was roughly 70 miles away from where I slept that summer, near-oblivious to that

overcrowded, desperate enclave—were hardly contained there. The conflagration was

close enough that local men who’d gone to Bosnia to fight could return home for the

weekends. They brought goods with them, loot which they would sell from the backs

of pickup trucks. They leaked. And the depredations and profits inherent in those

‘reasonless’ places nearby which were coming apart leaked also. Such a leak spread

far beyond Bosnia- even beyond Yugoslavia. It did not seem like the ripples in the

water from the splash of a stone; rather, to my uninitiated and overwhelmed eye, it

seemed like a violent industrial accident which began somewhere in the rural interior

of that imploded state and carried out in all directions, belching black smoke,

spraying refugees, guns, metal, blood, drugs and graves from Tirana to Munich and

further afield, all manner of pain and profit. And for a number of people in Vračar-

the men with the BMWs and the duty free stores and the drugs and the weapons and

stolen goods for sale, the men who were watched in awe as they sipped Turkish

coffee in cafes with sponsor girls and thinly disguised pistols in the waistbands of

their garish tracksuits—war was a good thing. Normalcy would have left them as

purse snatchers, petty thieves, back-alley pimps. To children, they were gods. What

they wanted, they simply took. It was their time.

Anderson 3
 The varied chapters of the 1991-1999 Balkan wars were less about ethnicity than they

were about economic redistribution and coercive accumulation—thinly veiled

organised criminal activities with the sheltering veneer of primitivism, further

concealed by the intentional encouragement of war’s view through a myopic prism of

race, religion, and blood. This prism allowed western elites to distance themselves

from the war by acknowledging what Serb and Croat leaders had, from the earliest

stages, repeated like commercial jingles which became lodged in the heads of

diplomats and journalists- that ancient ethnic hatreds were, indeed, the sole factor at

play.

Widely-understood economic rationales and cynical political calculations may be

used to explain all manner of things, but not a war in Europe. To understand the war’s

causes would have made the intervention question unavoidable in 1992. To go to war

for fiscal reasons or simple political maneuvers would be too craven a reason for the

West to ignore. But people being killed by virtue of their last names? Whether they

say Izvinite or Oprostite, Mleko or Mlijeko2? Here was something the politicians of

the day could puzzle over3.

2
Izvinite and Oprostite- excuse me- can supposedly define a speaker as either a Serb, or a Croat.
Mlijeko is the Croat pronunciation of Serbian Mleko- milk. These linguistic markers are, however,
reflective of regional, and not ethnic, dialectical differences. For more information, please see
Greenberg (2004).
3
And avoid, except when the notable massacres—mortars lobbed into breadlines and markets in
Sarajevo, for example—spurned editorials and demands to ‘do something.’ It was Srebrenica, in the
summer of 1995, that ultimately caused NATO to intervene, and show the Bosnian Serb Army as it
was—not the descendents of partisans who had kept six German divisions pinned down throughout
WWII, but rather, opportunists more interested in stealing than fighting. They melted away.

Anderson 4
 To those who subscribe to the rationales underlying ethnic conflict, and the

classification of such war as representative of breakdown and irrationality, the

question can be posed: would there have been a war if there were nothing to steal? No

aspiration for the betterment of one’s lot, through capital accumulation and

redistribution?

Due to the former Yugoslavia’s current status as peripheral to the EU, but one day a

part of it, international focus now falls upon reforming and strengthening the

judiciary, customs and immigration, and the rule of law; they now seek to undo the

systematic damage resulting from nearly two decades of war and state erosion.

This paper seeks to outline what reformers are up against. It will shine a light on the

regional tradition of banditry from the early modern era onwards; indeed, it will show

that the initial founders of such states were generally bandits whose deeds were re-

cast in the context of national liberation. This paper will demonstrate that the wars in

Bosnia and Kosovo were, in part, motivated by economic redistribution; at the top,

such operations were run by varied criminal enterprises whose trades benefited from

the ‘ethnic conflict’ label which concealed base motivations4, while at the bottom,

such activities were the coping mechanisms of a desperate population. Further, this

paper will delineate the history, forms and dynamics underpinning organised crime in

the region. The organised criminal structures which proliferated during the war are

4
For the purposes of this paper, crime is simply defined as a violation of the public good, which
affects the community as a whole. Organised crime is defined as a conspiracy of three or more persons
in an extra-legal act for monetary or other gain. And despite the Robin Hood imagery ascribed to some
of the persons mentioned in this paper, all references herein to banditry and organised crime refer to
crimes committed for private, rather than public, ends.

Anderson 5
 now entrenched in the region’s politico-economic topography; criminals are

legitimizing. And some are having their histories re-written.

The Balkan wars were a crime wave. The region contains no classical resources; no

black gold, no blood diamonds. In Bosnia, ‘nothing grows except rocks and snakes’;

eastern Bosnia and Northern Montenegro are known as the Vuk Jebina5, while

Kosovo’s primary export may be economic migrants. Serb actions in Croatia, Bosnia

and Kosovo were not waged to control any significant and extractable commodity:

certain low-value resources such as soft coal and timber were up for grabs;

cooperatives were ripe for asset-stripping, and humanitarian aid was found to be

taxable in cash, kind or both. The regional combat economy that encompassed

southeastern Europe served as an ongoing Serbian election campaign and assertion of

power by dominant elites in Belgrade, led by Slobodan Milošević . Their discourse

became the national discourse6.

By simply shaking one’s head in the sad acknowledgement that such a war (or wars)

occurred in Europe, we allow for another mistake. In the midst of numerous other

differences, state development in the Balkans shares more similarities to Sierra Leone

than to France: just as Sierra Leone was colonised by (British-supported) indigenous

elites in Freetown, the Ottomans colonised this corner of Europe and exploited the

mines of Srebrenica and Novo Brdo in a manner reminiscent of Kono and Tongo

5
‘The land where the wolves fornicate.’
6
It became unquestioned common sense that Serbs were protecting Europe from Mujahideen, Croats
were Ustasha, Kosovo was Serbia’s Jerusalem, and Serbs there- the salt of the Srpski Narod- were
subject to the depredations of tribal Albanians, recent and ungrateful new arrivals.

Anderson 6
 field. Elites emerged that utilised patronage networks to check rivals and generate

profit. Both regions were marked by cultures of corruption and post-WWII

governments which would not have survived in their Cold War form without

superpower support, through preferential trading status and cheap loans. In both

regions post-Cold War governments, who lost legitimacy a decade before, then lost

the ability to award loyalty through economic or political incentives; they were

altered by internal wars that radically reshaped or eradicated earlier systems. Both

areas have emerged from a decade’s worth of intermittent war after armed

international intervention. Both are scarred by conflict and infected by crime. Both

remain corrupt; both have growing organised criminal structures and international

organised criminal involvement. Both have dominant informal economies. And both

areas have two realities: that voiced by local politicians and international officials,

and the reality not mentioned, but known to all on the ground. Both are constituted of

ethnic affiliations and clannishness; in governments and businesses, loyalty and

dependence have more value than accountability and transparency.

The modern state in southeastern Europe is a relatively new phenomenon. To build it,

nations constructed states while either crushing, or integrating with, social bandit

elements in a central authority to use the popularity7 of those bandits whilst

mitigating their unruly behavior. Some became inlaws; some outlaws. The state only

became stronger than the nation in the decades after WWII—when it achieved

legitimacy, provided opportunity and offered the possibility of economic betterment

in the decades following WWII. The Balkans are again afflicted by the seeming
7
Which legitimised the government in the eyes of its citizenry (Xenakis 2001:15).

Anderson 7
 contradiction of strong nations and weak states; ethnicity conveniently emerged from

the economic morass of the late 1980’s as a primary marker of identity; the self’s

earlier interaction with a class-based society ended with that society. New interactions

occurred with the fragmented sections of that earlier society whereby the notion of a

Yugoslav was extinct. In its place sat the ethnic marker8, hammered on the forge of

apparatchik ambitions and shaped into a politico-economic tool which lent itself to

both asset and population transfer.

While not discounting ethnic grievances—they were there to be misused, and the idea

of victimization utilised by elites to manipulate their constituencies fell on receptive

ears—the Yugoslav wars were motivated by political expediency and economic gain.

They were the subject of massive international attention9 which focused on bridging

the ethnic divide while discounting the political and economic rationales of those who

sought to profit, and those who engaged in the illicit and informal only to cope, on all

‘sides’, be they ethnic or otherwise.

The Balkans are exactly that—mountains10, hungry and hardscrabble, a frontier

region where the law shrivels in relation to poverty; when people have a choice

between stealing and starving, they steal; where lean years are the norm, activities

8
This paper does not claim, as others have, that Yugoslavia was not a fragmented society. The
traumatic elimination of the Yugoslav identity affected active communists, city-dwellers, and other
bourgeoisie. But in the countryside, especially in Herzegovina and rural Kosovo, such ethnic divisions
never faded in place of the Yugoslav identity.
9
Between 1991 and 2000 the United States spent $15 billion on military intervention in the Balkans
(Mallaby 2002).
10
The very name Balkans—Turkish for mountains, the region taking its name from a chain of them in
Bulgaria that the Turks first encountered when the Byzantines were short-sighted enough to grant them
passage across the Dardanelles in the mid-fourteenth century—reflects how outsiders regarded it.

Anderson 8
 initially driven by desperation become vocations, and war, disrupting to most, offers

market opportunities to others. While banditry was the modus operandi of many

paramilitaries and soldiers in the 1990’s, in Serbia, the state became the biggest

bandit of all. Zoran Djindjic’s attempt to break apart the pervasive organised criminal

structures which took root under Milošević were answered by his death. Most

shocking to the perpetrators (namely the Zemun clan- an organised crime ‘family’

which essentially became an arm of the Serbian state during the 1990s, and was

closely integrated with state security bodies), it hastened their fall—but Serbia still

retains elements of the bandit state, and those bandits within it under Milošević

remain under the current leadership. In Kosovo banditry resurfaced during the 1996-

1999 Kosovo Liberation Army rebellion, the 1999 NATO war and its conclusion.

There, masked men erect roadblocks in the borderlands and assert their own

authority, as they have always done. The same is true in areas of Montenegro,

Southern Serbia, and Macedonia. Albania slipped into anarchy in 1997: the North

remains under its own law. And both internal and external organised criminal groups

utilise the region to both traffic drugs, arms, stolen goods and people, as well as

launder earnings.

Historical Background

‘There is no reason to suppose that the ‘brotherhoods’ of robbers called Bilejić and Tuvačević which
attacked Ragusan caravans near Novo Brdo and Kaçanik in the early sixteenth century, for instance,
had anything to do with a national liberation struggle… similarly, modern Albanian historians make
much of the ‘revolt’ of 1560 in the Peć area by Pjetër Bogdani; but all we know of his revolt is that he
robbed a caravan, killed some traders, and was captured and executed’ (Rizaj 1978:208; Rizaj
1982:481-2; Malcolm 1999:119).

Anderson 9
 National identity in southeastern Europe was a tool developed by peripheral elites in

relation to the other- primarily Turks, and secondly Muslims. Such markers of

identity can be imposed upon others: Bosnian Serbs became more Serb when they

were lynched en masse after Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination; Bosnian

Muslims embraced their neglected, esoteric Islam in the 1990s as soon as it became

apparent that they could die by association.

Yugoslavia and Albania were foreign constructions. From the medieval era until the

end of the First World War, the eastern Balkans was a series of Ottoman Vilayets,

while the west was run by Venetians, Hungarians and Habsburgs11. The Ottoman

Empire, from its peak under Süleyman I the Magnificent, declined under its own

corruption and soon retracted in the face of European state expansion12. It foundered

under its devsirme, its decadent Janissaries, its corrupt Phanariots, and its degraded

military. In its borderlands, the Turkish writ became open to question.

In the Balkans, laws imposed from afar were semi-enforceable in the lowlands, but

mountains, like oceans, evade centralised control (McCoy 1999:157). In pastoral

societies occupying rugged terrain, outside laws competed with another cultural code-

the blood feud (Malcolm 1999:19), which governed Bosnia-Herzegovina,

Montenegro (Durham 1909:20), Macedonia, southern Serbia, Kosovo and Albania13,

11
The occasional independent city-state emerged, of which Ragusa was the most successful.
12
This decline began after the 1699 Peace of Karlowitz (La Jonquière 1881:345). Beginning as early as
the late seventeenth century, ‘the economy of the Ottoman Empire became more closely articulated to
the burgeoning Eurocentric world system as part of the periphery’ (Gallant 1999:32).
13
As well as Corsica, Sicily, Sardinia, Scotland the Caucasus, the Horn of Africa, and Nang Pashtun
and Baluch areas of Central Asia. Misha Glenny suggests that the Sicilian blood feud was an Albanian
import from the late medieval period; Albanian refugees fleeing the 15th Century Turkish invasions

Anderson 10
 where it is codified in the Kanun14. It is important as well to consider that such codes

often apply only to those in one’s immediate kinship network or clan; those outside

the society governed by Besa were, and are, often prey to the negative elements of it;

they do not follow its rules, and its rules do not therefore extend to them. Most of all

they are not known, and the possibility of retribution as encoded in the Kanun is

theoretical at best.

The Ottoman Empire sustained itself by tribute extracted from its subjugated peoples;

taxes were set according to the Millet system, and Christians paid more. Exorbitant

rents and claims on livestock15 made by the Turks generated banditry; Hajduks16

formed bands to rob caravans. These bands were later called Cheta, their members

Chetniks- the name adopted by the Serb royalist General Mihajlović’s WWII rebels,

and now appropriated by extreme (and often, extremely drunk) Serbian nationalists.

settled in Sicily (in the area around Piana degli Albanesi, where their language still exists and their
descendants still live). Besa, or honor, may have been an idea passed on (in a violent way, no doubt)
from these adherents of Lek Dukagjini to the Sicilians. Gellner’s (2000) ideas on social order in
pastoral societies, and the prevalence of the blood-feud and honor concept in mountainous areas, is a
more likely reason for the existence of the blood feud in Sicily. Glenny, Misha. Criminal gangs
running the Balkans. BBC April 28, 2001:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/1300684.stm.
14
In the Albanian case, Malcolm notes, the Kanun is based firstly on one’s honor; secondly, on the
equality of persons; thirdly, one’s freedom to act in accordance with one’s honor, within the limits of
the Kanun, and not being subject to another’s command. Lastly is a man’s word of honor, the Besa,
which is inviolable (Malcolm 1999:18). The Kanun has a distinct message: there are those you may
take advantage of, but in the interests of peace among us, there are those you may not. Feuds made
Albania look lawless, but the opposite was true: ‘there is perhaps no other people in Europe so much
under the tyranny of laws’ (Durham 1909:28). In these highlands, feuds, banditry and blood vengeance
surface in conjunction with one another (Gallant 1999:52).
15
These taxes are precisely the reason why pork is the meat of choice in all Christian areas colonised
by the Ottomans. The Turks would not requisition unclean pigs, but they would claim chickens, cows
and goats. Pork, it is said, is Serbian beef.
16
The name Hajduk comes from the Magyar word for ‘cattle-drover.’ They first appear in the fifteenth
century, perhaps in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Bulgaria a ‘Haidot’ chieftain is recorded as early as 1454
(Hobsbawm 2000:78). Montenegro, the most Hajduk-associated of all the Christian lands, was never
formally conquered by the Turks. The Hajduk phenomenon appears in other areas, including Anatolia,
where there were no thoughts of ‘national liberation’ (Malcolm 1999:119).

Anderson 11
 Such men were and are thieves with vaguely expressed ideologies, fleeing from

armed groups and attacking unarmed civilians. The forces led by the Serbian militia

leaders Vojislav Šešelj, Arkan and Captain Dragan are heirs to this tradition of theft

in the guise of defending the nation—as was the Bosnian Serb Army, which never

distinguished itself against an armed force on equal terms. It excelled at shelling

undefended cities and killing civilians17. In Albanian areas, Hajduks were called

Kaçaks—the name given to the rebels who fought the Serbs after World War I, the

bands who burned Serb villages after the 1941 invasion of Yugoslavia, and the anti-

Partisan rebels who rose in the Drenica in 1946. Elements of the KLA and its

offshoots are descendants of such men; out for personal profit and articulating

grievance and redress.

Kaçaks and Hajduks were not usually rich. Banditry was often a subsistence trade,

‘for how much was there to rob on the byroads of Macedonia or Herzegovina at the

best of times?’ (Hobsbawm 2000:86). In the military frontier which separated

Habsburgs from Ottomans, Serbs who had fled Turkish lands settled there to practice

the complementary vocations of fighting (for the Habsburgs) and robbing (for

themselves- Glenny 1996:5). In other areas of the Balkans, the Ottomans deputised

17
BSA troops and paramilitaries sported the ‘Rambo look’- a rifle, a pistol, a machine pistol and a
collection of knives. This look harkens back to the turn-of-the-century Hajduks and their black-and-
white poses, replete with sword, dagger, rifle and smoking-pipe. Regarding the BSA, Rieff relates the
following: ‘such gear was for killing civilians, not enemy soldiers. If… the Serbs had believed they
were going to face people who could effectively shoot back, they would have carried more ammunition
and fewer weapons, and have fired in the short bursts necessary to hit a particular target, rather than in
the wild, clip-emptying salvos of fighters who neither knew nor cared much about where their bullets
would finally land’ (Rieff 1995:157).

Anderson 12
 those they could not control18, including Montenegrin and Albanian bandits, who

continued to satisfy their own plundering natures19. In Ottoman Greece, many

Klephts became Armatoloi- now inlaws, incidentally tasked with battling Klephts

(Glenny 2000:30-31). Kosovo’s Rugovo Gorge—historically the most passable route

from western Kosovo into Montenegro—was infested with brigands, as was Kaçanik,

named for the Albanian Kaçaks who preyed upon travelers there. Such groups

historically taxed caravans and peasants, and demanded a percentage of crops and

livestock. They behaved like states; they were later thought of as the liberators of

nations- and with accumulated start-up capital, they reinvented themselves as

respectable traders and merchants20, albeit with wealth of unknown origin. It was not

necessary to launder21 money then; the origins of pre-state wealth tended to be

illegitimate as a matter of course.

The state-builders of southeastern Europe were considered bandits and terrorists by

the elites they rebelled against; such criminals contained the ‘nuclei of potential

liberators’ (Hobsbawm 2000:89) in the national independence movements of Greece,

Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania and Bulgaria. It began with Servia,

where the reformist Ottoman ruler Selim III granted those subjects limited autonomy

18
Most tellingly, in some areas where the Ottoman Empire could not enforce the law, they simply
ignored the problem, striking bandit villages from the record. In Rumelia such villages became
Agrapha, or unwritten (Glenny 2000:25).
19
According to a 1614 report, one raid extended as far as modern-day Bulgaria (Lenormant 1866: 312-
315).
20
Regarding the Uskoks of Senj, ‘these valorous warriors have become avaricious merchants of stolen
goods, devoting themselves to nothing else than the sale of their plunder in Croatia, in Carniola, in
Styria, in Hungary, even across the sea in Apulia and the Marches, and even in Venice itself, so that
having abandoned the military arts they are applying themselves to one that is sweeter, that is, to
profit’ (Bracewell 1992:111).
21
The term money laundering was first used in prohibition-era Chicago.

Anderson 13
 within the empire; later restrictions on this autonomy were imposed by corrupt

indigenous janissaries22 who exploited their Serb tax base to no end (Stoianovitch

1980:262-3; Tilly 1990:24). Such Belgrade Dahi23 were creatures of Reno’s Warlord

politics; men who paid for the privilege of appointments to Belgrade, and then sought

to re-coup their investment through predatory, rent-seeking activities. And the

rebellion against them, in 1804, was led by the Hajduk Kara Djordje24; his insurgency

initially appealed for help from the Ottoman ruler—the rebels were actually rebelling

against the leaders of a Vilayet, not the Empire itself—until it dawned upon the

insurgent lot that they may have achieved the momentum to excise a section of the

empire. And they succeeded; Serbia was independent for 8 years, and was re-

conquered in 1812; Kara Djordje fled into Habsburg lands. The Serb Miloš

Obrenović led another revolt in 1815. Russia pressured Turkey into accepting

Obrenović’s autonomy; in a reconciliatory gesture Obrenović captured Kara Djordje

and presented Selim III with his head. In Bosnia the robber Pero Tunguz ambushed

an Ottoman caravan and, perhaps unintentionally, touched off the 1875 Nevesinje

rebellion (Glenny 2000:103-104) which, like the 1804 Serb revolt, was articulated in

a language of redress and self-determination subsequently utilised in this century by

the Hrvatska Vojska Organizacija (the Croatian Defense Council- hereafter HVO),

the Arkanici, Šešelj’s Chetniks, the Kosovo Liberation Army, the (Albanian) National

Liberation Army (in Macedonia), and the Albanian National Army (region-wide).

Soon after Tunguz’s opportunistic uprising, the Christian Macedonian insurgent Kota

22
Janissaries were initially the Ottoman Empire’s elite troops- they were taken as children from
southeastern Europe and relocated to Constantinople, and their loyalty was to none but the Caliph.
They eventually became elites in their own right.
23
An Ottoman honorific term for the leader of a Vilayet, or administrative area.
24
Which suitably translates into ‘Black George’.

Anderson 14
 Christov began killing Albanian landlords25; in 1904 Gotse Delchev’s Internal

Macedonian Revolutionary Organization26 began its insurgency, leading to ‘two

hundred and forty-five bands in the mountains. Serbian and Bulgarian Comitadjis,

Greek Andartes, Albanians and Vlachs… all waging a terrorist war’ (Sciaky 2003).

The political considerations of peripheral elites in this corner of the Ottoman empire

was articulated in the new language of ethnicity, and such bandits were hirelings of

such elites in Belgrade, Sofia, Salonika and Athens (Hobsbawm 2000:24). The IMRO

uprising ultimately led to the dispatching of international peacekeepers to the Balkans

roughly 90 years before Dayton; and the IMRO, in need of support funds, ran opium27

to buy guns. North of the IMRO uprising, Kaçaks developed politics in response to

Serb irredentist claims on Kosovo (then known simply as ‘Old Serbia’); they began to

kill Serbs28, who responded by forming their own foreign-funded self-defense Chetas

(Malcolm 1999:236). Kosovo was ultimately seized by the Serbs during the first

Balkan war29, along with much of Macedonia. And the Chetniks, who, like the BSA,

distinguished themselves by looting and murder in place of actual combat, entered the

whitewashed hagiography of national liberation30.

25
Strangely, he became a later hero to the Albanians, who composed a song for him (Hobsbawm
2000:54).
26
The IMRO sought to create a Macedonian state; the land was equally contested by Bulgarians,
Serbs, and Greeks. At the time, the ‘Macedonian Question’ was one of the most significant political
problems of the era.
27
Between 1878 and 1912, Macedonia and Thrace were significant producers of opium (Palairet
1997:343).
28
The Serb consul to Pristina, Miroslav Spalajkovic, reported in June 1905, ‘there was not a day that
one or two murders of Serbs were committed’ in Kosovo, adding that ‘nothing was done to stop
Albanian banditry.’
29
So pervasive had the ethnic marker become in Serbia that the seizure of Kosovo was met with the
same jubilation many Israelis felt when Jerusalem fell to the IDF in 1967.
30
‘Among them were intellectuals, men of ideas, nationalist zealots, but these were isolated
individuals. The rest were just thugs, robbers, who had joined the army for the sake of loot’ (Malcolm
1999:255).

Anderson 15
 The entity which ultimately became Yugoslavia only took authoritative and coercive

shape after the treaty of Versailles, ruled by the bandit Kara Djordje’s descendants.

The Albanians sporadically revolted until the mid-1920’s; they were mercilessly put

down31. Ethnicity remained as a discourse, especially among Croat politicians. After

WWII, Tito’s Yugoslavia, strengthened by a state-wide partisan identity, initially

prospered as a paradoxical and convenient ‘independent’ communist country.

Yugoslavia was flooded with foreign aid and loans given at extremely favorable rates,

which supported the façade of a successful centrally-planned economy. Yugoslav

communism’s economic ‘Third Way’—Worker’s Self-Management—was diligently

studied by foreign economists who remained unaware that the economic boom was

not a result of internal policies, but rather, external funds.

Yugoslavia’s criminal class began to take cohesive shape and establish minor

cooperative relationships with external criminal elements when Yugoslavia’s role in

organised crime was as a minor transshipment point for heroin bound for the West32;

then Iran banned opium in the 1950’s (McAllister 2000:198), and Yugoslavia’s

location became paramount. This local criminal underclass grew in stature and

strength. They would ultimately evolve into the criminal militias of the 1990s wars.

In the 1970s foreign aid declined, as part of a worldwide economic slowdown; for

Yugoslavia, this downturn would ultimately unleash the conditions—‘unregulated

31
The Kaçaks at this time operated from the frontier zone between Albania and Kosovo, like the KLA
later would, along with the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medved, and Bujanovac (in the Presevo
Valley exclusion zone) in 1999-2001.
32
Drug use correspondingly increased in 1950’s Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania (Stares 1996:43).

Anderson 16
 self-help, predation, and the untrammeled exploitation of resources and markets’

(Pugh & Cooper 2004:146)—which would fuel the wars of the 1990’s. The state

recognised that painful economic reforms were needed. It took out commercial loans

(at much less favorable rates than those secured during the 1950s and 1960s) to

postpone the process (Verdery 1996) and debt grew (Duffield 1998:75). As western

economies slowed, so, concurrently, did Yugoslav remittances from abroad—a major

part of the economy, especially in Kosovo, Bosnia & Macedonia33. Wealthier

constituent republics (namely Slovenia and Croatia), acutely aware that their

economies were supporting underperforming regions, sought to prevent capital

redistribution of their wealth through Belgrade by asserting their autonomy. As in

other centrally-planned states in economic decline, the republics began to compete for

resources- a process usually linked to the broader criminalization of the economy as it

moves away from formal, regulated channels. This competition generated illicit

transborder activity in an attempt, by the republics, to circumvent Belgrade and link

directly with international markets; unofficial customs controls emerged between the

republics which ultimately contributed to Yugoslavia’s collapse (Schierup 1992;

Duffield 2000:77). Parallel trade dominated the earlier, formal state trade networks

(Duffield 2001:157), assisted by Yugoslavia’s integration into western markets,

which exposed the state to the shocks of market transition (Kaldor 1999:85) unknown

by other Eastern Bloc nations.

The republics separated before the people did. Nationalism became a political

strategy to further solidify the separation of the republics. As state coherence

33
By 1987, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo were bankrupt (Pugh & Cooper 2004:153).

Anderson 17
 weakened and ethnic grievances were repeated ad nauseum by republic media outlets,

the economy continued to worsen. No answers were offered for this downward spiral;

the problem was externalised and increasingly discussed in the language of ethno-

historical wrongs, rather than economic ones. Inflation reached 2500 percent in

December of 1989 (Kaldor 1999:37). By 1989-1990, the state existed in name only.

Ethnicity was the dominant discourse, and the elites who had achieved power in the

constituent republics had no vested interest in Yugoslavia; quite the opposite. The

central government’s monopoly of violence was ultimately lost to the republics and

their militias before the war began.

The 1990s Wars- Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro

In 1986, the formerly loyal Titoist Slobodan Milošević moved from the shadow of

his mentor, Ivan Stamboulić34, and staked his political future on the grievances of

Kosovar Serbs. He emphasised Serb grievances and the historical other; Croat,

Slovene, and Albanian nationalism (and previously peripheral leaders such as

Tudjmann) emerged as a counterweight. After 1990, internal stability in Serbia

became dependent on the presence of continuous external threats. Far from any clash

of civilizations, a clash of personalities in the rubble of a fallen economy ended the

state. Ethnicity was the language in which this failure was articulated35; it was

34
He ultimately had Stamboulić murdered in the summer of 2000. The paramilitary Red Berets-
integrated with the Zemun Clan, an organised criminal group- carried out the hit.
35
Glenny relates a 1991 meeting in the Krajina: ‘The discussion around the table was inarticulate, but
it none the less revealed how these simple Serb peasants have been traumatised by unscrupulous
politicians wishing to realise their politics of nationalist fantasy. A confused tale of real and perceived
discrimination emerged. It was largely but not exclusively based on hearsay’ (Glenny 1996:11).

Anderson 18
 accepted by both (former) Yugoslavs and outside observers. However, ethnicity has

never sufficed to answer questions inherently underpinning the why of this war.

The 1991-1995 Croatian and Bosnian wars saw rump Yugoslavia36 take over organise

crime within its borders and use it as a policy tool. Ultimately it became a criminal

state. These wars, distinguished by the political machinations of former communists

who quickly moved away from the Titoist ideal of brotherhood and unity once it

became devalued, were characterised by accumulation and economic redistribution

throughout. The social pyramid was inverted as former bourgeoisie were ruined by

the war; but ‘simple boys from the countryside and tough kids from the towns found

that their guns made them the ones who could start amassing the Deutschmarks and

the privileges, sexual and otherwise’ (Rieff 1995:130).

Yugoslavia’s death knell occurred, not in June 1991, but in December of 1990, when

the Milošević government executed one of the biggest bank frauds in history. The

balance sheets of Serbian banks were fraudulently increased (with the foreknowledge

and collusion of Milošević ’s political party, the SPS) to a total of 2.6 billion

Deutschmarks; this was distributed as credit to large Serb companies, who in turn

purchased hard currency37. This effectively bankrupted the federation, and made

Yugoslavia’s physical demise inevitable (Judah 1997:260).

36
Rump Yugoslavia, also FRY, was generally used to describe the Yugoslavia which was composed of
the Vojvodina, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo.
37
The Serb government concurrently began printing off as many Dinars as it required (Dinkić
1995:63).

Anderson 19
 Enter Željko Raznatovic- Arkan38. This most colorful monster was arrested in the

Krajina one month before by local police with a carload of guns39. The guns were

destined for ethnic Serb militias in the Krajina; Arkan was sent there as part of an

operation created and executed by Jovica Stanišić 40, head of the SDB (Serbian Secret

Police), with the assistance of the Ministarstvo Unutrasnjih Poslova (Interior

Ministry)’s Frano (‘Frenki’) Simatović41 and Radovan (‘Badza’) Stojičić42. This

operation was coordinated on the ground in Knin, Croatia, by Yugoslav army General

Ratko Mladić—then purportedly ‘Yugoslav’ in outlook and running the Knin

garrison. A number of underworld figures were involved in this operation as well, and

some actually led their own militias, including the Srpska Garda, founded by the

Belgrade mobster Branislav ‘Beli’ Matić43. The state and its former nemeses were

finding common ground. These militias fit into Belgrade’s strategy in the initial

stages of the Croat-Serb war; Serb militias would seize towns and villages and the

Yugoslav army- moving in to ‘separate’ the opposing sides- would essentially

consolidate militia gains.

Arkan was illustrative of the criminality and ideological elusiveness of the Yugoslav

wars; he served the interests of the state as well as himself, and ultimately he would

attempt to reinvent himself as a politician. In previous incarnations he was a purse-

38
Arkan would soon build his own militia from Red Star football supporters; he coordinated their
training, and arming, with the SDB (through Simatović, Stojičić, and Radmilo Bogdanović), and
established a training camp in Erdut, Eastern Slavonia. In 1992 Arkan became a parliamentarian
representing Kosovo’s Pristina oblast. The Albanians boycotted the vote.
39
He was tried and convicted in a Croat court- which then released him, pending appeal.
40
Stanišić was arrested following Djindjić’s assassination, and is currently in Gaol in Den Haag.
41
Simatović was arrested in the underworld sweep following Djindjić’s assassination, and is in Gaol in
Den Haag.
42
Stojičić, who once announced that organised crime did not exist in Serbia, was murdered in a
Belgrade pizzeria in April of 1997. There were no arrests.
43
Matić was murdered at his Belgrade home in August 1991. There were no arrests.

Anderson 20
 snatcher, an assassin for the Yugoslav Federal Secretariat for Internal Affairs (SSUP),

and a sometime bank-robber44. He also bears the distinction of orchestrating the

attack on the Muslim civilian population of Bijeljina in April 1992; this attack is now

noted as the official beginning of the Bosnian phase of the war.

The modus operandi of the Bosnian chapter of the war demonstrated commonality

with the others; violence was used to control populations rather than simply capture

territory. Much of the war was subcontracted out by states to proxy militias in the

interior, whereby loot (and other forms of privilege) constituted payment for services

rendered. Protection and smuggling rackets abounded; taxes were levied on aid;

redistributive mechanisms cropped up in cleansed, or soon-to-be cleansed, towns45;

asset transfer occurred en masse between non-Serbs and Serbs46; the control of trade

routes and markets was of paramount importance, so much so that the location of

trade routes would dictate the nature of sieges and offensives—or the lack of them.

Vareš, Bihać and other examples of this will be considered below, and will show how

interests of trade dictated interests of war. Through this war, all manner of economic

considerations—everything from the redistribution and seizure of both the routes

propelling and the mechanisms defining trade, to petty theft—were simply not seen

44
One of his colleagues, Goran Vuković, reminisced: ‘Of all of us Arkan robbed the most banks. He
walked into them almost like they were self-service stores. No one can quarrel with that fact about
him. I don’t know about politics, but as far as robbery is concerned, he was really unsurpassed.’ (UN
Commission of Experts 1994:207). Vuković later speculated that the government was operating death
squads to target its supposed confidantes. He survived six assassination attempts before he was finally
murdered in Belgrade on Dec. 12, 1994. There were no arrests.
45
Peter Maas recounts ‘farmers atop tractors and horse-carts weighed down by rugs, sofas, and kitchen
pots stolen from ransacked homes’ (Maas 1996:77).
46
In Prijedor the expropriated assets of 50,000 cleansed non-Serbs came to several billion DM. Serbs
there robbed their own industry and agriculture, stripping equipment from the Ljubija mine and other
Prijedor enterprises (Judah 1997:255).

Anderson 21
 by external actors. The prism in which they viewed the conflict was one of ethnicity

and redress47, and it had no room for simpler economic rationales. Such a myopic

view effectively spayed peacebuilding efforts for much of the war.

Towns remained under Bosnian Federal control; Serbs and Croats controlled the

countryside. Price differentials arose due to sieges; in Croat areas, the prices were 75

per cent less than Sarajevo (Glenny 1996:219)48. External to the pressurised cities,

Serb and Croat OC, in conjunction with armed groups, including the BSA, supplied

BSA-besieged federal towns with necessary foodstuffs and provisions (including

pharmaceuticals and weaponry) at usurious mark-ups, while internally, the economies

of federally-controlled cities were conquered by those same Bosnian-Muslim

criminals who initially defended the cities49. In the war’s beginning, when the

Bosnian government had no army to speak of, notable criminals manned the

barricades; they saved Sarajevo in April of 1992 and eliminated the last vestiges of

the Yugoslav army from the city (Rieff 1995:131-132). When the situation grew

static enough for cooperative trade to begin between organised crime groups, such

Sarajevo gangsters often purchased guns from Kiseljak Croats and BSA troops with

47
The war’s beginning was also marked by the biggest organized car theft in history. The Vogošća
Volkswagen plant was looted of 5,000 cars, not to mention parts and strippable assets. To this day no
one has been so much as accused of this crime, although state-OC involvement is implied due to the
sheer level of logistical coordination needed to steal 5,000 cars. Some claim the robbery was divided
between the Serbian and Sarajevo mafias. Others claim that the VW Golfs were sold in Serbia, then
stolen from their new owners and re-sold in Bulgaria and Belarus (Judah 1997:254; also Dulović,
Jovan, Uros Komlenović and Dragoslav Grujić. Turning a Blind Eye, in Vreme No. 131, March 28,
1994.
48
In Sarajevo during the siege, one egg cost 2.50 DM.
49
Glenny notes that many Bosnian criminals operating in Frankfurt, Zurich and Stockholm returned to
Sarajevo to raise militias (Glenny 1996:217-218).

Anderson 22
 their smuggling profits (Glenny 1996:217-218; Kaldor 1999:53)50. The role of such

weaponry was primarily to both occasionally defend against untrustworthy business

partners and to control a restive and exploited customer base.

Serb cigarettes entered Sarajevo via Croat HVO checkpoints; Serbs paid Muslims and

Croats to escape from Sarajevo on this same overland route51. The nexus of profit and

non-accountability was a breeding ground of hybrid units of uncertain and shifting

allegiances52; Caco and Čelo, Sarajevo legends, commanded their own armies53.

Caco’s men murdered an as-yet undetermined number of Sarajevo’s remaining

Serbs54. The political gains sought by Zagreb and Belgrade through combat advances

were nullified by the trade concerns and illicit activities of the ethnic brethren—

namely the HVO, BSA, and numerous local militias—they had subcontracted this

war to, in the interests of plausible deniability. War remained the concern of those

without access to markets55. Once such access was gained, the motivation to risk

death significantly lessened.

50
It should be noted that in the areas which the Serbs were determined to take, including Srebrenica
and the northern corridor, such armaments deals were not made.
51
Elsewhere in Bosnia, Serbs charged 1,000 Marks to Muslims and Croats to exit the Bosanska
Krajina (Rieff 1995:89). A tunnel running under the Sarajevo airport runway brought goods in and
refugees out; young men had to purchase draft exemptions and then pay an ‘entrance fee’ to the tunnel
(personal conversations with men who utilised this route and others, Sarajevo, August 1996,
September 2000)
52
By 1994 the UN identified eighty-three paramilitary groups in Bosnia and Croatia; fifty-six Serb,
thirteen Croat and fourteen Muslim (UN Commission of Experts 1994 Annex III, A:11). The
motivation of paramilitary groups remained economic (Kaldor 1999:53). According to Vasić, 80
percent of the paramilitaries were common criminals and 20 percent were fanatical nationalists. The
nationalists did not last long: fanaticism, he noted, is bad for business (Vasić 1996).
53
Caco—Musan Topalović—was a club musician. Čelo—Ramiz Delalić—had recently served eight
years for rape. Other groups included the Wolves, Green Berets, Black Swans, Yellow Ants, Mecet’s
Babies, Mosque Pigeons, Knights, Serbian Falcons, etc. (Kaldor 1999:49).
54
Komlenović, Uros. Serbs in Sarajevo: the Fate of Dr. Malić, in Vreme News Digest, No. 250, July
20, 1996.
55
The Muslim paramilitaries on Mount Igman (which the Serbs would use to shell Sarajevo, killing
thousands, and obliterating the national archives, among other outrages) were willing to sell their

Anderson 23
 Bosnia’s gangster militias were not incorporated into federally-controlled units until

Prime Minister Haris Silajdzić did so, in the fall of 1993; while some became inlaws,

other remained outlaws which the Bosnian military then destroyed. Čelo was jailed,

and later pardoned56. Caco was eliminated57; Sarajevo Muslim Jusuf ‘Juka’ Prazina

resented government intrusion so much that he joined the HVO and fought his own

ethnic brethren in Mostar58, under a Croat flag (Glenny 1996:218). Such ambiguities

and a sharp difference between what is done, and what is preached, led to resignation

and disillusionment among ordinary troops of all ethnicities in every significant

contested area. Such disillusionment was particularly striking in Serb groups, the

Krajina militias and the BSA in particular. In September of 1993 Serb soldiers in

Banja Luka revolted and demanded the arrest of local Serb ‘war profiteers’ (Bougarel

1996B). Some BSA troops had, indeed, joined from patriotic fervor and an ill-defined

sense of obligation. What they found was hardly the defense of a nation. Profiteering

surrounded them—a business they were excluded from on the front lines, and one that

was officially treasonous59. The patriotic environment, where nationalist folk songs

were once composed about the Serbian northern corridor (Silber & Little 1995:337),

withered, consumed by the pervasive criminality that such ethnic sentiments once

masked.

positions to the BSA—so long as they could retain control of the black-market routes into the city
(Kaldor 1999:51).
56
Celo was arrested on August 29th, 2004, on outstanding warrants. See Ramiz Delalić Celo Arrested
in Ilidza last night. Oslobodjenje (Sarajevo), August 30, 2004.
57
But not before he took an entire apartment building hostage, kidnapped several policemen, and
murdered them.
58
Prazina’s body was found in the trunk of a car on a roadside in Belgium on January 1, 1994. There
were no arrests.
59
‘Saving the nation was not allowed to interfere with personal and party gain’ (Pugh & Cooper
2004:156).

Anderson 24
 Vareš

Vareš epitomised a rule of thumb in the Yugoslav wars; commerce often trumps

warfare. The town became an ethnic meeting point where interrelated and

overlapping distribution and trade networks functioned irrespective of ethnicity;

indeed, profits were heightened because of ‘ethnic conflict’ and the inhibitions it

placed on external competition.

Vareš was a Croat town, on the main road to Tuzla, a predominantly Muslim city.

Tuzla and Vareš both additionally maintained trade relations with Ilijas, a Serb

hamlet; Ilijas dispatched weekly shipments of sugar, flour, oil and tobacco to Vareš60,

whose traders often re-sold the goods to nearby Muslim areas after the Muslim-Croat

civil war began61. The terms of trade between Ilijas and Vareš were ultimately agreed

upon by the Bosnian Serb leadership in Pale (ICTY 1998:15,142). The Vareš HVO

opened their own shops (ICTY 1998:15,074); they also sold goods to their ethnic

brethren in the Tuzla HVO, who resold such commodities to the Muslim population

of Tuzla (ibid). The Tuzla HVO, incidentally, never modified their friendly relations

with Tuzla’s Muslims during the Muslim-Croat civil war: Tuzla managed to preserve

a multiethnic character for the war’s duration (US Department of State 1995). This

character, however, was fairly unique. Muslim militias south of Vareš cleansed

20,000 Croats from Visoko, Breza, Kakanj and Zenica, all of whom fled to Vareš

60
The Serb commander of Ilijas also sold artillery pieces to a nearby Muslim village before he
retired—to Serbia.
61
During the Muslim-Croat civil war, Croats rented tanks from Serb forces for 1000 DM per day;
Croat forces had to pay to cross Serb territory to fight Muslims. In Mostar, Muslims paid the Serbs to
shell Croats (Kaldor 1999:51); the Serbs would shell Croats after warning them, so to not jeopardise
trade relations (Judah 1997:250).

Anderson 25
 (which was understood by all sides to have a protected status), leading the Croat

leadership to strike a transport deal with the Serbs to escort these refugees across

1000 kilometers of ‘enemy’ territory and into the Croat Herceg-Bosna statelet (ICTY

2000:22,105). Those trucks returned to Vareš with guns which were sold to Tuzla’s

Muslims. Such trade relations ended when a radical HVO unit arrived from Kiseljak,

jailed the Croat mayor, and expelled Vareš’s Muslims from the city (Silber & Little

1995:300). Ironically the Kiseljak Croats—especially the Kiseljak HVO—profited

hugely from the Sarajevo trade; they bought and sold weapons irrespective of

ethnicity, and worked closely with the BSA and some Muslim militias. Upon taking

Vareš, the Kiseljak HVO planned an emergency evacuation route for the town’s

Croats that was only blocked by one unknown variable; Stupni Do, a small Muslim

village. The HVO massacred the village in an early morning attack. Muslim troops

soon entered an empty Vareš.

Bihać

In September of 1993 local Muslim politician Fikret Abdić declared Bihać and its

environs an Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia, with himself as president.

Bihać was surrounded by ‘hostile’ forces: trade continued. ‘Too many people were

making too much money out of (Bihać) to want it snuffed out’ (Judah 1997:243).

Goods convoys crossed Krajina Serb Territory to Croatia via Bihać: a bus line was

established. Abdić bought oil from the Croats, and his ‘state’ was given a duty-free

area in the Croat port of Rijeka62: meanwhile their enemies, the Krajina Serbs, sent

food to Bihać, to be processed by Abdić’s company, Agrokomerc (Judah 1997:244-

62
Daly, Emma. Is Life Really Worth Living Under King Babo? The Independent (UK), July 30, 1994.

Anderson 26
 5). Abdić ultimately traded large amounts of Croat oil for electricity imported from

the Krajina63.

In Bihać in August of 1994 the Bosnian 5th Corps—which remained loyal to the

Sarajevo government—revolted against Abdić, who fled the short-lived republic with

30,000 ‘loyal’ Muslims64. In October the 5th Corps broke out of the Bihać pocket,

overrunning Serb positions with the same weapons the Serbs had earlier sold them.

Abdić’s ‘army’ relocated to the Krajina: it, and the Serbian militias, both collapsed

when the Croats overran the Krajina in the summer of 1995 (Judah 1997:244-247),

rapidly expelling 200,000 Serbs in the greatest European population transfer since the

expulsion of the Sudeten Deutsche from Czechoslovakia after 1945. Former Krajina

information minister Dusan Ecimović flatly stated to Belgrade’s Nasa Borba that

corruption had undermined the Krajina’s defenses65. The Croat offensive disrupted

the oil-smuggling operation which connected Serb Krajina Army Corps Commander

Lazo Babić with Muslim businessman Aca Dragicević. Fikret Abdić and Krajina

President Milan Martić received significant kickbacks from the trade66.

The undermining of the ethnic discourse and the disillusionment which was bound to

follow was not restricted to the Krajina and western BiH. In the Republika Srpska, by

1995 Radovan Karadzić’s son, Aleksandar, controlled much of the Pale black market;

like Marko Milošević , he was both scorned and feared. Corruption was invasive in

63
Mekina, Igor. Bosnia in the West. Vreme No. 146, July 11, 1994.
64
Huic, Davor. Bosnian Troops Take Rebel Stronghold. The Guardian (UK), August 22, 1994.
65
Naša Borba, Cited in VIP, Belgrade, May 10, 1995.
66
Naša Borba, Cited in VIP, Belgrade, May 10, 1995.

Anderson 27
 that statelet; most notably, former RS Prime Minister Vladan Lukić was accused by

the Bosnian Serb Parliament of involvement in the theft of 3.5 million DM which was

earmarked for illegal oil purchases from Bulgaria, and former deputy Prime Minister

Branko Ostojić allegedly helped steal 5.5 million DM intended for illicit Romanian

oil purchases (Judah 1997:254).

Disillusioned Serb front-line soldiers claimed they had been betrayed by their leaders,

who bought property in Serbia proper and made millions (Judah 1997:255). For such

troops, grievance was a false promissory note they were encouraged to invest in.

They believed in the ethnic conflict label, just as the West did. The grievance which

remained was the grievance against one’s own.

What was left, in the end, were those once-illusory ethnic hatreds, grown through

repetition and ultimately made true through war. Those who believed that such ethnic

conflict truly existed, irregardless of economic or political concerns, and cleansed

accordingly, were the fathers of such a war. And the label ethnic conflict must remain

as a psychological defense mechanism. It is hugely important to its practitioners that

they were not fooled or lied to, and that those people they expelled, hurt or killed

deserved it. The violence done onto them was pre-emptive and defensive. It had to be.

Ethnic cleansing must always be justified by its practitioners as the irrevocable them

or us—a repetitive psychological curse which extends the ethnic discourse, and

continues the grounds on which grievance and redress can be articulated, for another

few generations. A regional war in a few decade’s time will be justified by the

Anderson 28
 violence done from 1991 to 1995, and such excuses as the shedding of past blood will

have a ready audience of naïve and hungry men.

Beograd Agrapha: the Economy and the Organised Crime—State Nexus

Violent modes of enterprise give a comparative advantage to sociopaths.

- Reno 2000A:54

Serbia was once the political, economic, and agricultural heartland of southeastern

Europe. In 1993 its economy collapsed67. The state had other interests to attend to. It

debased its own currency by printing off the Dinars it required; this was a calculated

short-term move, and the government knew what the results would be. But, being a

criminal state68, Belgrade had different priorities. By August of 1993 inflation

climbed to 1880 percent; at an annualised rate, this totals 363 quadrillion percent.

The next month, in the interests of space, six zeroes were removed from the

banknotes. November’s monthly inflation was 20,190 per cent. December’s inflation

equaled 313,563,558 percent (Judah 1997:268). In that month, 500 Billion Dinar

notes were printed69.

67
With the exception of Slovenia, Yugoslavia’s successors emerged from their wars economically
ruined. Bosnia’s GDP fell from US$2,719 per head in early 1992 to US$250 in 1995. Serbia &
Montenegro’s GDP fell to 49 percent of 1989 levels (Bojićić 1997). Yugoslavia calculates not GNP
but Gross Material Product (GMP); in 1989 GMP was US$24.6 billion. By 1993 this dropped to
US$9.5 billion. Serbia & Montenegro’s growth rates were -8.2 percent in 1991, -26.1 percent in 1992,
and -27.7 percent in 1993. By early 1993 (and hyperinflation), industrial production was 30 percent of
1990 levels. Croatia’s GDP fell to 65 percent; Macedonia’s GDP fell to 55 percent. Serbia would not
stop this plunge until 1996. Albania’s GDP fell to 81 percent. (Bojićić 1997).
68
Radio B92 stated that ‘Belgrade epitomised the Chicago of the twenties, the economic crisis of the
Berlin of the thirties, the intelligence intrigues of the Casablanca of the forties and the cataclysmic
hedonism of the Vietnam of the sixties’ (Knezević 1995:3).
69
In this hyperinflation, monthly pensions were worth approximately 3 pounds sterling. Some elderly
Beograders committed suicide. To prevent a total collapse, the government forced businesses to accept

Anderson 29
 I was in Belgrade that December. I was blissfully unaware of economics. But I did

note that, in bars, the prices of drinks would change between rounds.

Serbia experienced the Bosnia spillover- it became awash with drugs and guns. But in

the Serbia of the time, this spillover was politically beneficial. And economically,

they created opportunities to fill state coffers through sanctions-busting. The same

circumstances which damaged the livelihoods of ordinary citizens became rackets to

give out to loyalists; elements of the state would profit obscenely from its own

censure and possible collapse. Sanctions and UN security council resolutions became

the bogey men which allowed the government in Belgrade to effectively externalise

‘the enemy’ to its citizens.

Organised crime was used by the state to channel funds and weapons to ethnic

militias in the hinterlands; those non-state armed groups, and those third parties,

allowed for plausible deniability on the part of Belgrade. When sanctions became

imminent, organised crime was ultimately co-opted by FRY as a business venture to

fund the Yugoslav army, the interior ministry, and other institutions (Yannis

2003:177) necessary for the state’s survival. This was on top of the extralegal income

and kickbacks it produced for connected elites including the Milošević family itself.

Milošević ’s survival instincts overruled classical economic concerns. Serbia

checks, thus passing the economic damage on to them. Businesses retaliated by removing goods from
their stores.

Anderson 30
 generated hard currency through black-marketeering, extortion, bank fraud70,

kickbacks and drug-running. The state was an intermediary for money-laundering

operations; it imported cigarettes as duty free and then re-exported to the West

(Williams 2001:110). Belgrade University Law School Professor Dejan Popović

described this as the Columbia Syndrome: ‘a merging of top political leadership with

different forms of the underworld and mafia.’71 Interior ministry police (Ministarstvo

Unutrasnjih Poslova, hereafter MUP) became the regime’s Praetorian Guard,

alongside the Red Berets, who served as the assassins of Ivan Stamboulić and Zoran

Djindjić, and the failed assassins of then-opposition leader (and current Foreign

Minister) Vuk Drusković. The Red Berets were connected to the Zemun Clan, an

organised crime collective which planned the Djindjić murder. Economic benefits

kept MUP loyal: the army was left to the side (Keen 2000:34)72. MUP’s loyalty was

also party assured by the integration of a large number of Croatian- and Bosnian-Serb

refugees in that body. Such men had no legal status, and their ability to provide for

their families was determined by loyalty and job performance. For both politicians

and organised criminal elements—increasingly inseparable—continuing conflict was

desirable in regard to both continued earnings and the possibility of legal

repercussions from some future peacetime government (Kaldor 1999:55). The lure of

profit and threat of incarceration tied the Milošević family (especially Slobodan’s

70
Including pyramid banking schemes headed by Jezdimir Vasiljević and Dafina Milanović. Vasiljević
created his own bank in 1991; he invested in a Montenegrin cigarette factory which manufactured
counterfeit Marlboros. In autumn 1992 he sponsored a chess match between Spassky and Bobby
Fischer. Milanović started her own bank—Dafiment—in October 1991. The state ‘borrowed’ heavily
from both banks, effectively robbing its own citizens (Dinkic 1995:198).
71
Harden, Blaine. Fast Life, Flashy End for Belgrade Mobster; Gangs Rise to Prominence in Serbia,
in the Washington Post, November 21, 1992.
72
This was especially apparent in Kosovo, where the Yugoslav army acted as rear-guards and
shepherds to MUP actions against the Kosovo Albanian population.

Anderson 31
 son, Marko, who controlled the cigarette trade in Serbia) and hundreds of high-

ranking government officials to such criminals as Arkan, Milorad Todorović, Vlada

‘Tref’ Kovačević, Dušan Spasojević, Milorad Luković and thousands more of the

violent, young, and hungry low-level service providers who answered to them.

UNSCR 757 banned all imports to, and exports from, Serbia & Montenegro, allowing

only for the importation of medical supplies and foodstuffs. Financial transactions

were prohibited: air and sea traffic was suspended. The economy that emerged under

sanctions allowed for the further legitimation of criminality within the state.

Sanctions necessitated further links between organised crime and the government,

and allowed for organised crime to become a patriotic endeavor; the international

community became the other, a dangerous ethnic group in its own right. Organised

criminal groups soon took over trade in imports and hard currency (Malcolm

1999:351). Sanctions also allowed for a further tightening of markets and

monopolization of the flow of key goods, allowing for the creation of artificial

shortages which led to steep price increases; the state and organised crime could

maximise profits while blaming sanctions.

The criminalization of the Serbian state was reflected in government-organised crime

connections in Bosnia, Macedonia and other states (Yannis 2003:175; Naylor

1999:337), while the Krajina and the Republika Srpska became a ‘patchwork of mafia

fiefs’ (Judah 1997:255). Across the region organised criminal groups opened cafes,

bars, bureaux de change and boutiques to launder cash. Gas stations proliferated—as

they would in Kosovo after the 1999 war. Macedonia became a key country for

Anderson 32
 sanctions-busting; the government took a large commission (ICG 2001:208). Skopje

became a centre for Serbian front companies. The Macedonian government became

semi-criminalised from this trade (Ibid.); given Greece’s illegal economic embargo, it

had little choice73.

Serbia’s indigenous organised crime of the 1990s was vastly different from the

organised criminal groups and activities which emerged during the Cold War. Both

flourished under different market conditions (Volkov 2000; Xenakis 2001:2). Earlier

renditions of organised crime were cooperative in nature; the emerging organised

criminal patterns of the 1990s was marked by extreme youth and extreme violence74.

Knele, a legend of the Belgrade mob scene, was only 21 when he was finally

murdered75.

The most violent section of the shadow economy involved petroleum. At its lowest

and safest level, private citizens drove into Hungary, filled up their tanks, drove back

and extracted the gas to sell. At the highest level, the state and OC interacted as one.

Arkan took over small oilfields in Eastern Slavonia. Jetties and rowboats crisscrossed

the Danube with jerrycans full of gas; Romanian and Hungarian border villages grew

73
This criminalisation, in part, remains; UN and other NGO reports on the networks of human
trafficking, drugs-, weapons-, and people-smuggling in Macedonia all indicate government
involvement (ICG 2001:208). And bombings in Kumanovo, Stip and other eastern cities are connected
to disputes over smuggling profits.
74
De Luce, Dan. Serbia’s Cocky Young Gangsters Remove Serbian Old Guard. Reuters, Dec. 12,
1993; Komlenović, Uros, & Jovan Dulović. Dangerous Children, in Vreme News Digest No. 162,
October 31, 1994.
75
Knele was the protégé of the murdered—and quoted, at the beginning of this paper—gangster
Djordje ‘Giška’ Božović. See Petrović, Dragoljub. Target of Unknown Assassins, in Naša Borba,
Beograd, April 20 1997; Harden, Blaine. Fast Life, Flashy End for Belgrade Mobster; Gangs Rise to
Prominence in Serbia, in the Washington Post, November 21, 1992.

Anderson 33
 rich. Albania and Bulgaria illegally exported so much gasoline that they created

internal shortages76.

The Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian war; they de facto legitimised the Republika

Srpska- a mafia statelet, founded on genocide. The Bosnian Federal Government was

two parts- a semi-criminal Bosnian federal state, and a semi-criminal Croat Herceg-

Bosna where the Kuna was currency and the citizens carried Croat passports. Serbia

itself remained criminal: Milošević emerged as a re-legitimised power-broker whom

diplomats could continue to turn to. The plausible deniability he continued to proffer

was accepted as a lesser evil that the alternatives- a continued diplomatic and

economic war against the Yugoslav husk. Sanctions were lifted. The State-OC

structure remained intact, and the ground was leveled for the next stage of the

conflict.

The 1990s- Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, S. Serbia, Montenegro

The Kosovo conflict ‘could be all too easily caricatured as a struggle between drug

traffickers on one hand and cigarette smugglers on the other’ (Williams 2001:110).

Such a claim might, if mistakenly taken at face value, seem to discount the very real

ethnically-motivated violence that has been committed in the province, as well as the

human cost. In the Slavic-Albanian linguistic frontier, hatred—real, palpable hatred—

abounds, much more so than in Bosnia. But Williams’ aside contains harsh and

uncomfortable truths that partially defined both the reasons underlying the conflict

76
The examples offered here are from my own experience, in the Vojvodina (1993), Lake Scutari,
Montenegro (1994) as well as border villages in Romania/ Bulgaria (1994).

Anderson 34
 and the province’s post-1999 (or better, post-Serbian) entity. That war served to

sustain Milošević ’s control over both the state and its informal economy, and allow

for the profit of his inner circle (Yannis 2003:177). The Albanians themselves may

have been incidental.

From its absorption into Serbia in 1912 until the present, Kosovo was marked by

underdevelopment. The industries it possessed were inefficient and insufficient; its

institutions, whether Serb or Albanian, were highly corrupted (Yannis 2003:173).

Direct investment in Kosovo was limited to a few select industries, namely those

involving resource extraction (Trepća, Belaćevac, etc). Such resources were then

exported to other Yugoslav republics at state-subsidised prices. Belgrade did, in better

economic climates, invest in education, creating the University of Pristina77, which

served as a temporary unemployment safety valve (Magnusson 1981:6-7, 11-16, 40-

52; Malcolm 1999:336). Kosovo’s unemployment rates were the highest in

Yugoslavia; many young men were thereby given an extra four years at university in-

between secondary school and the un- or under-employment directly linked to lack of

investment and concurrent overpopulation78.

In 1987 Milošević re-invented himself on the grievances of Kosovo’s Serbs and the

historical relevance of the province to Serbia itself. Albanian residents of the province

77
Instead of delicately considering whether to utilise the Serbian or Albanian spelling of this city, I
have opted instead to simply use Pristina, as most internationals in the province do.
78
Kosovo has the greatest population density in southeastern Europe, and the highest birthrate in
Europe (Serbia, inversely, has more abortions than live births). For more information on the apparent
connection between demography and conflict, especially in regard to high populations of young males,
please refer to Urdal (2004).

Anderson 35
 were demonised by politicians and subservient media outlets; urban Serbs who had

never visited the province, and tended to look down upon Kosovo Serbs, were subtly

‘socialised’ to Serb suffering and a cultural ‘genocide’ which, it was alleged,

Albanians were committing there. Belgrade revoked Kosovo’s autonomous status and

instituted direct rule in 1989; ethnic Albanians were systematically rooted out of

Kosovo’s administration and fired from their jobs for refusing to, among other things,

sign “loyalty oaths” to the new regime. Serbs (and the occasional Roma) replaced

them; Kosovo’s Albanians found themselves under a Serb-dominated system which

exposed them to constant harassment up to and including arbitrary arrests, beatings,

and the occasional extrajudicial execution. An Albanian ‘parallel state’ was born, to

support a nonviolent resistance movement; alternate schools and medical facilities

were established, and a voluntary tax system (3 percent of income) was created.

Kosovo’s Albanians mistakenly believed that this system would bring international

attention to their cause.

UNSCR 757, which blanketed sanctions across rump Yugoslavia, delivered a

crippling economic blow to Kosovo; it resulted in the closure of Kosovo’s

international land borders, and cut major trade routes from Kosovo to Albania and

Macedonia which served as then economic lifelines to the province. Before 1989,

Kosovo was the poorest region in Yugoslavia; but between 1989 and 1994, the

province’s GDP fell by an additional 50 percent, to under US$400 per capita by 1995

(World Bank 2001:2). The informal economy became dominant. Many Kosovo

Albanians fled abroad: under sanctions, the remittances they earned became

Anderson 36
 increasingly difficult to send home. When sanctions were lifted, these remittances

moved from income supplements to standalone incomes; by 1998 such remittances

accounted for half of the province’s GDP. Nearly all Kosovo Albanian families had at

least one male member working abroad79.

In May 1992, when UNSCR 757 took effect, Shkodër, Albania became a smuggling

haven80. Albanians transported petroleum products across Lake Skutari81 to

Montenegro, where the Albanians received payment from Serb and Montenegrin

smugglers in cash and, occasionally, weapons. Roughly a year after SCR 757, the

Kosovo Liberation Army (Ushtria Çlirimtare ë Kosovës, hereafter KLA) was formed

by several extended rural families in the Drenica; its fulcrum was the Jashari Clan of

Prekaz82. Those same guns the Serbs traded for gasoline on Lake Skutari would be

sold to KLA middlemen in Tirane (Adem Jashari, Patriarch of the Jashari clan and

one of the founders of the KLA, was a frequent visitor) and transported into Kosovo,

for eventual use against Serbs there (Sullivan 2004:111). The KLA’s message of

violence would be received with keener ears after the 1995 Dayton Accords, which

failed to even mention the status of Kosovo. Many Kosovo Albanians grew

79
This tradition continues today, albeit with more difficulty; Western governments now consider
Kosovo Albanians to be economic refugees rather than political ones. This generalization is based on
the 2.5 years I spent in the province.
80
Incidentally, Albania’s mid-1990s instability partly resulted from the developing OC-state nexus
involved in sanctions-busting to Serbia & Montenegro and arms trafficking to Bosnia (Kaldor
1999:109).
81
200 boats crossed Skutari per day in 1993-1994, and the trade was valued at roughly US$1 million a
day. Jung (2003:142-150) cited in Pugh and Cooper 2004:154.
82
According to postwar statistics, KLA members were, on average, 20-40 years old, with a 50 percent
chance of having 6-12 dependents. 75 percent had high school educations; 30 percent were
unemployed before the war (Özerdem 2003:85). Frustrated and disillusioned young men, often
unemployed, now treated by the west as economic (not political) migrants, flocked to the cause.

Anderson 37
 disillusioned; the parallel system served only to hand out unaccredited diplomas83; the

non-violence it preached appeared hollow. And less than a year after Dayton, the

KLA began to kill.

The group’s first attack on Serb civilians occurred at the Cakor Café in Decani84 on

April 22, 199685. Small-scale attacks on isolated police outposts soon became their

modus operandi. KLA attacks, and popularity, grew with the influx of cheap small

arms which accompanied the Albanian government’s 1997 collapse, when

government-sanctioned pyramid schemes collapsed (Kaldor 1999:109) and took the

savings of 1/3rd of the country with them. Albania’s armed forces weapons depots

were thoroughly looted in the chaos which swept the country afterward86; this

temporary eruption of mass violence led to the arming of Kosovo in general. As the

KLA expand, training camps were established in Albania by the group and their

rivals, the LDK-affiliated Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosova (FERK). FERK

was soon destroyed in what could be characterised as a Kosovo Albanian civil war,

waged in Albania proper—a precursor to the real fight.

KLA-heroin connections are bandied about with much fanfare. If the KLA were a

coherent group with a centralised command structure, then the charge would possibly

stick. But the KLA was more a mass movement of men (and occasionally, women)

83
Comments made by a Kosovo Albanian friend in Pristina, March 2004.
84
Again, I am opting for the internationalised spelling rather than the Serb or Albanian.
85
Three died, including a Croatian Serb refugee; three more attacks occurred in the next hour, killing a
policeman and a female prisoner en route to a cell in Pristina (Glenny 2000:652-653).
86
656,000 guns, 3.5 million hand grenades, half a million land mines and 1.5 million rounds of
ammunition went missing (ICG 2001:215).

Anderson 38
 who, whether left- or right-wing, could agree on one thing; that Serb rule in Kosovo

must end. While the KLA did have a military commander (current interim Prime

Minister Agim Çeku) as well as a political leader (Hasim Thaçi), both of which did

coordinate some actions (the former diplomatic, the latter military), they did not have

command of an entire structure which was comprised of differing factions with

opposing regional and political allegiances. Some of the actions most likely made by

a centralised command structure within the some aspects of the umbrella are

negatives- including the assassination of LDK and FERK officials. In 1998 the KLA

was still regarded (but not classified) by the US State Department as a terrorist

organization (Özerdem 2003:80). KLA ‘leaders’ conspired against one another; an

illustrative example were the political maneuverings of Hasim Thaçi and Adem

Demaçi during the Rambouillet accords. Each epitomised the differences between the

umbrella’s right- and left-wing87. Regarding the common perception of the group

within Kosovo, Malcolm puts it most aptly:

Albanian villagers thought (the KLA) was a local resistance movement, aimed in theory at ‘national

liberation’ and in practice at protecting their villages against Serb attacks; and because enough of

them came to think so, that is what it turned into (Malcolm 1999: xi).

And so: elements of the KLA acquired funding from drugs and prostitution in Europe.

Reports by Interpol, Europol, U.S. and European governments, the Observatoire

87
The left centred around the LPK- Lëvizja Popullore e Kosovës, or Popular Movement of Kosovo, an
extreme Marxist group once affiliated with Enver Hoxa- and Adem Demaci. The right were loose
groups historically affiliated with the Skanderbeg SS, Kacaks and Balli Kombertar guerillas. Many in
the LDK became KLA, fought for the duration of the war, and then returned to the LDK. FERK
members and KLA members killed one another until the organizations merged; after the war, FERK
members were targeted again.

Anderson 39
 Geopolitique des Drogues, and journalist’s accounts detail links between KLA

members and Albanian organised crime, and claim that some KLA weapons were

bought with heroin profits, laundered through European banks (Yannis 2003:176).

This implicates members of the KLA, but the KLA itself remained was a loose group

of men with guns. Some shot soldiers; some shot civilians, and some ran heroin. A

caveat must be leveled; just as there are Albanian drug traffickers, they are different

from Kosovar Albanian drug traffickers, and members of the KLA who traffic drugs

(Williams 2001:108). Often the groups are viewed as indistinguishable from one

another, but differences and affiliations are marked. One distinction remains for the

umbrella as a whole; it killed more Albanians than it did Serbs88.

In March 1998, MUP eliminated the Jashari family in a three-day gun battle in the

Drenica. This violent siege predicated a MUP campaign in the Drenica which sent

30,000 Albanians fleeing from the region as Serb forces cut electricity89, blocked

roads and subjected villages to artillery and mortar barrages (Sullivan 2004:196)90.

The still-contested Raçak massacre91 occurred in January of 1999. The NATO war

began after the Rambouillet accords failed; it lasted 78 days. Close to a million

Kosovo Albanians were expelled by MUP, Yugoslav Army, local militias and

88
These killings are usually justified in that the victims were ‘collaborators.’ But such collaboration
was loosely defined; for example, a gym teacher in a secondary school in Pejë/ Peć, who remained
employed after the 1989 revocation of autonomy. In 1999 he was kidnapped and decapitated. Those in
Pejë who described this murder to me called it a KLA act, and they described the victim as a Serb pet
and a traitor. But who, seven years later, can say? (This is based on my own experiences and
conversations in Pejë/ Peć, January 2001).
89
The severing of power to a village often served as a warning that a Serb action was imminent. This
was described to me by KLA veterans in Suva Reka and Gjakovë/ Djakovica.
90
Taking a historical queue from the partisans, the KLA attacked Serbs and expected reprisals,
knowing that such reprisals would draw both recruits and international attention.
91
The Serbs maintain that those Albanians who died in Raçak were KLA members who were killed in
combat; Albanians maintain that they were civilians which MUP simply murdered in a ditch.

Anderson 40
 paramilitaries92. Between six and 10,000 Kosovo Albanians died between 1998 and

the war’s end93.

Postwar Kosovo

The Kosovo war ended with the Kumanovo Military-Technical Agreement, signed on

June 9th, 1999. When Serb forces left, the law left with them, and NATO’s Kosovo

Force (KFOR) began their occupation of a province whose administrative & judicial

structure had disappeared; departing Serb forces had apparently gone so far as to

leave with Kosovo’s cadastral and criminal records94. The United Nations Interim

Administration- Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) was tasked to re-establish Kosovo’s

legal system95; KFOR found itself in an ill-defined policing role—something most of

its troops had no experience with. Further complicating matters, within one month of

the Serb military withdrawal, 650,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees returned. These

returnees, and the Kosovo Albanian population at large, turned on the remnants of

Kosovo’s Serbian and Roma population, murdering scores and causing the flight of at

least 220,000 into Serbia proper. The province’s freedom from Belgrade oppression

was marked by looting, house appropriation, asset redistribution, assaults and

murders- both ethnic and opportunistic.

92
Apparently MUP’s Frenki Simatovic was the fulcrum connecting these groups. See OSCE As Seen,
As Told, 2000, Part II, Chapter 3: The Military/ Security Context; ICG 2000:55
93
The number of Kosovo Albanian casualties remains a point of contention for all. Serbs maintain
3,000 dead, all ‘terrorists.’ This matches the Serb claim of over 3000 Serbs missing since war’s end-
also a faulty figure. Albanians often claim a minimum of 15,000 dead. The most appropriate figure is
between 6 and 10,000 killed between early 1998 and the NATO war’s conclusion: this figure is used
by the EU, KFOR and others. The true figure will not likely ever be known.
94
It was later established that many of the cadastral records had not been removed, but instead were
seized by certain K-Albanian elements seeking to ‘reinvent,’ for considerable profit, property
ownership in pre-UN Kosovo. See Manuel, Susan. Cutting back the Property Jungle, in Focus Kosovo
Magazine, October 2002: http://www.unmikonline.org/pub/focuskos/oct02/oct02.htm.
95
In the interests of sovereignty enshrined in UNSCR 1244, UNMIK enforced the Yugoslav legal
code, a code that UNMIK, KFOR, and UN Civilian Police (CIVPOL) had to teach themselves.

Anderson 41
 The departure of Serb forces, and the arrival of KFOR, was the best possible outcome

for local organised crime. The law left: the new enforcers did not speak the language

or understand the customs. The informal and criminal economy was by this time

connected to Albanian political extremists (Yannis 2003:168-9); it rapidly expanded

under UNMIK.

Postwar KLA-KPC

After the Serb withdrawal, the KLA declared itself the Provisional Government of

Kosovo (PGK), led by Hasim Thaçi. The PGK took hold at both the municipal and

ministerial level; across Kosovo, KLA regional structures set about appropriating as

many formerly “socially owned” businesses as possible (ICG 1999:4, 5, 12). Self-

appointed KLA mayors and affiliates levied ‘taxes’ on local businesses and economic

activities (Yannis 2003:181). The PGK was disenfranchised rapidly by UNMIK and

KFOR, which forced it into the political arena, much to the delight of the LDK.

In the interests of provincial stability and ease of surveillance, UNMIK demobilised

the KLA and created from it the Trupat e Mbrojtjes Së Kosovës (TMK)96, or Kosovo

Protection Corps (KPC), on September 20, 1999. Numerous other demobilised KLA

veterans also joined the newly-founded Kosovo Police Service (Cooper 2001).

96
Internationals joked that the Albanian initials TMK stood for Tomorrow’s Masters of Kosovo.

Anderson 42
 The KPC is a ‘civil defense’ organization loosely modeled on the US National

Guard97. It engages in public relations exercises including tree-planting and joint

work with NGOs on environmental campaigns, amongst others. But its command

structure is essentially a replication of the KLA command structure—and, much to

the chagrin of Belgrade, the KPC is an armed body. In addition to the limited and

regulated small arms they possess, it is assumed by both KFOR and CIVPOL that

individuals and factions who have representation in KPC have significant stocks of

heavy weapons at their disposal which were not handed over during the DDR

process; what was handed over tended to be broken98. CIVPOL has no authority over

the KPC—nor does the KPS99.

Numerous KPC members have been indicted in criminal enterprises100, including

property seizures, extortion, operating brothels, and acting as a shadow police force

(the last being expressly forbidden by the TMK/ KPC charter101). KPC members have

extorted funds from local businesses, as have former members of the KLA102. The

Grand Hotel Pristina is owned in-part by former KLA members—as are businesses in

97
The KPC’s official duties are, among other things, ‘assisting in ceremonial duties’, ’conducting
search and rescue operations’, ’assisting NGOs and civil society development’, and so on. The KPC
initially had 2,000 active-duty members and 3,000 reserves; these numbers have since been reduced by
KFOR.
98
These are assumptions held by nearly all internationals and locals in the province. The information
here was provided during conversations with American KFOR officers in Gnjilane/ Gjilan, January
2001; Italian KFOR reps, Film City, Pristina, March 2001; etc.
99
KFOR is officially tasked with policing the KPC.
100
Kosovo 'Disaster Response Service' Stands Accused of Murder and Torture. The Observer (UK),
March 12, 2000.
101
UNMIK Regulation 1999/8: On the Establishment of the Kosovo Protection Corps.
http://www.nato.int/kfor/kfor/kpc/unmik_reg_99_8.htm.
102
The KPC ‘supplements the slender funds provided by international organizations with donations
raised locally, either directly or through the organization “Friends of the KPC.” Informal contacts
suggest that sums of between DM 300 and DM 3,000 per business per month are collected by
organizations connected with the former KLA’ (ICG 1999:7).

Anderson 43
 every urban area in Kosovo. The PGK stampede to co-opt formerly public enterprises

was never undone; these businesses remain unofficially privatised. And past KLA

affiliations and present organised criminal activities are all too often found in

tandem103.

Internationals remain extremely wary of arresting such men; when ex-KLA

commander (and parliamentarian) Fatmir Limaj was arrested and extradited to the

ICTY104 in February 2003 nearly a quarter million Kosovo Albanians protesters

brought Pristina to a standstill. CIVPOL’s first arrest of active-duty KPC members

resulted in a police station being put under siege by chanting KPC members:

CIVPOL released the men. Numerous KLA veterans, and KPC Regional Training

Group (RTG) leaders, including Rrestem Mustafa and Daut Haradinaj (Ex-Kosovo

PM, and current Den Haag indictee, Ramush Haradinaj’s younger brother), were

arrested and ultimately jailed by UNMIK courts for war crimes committed against

Albanian civilians in 1998-1999105. The younger Haradinaj’s July 2002 conviction

was followed by grenade attacks against police stations in Podujevo and Pristina; UN

vehicles were also attacked or vandalised (an occurrence now so commonplace that it

103
Ex-KLA member Sabit Geci was arrested in Pristina in October 2000 moments before KFOR &
CIVPOL raided thirteen homes, bars and brothels controlled by the Geci clan—whose family members
have distinguished themselves by their KLA memberships, political connections and OC predilections.
Guns and heroin were seized (GDN Oct. 2001:4). The Gecis run an extensive criminal network in
Pristina. Sabit was later sentenced to 5 ½ years in prison for extortion. See UN and NATO Move to
Curb Kosovo Crime, in the New York Times, 15 October 2000; also Kosovo Supreme Court upholds
Sabit Geci's Sentence, in Koha Ditore, UNMIK Local Media Monitoring, January 25, 2002.
104
Please refer to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’s website-
http://www.icty.org.
105
No Albanian has been arrested and tried in a Kosovo court for war crimes committed against Serbs.
Such an event would, UNMIK fears, produce an adverse reaction among the Kosovo public, which
does not so much deny that such crimes took place; rather, such crimes are seen as reactions to ten
years of oppression and violence wrought by Serb forces on Albanians. Implicit is the assumption that
they deserve it. This is my own opinion.

Anderson 44
 hardly warrants attention; in 2002, however, it was notable), and an RPG was fired at

the Pristina courthouse106. KFOR, which assumes policing responsibilities over the

group, often rotates KPC RTG commanders, ‘some of whom were widely suspected

of turning their commands into local fiefdoms where they engaged in a variety of

illegal fundraising activities’ (ICG 2001:90). The US Office has blocked KFOR

moves to arrest KPC members107; after the ‘Niš Express’ bus bombing in February of

2001 (which killed a dozen Serb civilians), KFOR paved over the blast crater before

CIVPOL could canvas for evidence108. KFOR arrested several KPC members for the

attack, but released them because critical information from US intelligence sources

was not released109. KLA and KPC elements are involved in post-war ethnic

cleansing (of Serbs and Roma) in Kosovo (OSCE 1999: xii). Ex-KPC RTG Leader

Sami Lushtaku (expelled from the KPC by KFOR) was arrested by KFOR for helping

organise the March 2004 Serb pogrom.

The KPC, like the KLA, is not, on the whole, a criminal enterprise; it contains

criminal elements. Frankly the KPC does not even utilise its own command and

control structures to police itself. It expels its own only under international pressure.

A segment of Kosovo society- be it a ‘search and rescue organization’ or some other

enterprise- is effectively beyond the reach of the province’s police force. UNMIK

fears that actively policing the KPC would lead to a general uprising. The exclusion

106
Law & Order Chronicle, Focus Kosovo Magazine, August 2003
http://www.unmikonline.org/pub/focuskos/aug03/focuskchron.htm.
107
Rule of Law Is Elusive in Kosovo; UN, NATO Criticised For Inaction on Violence, in the
Washington Post, July 29, 2001.
108
Ibid.
109
Ibid. One suspect escaped from America’s Bondsteel Camp when, amazingly, his mother smuggled
him wire cutters baked into a pastry.

Anderson 45
 of CIVPOL (and, at some future date, KPS) from policing this group damages the

rule of law in Kosovo. CIVPOL should have been the primary actor in policing KPC-

albeit with heavy KFOR backup. KPC will not go away: UNMIK and CIVPOL will,

and KPS will not have the authority to police the KPC in the future because of the

precedent that is set now. This is a quiet assumption, by UNMIK, that the KPC is the

future army of Kosovo. More illustrative to this paper’s purpose, the monopoly on

organised violence in the Republic of Serbia does not exist: the existence of CIVPOL

and KFOR (which do not coordinate with one another), the KPS and KPC (which

contend with one another; one armed group cannot police the other) and the old JNA

on the borders of one of its provinces, but banned from entering, allows that Serbia

has not fit the minimal Weberian definition of a state since June of 1999. This is an

indication from the powers that be that Kosovo is on the path to independence,

following Montenegro.

Heroin and OC

Kosovo, for all the illegal goods which flow through it, remains less a trans-shipment

point for illegal and illicit goods in the Balkans than other states; UNMIK does not

allow goods to pass in transit110. A random sampling of heroin confiscations

implicates the entire region in the traffic; heroin does not magically appear in

Kosovo, and the drugs and weapons trade along the Balkan Route is very obviously

multi-ethnic and cooperative in nature. On November 15, 2000, Macedonian police

confiscated nearly US$3.5 million worth of Turkish heroin from a village near Struga.

110
All the Paths of Cigarette Smuggling (Koha Ditore), in UNMIK Local Media Monitoring October
24 2002. accessed online at http://www.unmikonline.org/press/2002/mon/Oct/lmm241002.htm on
August 13, 2004.

Anderson 46
 This product followed the alternate route opened by Macedonian-Albanian

‘godfather’ Daut Kadriovski, which helped to reroute the Balkan route through

Macedonia and Albania and away from conflict areas (GDN April 2002:2); Struga is

near Lake Ohrid, which straddles the Macedonian- Albanian border. In March 2001,

Bulgarian police discovered 80 kg of heroin on a Kosovo-bound tomato truck111. In a

single ten-day period in November 2001, Italian police inspecting ships en route from

Durrës, Albania, to Brindisi, Italy, seized 4 tons of marijuana, 300 kg of hashish and

20 kg of heroin112. While the Marijuana’s local origin was a near-certainty (southern

Albania produces a bumper crop), the origin of the hashish is open to speculation.

The heroin is not. If one considered only distance, this heroin likely traveled to

Durrës via Macedonia (following the same route as the Struga confiscation) or via

Kosovo- the Vrbnica/ Morine land crossing113. Geography is note the determining

factor; ease of passage is, and it is determined by the ease of co-opting state elements

including customs and immigration. Later in 2001, the chief of police of Durrës

(incidentally the second-largest city in Albania, and that country’s main port)

implicated in a 35 kg heroin transaction. The next year, in Kosovo, UNMIK In

December of 2002 UNMIK police arrested a 14-year-old Albanian boy in possession

of 5.2 Kg of heroin114. In July of 2003, UNMIK seized 18 kg115. In this period, KFOR

enacted staggered roadblocks along the main Pristina-to-Prizren route and searched

111
80 Kilos of Heroin Bound for Kosovo. March 3 2001, B92.
112
Conversely, from January to November of that year, the same police seized only 4.5 kg of heroin,
260 grams of cocaine, and seven tons of marijuana.
113
I have witnessed bribes paid to Albanian customs officials on this border in the form of track suits
and football jerseys. During the 1999 Kosovo war, these same border officials leveled ‘entry fees’ on
fleeing Kosovo Albanians (interviews in the ‘Slovene village’ transit centre, Gjakovë/ Djakovica,
Kosovo, Dec. 2001).
114
Major Heroin Haul in Kosovo. December 13, 2002, Beta Novinska Agencija.
115
Police Seize Heroin in Kosovo Worth 800,000 Euros. July 29, 2003, AFP.

Anderson 47
 every auto and person which passed116. To the immediate north of the province, in

October of 2003, 10.2 kg of heroin were seized on the Serb-Montenegrin

administrative border; UNMIK police later arrested three persons attempting to enter

Kosovo from Albania with 36 kg of heroin117. Again, this is determined by ease of

passage; one can speculate that these men had a better route in mind. In January 2004,

a joint UNMIK-Albanian operation confiscated 55 kg of heroin118. This list is by no

means thorough.

These amounts seem substantial until one considers that an estimated 100 kg of

heroin enters Montenegro every day119. One should also consider that a distinct

minority of illegal goods in transit are actually discovered. Anyone who has walked

in the Prokletije Mountains, which form the Kosovo-Albanian border as well as the

historical Rrafsh, or highlands, can see how porous that border is; one can be in

Albania without realizing it120.

Seizures of acetic anhydride at Kosovo’s borders indicate that the province is no

longer only a transit, but also a refining station (GDN Oct.2001:2). This change

occurs in tandem with the transfer in status of Kosovo Albanian organised criminal

116
I spent an inordinate amount of time in these roadblocks, which lasted up to four hours.
117
Daily Media Reviews, October 16-17, 2003; Weekly Media review, October 13-20, 2003. Accessed
online at http://www.seesac.org on December 2, 2004.
118
Massive Heroin Haul on Albanian Border. January 31, 2004, Beta Novinska Agencija.
119
Large Quantities of drugs from Kosovo Smuggled into Montenegro, Daily Media Review,
December 17, 2003, accessed online at http://www.seesac.org on December 2, 2004.
120
The south Serbian-Kosovo border is porous as well. Whilst in Kosovo, a number of my local
colleagues would cross into the Preševo valley to visit relatives, without ever passing an administrative
checkpoint.

Anderson 48
 groups; they are making the leap from Service Providers (‘mules’) to Controllers of

Product.

In 1999, roughly 80% of heroin seized in Europe arrived there via the Balkan

Route121. The wars in the former Yugoslavia may have occasionally slowed and/ or

diverted this traffic122, but the trades will always gravitate to wards areas where the

rule of law is questionable. And where profits are significant enough, ethnically

diverse organised criminal interests will extend hands of friendship across ethnic

lines. Daut Kadriovski’s opening of alternative transit routes through Macedonia and

Albania served to open new routes rather than halt old ones. Fifteen percent of drug

traffickers arrested in Europe in 1998 were Albanian123; but as Albanian organised

crime has grown and moved beyond simple service provision124, they have begun to

employ other nationalities for the couriering of product, and the arrest rate of ethnic

Albanians has dropped.

Numerous regional insurrections were partly based on the control of smuggling

routes; the involvement of numerous KPC representatives in these groups

demonstrate region-wide patterns of cooperation and indicate the support of

insurgency through illegal activities (although which came first is often open to

question- the question of whether organised crime is only a tool to support the

121
http://www.interpol.int/Public/Drugs/heroin/default.asp.
122
Albanian Drug Barons Find their way around the War, in the Guardian (UK), November 1, 1994.
123
http://www.interpol.int/Public/Drugs/heroin/default.asp .
124
Emergent organised crime groups first find themselves on an international playing field in the role
of service providers. Albanian organised crime controls prostitution in London and heroin in many
areas of western Europe: but upon their first emergence they were mules and contract killers. They
learned trades and took them over. In Eastern Europe, the Vietnamese are currently in this position.

Anderson 49
 insurgency, or whether expanded control of organised criminal activities is the goal of

the insurgency, is something which must be answered by the individual). After the

close of the DDR process and the formation of the KPC, dissatisfied KLA veterans

with pan-Albanian aspirations (which often coincided with informal economic

interests) went on to form the separatist Liberation Army of Preševo, Medved &

Bujanovac (UÇKPMB), which sought to join majority-Albanian south Serbian areas

with Kosovo; the Macedonian National Liberation Army (NLA), which campaigned

for human rights but sought to carve its own statelet out of Macedonia; and the

region-wide Albanian National Army (ANA)125, which seeks a pan-Albania based on

maps created during the time of the 1878 Treaty of Prizren126.

Behind the UÇKPMB conflict lies control of a byroad of the Balkan route. The

insurgency centered on Veliki Trnovac—a heroin trafficking centre that Interpol has

monitored since the 1980s (GDN Oct. 2001:3). GDN also asserts that heroin is a

motivating factor behind the Macedonian insurrection of 2001: control of the Skopje-

Preševo road (which runs through then-contested Arachinovo and Kumanovo, and

ultimately connects them with Veliki Trnovac) was at stake. Misha Glenny simply

and unequivicobally states that the 2001 Macedonian conflict was about control of the

counterfeit cigarette trade127.

125
Evidence of an Albanian guerilla group in Montenegro is limited to a now-defunct website and the
occasional communiqué from an anonymous internet café in Ulcinj.
126
This pan-Albanian streak is prevalent in the KPC: the 1878 maps are (or at least, were, back in
2001-2002) common sights in KPC regional offices (this is based on personal experience).
127
Glenny, Misha. Criminal gangs running the Balkans. BBC April 28, 2001.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/1300684.stm.

Anderson 50
 Most of the KPC’s senior leaders were removed from their positions by KFOR in

2001 after appearing on US State Department watch lists due to their support of

Macedonia’s National Liberation Army (NLA). General Ostreni, 2nd in command

under then-KPC leader Agim Çeku, was expelled in February 2001 for his leadership

role in the NLA. In 2003, all KPC members were briefly barred by UNMIK from

leaving Kosovo due to significant Albanian National Army ANA128 elements within

the group.

Germany’s representative in Kosovo, Peter Rondorf, warned in 2004 that Kosovo was

in danger of becoming a breeding ground for organised crime129. The province is

already a center of criminal activity; extensive links already exist there between

organised criminal activity and Kosovo politicians (Yannis 2003:188)130. In 2001

UNMIK reported that tax collection operated at 50 percent of its potential; 80% of

this loss—hundreds of millions of Euros (UNMIK/EU 2001)—was attributable to

organised criminal activity. Organised crime lies behind a number of prominent

unsolved murders in Kosovo, including the assassination of Rexhep Luci131.

128
The Albanian National Army is a group of cigarette smugglers who have cloaked themselves in
the veil of greater Albanian irredentism: they have hardly any support from the Albanian community at
large. UNMIK has made membership in the group illegal: former NLA leader Ali Ahmeti has
denounced the ANA as well. The ANA was reportedly responsible for the assassination of Selim
Broshi on Sept. 15, 2000: Broshi headed the Yugoslav secret police in Kosovo until 1988 (ICG
2001:89). Several ANA members in the KPC bombed the Zvecan Bridge (a railway connecting North
Mitrovica with Serbia proper) in February of 2003. They blew up only themselves.
129
Kosovo Prone to Organised Crime, Beta Novinska Agencija, June 7, 2004.
130
On September 12, 2000, Italian KFOR raided a Pec warehouse belonging to Ekrem Lluka, a
businessman who funds (ex-Kosovo Prime Minister and Den Haag indictee) Ramush Haradinaj’s
AKK. Forty tons of contraband cigarettes were seized (GDN Oct.2001:3).
131
Luci was nominated by UNMIK to oversee building codes and determine land ownership. He was
officially appointed on September 10, 2000. The day after he was shot in the head in front of his home.
There were no arrests.

Anderson 51
 Gas stations have proliferated across Kosovo132; UNMIK, which exercises no

licensing control, suspects that many are money-laundering fronts. Customs

documentation on petrol imports are easy to create and impossible to verify133.

Additionally, a significant proportion of consumer goods on sale—CDs, DVDs,

clothes, shoes, cigarettes and computer software—are counterfeit. Enforcement is not

visible (Noble 2003), although a banderole system has since been enforced to mark

taxes paid on tobacco products; each banderole has an identifying number by batch,

making it easier for authorities to conduct confiscations.

Kosovo Today

UNSCR 1244 defined the 1999 international intervention in Kosovo; it stated that

Kosovo was an autonomous province of Serbia. 1244 was an unwieldy compromise

to justify an act—the NATO war—which, although understandable, remained illegal;

an opening nod to Yugoslavia’s sovereignty placated France and Russia. The

resolution, however, casts a long shadow. Kosovo’s independence is hardly allowed

by the resolution, but Kosovo Albanians will accept nothing but independence; they

will get it in some truncated form. The formation of the KPC violated Serb

sovereignty, despite all assurances to the contrary.

The EU and the World Bank took five months to develop an UNMIK strategy for

Kosovar reconstruction (Yannis 2003:180). And between 1999 and 2003 alone,

132
Note that Kosovo has roughly 10 times as many Petrol stations as Bulgaria—a wealthier country
with a significantly larger population. Petrol stations are especially conducive to laundering because
the transactions tend to be small, cash-based exchanges.
133
Beasley- Murray, Benjamin. Kosovo: Mafia Crackdown. Institute for War and Peace Reporting,
December 21, 2001.

Anderson 52
 Kosovo received US $1.7 billion in international aid. The service economy has

expanded to cater to the international presence. UNMIK began a business registration

campaign in 2000, which succeeded in formalizing (and making taxable) many

informal businesses. UNMIK Customs has become more efficient, thus increasing

local government revenue134. At the end of 2000 the World Bank noted a 60 percent

increase from the estimated pre-conflict per capita GDP (Corker et al 2001:14).

However, the tradition of Diaspora remittances still accounted for 40 percent of GDP

(Yannis 2003:184), and is illustrative of a marked lack of opportunity in a province

whose young feel, not just the urge, but also the necessity, to seek a living abroad.

Neither KFOR nor UNMIK possess internal security services that enable them to

address or counter organised crime. Neither does the OHR or EUFOR in Bosnia.

Such organizations claim the responsibility of policing the criminal elements of alien

cultures with long traditions of smuggling and rejecting outside authority. In 1999

UNMIK’s response to organised crime was nil. It possessed neither the will nor the

capacity to target economic crimes. This situation has slowly been rectified: in

January 2001, CIVPOL established an OC Intelligence Unit. Later that year the EU

UNMIK pillar (reconstruction) established an Anti-Economic Crime Unit. New

criminal codes were introduced in 2002. UNMIK’s capacity was increased

exponentially with the inclusion of the Guardia di Finanza in the Financial

134
In May of 2002, UNMIK Police arrested Ylber Rraci, Director of the Kosovo Customs Service.
Rraci was charged with fraud, Abuse of an official position, and ‘Plundering’. The investigation
against him dissolved as witnesses withdrew their statements; UNMIK still considers him corrupt.
Rraci was head of customs before the 1989 revocation of autonomy, maintained his position during
Serb rule (1989-1999), and then kept his position after the NATO war (Interview with an OSCE-
OMIK official within the Office of the Prime Minister (PISG), Pristina, Kosovo, April 2003; also
Customs Official Arrested, UNMIK Police Press Release, May 5, 2002).

Anderson 53
 Investigations Unit, which conducts random financial investigations of public

enterprises funded by the Kosovo budget. A Special Prosecutor for Financial Crimes

was created to oversee FIU corruption cases. In November 2003 an Investigation

Task Force was created to investigate corruption and fraud within UNMIK, the

provisional institutions of Self-Government (PISG) and others operating with public

funds135. One mobile Ukrainian canine unit was lent to UNMIK customs and

CIVPOL.

In Kosovo, UNMIK and KFOR initially believed that targeting Albanian organised

criminal interests was dangerous. This belief has set the province back economically.

In 1999 options existed—including martial law—which might have eliminated

parallel structures, reduced the exploding criminal economy, and eliminated the

culture of impunity which blossomed after war’s end (Yannis 2003:187). While such

ideas have merit, it should be noted that the KLA was then heavily armed (Today’s

Kosovo still has nearly 300,000 illegal firearms); a war between the KLA and KFOR

would have been particularly hazardous given that the Kosovo action had little

popular support in the West, where dead peacekeepers rapidly alter public opinion—

especially in the United States.

UNMIK should have prioritised the rule of law: however, Yannis claims, establishing

a functioning judiciary was initially not a priority (Yannis 2003:189). What Yannis

forgets is the exodus of 650,000 refugees returning to Kosovo within six weeks of the

135
UNMIK Appoints Special Prosecutor for Financial Crimes. UNMIK Press Release 1277, December
2, 2004.

Anderson 54
 war’s end. UNMIK struggled to coordinate with KFOR, which oftentimes seemed to

scorn it, and both attempted to take power back from Thaçi’s Kosovo ‘government.’

Hindsight allows for such condemnations. CIVPOL and KPS have since deployed

specialists in economic crimes; the administration is slowly asserting the rule of law,

but it still faces the arduous task of rooting out organised criminal structures which

have diffused through all levels of Kosovo society. Former state-owned businesses

seized after war’s end could be confiscated; the potential consequences, however, are

illustrated in Rexhep Luci’s execution in 2000. UNMIK CIVPOL’s reliance on

foreign specialists ensured, for a long time, that local KPS did not learn the policing

and investigatory skills they require in order to police their own; this situation is

changing with training. An institutional distrust of locals, often developed by

international civil servants across multiple international missions, pervades the

UNMIK system136.

The Kosovo Police Service is UNMIK’s success story. They created what is arguably,

and relatively, the most democratic, fair, and un-corrupted police force in

southeastern Europe. CIVPOL set a goal to have KPS reflect the ethnic composition

of the areas it would work in137, but this is less an admirable ideology than a safety

issue- I recall the grievous beating a Serb KPS officer in Gjilan/ Gnjilane received

when he was assigned, by a short-sighted, or perhaps disagreeable senior officer, to

direct Albanian traffic. KPS, as imagined by CIVPOL, would be police first, and

136
This is my own opinion, based on time spent in Kosovo and other UN/ NGO interventions.
137
As of 2003 the force was 9% Serbian and 84% Albanian. Other nationalities represented in KPS
included Roma, Turks, Gorani, Cherkezi, Croats, and Bosniaks (the last being the Kosovo terminology
for a Slavic Muslim).

Anderson 55
 Serbs or Albanians second138; their loyalty would be to the rule of law, and not to any

one politician or regime. The first KPS recruits entered the Vucitrn/ Vushtrri police

school in September of 1999; in addition to western investigation methods139, the

recruits are taught conflict resolution, and democratic/ community policing.

Kosovo’s economy remains weak. The province’s industrial sector—including

chemical processing and resource extraction, namely the Trepca complex, which is

viewed as a ‘golden goose’ by locals—is not an asset (Yannis 2003:177). The

province’s economic advantage can be found in its people: Kosovo is a pool of cheap

labor, and this is part of its economic future. A great fear of Kosovo Albanians is that

the Serbs will ‘return’; it is imagined that they will return with their blue-grey

uniforms and German Shepherds. But the reality is that they will return—and when

they do, they will build factories and open plants to process food and build furniture,

among other things. Croat and Slovene companies already view the province as both

an assembly site and a market; Croat Cigarettes and Slovene beer are ever-popular,

and Gorenje assembles furniture in a factory south of Pristina.

Kosovo remains heavily armed140 and poverty-stricken: its economy is effectively

criminal, and dependent on subsistence farming, weapons-, people- and drug-

138
KPS earns its spurs in Gracanica, by Edward Poultney, Focus Kosovo Magazine, December 2002
http://www.unmikonline.org/pub/focuskos/dec02/focuskmunaffair2.htm .
139
Including the novel—at least, in Kosovo—idea that police loyalty is to order and not to any
politician or regime. For more on training, please refer to the Kosovo Police School website:
http://www.osce.org/kosovo/police.
140
The United Nations Development Program estimates that there are roughly 300,000 illegal small
arms in Kosovo; this is on top of roughly 25,000 registered hunting rifles. Illegal small arms are found
in two out of three Kosovo households. See UNDP Kosovo Small Arms Report
http://www.kosovo.undp.org/Projects/ISAC/isac.htm, & Poultney, Edward. Campaign to Haul in

Anderson 56
 trafficking, and Diaspora remittances (Sullivan 2004:315). And Kosovo’s status, if

not determined soon, may radicalise the population ever further than it already is.

Violence against UNMIK and other agencies is increasing; a part of this violence can

be ascribed to collective aspirations and frustrations, but another, lesser part can be

ascribed to groups who have a vested extralegal interest in internationals leaving, and

Kosovo being left to its own devices. This was one of the multiple driving

considerations behind the founding of the KLA in 1993; those families in the Drenica

who founded the group would have likely fought any attempt at state control, be it

Serb, Kosovo Albanian, or UN. The Jasharis fought Serbs to assert their

independence—including their trade independence. The family were smugglers*.

Albania Today

Albania’s future is tied to the surrounding region, especially Kosovo; organised crime

prevents it from functioning as a normal state (ICG 2001:5). Albania remains firmly

situated on a smuggling route for drugs and people that connects its criminal and

political elites with counterparts in Montenegro, Serbia, Macedonia, and Kosovo—

and through them, illicit and illegal product sources (Turkey and Central Asia), and

markets (Italy, and through it, the rest of Western Europe). Albania is a major way-

station for illegal migrants141, and drug cultivation is a major factor in southern

Albania’s rural economy (ICG 2001:215). Albania also sits on a prime cigarette-

smuggling route into Italy, where in that EU country alone 500,000 people once

Illegal Guns. Focus Kosovo Magazine: August 2003

http://www.unmikonline.org/pub/focuskos/aug03/focusklaw3.htm .
141
Italian police intercepted 40,000 people trying to enter Italy from Albania in 1999; 7,000 were
Albanians (ICG 2001:216). Italian naval patrols off the Albanian coast have seriously reduced this
human traffic.

Anderson 57
 earned a living selling counterfeit cigarettes, including 25,000 smugglers (Sterling

1994:102).

Albania, like Kosovo, is a thoroughly armed society; caches of arms and ammunition

are hidden all along its borders. In the Diber district, locals have gone so far as to

stockpile weapons for future sale; they are betting on a new Macedonian civil war

(ICG 2004:10). Albanian organised criminal groups continue their expansion; the

weakening of Italian organised crime (through the ‘supertrials’ of the late 1980s-early

1990s, and the resultant weakening of the Ndrangheta and other groups) created a

vacuum ultimately filled by Albanian syndicates (Williams 2001:102), especially

regarding prostitution. The government remains a partner to such groups, although

the exact degree is unknown; illustratively, however, Albanian gangster Nehat Kulla

was actually responsible for current PM Fatos Nano’s security when he was jailed by

then-Prime Minister Sali Berisha from 1993 to 1997 (GDN April 2002:2).

Much of Northern Albania remains outside of Tirana’s control, and suffers from

endemic crime and banditry. The Pristina-Tirana bus was once so frequently robbed

that its passengers still do not carry valuables en route. Tropoja’s peripheral elites are

a law unto themselves, and the area once served as the KLA’s primary weapons

bazaar. Local police are linked to (and sometimes simply are) organised crime; others

will not carry out arrests for fear of being targeted in blood feuds (ICG 2001:215). In

the north, and across rural Albania, locals abide by self-imposed curfews, and the

Anderson 58
 supposed enforcers of law wear ski masks to avoid identification while they seek not

to offend lest they find themselves owing blood, as determined by the Kanun142.

Cooperation between UNMIK and Albanian police is problematic. Several wanted

Albanians have fled to Kosovo; UNMIK has failed to arrest them. UNMIK

Cooperation with Albanian police halted when KFOR implicated Albanian police in

OC in the Kukës region. Albania’s police are slowly reforming with the guidance of

Western European Union advisors; a police training mission has restructured the

Department of Public Order (ICG 2001:217), but the effect of reforms are

questionable in a country where police lack vehicles, facilities, and even registration

books (ICG 2004:10).

The border remains porous; the terrain is rough to police in both a geographic and a

social sense. Increasing police salaries would alleviate the seeking of rents as

supplementary income; and importing outside law enforcement—Tosks from the

south are a distant possibility—remains politically unfeasible because of the

longstanding and politically polarising Gheg-Tosk division143. There is also the

simple matter that the Albanian Rrafsh has never been effectively policed. Ghegs

there has historically been left to their own devices, and they do not respond well to

outside authority—especially not Tosk authority.

Bosnia Today

‘Your criminals here in southeast Europe are our criminals in the European Union.’

142
For more information on the Kanun, please refer to pages 10-11 of this paper.
143
Ex-PM Sali Berisha has a Gheg support base while his political enemy, Current PM Fatos Nano, is
bolstered by Tosks.

Anderson 59
 -Paddy Ashdown
July 2004

Bosnia’s direct war damage cost US$50 to 60 billion dollars and a plunge in GNP to

25% of the pre-war level. Roughly a quarter-million people perished. Although

nominally an independent state, Bosnia- Herzegovina is, in reality, a protectorate

(Chandler 2006), lacking ‘the power to formulate and implement independent

monetary, fiscal, price, and foreign-exchange-rate policies, and policies regarding

privatization, incomes, and social welfare’ (Pugh & Cooper 2004:181). The Office of

the High Representative, defunct as of December of 2006, was ultimately in charge of

governance and judicial matters. The Bosnian Federal Entity and the Republika

Srpska maintain separate interior ministries and intelligence apparatuses. The main

political parties of Bosnia’s three dominant ethnicities control significant aspects of

BiH’s economic sector144. Such ethnic groups rule through parallel structures pre-

dating the Bosnian war, which allows them to effectively bypass the interventions of

the OHR and others (Pugh 2001:10). The state is ultimately defined by a horizontal

corporatism with roots in the 1992-1995 war—an overlapping relationship between

politicians, war entrepreneurs and organised criminal groups, all engaging in mutually

protective practices (ibid:172).

144
Regarding the Croat and Muslim entities, Pugh notes that ‘the Bosniac Party of Democratic Action
(SDA) controls utilities such as the PTT, Elektroprivreda, and Energoinvest. The privatisation of banks
in BiH permitted war entrepreneurs to steal savings and engage in money laundering to finance
nationalist projects. The Croatian Bank of Mostar is dominated by the leader of the Democratic Croat
Union’s (HDZ) right wing; the Hercegovacka Banka of Mostar was closely linked to the Croat
Defence Council (HDO) and a faction of ‘Generals’ led by Ante Jelavić (who was sacked from the
three-man state Presidency in March 2001 by Wolfgang Petrisch). It included directors of the Mostar
Aluminium Company, Pension Fund and Monitor Construction Company.’ (Pugh 2001:8). The Bank
was ultimately raided by SFOR and disbanded by the OHR.

Anderson 60
 Bosnian Deputy Police Minister Jozo Leutar launched large-scale investigations into

this horizontal corporatism; for his efforts he was assassinated, in March of 1998145.

Such links have not been investigated since. Bosnian organised crime cooperates

across ethnic lines; it maintains political links which developed in the 1992-5 war. In

the RS these links allow for the continuing elusiveness of the Hague-indicted wartime

Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzić, Bosnian Serb Army leader Ratko

Mladić, and others.

The European Commission’s November 2003 feasibility study on the readiness of

Bosnia to negotiate a Stabilization and Association Agreement146 with the EU—a

precursor to membership—noted that the ‘smuggling of high-tariff goods such as

cigarettes, alcohol and petroleum products is widespread.’ The report estimated

revenues from these trades at between 150 million and 300 million Euros. This is

equivalent to the Bosnian state budget. The EC further noted horizontal corporatism,

which it duly described as the ‘symbiotic relationship between crime, business and

politics.’ Known sales tax fraud (since eliminated in favor of VAT) in BiH from Jan

2001 to Dec 2002 cost 250 million euros; money laundering is worth 1.5 billion euros

a year (Pugh & Cooper 2004:175). IFOR initially occupied Bosnia with little

motivation to arrest war criminals, much less pursue economic ones; some IFOR

policies built bridges between ethnicities, but not in a way that IFOR initially

145
The six Bosnian Croats arrested for the assassination were later acquitted. See Buturović, Adnan.
Who Killed Jozo Leutar? Slobodna Bosna (Sarajevo, Bosnia), November 11, 2002.
146
Pugh and Cooper (2004) note that an EU SAP, once agreed to, becomes binding and supersedes
local laws; as of 2002 only Croatia and Macedonia agreed to EU SAPs. Further, they note that the EU
was initially created as a mutually protective system, hardly in the spirit of current EU practices in the
Balkans (Pugh & Cooper 2004:180).

Anderson 61
 conceived147. On December 2, 2004, EUFOR took over from SFOR. Their once-

vigorous mandate, to directly target organised crime, has been quietly dropped148.

Bosnia a primary way-station for illegal immigrants; Chinese, Iraqis, and others are

trafficked there en route to the west. It serves as both the origin and destination of

trafficked sex-workers, a way-station on the Balkan Route.

Serbia & Montenegro Today

Arkan was assassinated in January 2000. The holes left in the walls from the bullets

which passed through his face and heart in the lobby of the Intercontinental hotel

have since been plastered over; that hotel, its 1970’s bar once filled with sponsor girls

and bodyguards, where Vračar’s children once went gangster-watching, now caters to

development workers, diplomats, and the occasional tourist. Milošević ’s last attempt

to gerrymander an election went awry; he was ousted in November of 2000149,

extradited by Djindjić to the Hague in 2001, and he died in a cage there.

Montenegro’s long-standing Prime Minister, Milo Djukanović, has been implicated

by Italian law enforcement in the cigarette-smuggling trade; members of his

government have been implicated in women-trafficking150. Serbian PM Zoran

Djindjić, like Leutar, led an organised crime crackdown; he was assassinated in April

of 2003. Serb authorities arrested around 10,000 people in the following weeks, and

shot others, including Zemun Clan leader Dušan Spasojević, were killed. The

147
The creation of Bihać’s Arizona market by IFOR brought former ethnic adversaries together to
realise that they possessed mutual vested business interests, as well as someone—IFOR and the
OHR—to connive against (Williams 2001:108).
148
Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Investigation: Will Europe Take on Bosnia's Mafia?
December 4, 2004, http://iwpr.net/?p=bcr&s=f&o=154989&apc_state=henibcr2004.
149
Many in the province dreaded the outcome of the November 2000 Belgrade protests, preferring a
hated figure such as Milošević whose very presence would bolster their claims of independence.
150
Montenegro Slammed in Human Trafficking Report, AFP, November 20, 2003.

Anderson 62
 crackdown was so thorough that the internal drug market was frozen by the state’s

coercive response, although it quickly rebounded151. Milorad ‘Legija’ Ulemek, a

member of the Milošević -era Red Berets, and the alleged mastermind of the Djindjić

killing, surrendered in 2004. He has since claimed that members of the Djindjić

government assisted the Zemun Clan in the sale of hundreds of kilos of heroin152.

States in the early modern era developed police forces which were subordinate to

governments—not individuals—and separate from forces that wage war, so that they

may not become the ‘tools of dissident magnates’ (Tilly 1985:175), such as Slobodan

Milošević , who disenfranchised the army and turned MUP and the Red Berets into

organised criminal groups which served as his own Praetorian Guard. The strategy of

spaying the army and favoring the police is popular, and was utilised in Sierra Leone

under Presidents Stevens and Momoh, and Liberia under Doe153. Such quasi-states

are learning lessons first taught in 17th-century Europe. In Serbia today, MUP and

state security remain compromised by their Milošević -era criminality. They engaged

in organised criminal activities, assassinations, and wartime activities that leave them

complicit in genocide (ICG 2001:42). As in Sierra Leone, effective civilian oversight

is an absolute prerogative of change; in the meantime, MUP superficially modifies

itself with both a webpage and public relations prerogatives.

151
Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Serbia’s Drug Scene Thrives Despite Clampdown.
December 18, 2003: http://iwpr.net/?p=bcr&s=f&o=155033&apc_state=henibcr2003.
152
Prosecution acts on Legija Claims, RTS Beograd, June 14, 2004.
153
In present-day Sierra Leone the police are currently developed at what the army regards as its
expense (Interview with Abdullah Mustapha, Office of National Security, Freetown, July 2004).

Anderson 63
 Serbian police seized 360 kg of heroin in Serbia in 2004154; no significant drug

seizures were made in the previous 13 years, due to police complicity in the heroin

trade under Milošević . The Balkan Route is alive and well: the biggest drug routes

now run into Serbia via Gradina (Dimitrovgrad) and into Macedonia, where heroin

moves north via Kosovo and west via Albania, to Italy155.

Conclusion

The end of cheap loans and loss of foreign patronage effectively ended the Yugoslav

economic ‘miracle’ by the time of Tito’s death. Its economic collapse began before

the rest of the eastern bloc, due to its earlier exposure to the shock of market

transitions; the informal economy came to dominate through market linkages which

republics sought to directly forge with markets, bypassing Belgrade; the old

brotherhood ideologies were replaced by the autarky and irredentism of blood bonds

which resembled gang loyalties. In the post-Cold War era, History, for Yugoslavia,

did not end (Fukuyama 1989). Nor did it end for certain states which only survived so

long due to geopolitical strategies which became dated in 1991. The elites, peripheral

and otherwise, of such states developed novel, informal coping mechanisms;

governance gaps were filled by informal power structures comprised of said elites,

other remnants of earlier state incarnations, insurgent bodies, criminal groups,

external forces, or none at all.

154
Police Agent says over 360 Kilograms of Heroin Seized this Year. Beta, October 25, 2004.
155
The Albanian government has reacted to such smuggling though the novel premise of banning
speedboats. This has actually had a positive effect.

Anderson 64
 Organised crime thoroughly infiltrated the federal and republican governmental

structures of a fragmenting Yugoslavia before and during the wars of the 1990s.

Organised crime has always existed on the peripheries of southeastern European

states, and earlier, empires- from the days of Agrapha villages through to Tito- but in

the last two decades it moved to the core of that state’s successors. If organised crime

constitutes the state, does the idea of infiltration therefore become irrelevant? Given

the history of the state itself, from the early modern era to the present, organised

crime as a tactic is the rule rather than the exception in regard to the fund raising and

rent seeking inherent in patrimonial power politics; horizontal corporatism also has its

historical precedents, and the ability to offer rackets to sycophants remains a valued

political tool. It was criminals who became the liberators of some states from the

Ottoman yoke, and it was varied criminals who helped separate the Krajina from

Croatia, preserve the Belgrade elite, defend Sarajevo (saving that city in 1992), and

propel the armed resistance to Serb oppression in Kosovo. And in Yugoslavia’s

successor states, a broad process of mythologization is underway for the brigands of

the 1990’s, whose acts of theft and violence are being re-interpreted in the context of

national liberation. Caco’s grave in Sarajevo is a place of pilgrimage, as is Arkan’s in

Belgrade. Radovan Karadjić pens best-selling books from hiding, and Ratko Mladić

never would have conducted the Srebrenica massacre, because that is simply not what

a soldier does: a refrain commonly heard. Franjo Tudjman will no doubt be one of the

fathers the Croatian nation, and Serbia will have room for Slobodan Milošević as

well. A virulent minority can re-cast the die of such men and their acts and find a

Anderson 65
 ready audience. And in 200 years, who knows how such stories will be told? Will

Srebrenica be called a massacre or an incident by Serbian history texts?

The reshaping of the policing and judicial systems is a post-conflict priority (Collier

2000:109). Weak Balkan states are unable to allocate additional resources to their

criminal justice systems; proper pay and operating conditions for (newly restructured)

security services must occur alongside the democratic transitions that should ideally

ensure that said services are accountable (Keen 2000:38). In southeastern Europe,

coordinated multistate enforcement is needed to eliminate the lifesbood of organised

crime—the traffic in drugs, guns, stolen and counterfeit goods, and persons156. In the

context of globalization, the absence of the rule of law in one land contributes to

criminality in others- and the possibility of multistate enforcement remains

compromised by regional politicians who are deeply implicated in all manner of

corruption and illegal activity. UNMIK’s moves against drug smuggling effects

conditions in Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Albania, and vice-versa; the KFOR

checkpoints on the road between Pristina and Prizren have a ripple effect across the

entirety of southeastern Europe. A UN task force binds Croat, Serb, and Montenegrin

law enforcement together in the halting of such traffic, but such initiatives must

encompass the entire region to be effective. Ultimately, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria

and Turkey must be bound in the same compact, to avoid the displacement of the

traffic to less ‘attentive’ countries (Pugh & Cooper 2004:176).

156
The Greek and Italian governments outlined measures against Balkan organised crime in June 2003:
The EU-Western Balkans Summit reiterated the western Balkan countries as potential EU candidates.
Preliminary talks on joint programmes to combat Balkan are underway between Europol and Albania,
Croatia, BiH, Macedonia, Serbia, and Montenegro (Europol 2003:31).

Anderson 66
 The threat of renewed violence in southern Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo has

dissuaded foreign investors, and will continue to do so for years to come. But

abundant opportunities remain in illicit and illegal markets and transactions in those

numerous areas of the Balkans ‘without a functioning system of government (or

simply a criminal government)… attractive to foreign entrepreneurs interested in

import-export deals, those who can manage their own economic environment in an

enclave, or those who need the façade of sovereignty to conceal certain transactions,

such as money-launderers or drug-traffickers’ (Ellis 1999:185).

Targeting Economic Rationales and Organised Crime

Where is there room for peacebuilding in the criminalised war economy? In war, and

in the realm of the illegal, profit is not accounted for—and when a cold peace comes,

that peace ‘may institutionalise all manner of exploitation and violence’ (Keen

2000:39).

Grievance and fear are found among foot-soldiers and civilians. The Kosovo war was

a legitimate issue of grievance taken advantage of by some, but not all. Bosnia and

Croatia were wars underpinned by lies sold to uncertain populations whose

information sources were controlled. Whether the grievance is real or imagined is a

moot point: the perception is more important than the facts, which most do not have

ready access to, and which are always open to reinterpretation. People kill and die

because of what is felt. Efforts at peacebuilding must take into account the perception

Anderson 67
 of grievance at the ground level; such efforts by well-meaning external actors will

shudder and halt when the profits of key players are not included in the calculus of

mediation and resolution. Sources of profit must be identified, considered, and

choked off: incentives and disincentives must be streamlined (Berdal & Malone

2000:12-14). This process must occur in tandem with conflict management (Williams

2001:111). In insurgencies and revolutions, the question, who or what funds them?

must be asked, and acted upon. Each answer will be unique, not just from insurgency

to insurgency, but even from soldier to soldier.

The criminal elements present in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia make

their living in a market-driven business where the demand for drugs, guns, and

women are high. As long as the market persists—and that market is located in the

West, where demand is derived—organised crime will exist to feed it. The

implications this simple formula could have on a coherent EU policy are immense,

and the West knows this; in the US and the EU, the roots of drug abuse are not dug

out, and the origin of the power of organised crime- the illegality of said drugs- is not

discussed. Instead, the consistent desire to personalise the struggle of state versus

organised crime (or insurgency, terrorist group, etc.) leads to a false image of a bad

trade existing only due to one ‘kingpin’. This personalization makes it easier for one

government to claim a ‘victory’ for a single death (be it Pablo Escobar, Adem Jashari,

when, in fact, no victory was secured. And in the drug trade, it could be argued that

there are no personalities. In the current context of drug illegality, and the coercive

mechanisms which must be in place to stop drugs and other illegal goods, not at their

Anderson 68
 sources or in their destinations, but rather, en route, multigovernmental initiatives are

imperative. In the fight against organised crime, the rackets and trades to be targeted

must be triaged by involved law enforcement and governmental actors; the illegal

prioritised, and the illicit left for last. Targeting bootleg DVDs sold on street corners

makes for headlines but means nothing in light of drugs and arms, and punishes the

persons who engage in such trades at the subsistence level; such illicit extra-state

transactions are necessary to development in war-damaged communities, and can be

such transactions the lifeblood of citizenry. Illicit and illegal economies generate

supplementary trades including service provision, transport logistics, storage

facilities, construction, etc. And ultimately, the informal economy is a lifeline for

citizenry, providing wages in the absence of a social safety net, serving to both

increase employment and lessen social inequalities. For those with little other choice,,

the illicit and illegal serve as coping mechanisms.

In states such as those discussed in this paper, a policy which looks coldly at market

conditions (and within those conditions, the ability of citizenry to care for

themselves) would excuse such informal practices, and let them proliferate, until the

state is in a position to regulate the economy through business registration, VAT, and

so on. The state may then act as a guarantor of fair commerce, contract enforceability,

and ‘protection’ from extra-state actors including organised crime. Until then, any

controls imposed upon the informal economy must be implemented alongside policies

which address the invasive structural inequalities (Pugh & Cooper 2004:182) which

often lead persons to engage in such illicit activities in the first place. Ultimately, the

Anderson 69
 imposition of a Western model upon such areas would have as an end-goal the

eventual existence of an honored and understood state-citizen compact, where in

addition to an environment conducive to business and the rule of law, there would be

the existence of a welfare system for those who temporarily require it; free (or

subsidised) education and healthcare, and so on. Underlying such policies is the

notion of opportunity—and alongside such protection mechanisms would rise the

notion of citizenship.

This not entirely understood by external actors. Liberal economic models are often

prescribed to such damaged states on the basis of the thoroughly discredited idea that

such models act as a panacea for all ills. To have Western states and Western

agencies simply force lopsided economic measures on such states is a lesson, not only

in misunderstanding and short-sightedness, but also, cruelty.

The interplay of insurgents, militias, politicians, entrepreneurs and organised crime is

glimpsed, but not in detail. Partly at fault is the fluidity underlying such terms. Where

one may end and the other may begin is not explored due to the secrecy inherent in

criminal transactions which prevents ‘points of vulnerability to be readily identified

and exploited by international actors seeking to cut off such commerce’ (Berdal &

Malone 2000:12). Europol states that the struggle against organised crime is

‘fundamentally based on a coherent and common understanding of the phenomenon’

(Europol 2003:26). But this understanding is lacking. Organised crime is not

considered a formidable non-state actor outside of select law enforcement agencies

Anderson 70
 and select academics such as Susan Strange (1996) and Manuel Castells (1998)—

both of whom may be considered the most astute observers of organised crime on a

macro level157. Organised crime is characterised by opportunity. This should be its

primary definition as well. The very expression organised crime must be separated

from its stereotypes. The definition of such crime, much like the Weberian definition

of the state, is minimalist; according to the 1999 UN Draft Convention against

Transnational Organised Crime, it as a ‘structured group of (three) or more persons

existing for a period of time and having the aim of committing a serious crime in

order to, directly or indirectly, obtain a financial or other material benefit’.158

In many countries, while certain activities may be illegal, the handling of the

proceeds derived from those activities is not. Money laundering only became a crime

in America in 1986. That state countered the difficulties behind prosecuting complex

organised criminal rackets by creating a new law: the Racketeer Influenced and

Corrupt Organization Act (RICO)159, which allows group ‘members’ to be prosecuted

for crimes committed by other members of the group in question, even though they,

as individuals, were not involved. Strange suggests the establishment of an

157
Strange defined such criminal structures are virtual states; models of ‘organised counter-
government’ (Strange 1996:110).
158
UN Conference on Transnational Organised Crime 2000; Accessed online at
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/crime_cicp_convention.html on Dec. 1, 2006. Interpol’s Organised
Crime Unit additionally defines OC as ‘any group having corporate structure whose primary objective
is to obtain money through illegal activities, often surviving on fear and corruption.’
159
Whereby ‘it is unlawful for anyone employed by or associated with any enterprise engaged in, or
the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce, to conduct or participate, directly or
indirectly, in the conduct of such enterprise's affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity or
collection of unlawful debt.’ RICO convictions allow judges to sentence offenders to 20 years in
prison; assets and profits from illegal activities are forfeited. Please see the United States Department
of Justice Criminal Resource Manual
(http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usam/title9/crm00109.htm) for more
information.

Anderson 71
 International Criminal Court to judge such multistate organised criminal activities

(Strange 1996:120-121) and the resulting financial malfeasance usually referred to as

‘white collar crime.’ Such restrictions concentrate on the crossing of informal profits

into the formal economy: when such profits remain in the informal or are sunk into

real-estate and other ventures in the third world, such wealth remains untouched.

The greatest threat to organised crime in all its incarnations- be they classical mafia,

economically-motivated insurgency, and so on- is the potential legalization of drugs

and the subsequent elimination of the oligopoly rent.

The west responds to weak and failed areas with an often American-led imperialism

(Chandler 2006) that, before the March 2003 war against Iraq, was referred to as

benign, ‘defensive and cooperative rather than expansionist in its aims’ (Gray

2003:97). In Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, East Timor, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, the

UN, EU, OSCE and a bounty of other governmental and multilateral agencies, with

the assistance of thousands of NGOs, attempt to re-impose the Western ideal of the

state structure. The UN’s role in the restructuring of failed areas remains paramount.

But UNMIK and other missions are, in the area of rule of law, hamstrung by internal

UN guidelines which prohibit its employees from utilizing paid informants and

conducting wiretapping activities. External peacekeeping forces are additionally a

boon to indigenous organised criminal structures. This is especially true in Kosovo

and Bosnia. In both, CIVPOL as a body lacks the local knowledge—and requisite

language ability—needed penetrate insular cultures, find and identify exploitable

Anderson 72
 sources, and ultimately break apart criminal structures. But UN rules prevent

CIVPOL from utilizing, much less paying, informants. They are the law in a clannish

land they cannot understand the criminal topography of160, and they currently lack

guides.

The criminal fortunes made in Kosovo, Serbia and Bosnia will continue to be re-

laundered and legitimised. It is both a reassurance and a cliché to state that successful

criminals will ultimately move to protect their wealth from younger, uglier, hungrier

versions of themselves, and new laws will be born, or even states.

Asking how Yugoslavia may have been ‘saved’ is beyond the scope of this paper. But

such questions are not silly historical ‘what ifs?’ Transparency, good governance, the

rule of law and development are the right answers, and the easy ones. A multiplicity

of supposed truths and actors, state and non-state, allows one to choose the most

convenient facts post-mortem and forge policy from there. What is now apparent is

that Western Europe’s heroin flows through the Balkans, and that region’s gangsters

and old militias profit. The rule of law in the EU is directly affected by the absence of

such a concept on its periphery. One state must defend the integrity of all states.

160
Pugh and Cooper characterised such clan networks as found in Kosovo as ‘governed by rules of
exchange, codes of conduct, and hierarchies of deference and power, and are reinforced through a
series of strategies, including interfamilial marriage (wife-givers and wife-takers), gifts, and
partnerships (with family members presenting claims for profit, involvement, and opportunity). They
are not anarchic and do not depend purely on coercion. Trust and social cohesion are critical.
Counterintuitively, it may be the absence of a state and of predictable social relations that engenders
greater trust and solidarity at the local level (Pugh & Cooper 2004:69).

Anderson 73
 In the Balkans, the state remains a source of patronage rather than a guarantor of

stability and order. It imposes itself; it demands its cut but offers little incentives

other than an absence of harassment, or even violence. Citizenry do not believe a state

can be different; they listen to concepts such as state-citizen compact which make

little sense outside of the communist context. Democracy is anarchy. For the

perception to change, it falls upon the state to change. This is a difficulty that is

beyond the scope of this paper to address, and it falls upon local elites to do so. Until

then, civics is not comprehended.

In insecure times it holds true that good people are capable of bad things if such acts

give them security and allow them to care for their families. In the Balkans, insecurity

and poverty are daily fears; the last 15 years have seen a return of the once-far-off

fears of hunger and violent death. When people cannot conceptualise a better future

for their children, much less themselves, then things fall apart. The conditions that

underlie such fears remain.

Anderson 74
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