KOSOVO DRUG MAFIA SUPPLY HEROIN TO EUROPE

International agencies fighting the drug trade are warning that Kosovo
has become a "smugglers' paradise" supplying up to 40% of the heroin
sold in Europe and North America.

Nato-led forces, struggling to keep peace in the province a year after
the war, have no mandate to fight drug traffickers; and - with the
expulsion from Kosovo of the Serb police, including the "4th unit"
narcotics squad - the smugglers are running the "Balkan route" with
complete freedom.

The peacekeepers of K-For "may as well be coming from another planet
when it comes to tackling these guys," said Marko Nicovic, a lawyer
and vice-president of the international narcotics enforcement officers
association, based in New York.

"It's the hardest narcotics ring to crack because it is all run by
families and they even have their own language. Kosovo is set to
become the cancer centre of Europe, as western Europe will soon
discover," he said.

He estimates that the province's traffickers are now handling between
4.5 and five tonnes of heroin a month and growing fast, compared to
the two tonnes they were shifting before the Kosovo war of March-June
last year, when Nato bombing forced Serbia's regime to pull out of the
largely ethnic-Albanian province.

"It's coming through easier and cheaper - and there's much more of it.
The price is going down and if this goes on we are predicting a heroin
boom in western Europe as there was in the early 80s."

A heroin trafficker in Belgrade confirmed to the Guardian that since
the war the Kosovo heroin dealers, most of them from four main
families, are concentrating on the western Europe and US markets.

A kilo of heroin that is worth UKP10,000 in Kosovo or UKP20,000 in
Belgrade can make UKP40,000 on the British, Italian or Swiss markets,
said that 24-year-old heroin middleman. He expected the Kosovo route
to grow: "There's nobody to stop them."

Only half the promised 5,000 policemen have arrived to join the peace
operation in the province, which is now the main route for heroin
flowing through some of the world's most troubled countries,
Afghanisatan, northern Iran, the southern states of the Russian
Federation, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Kosovo and into western Europe and the
US

"It is the Colombia of Europe," said Mr Nikovic, who was the chief of
the Yugoslav narcotics force until 1996. "When Serb police were
burning houses in Kosovo they were finding it [heroin] stuffed in the
roof. As far as I know there has not been a single report in the last
year of K-For seizing heroin. They are soldiers not criminal
investigators."

Echoing this, an official at Nato in Brussels said: "Generals do not
want to turn their troops into cops ... They don't want their troops
to get shot pursuing black marketeers."

There is no evidence that the ethnic Albanians' Kosovo Liberation Army
is involved directly in drug smuggling, but according to the
British-based International Police Review published by Jane's they may
be dependent on the drug families who, the Review says, partly funded
the KLA's operations in Kosovo last year.

When drug squad chiefs from northern and eastern Europe met
in Sweden 10 days ago, the Balkan route was the main issue,
according to the head of the Czech narcotics agency, Jiri
Komorous: "There are four paths of drug trafficking through
the Balkans to western Europe and we have to improve our
attempts to control the Kosovo Albanians."

The Kosovo mafia has been smuggling heroin since the mid-80s
- - but since the Kosovo war they have come into their own,
according to Mr Nicovic: "You have an entire country without
a police force that knows what is going on."

The Kosovo Albanian mafia is almost untouchable. "Everything is worked
out on the basis of the family or clan structure, the Fic
(brotherhood), so it is impossible to plant informers," said Mr Nicovic.

"Their diaspora have been in Turkey and Germany since Tito's communist
purges so the whole route is set up. Now they have found the one
country between Asia and Europe which is not a member of Interpol."

To Britain, he said, there are two routes: "By truck through Germany,
Belgium and France and then via Dover - and also through Budapest,
Poland, the Netherlands, then to Britain."

Responsibility for organising police work in Kosovo "is a grey area",
said the Nato official, but "if organised crime goes on thriving it
will have intenational ramifications".