Kosovo | Galloway Family Foundation

KOSOVO

Refugees fleeing Kosovo in 1999 pass two-year-old Akim Shala through the fence and into Albania. (Credit: Carol Guzy)

OTHER GFF PROJECTS

Kosovo is a young nation seeking to validate its sovereignty and build lasting institutions in an area that has been riddled for centuries with ethnic tensions and violence between Albanians and Serbs. Its state-building credentials took a big hit when a respected human rights organization, the Council of Europe, released a report on a Kosovo mafia directing heroin, gun, women and organ trafficking. According to the report this mafia is woven into the fabric of the current government, so inextricable from the current administration that the Prime Minister is alleged to be the head of the criminal gang.

The country of nearly two million people is in one of Europe’s poorest regions. Kosovo is only recognized as an independent state by 75 countries. It has long sought broader acceptance that has been withheld by states like China and Spain in no small part because they are skittish about secessionist movements within their own borders.

Serbs and Albanians battled for control of the Kosovo region through much of the 20th century. It was declared an autonomous province from Yugoslavia in the 70s, but later stripped of this status by President Slobodan Milosevic. In the mid 1990s the Kosovo Liberation Army, a guerrilla movement escalated attacks on Serb targets prompting a quick and brutal backlash by the Yugoslavian military. More than 10,000 people were killed in the Serb insurgency and hundreds of thousands driven from their homes. NATO came in to quell the violence and drove out the Serbian forces leaving the territory to UN administration and ultimately independence in 2008.

The US was instrumental in driving support for an international intervention to protect the Kosovar Albanians. The Council of Europe report lambasts not just Kosovo’s internal governance but the international forces that cried foul at Serbian atrocities and may have looked askance at the same crimes committed by Albanians.

GFF supports journalism investigating corruption and crime in Kosovo, and examining possible international complicity in overlooking crimes to promote stability instead of justice.

BACKGROUND ON KOSOVO

The Council on Europe held a two-year inquiry on Kosovo, they found:

- A mafia inside the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) called the “Drenica Group” was controlled by Hashim Thaqi, the current Prime Minister of Kosovo. The group trafficked drugs, human organs and women.

- Thaqi’s mafia “built a formidable power base in the organized criminal enterprises that were flourishing in Kosovo and Albania”

- During and after the Kosovo war, the Drenica group harvested kidneys from executed detainees in a remote detention center in Albania, the organs were sold overseas.

- There were “a large number of trafficked women and girls” brought to another of the group’s detention houses “where they were exploited for sex not only by the KLA personnel but also by some of the menfolk [in the community]”

- Intelligence analysts working for NATO and those working for at least four foreign governments knew of many of these allegations including that Thaqi was most commonly identified as “the most dangerous of the KLA’s ‘criminal bosses’”.

- The international community pursued “stability and peace at any cost” in Kosovo, instead of thoroughly investigating crimes committed by both sides; thereby “sacrificing important principles of justice”

-“Acts were viewed through a lens that depicted everything as rather too clear-cut: on one side the Serbs, who were seen as the evil oppressors and on the other side the Kosovar Albanians who were seen as the innocent victims.”