Albanian Insurgents Increasingly Linked to Drug Trade

A T H E N S, Greece, March 9 -- It's a simmering pot of troubles that until this week, had been largely off American radar screens. Albanian insurgents operating in Kosovo were out of sight and out of mind.

But clashes between U.S. troops and Albanian insurgents have brought the region into the spotlight with a startling twist ... the involvement of the Italian Mafia.

Western investigators are frustrated by the trafficking of narcotics out of the region and into Western Europe and North America. They believe the operations, using ethnic Albanian insurgents, are run by the Italian Mafia in tandem with Albanian organized crime groups.

Last week, Italian police in the port of Brindisi, geographically opposite Albania, announced the interception of 1.3 tons of cannabis, hashish and ammunition in a rubber dinghy manned by Albanians, the latest of many such seizures.

U.S., Greek and allied diplomats in the region have expressed concerns that the Albanian guerrillas, believed to be financed in part by the drug traffic, hope to link up with insurgents with the ethnic Albanian minority in Macedonia.

U.S. sources acknowledge that American troops attached to NATO, after initial hesitations about getting too actively involved, have been ordered, along with Polish and Ukrainian contingents, to try to contain the fighting on the Macedonian border.

Global Operations

France's foreign ministry joined the chorus calling on the NATO force to fulfill all its responsibilities on the Kosovo side of the frontier — and to prevent extremist elements from crossing it.

European police and intelligence sources report a growing involvement of ethnic Albanians in the drug trade. Some of the hundreds of thousands of legal and illegal ethnic Albanian refugees mostly in Greece, Switzerland and Germany are believed to be involved.

In 1999, police in Durres, Albania — with help from Italian law enforcement — arrested a "godfather" of the Italian Mafia group called "Sacra Corona Unita" which, with Albanian operators and couriers, ran the smuggling of drugs, women for sex slavery and illegal immigrants, according to regional police sources.