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Commentaire de Michel Koutouzis

sur Hashim Thaci : Un chef mafieux à la tête du Kosovo


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Michel Koutouzis Michel Koutouzis 17 décembre 2010 08:01

The KLA’s Links to the International Heroin Trade

In Kosovo, Hashim Thaci’s KLA served as the militarized vanguard for the Albanian mafia whose « 15 Families » control virtually every facet of the Balkan heroin trade. Kosovar traffickers ship heroin originating exclusively from Asia’s Golden Crescent. At one end lies Afghanistan where poppy is harvested for transshipment through Iran and Turkey ; as morphine base it is then refined into « product » for worldwide consumption. From there it passes into the hands of the Albanian syndicates who control the Balkan Route.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported,

Until the war intervened, Kosovars were the acknowledged masters of the trade, credited with shoving aside the Turkish gangs that had long dominated narcotics trafficking along the Balkan Route, and effectively directing the ethnic Albanian network.

Kosovar bosses « orchestrated the traffic, regulated the rate and set the prices, » according to journalist Leonardo Coen, who covers racketeering and organized crime in the Balkans for the Italian daily La Repubblica.

« The Kosovars had a 10-year head start on their cousins across the border, simply because their Yugoslav passports allowed them to travel earlier and much more widely than someone from communist Albania, » said Michel Koutouzis, a senior researcher at Geopolitical Drug Watch who is regarded as Europe’s leading expert on the Balkan Route.

« That allowed them to establish very efficient overseas networks through the worldwide Albanian diaspora — and in the process, to forge ties with other underworld groups involved in the heroin trade, such as Chinese triads in Vancouver and Vietnamese in Australia, » Koutouzis toldThe Chronicle. (Frank Viviano, « KLA Linked to Enormous Heroin Trade, » Wednesday, May 5, 1999, Page A-1)


It is hardly an accident that the meteoric rise of the Kosovar families to the top of the narcotrafficking hierarchy coincided with the KLA’s sudden appearance in the area in 1997.
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