By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The Kosovo Liberation Army, which the Clinton administration has embraced
and some members of Congress want to arm as part of the NATO bombing
campaign, is a terrorist organization that has financed much of its war
effort with profits from the sale of heroin.

Recently obtained intelligence documents show that drug agents in five
countries, including the United States, believe the KLA has aligned itself
with an extensive organized crime network centered in Albania that
smuggles heroin and some cocaine to buyers throughout Western Europe and,
to a lesser extent, the United States.

The documents tie members of the Albanian Mafia to a drug smuggling cartel
based in Kosovo's provincial capital, Pristina. The cartel is manned by
ethic Albanians who are members of the Kosovo National Front, whose armed
wing is the KLA. The documents show it is one of the most powerful heroin
smuggling organizations in the world, with much of its profits being
diverted to the KLA to buy weapons. In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA -- formally
known as the
Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves, or UCK -- as an international terrorist
organization, saying it had bankrolled its operations with proceeds from
the international heroin trade and from loans from known terrorists like
Osama bin Laden.

"They were terrorists in 1998 and now, because of politics, they're
freedom fighters," said one top drug official who asked not to be
identified. The DEA report, prepared for the National Narcotics Intelligence
Consumer's Committee (NNICC), said a majority of the heroin seized in
Europe is transported over the Balkan Route. It said drug smuggling
organizations composed of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians were considered
"second only to Turkish gangs as the predominant heroin smugglers along
the Balkan Route." The NNICC is a coalition of federal agencies involved
in the war on drugs.

"Kosovo traffickers were noted for their use of violence and for their
involvement in international weapons trafficking," the DEA report said.

By DAVID ROHDE STANKOVEC I REFUGEE CAMP, Macedonia -- For a moment, it seemed as
if the mob of Albanian refugees would literally tear the 7-year-old Gypsy boy apart, limb from limb, said
three aid workers who saw the attack on Saturday night. Minutes earlier, 15 to 20 enraged Kosovo
Albanian refugees had beaten the boy's older brother and father, whom they accused of collaborating
with the Serbs and killing Albanians inside Kosovo last month. "The look in their eyes when they tried to
tear this boy's arms out -- there was just fire in their eyes," said Ed Joseph, of the Catholic Relief
Service, one of the aid workers who pulled the boy from the mob. The attack was part of a chaotic and
terrifying four-hour siege here as a mob of several thousand Kosovo Albanian refugees tried to seize
and beat the Gypsy family. Joseph, who was still shaken by the attack Sunday, said the attack seemed
to him to be a grim omen for what could happen in Kosovo when the refugees return. "I think it's a very
bad harbinger for any kind of reconciliation or easy peace," he said. "Any Serb still there has to be
packing his bags." In one sense, the refugee camps here are sweltering cauldrons of hate,
where increasingly frustrated Kosovo Albanians can commiserate about their mutual victimization at the
hands of the Serbs. As might be expected, peer pressure is exerted in the camps to hate Serbs. In the
Cegrane camp here, which holds 40,000 refugees, children recited poems to a crowd of refugees last
Thursday that glorified the Kosovo Albanian rebel soldiers and listed massacre after massacre believed
to have been committed by Serbs as their Albanian teachers looked on approvingly. And most refugees
interviewed here Sunday said they believed the Gypsies who were attacked did commit war crimes and
applauded the mob's actions.
"We are the Hague for them," said Afrim Ademi, an Albanian refugee, referring to the international war
crimes tribunal in the Netherlands. Rumors of what sparked the attack on the Gypsies were already
rampant Sunday. Nancy A. Shalala, a spokeswoman for the Catholic Relief Service who was trying to
piece together what occurred Saturday night, said that
she repeatedly heard that a newly arrived ethnic Albanian refugee said he recognized the Gypsy
teen-ager because he was wearing a piece of jewelry stolen from the refugee's mother. The refugee
reportedly said the Gypsy had killed his father and then robbed his mother. The Gypsy teen-ager and
his father were then beaten in separate attacks and brought at about 7:30 p.m. to the Catholic Relief
building by Kosovo Albanians who work for the aid agency. A group of 15 to 20 Albanian refugees
stormed the building an hour later and beat them two men even more fiercely. The aid agency's staff
staff finally pushed the group out of the building. A large crowd then began forming around the building,
led by a group of 150 to 200 men, Ms. Shalala said. The badly beaten father and son were moved to
the building's bathroom to prevent them from being seen by the crowd. Aid agency workers also went
to the family's tent to try to retrieve the mother and three younger children before they too were set
upon by the
Albanian refugees. When they arrived at the relief agency's building, the 7-year-old boy was grabbed by
the mob, but then wrestled free by aid workers. With other Gypsies in the camp being "hunted like
dogs," aid workers said, the aid workers tried to hide them to protect them.

One person calls it terrorists, another calls it a liberation army. It just depends from which viewpoint you look at it.

Zoja

http://www.hackworth.com/Kosova.html


"For good reasons, the KLA is an internationally recognized terrorist group and was listed as such by our own State Department when paramilitary
operations began against them on March 1st as a result of their rising level of terrorism against Serb police and against Albanian loyalists, including several
postmen and a forest ranger. The KLA is also associated with a major drug smuggling ring that runs from Turkey into Europe via the Balkans. To date, the
KLA appears to have killed more Albanians than Serb police or soldiers."