The Decade Horribilis: Organized Violence and Organized Crime along the Balkan Peripheries, 1991–2001

Abstract

The 10-year-long cycle of war that swept the Balkan peripheries saw the soldering of nationalist agendas, local clientelistic interests, and transnational illicit activities. This investigation seeks to shed light on the nexus that exists between this collusive admixture and the process of violent geopolitical rearticulation. Using mainly investigative journalism and specialized research, the author explores underground political economies, mapping out illicit flows, reading the modifications in routes and distribution modalities in connection with power shifts and war. The analysis moves from the Croatian secession to the explosion of the ‘Albanian question’, from the underpinnings of Milošević's regime to the independence of Montenegro. The author identifies distinctive regularities that underlie the symbiotic relationship between political power and organized crime structures: a possible discontinuity is discerned in the longue durée trajectory of state making, war making and illicit trades. While the political holds primacy, the global neo-liberal economy de-structures traditional organizational models, empowers intermediation, and gives organized crime a formidable opportunity to emancipate itself from the traditional role of provider, often allowing direct intervention in the management of political violence and in the moulding of state structures.

Notes

¹ The concept of ‘’deep state' is illuminated by episodes such as the Susurluk car accident of 1996. On 3 November 1996 a Mercedes collided with a lorry. The car was carrying a top police official, a member of parliament, a wanted gang leader, and a former beauty queen. The crash pointed to shady links between politicians, police, the military and criminal gangs.

² Notorious is the state company Kintex, which covered the activities of the Syrian Ismet Fatik Turkmen Shaban.

³ ‘Un proiettile al cuore del piú ricco di Bulgaria’, Osservatorio Balcani, 11 March 2003. A vittima eccellente was Filip Pavel Naidenov (alias ‘Fatik Junior’, son of the mentioned Ismet Fatik), a major dealer in weapons and drugs (‘Sofia come Chicago anni ’20',Osservatorio Balcani, 20 August 2003). Another protagonist of smuggling in and through Bulgaria was Konstantin Dimitrov, alias Samokovetsa; he was in charge of dozens of transport and security companies when he ended his days face down in a hotel of Amsterdam in December 2003 (Mangalakova, 2003).

⁴ ‘Crimine e politica in Bulgaria: i musi’, Osservatorio Balcani, 19 March 2003.

⁵ UN Security Council resolutions 713 and 724, 1991.

⁶ Turkish Daily News (Ankara, 5 March 1997) reports that the American Drug Enforcement Agency estimated that every month, four to six tons of heroin left Turkey to be introduced in Europe.

⁷ T. Sansa in La Stampa, 5 August 1991 (cited in Gambino and Grimaldi, 1995).

⁸ Assessments by Paul Beaver for Jane's Defence Weekly (quoted in Bellamy, 1995).

⁹ Before opting for employing explosives, the Corleonesi of Cosa Nostra had been testing some bazookas and anti-tank weapons that had been ordered in ex-Yugoslav territories.

¹⁰ Family-based enlarged clans along which Albanian mafia organizations tend to be structured.

¹¹ ‘Montenegrin-Albanian flour smuggling’, OMRI Daily Digest, 18 October 1995.

¹² Globus, 8 July 1994 – quoting the Albanian newspaper Gazeta Alleanca (cited in Ameye, 2006).

¹³ See also Commissione Parlamentare di Inchiesta sul Fenomeno della Mafia, ‘Audition of the Ministry of Interior’, Rome, 18 April 1997.

¹⁴ Agence France-Presse, 9 June 1998.

¹⁵ G. Barbacetto, in La Repubblica, 10 February 2001.

¹⁶ Figures provided by the Albanian Ministry of Interior give a rough estimate of 600 zodiac speedboats active during the decade 1992–2002.

¹⁷ ‘Novom HDZ-u moze se povjerovati tek kada vrati opljackani golemi novac iz domovine i inozemstva!’, Novi List, 30 March 2004.

¹⁸ See also Nacional, 9 November 2001.

¹⁹ In 1992 the Jadran Express, a ship carrying the Maltese flag was intercepted in the Adriatic Sea with a load of 20 tons of artillery ammunition heading to Montenegro and Serbia. The societies that cover the load refer to Italian organized crime and are based in Cyprus, Gibraltar and Croatia.

²⁰ The transfer of some $300 million to Belgrade, which was announced in December 1999 after a visit to China by the Yugoslav Minister of Foreign Affairs (Jane's Intelligence Review, February 2000), could in large part be regarded as Yugoslav capital on its way back.

²¹ Monti was controlled by the powerful Italian mafia boss Francesco Prudentino, eventually arrested in Thessaloniki, Greece in December 2000.

²² On Operation Crna Gora, see the report ‘Tobacco Companies Linked to Criminal Organizations in Cigarette Smuggling’, Center for Public Integrity – International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, 3 March 2001.

²³ 5,690 tons of illegally traded cigarettes were seized in 1999 inside the EU borders. EU experts are convinced that this figure represents approximately 10 per cent of the cigarettes actually smuggled (Sensini, 2001).

²⁴ The Balkan construction sector gained world-wide reach. Kosovar Albanian Behgjet Paçolli is in control of a veritable empire (Mabetex) headquartered in Switzerland, with interests in South America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union (construction of the new Kazakhi capital) and above all Russia (reconstruction of the parliament building, bombarded in 1993). In Russia, the detonation of the ‘affaire Mabetex’ touched President Yeltsin, involving the then Swiss prosecutor Carla del Ponte and the Security Services then led by Vladimir Putin.