Part I: Prime Minister Thaci, friend of world leaders and suspect in crime.
By Matt McAllester, Global Post
In 1999, the United States and NATO fought a war against “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo by forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. On the ground, a guerrilla group of Kosovar Albanians called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) allied with the United States and NATO in the war against the Yugoslav forces, led by Slobodan Milosevic. International support for the KLA in the nearly three-month campaign was strong. The war became cast as a battle for human rights and international order. At the end of the fighting, on June 10, 1999, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, winding up a presidency tainted by American passivity during the slaughters in Bosnia and Rwanda, proudly proclaimed: “Because of our resolve, the 20th century is ending, not with helpless indignation, but with a hopeful affirmation of human dignity and human rights for the 21st century. For in Kosovo we did the right thing. We did it the right way. And we will finish the job.” Twelve years later, few would argue that the war was not justified. But the U.S.-backed KLA leaders who went on to be elected to run Kosovo are now being investigated for operating what amounts to an organized crime syndicate with allegations of murder as well as widespread trafficking of women, narcotics and even human organs. And, as a GlobalPost investigation has found, American and NATO officials had evidence of the criminal allegations all along.
PRISTINA, Kosovo — It was the fall of 2000, just over a year after the end of the war in Kosovo, when two NATO military intelligence officers produced the first known report on local organized crime, painting the former political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), Hashim Thaci, as having “established influence on local criminal organizations, which control [a] large part of Kosovo.”
The report, the existence of which has not been previously reported, was widely distributed among all NATO countries, according to former NATO sources interviewed by GlobalPost. And year after year as the nascent democracy of Kosovo struggled to move forward and Thaci rose to political prominence, more detailed allegations and intelligence reports, totaling at least four more between 2000 and 2009, would name Thaci, these sources add. The reports were widely available to U.S. and NATO intelligence officials, and at least two were readily available on the internet. In one 36-page NATO intelligence reportobtained by GlobalPost, Thaci merits a page to himself with a diagram linking him to other prominent former KLA members who are themselves linked to various criminal activities that include, extortion, murder and trafficking in drugs, stolen cars, cigarettes, weapons and women.
Today, Thaci is the prime minister of Kosovo. In fact, he was just recently re-elected to his second term.
In spite of U.S. officials knowing about the numerous and detailed allegations against Thaci and many of his former colleagues in the KLA, he has remained a valued ally of successive U.S. administrations. It is unknown which U.S. officials have seen the reports. But a NATO diplomat said it was common knowledge that Thaci is suspected of criminal activity: “Whenever you looked at him always in the briefings it was ‘suspected of organized crime.’”
And when asked if he heard the accusations against Thaci and others over the years, Daniel Serwer, a former senior American diplomat in the Balkans and now a senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said, “Absolutely. It’s been a common allegation.”
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright publicly embraced Thaci. Former President George W. Bush hosted him in the Oval Office. Vice President Joseph Biden also welcomed him to the White House, in July. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited him in Kosovo as recently as the fall.
“I want you to know, prime minister,” Clinton said to Thaci, during her visit to Pristina on Oct. 13 last year, “that just as we have been with you on the hard road to independence, we will stay with you. We are your partners and we are your friends and we are very committed to your future.”
Serwer said that Clinton has “certainly heard the allegations against them … . We all heard them.”
Kosovo, a fledgling democracy that the United States and NATO together helped liberate and then create in a globally popular war that was partly framed by the United States and its allies as a war of humanitarian intervention, is now hamstrung by corruption and intimidation.Thaci and many of his fellow Kosovo Albanian guerrilla leaders who were key U.S. and NATO allies in the 1999 war have clung to power and are facing numerous allegations of criminal wrongdoing. In a country whose very existence was fuelled by the West’s concern for human rights, many citizens are afraid to criticize a prime minister and his allies, who stand accused of routinely violating human rights.
Based on three months of reporting, involving dozens of interviews with politicians, former KLA members, diplomats, former NATO soldiers, political analysts and officials, GlobalPost has found that concerns about criminality among Kosovo’s ruling political class went largely ignored by the United States, NATO and the United Nations over the past 11 years — and in some cases U.S. and U.N. officials thwarted criminal investigations into former senior KLA figures. That, according to many of these people who have played a part in Kosovo’s recent history, was because the United States, NATO and the United Nations believed that keeping the peace in Kosovo between its ethnic majority Albanians and minority Serbian population — and Serbia itself — was a priority that outstripped all other concerns, including allegations of horrific human rights abuses.
At the same time, the KLA were cast as Kosovo’s heroes and its leaders emerged from the war with unparalleled political popularity and power, which limited the options of the United States and other NATO countries in finding effective partners in Kosovo. “It’s very easy to be holier than thou but in the end in places like this you’re going to meet people who are not good,” the NATO diplomat said. “If they were good people then probably they wouldn’t be in power or you wouldn’t have a problem with the country in the first place. It’s the price of doing business.”
Thaci has not been charged in a criminal case, but the timeline of the mounting allegations against him reveal that U.S. and NATO officials knowingly supported him and other Kosovo leaders who were purportedly involved in serious crimes right from the start of the Kosovo conflict.
“Americans and those who were in charge had access to this and other documents,” said a Western diplomat with knowledge of the region, referring to the intelligence report that is marked on every page as being for the viewing of the United States and NATO. Four other diplomatic, military and intelligence sources confirmed the documents were seen by U.S. officials.
Referring to the 2000 report, a former NATO intelligence officer in Kosovo who had access to a wide array of information relating to organized crime said that the United States and other NATO countries “did nothing after its publication, which made me disappointed and disheartened.”
Florin Krasniqi, a Brooklyn-based businessman who raised large amounts of money for the KLA and shipped high-powered rifles from the United States to the KLA, said he has personally complained to senior State Department officials about corruption and crime at the top levels of government in Kosovo but he said he is routinely dismissed.
“You can be corrupted as hell,” Krasniqi said, “but as long as you keep the stability you are a friend.”
Krasniqi, who was recently elected to the Kosovo parliament, described his former KLA comrade Thaci as “the head of the mafia here.”
Thaci is a telegenic, commanding figure who speaks passable English. He first became close to American officials during peace negotiations in France in March 1999, prior to the outbreak of war.
“I don’t think there’s any escaping the fact that these allegations have been around for a long time and in order to put them to rest there has to be a serious investigation,” said Serwer. Thaci, whom Serwer knows, “would like it to just go away. But I don’t see how it can go away.”
Some of the longstanding suspicions about Thaci and his associates were brought into stark and public focus in December when a Swiss senator named Dick Marty published a report under the auspices of the Council of Europe, a respected human rights organization, accusing Thaci and other prominent former KLA commanders of being involved in numerous crimes, including trafficking in human organs harvested from people who were allegedly killed for that purpose.
Then-State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley responded to the release of the report in December, saying that “any evidence and sources cited in this report should be shared with competent authorities to conduct a full and proper investigation.”
But beyond that, administration officials are reluctant to discuss why successive American governments have backed Thaci even though every administration since Bill Clinton’s has had access to the detailed allegations of Thaci’s alleged ties to organized crime.
The U.S. ambassador to Kosovo, Christopher Dell, declined numerous requests for an interview. A spokeswoman agreed to accept questions for a possible response from Dell, but then he declined to answer any. State Department officials, including former ambassador and current Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Tina Kaidanow, also declined to comment. Other officials and former officials declined to comment, including Secretary of State Clinton, former Secretary of State Albright and Albright’s former spokesman Jamie Rubin.
A spokesman for Thaci also declined numerous requests for an interview, saying that Thaci was too busy. Thaci also did not respond to written questions. Thaci is threatening to sue Marty over the report. Thaci has called the report “scandalous” and has said that its aim was “to devalue both the KLA and the independence of Kosovo.
Criminal investigations
Beyond intelligence reports and mounting allegations, several criminal investigations of Thaci’s allies were known to U.S. officials — and three are a matter of public record.
GlobalPost has obtained a case report from the now-defunct U.N. mission in Kosovo’s War Crimes Unit, dated May 20, 2008. The case report describes how, shortly after the war, German NATO soldiers found and released 14 people who were being illegally detained by the KLA in the city of Prizren in southern Kosovo. They also found the body of an elderly Kosovo Albanian man who was still handcuffed. He “showed signs of having been beaten,” the reports reads.
Among those named as suspects in the report is Kadri Veseli, who is considered by many in Kosovo to be Thaci’s closest ally. Veseli was chief of SHIK, the KLA’s intelligence service, an organization that continued to exist and operate without legal sanction until 2008, and possibly exists to this day. In addition to Veseli, other senior KLA commanders and Thaci allies, including Azem Syla, Sabit Geci and Fatmir Limaj, are also named as suspects in the report.
None have ever been charged in relation to the alleged crime in Prizren. But Syla, Geci and Limaj have also been subject to other criminal investigations.
Syla was arrested by police in late 2009 and questioned about whether he was involved in ordering SHIK hitmen to kill a political opponent. Syla has not been charged in the case, whose star defendant is likely to be a self-professed SHIK assassin named Nazim Bllaca.
Limaj, another senior former KLA leader and Thaci’s former minister of transporation, was charged with war crimes in mid-March by EULEX, a mission of the European Union that works with Kosovo officials on enforcing the rule of law.
Last year EULEX investigators raided and searched Limaj’s homes and places of work. He has not been indicted but many observers in Kosovo believe he is, or was, under investigation for massive corruption related to road construction contracts as well as war crimes. (Limaj was acquitted of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.)
Geci is currently on trial, charged with war crimes by EULEX prosecutors. The EULEX investigation into Geci features Thaci in a cameo, GlobalPost has learned. Prosecutors and witnesses allege the during the war Geci ran a prison in the KLA headquarters in the town of Kukes. In the prison, prosecutors and witnesses say, Geci tortured numerous Albanian prisoners suspected of being collaborators or political opponents of the KLA.
In an interview, one of the estimated 20 survivors of the prison said that he saw Thaci present at the prison. The man, who says Geci tortured him and murdered his brother, has agreed to testify in Geci’s trial but requested anonymity before agreeing to an interview.
“I saw Hashim Thaci with my own eyes,” said the man, acknowledging that it was possible that Thaci did not know the prisoners were being tortured at the KLA base. But, the man said, the prisoners were held in a room with a large window and “he could see us.”
The man said he has told EULEX prosecutors about seeing Thaci at the prison camp. EULEX prosecutors declined to discuss the case.
If a reckoning of some senior KLA leaders is perhaps beginning with Geci’s trial, it has been too long in coming, critics say. Among those critics are people whose job it was to investigate and prosecute criminals in Kosovo after the war.
Protected by the United States?
One of the most frustrating examples of American power in the capital Pristina, say current and former U.N. officials and Western diplomats, was the influence American diplomats exerted over the supposedly independent U.N. prosecutor’s office in Kosovo.
“There was interference by the U.S. mission [to Kosovo] preventing effective investigation and prosecution of senior Kosovo officials,” said a U.N. official, who is in a position to know about the details of the United Nations’ law enforcement efforts during the time that it administered Kosovo, from 2000 to 2008.
The official said that the senior Kosovo politicians were being investigated for being allegedly involved in organized crime, and that U.S. officials prevented searches of the suspects’ homes and in one case were involved with U.N. officials in preventing a sentence from being carried out. The U.N. official said that these phone calls were “well known” and deeply frustrated many of the international prosecutors who were working for the United Nations and wanted to prosecute these Kosovo officials.
On June 14, 2008, the most senior U.N. official in Kosovo, Joachim Ruecker, issued an executive decision suspending the prison term of a former KLA commander named Sami Lushtaku, who had been sentenced to a total of 11 months in prison. Lushtaku was mayor of a town named Skenderaj, where support for the KLA is strong. In his order, which GlobalPost has obtained, Ruecker notes that Lushtaku’s sentence would make him legally ineligible to be mayor and “such an outcome would be politically highly sensitive at this stage and contrary to the public interest.” It is unknown if American officials influenced Ruecker’s legal decision, but a former senior NATO official in Kosovo said that CIA officials in Kosovo had tried to prevent NATO soldiers from arresting Lushtaku prior to prosecution.
Other officials and former officials confirmed that the United States protected some senior political figures, including former KLA leaders close to Thaci, for the sake of creating the impression that Kosovo was a stable country with strong local leaders. The same officials and former officials said that other NATO and U.N. officials were often complicit in suppressing investigations, although many others were angry at the blocked investigations.
“When we talked to them [the former KLA commanders who are still very influential in Kosovo today] we all knew they lied to us and they knew that we knew they were lying but there was not much we could do thanks to politics and their patrons in D.C.,” a former NATO intelligence official who worked in Kosovo told GlobalPost. “They freely run prostitution, petrol smuggling, money laundering, racketeering, intimidation of LDK people [members of a rival political party, the Democratic League of Kosovo]. They get away with murder.
“The Americans were not making criminal investigations easy,” the former NATO intelligence official said. “In a couple of cases that I know of they wanted investigations to freeze because that ‘was not the right time to do it,’ according to them, so they just pulled the plug and there was nothing that we could do. It concerned the big fish.”
A former international monitor with connections to the U.N.’s mission in Kosovo said: “It got to the point where some of my prosecutor friends were told not to do this. One can understand if someone says wait. They might be told hold for a while. But for people to just flat out say ‘don’t you do this ever’ and to treat the prosecutor’s office as an extension of the political office — that’s where lines get blurred.”
The former monitor sat in on meetings involving U.S. diplomats in which they and U.N. officials discussed whether political considerations should prevent certain political figures from being investigated or arrested.
The sense that Thaci and his close associates are protected and untouchable has created what many observers in Kosovo describe as a sense of hopelessness. Thaci is building a large house in the capital, Pristina, and even if the money for the construction comes from legitimate sources many ordinary Kosovars, who are the poorest people in Europe, see the house as a symbol of arrogance and corruption.
“To me this is absolutely reprehensible,” Serwer said.
It is highly unlikely that Thaci would ever be prosecuted by a Kosovo court. “The police, public prosecutors and courts are erratic performers, prone to political interference and abuse of office,” the non-partisan International Crisis Group wrote in a report last year, echoing a view shared by many Kosovars, foreign governments and aid groups.
A GlobalPost reporter interviewed Kosovo’s chief of police, Reshat Maliqi, and asked him why he had not initiated an investigation into Thaci or ordered his officers to search for evidence, given the numerous allegations against the prime minister. “We didn’t try,” Maliqi said, “because someone needs to knock on my door” bringing evidence.
If anyone is to prosecute Thaci it would almost certainly have to be international prosecutors. Since 2008 EULEX has been the most powerful judicial force in Kosovo, which declared independence the same year. Thaci’s opponents and critics hope that EULEX prosecutors will aggressively investigate the prime minister.
A Western diplomat based in Kosovo confirmed to GlobalPost that EULEX had been quietly investigating Thaci for some time. And in January EULEX announced its prosecutors had opened a preleminary investigation into the organ-trafficking allegations in Marty’s report.
There are signs that Thaci’s friends in Washington are becoming increasingly embarrassed by the swirl of corruption and crime that surrounds him and other former KLA commanders.
When Thaci visited Biden in July, Biden was all smiles in public with Thaci but “hammered” him about corruption in their private meeting, according to someone with knowledge of the meeting. Thaci agreed with Biden that there was a problem and said he would try harder to stop corruption and crime in the Kosovo government.
And if Thaci wants to visit the United States again it is now unlikely that he would ever be able to obtain a U.S. visa other than a diplomatic visa, which grants him immunity, U.S. government sources told GlobalPost. The United States does not generally allow foreign nationals into the country when there are unresolved allegations of human rights abuses against them. Thaci has told associates that he is now concerned about traveling overseas because he fears being arrested in a foreign country.
Thaci remains by far the most powerful politician in Kosovo. But if the United States were to withdraw support for him, or for his country, Kosovo would be plunged into political chaos that some people believe would lead to the break-up of the country. Such chaos also comes with a danger of resumed ethnic hostilities.
“At one point the United States is going to say you don’t deserve a country,” said Engjellushe Morina, executive director of the Kosovo Stability Initiative think-tank in Pristina. “Some of Kosovo will go to Albania and some will go to Serbia. It would be a disaster for that to happen. We so badly wanted a state and we didn’t know how to run a state.”
Part II: Investigating an intelligence service in the shadows.
PRISTINA, Kosovo — It’s known as K-SHIK, an Albanian-language acronym for Kosovo’s National Intelligence Service, and it has always operated in the shadows of Kosovo’s darkest corners.
That is, until now. GlobalPost has interviewed a key informant in a criminal investigation into alleged K-SHIK assasinations as well as several victims of alleged K-SHIK intimidation tactics. In a series of extraordinarily candid interviews, these sources have come forward to shed new light on U.S. support of K-SHIK’s operations in Kosovo and K-SHIK’s alleged history of targeting political opponents for intimidation — and allegedly murder.
Setting up a headquarters here in Kosovo’s capital in the aftermath of the 1999 war, the notorious intelligence agency became an extra-legal entity that was at first under the command of the victorious and U.S.-allied guerrilla movement, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
Later it was directed by the Democratic Party of Kosovo, American and Kosovar sources say. The party’s leader is the prime minister, Hashim Thaci, who was recently elected to a second term and who continues to receive support from the highest levels of power in Washington.
Today, there is no longer a physical headquarters and officially the intelligence service does not exist, according to the man who headed up the agency for nine years. But sources connected to SHIK, as it is most commonly known, maintain that it remains active in enforcing the political status quo through fear and intimidation.
The United States and other NATO countries who fought to oust Yugoslav forces from Kosovo in 1999 provided support for SHIK, according to the intelligence service’s own former chief.
The former head of the intelligence service, Kadri Veseli, a key ally of Thaci, revealed in an exclusive interview with GlobalPost that he received U.S. support, saying, “We had a lot of partners — 25 intelligence services … . The U.S., they help us a lot.”
Veseli denies that SHIK carried out systematic political killings, but he says that the foreign intelligence services assisted SHIK “in every way.” He refused to discuss specifics of how the organization operated.
A half dozen sources, including another former SHIK operative, a former KLA fundraiser, a Western diplomat with knowledge of the region and a Kosovar political analyst, confirmed that the United States has supported SHIK, which was never formally overseen by a government or international body.
The former hitman
In a house heavily guarded by NATO troops, the former self-proclaimed SHIK hitman, Nazim Bllaca, told GlobalPost that SHIK orchestrated a campaign of political murder after the 1999 war ended. During that period, he said, hundreds of minority Kosovar Serbs and Kosovar Albanians suspected of collaborating with Slobodan Milosevic’s forces or being members of a party opposed to the victorious KLA were killed. It is unknown how many of these alleged murders prosecutors in Kosovo believe were carried out by SHIK, but since talking to GlobalPost, Bllaca has agreed to testify in another trial that began in mid-March of two former KLA soldiers with whom he has told prosecutors he killed an Albanian man in June 1999.
The NATO troops outside Bllaca’s door were there to protect him, he explained, from possible assassins trying to silence him as he has come forward to provide testimony against SHIK.
“I was part of a criminal and illegal organization called SHIK,” Bllaca said. “I am the author of one killing and I assisted in many others … . Personally, my group and I were working on collaborators and political killings.”
Two Kosovo Albanian politicians, one a former deputy prime minster, backed up the claims of the self-proclaimed hitman, saying that agents of the intelligence service tried to kill them. Bllaca said it was, in fact, his team that tried to kill the two men.
Prosecutors at EULEX, a mission of the European Union that works with Kosovo officials on enforcing the rule of law, are preparing Bllaca’s indictment on charges of murder, attempted murder and involvement in organized crime, according to EULEX documents seen by GlobalPost, and according to Bllaca himself, who is cooperating with EULEX prosecutors. Bllaca has told prosecutors that a senior former KLA official ― a close ally of Thaci named Azem Syla ― ordered him to do the killings. EULEX prosecutors declined to say whether they planned to indict anyone else connected to the murders.
“My goal is to shed light on all the killings in Kosovo,” Bllaca said.
Veseli denied that he or SHIK had ever been involved in murder or any crime. “Nazim Bllaca was never part of SHIK,” said Veseli, 43, during a more than two-hour interview in a restaurant in Pristina. “We were never in touch with him.”
Neither Veseli nor Thaci has been charged in a criminal case.
American involvement
The U.S. ambassador to Kosovo, Christopher Dell, declined repeated requests for an interview, as did officials at the State Department in Washington. They also declined to respond to written questions.
Most people who spoke to GlobalPost about SHIK, its activities and its ties to the U.S. government spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to face repercussions.
“It was sponsored by the CIA,” said a former senior U.S. official in Kosovo, who believes that SHIK turned into an organized crime organization. “At the beginning there were about 16 chosen by hand ― trained, equipped and outfitted and doing good things … but what it turned into was a method to maintain control of the crime and the politics in Kosovo.”
The former American official said SHIK was still supported by the United States and is “stronger now than it’s ever been, quite frankly.”
“The U.S. has been involved in training both SHIK and Kosovo’s security structures,” the Western diplomat with knowledge of the region said.
A former SHIK operative who no longer lives in Kosovo confirmed that he had been trained in the United States and Germany by American intelligence officials.
“[Veseli] had direct links with the American and English intelligence,” said Florin Krasniqi, a former KLA fundraiser and now a member of the Kosovo parliament. “Anything Americans and English wants, he gave them, on a plate … Kadri Veseli was financed, supported, supplied by these agencies.”
Veseli was friendly enough with U.S. officials to be invited to at least one, possibly more, Fourth of July barbecue celebrations at the U.S. Embassy in Pristina, according to three sources, including one who saw him at the celebration. Veseli did not dispute that he attended Fourth of July celebrations at the embassy, although he would not directly confirm his presence there.
There is strong indication that American officials knew of the suspicions of SHIK’s alleged involvement in targeting political opponents, even as the United States and other NATO countries were providing support for SHIK.
An intelligence report dated 2004 notes that Thaci associate and former KLA commander Xhavit “Haliti with Kadri ‘SALI’ VESELI, chief of KshiK prepared a ‘Black List’ of moderate politicians who were intimidated by KshiK and PDK supporters.” It is not known who in the American government has seen the report but the well-informed Western diplomat confirmed that officials in Washington had seen the report. (The report is marked “Secret Rel USA KFOR and NATO,” which is standard Pentagon code for “Secret – Releasable to the United States and NATO.” KFOR is the NATO force in Kosovo.)
The same intelligence report states: “KShiK has strong links with a number of Kosovar criminal organisations and derives much of their funding from illegal activity … KShiK also uses intimidation tactics to obtain funding from companies.”
Another intelligence report, this one authored by the German intelligence agency, the BND, in 2005 states, in German: “The SHIK developed its present form in the second half of 1999 in PRISTINA on THACI’s initiative. THACI and [former KLA leader and prime minister Ramush] HARADINAJ, among others, used it to recruit suitable candidates for the Kosovar police service and the TMK [the Kosovo Protection Corps, an emergency response force comprised mainly of former KLA soldiers]. In reality, the service is primarily involved in spying activities, intimidation, and physically eliminating democratic forces.”
In accusing Syla and SHIK ― and by implication, Thaci and Veseli ― of complicity in the political murders he has confessed to, Bllaca is striking at the heart of Kosovo’s power structure and reputation. There are no more powerful political figures in Kosovo than Thaci, a close American ally who has been received at the White House and has hosted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Pristina.
If Bllaca is convicted, he will likely go to prison for many years. He nevertheless seemed remarkably upbeat. He was clean shaven, had a new haircut and joked with the Italian soldiers guarding him. His motives are hard to fathom.
If he is driven by his guilt at killing a man then his relaxed, quick-wittedness entirely masks a tormented soul. Some analysts have guessed that Bllaca is driven by fear, rather than guilt, and decided that the only way to save his own life was to turn himself in and seek a plea agreement. Indeed, in the interview with GlobalPost, he spoke of a falling-out with SHIK several years ago and how he believes there is now a price of 100,000 euros on his head.
Veseli, one of Bllaca’s targets, believes that Bllaca did kill the man he claims to have killed. But it was not as a member of SHIK, Veseli said.
“Maybe he is now mad,” Veseli said, shrugging his shoulders.
The victims
Another person who believes Bllaca’s claims is Buki Kllokoqi, the son of the man Bllaca says he killed.
For years the Kllokoqi family have remained silent on the topic but Buki and his mother, Drita, agreed to be interviewed in the home where Ibush Kllokoqi was shot dead on Aug. 6, 1999.
“[Bllaca] was ordered to do that,” said Buki Kllokoqi, 30, an IT specialist with an international company that has an office in Pristina. “The guys who ordered it are the real criminals in this case. He is just a puppet.”
Kllokoqi, in perfect American-accented English, spoke with controlled anger about his father’s murder. There is an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in Kosovo that has historically prevented witnesses from speaking publicly, or in court, against senior former KLA officials. Kllokoqi is different. “I really don’t give a —- about what they may say or do,” he said, when asked whether he was worried about the consequences of discussing his father’s death.
Kllokoqi refused to answer questions about which individuals he holds responsible for his father’s murder but he was unusually frank in saying that Bllaca’s accusations about who his bosses were ring true to him.
“It makes sense to me,” he said. “Who else would want my father dead?”
Kllokoqi makes a point of saying that he and his father, and all the family, were and remain strong supporters of the KLA and Kosovo. “Certain individuals, in the name of the KLA, did atrocities but that does not mean the KLA is bad,” he said. “They used the KLA banner to do whatever they did.”
What brought assassins to Kllokoqi’s front gate on that night in August, 1999, was a misapprehension about Ibush Kllokoqi, the dead man’s son and wife said. Ibush Kllokoqi was a senior officer in the old Yugoslav intelligence service, his son said. “He left his job in 1991,” he said. “His job was occupied by Serbs. He was not a collaborator … . He got his pension and left. Because he did not want to be part of the Serbian terror machine.”
Unfortunately for Ibush Kllokoqi, he had learned “too much about all of those guys,” Buki Kllokoqi said, referring to Albanian and Kosovo Albanian criminals who later became powerful in the KLA.
After he retired, Ibush Kllokoqi bought two buses to rent out, his son said, but the business was not successful. During the war of 1999 the family fled to Montenegro. Along the way, said Drita Kllokoqi, some Serbian men “beat up my husband so badly.”
Once home in Pristina, after the Serbs had retreated from Kosovo, the family put word out that they were selling their buses. So it was hardly a surprise when three men came to the front gate of the wall that surrounds the family’s house on a sloping street in central Pristina. The men asked about the buses that were for sale.
“I went out,” said Drita Kllokoqi, 59. “There were three but just one came near the gate. The others were standing behind him. I asked my husband to go outside.”
It was about 9 p.m. and Ibush Kllokoqi was eating his dinner. He was carrying a piece of pie in his hands when he came through the front yard to the gate. “I turned my back and heard shots,” Drita said. “At least three, maybe four. I turned around and saw him lying down. He was still alive.”
He died soon after.
Drita remembers little else about the murder. “I can’t even remember the face of the guy I talked to,” she said.
Bllaca says his is one of the faces she can’t remember.
“Ibush Kllokoqi was part of the Yugoslav secret service,” he said, explaining why Kllokoqi was a target for him and his two accomplices.
When talking of the murder Bllaca tended to talk in the passive. “He was killed in Pristina at the footsteps of his home. With a gun. A Scorpion [machine pistol] with a silencer. It was the evening, in the dark. Six to 11 bullets. They hit him in the left of the body. He was killed in front of his wife. There were three of us. Our first job was to get him out of his home. The person on the right had the job of talking to him.”
When asked which of the three had actually shot Kllokoqi, Bllaca said: “It was me.”
Bllaca has told EULEX prosecutors, as he has stated publicly and to GlobalPost, that his hit squad also tried to kill two prominent members of the Kosovo Albanian party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), which was the KLA’s major rival.
In an interview, one of the men, Adem Salihaj, a former deputy prime minister of Kosovo, said that he had been given information by a friendly source in SHIK that other men from SHIK would try to kill him. So as he drove home on June 12, 2000, to his house in the town of Ferizaj, about 40 minutes outside Pristina, he was armed.
“I had a handgun with me,” he said, “which I held in my hand.”
As he drove toward his house, a car pulled up alongside him. One of the men in the car was pointing a machine pistol with a silencer at him. “I stopped,” he said. “They stopped.”
Salihaj and the gunman got out of their respective cars and aimed at each other. “He couldn’t shoot,” Salihaj said. “I think my gun was not cocked to shoot either. We were just two guys pointing guns at each other.”
The would-be assassin got back into his car and the men rapidly reversed away from Salihaj. Salihaj cocked his gun and fired at the car. He shot twice more.
A second car was awaiting him close to his house ― but it drove away. “Nazim Bllaca says he was in that car,” Salihaj said.
Salihaj is convinced he knows who tried to kill him.
“It was SHIK,” he said. “No one did political killings other than SHIK. At that time I was threatened by the PDK all the time.”
He added: “I think, ultimately, it was SHIK’s chief who did this,” he said. “Kadri Veseli. But the killings wouldn’t have happened without the order of the political leader.”
Asked if he meant Thaci, Salihaj said: “They couldn’t be done without the political approval of Hashim Thaci … . The only mechanism SHIK responded to was the PDK so there is direct responsibility of HashimThaci.”
“SHIK,” Salihaj said, echoing many well-informed people in Kosovo, “still exists.”
About three weeks after Bllaca says he and his fellow assassins tried to kill Salihaj, they moved on to a new target, another LDK party official named Agim Veliu, who is now the mayor of Podujevo, a town half an hour outside Pristina.
This time, the assassins did a better job, peppering Veliu’s car with bullets as he drove home at about 7 p.m. on the evening of July 1, 2000.
Sitting in his office, Veliu, 50, produced a photograph of the side of his car, which was pierced with several bullet holes. “I was injured with three bullets,” he said.
“SHIK, of course,” he said, when asked if he had any suspicions about who had tried to kill him. “Of course it was SHIK. That was their way ― to eliminate people in their way of power.”
He named Veseli and Thaci as being in charge of SHIK.
“I think that no one related to SHIK deserves to be the head of government, leading the people,” Veliu said, “and no one involved with SHIK deserves American support.”
Veliu said that the love that most Kosovars have for the United States is beginning to fade. “I’ve been in so many villages and all appreciate the USA so much but now I’m seeing trust lost because the USA supports these kind of people who are involved in organized crime.”
Part III Kosovo’s Mafia: A hotbed of human trafficking
PRISTINA, Kosovo — The man in the black leather jacket preferred to speak about his past in the security of a car parked in a distant, rural part of Kosovo.
“The big guys don’t take a cut in this business — they run it,” said the man, who gave his name as Luan and acknowledged that he previously made his living from trafficking women and girls into Kosovo against their will so that they could be forced to have sex with paying customers. “The system is highly organized and there’s no police or anything to stop it. Everything is corruption from top to bottom.” Every day, an enterprise of trafficking women thrives in this country.
In the aftermath of the U.S.-led war in Kosovo in 1999, this nascent democracy, born of an international effort to protect human rights, has become a hub of the global trade in human beings, according to human rights investigators who monitor human trafficking.
This industry, which operates in a shadowy underworld where former members of armed militias have turned into murderous enforcers in a criminal enterprise, nets an estimated $32 billion globally every year and is widely considered by international human rights’ investigators to be the fastest growing criminal activity in the world.
According to an International Labor Office (ILO) report, a single female held for sexual exploitation yields an average of $67,200 annually in Western Europe. In a three-month investigation, GlobalPost has uncovered mounting allegations that the highest levels of the U.S.-backed Kosovo government are involved in this human trafficking.
The victims of the trade are typically teenage girls who are recruited, seduced and often forced into what amounts to sexual slavery. There is prostitution in Kosovo that services the international community, the U.S. and NATO military forces and the U.N. and aid workerts who operate here. But more frequently, investigators say, Kosovo is a trafficking hub for women sold into prostitution rings in the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Western European capitals and elsewhere. Much has been written about these victims, but less has been written about the men who carry out the trafficking.
In the course of its investigation, GlobalPost gained access to several men, including Luan, who say they were directly involved in the trade. The detailed information they provided helped to assemble an impressionistic picture of how the trade works here in Kosovo and beyond. And their statements combined with several intelligence reports and the findings of ongoing criminal investigations into organized crime in Kosovo reveal how the syndicate that carries out this trafficking does so with the complicity — and in some cases direct involvement — of the very highest levels of Kosovo’s political leadership.
Sources point to the top
The United States and its NATO allies, and the United Nations, have said publicly for some years that corrupt officials within Kosovo’s government and police have at times taken part in the illegal trade of women and girls for sex.
“Trafficking-related corruption continued to hamper the government’s anti-trafficking efforts,” the State Department writes in its 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report, citing experts in trafficking. “Foreign trafficking victims often arrive in Kosovo with valid documents and employment contracts stamped by Kosovo officials who may be aware that the document holders are trafficking victims.”
But the privately discussed rumors that have circulated for almost as long among American officials, Western diplomats and ordinary people in Kosovo are much worse: that the corruption goes beyond low-level officials, all the way to high-level politicians.
No senior Kosovar official has ever been charged in relation to human trafficking in Kosovo. GlobalPost reporters, during the course of a wider investigation into allegations of broad criminality by former senior Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) commanders and their ties to the United States and other Western countries, interviewed three men involved in sex trafficking in Kosovo, two Albanians and Luan, a Kosovar Albanian. All three men insisted that some senior political figures, specifically former KLA commanders, were indeed involved in the trafficking of women and girls. Furthermore, GlobalPost has obtained several intelligence reports from NATO military and intelligence services that also claim senior former KLA commanders have been involved in the sex-slavery business. Further bolstering the claims, various well-informed people, including a former NATO intelligence official who worked in Kosovo and a Western diplomat with experience in the region, all say that it has been common knowledge in American, NATO and U.N. circles for years that the former guerrilla commanders — many of them now in positions of great power in Kosovo — are believed to be linked to sex-trafficking.
Luan said that officials in the parties of two former KLA commanders are closely tied up in the trade. The parties are: the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), whose leader is the current prime minister of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci; and the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo (AAK), whose leader is Ramush Haradinaj, a former prime minister who is currently in custody at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague as he awaits trial on charges of war crimes.
“The whole thing, as well as any other illegal business, is controlled by the state both in Kosovo, Albania and all of former Yugoslavia,” said one of the Albanian men, who called himself Rexhep. “No one can do [smuggle] drugs, women, cigarettes or anything without blessing from above. I mean, you can try but you’ll be found in a ditch somewhere after many days already half-eaten by worms and dogs, which has happened to some.”
The three traffickers who made the allegations against the former KLA commanders are self-described criminals and their stories could not be independently confirmed. They insisted on anonymity, saying they did not want to face retaliation from other criminals or arrest from law enforcement officials. Two GlobalPost reporters have for many years interviewed criminal figures in the Balkans and in every previous case the stories of the criminals have held up to scrutiny. The three traffickers agreed to be interviewed because they trusted the intermediaries used to arrange the interviews and the reporters, who have been working in the region for many years. The traffickers do not know each other; GlobalPost reporters found them through separate channels.
Intelligence reports finger Thaci
One of the NATO intelligence reports obtained by GlobalPost features a diagram linking Thaci to two other men who are then linked to prostitution. The report, like four other Western intelligence reports GlobalPost has viewed, links Thaci and other former KLA commanders to a broad array of organized crimes.
Another NATO intelligence report, written in November 2000, claims that a close associate of Thaci is involved in sex trafficking: “Prostitution: arrival of women mostly from Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Slovakia is under [the man’s family’s] indirect control and it receives profit.”
A third intelligence report [3], which is dated March 10, 2004, and is marked “SECRET Rel USA KFOR and NATO” and was confirmed by a Western diplomat as being viewed by U.S. government officials, describes one of Thaci’s close associates — former KLA commander Xhavit Haliti — as believed to be “highly involved in prostitution,” among other alleged crimes, including murder.
“We just controlled the main border crossings while petrol, drugs and trafficked women continued to be poured in both through official and illegal entries,” the former NATO intelligence officer said. “We lacked resources and permission from higher authorities to act since the number one priority was peace and stability and they wouldn’t allow anything to disrupt that.”
The official added: “A lot of trafficked women entered Kosovo without any hurdle. The people behind the brothels and sexual slavery were all with the government, KPC [the Kosovo Protection Corps], the PDK and the AAK. No one outside these structures had even a remote chance to run it on such a large scale.”
In spite of the longstanding allegations against Thaci, which American officials have known about for years (the NATO and other intelligence reports have been in wide circulation among American and European diplomats for years, sources tell GlobalPost, and two are even on the internet for all to see), Thaci has received strong support from the United States. He visited Vice President Joseph Biden at the White House in July and has hosted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Kosovo.
The “FedEx” of trafficking women
Describing himself as “the Balkan version of DHL and FedEx” for trafficked women and illicit goods, the second Albanian trafficker, who gave his name as Gjon, said he had worked for and with Kosovar organized crime groups headed by former senior KLA commanders.
During the 1999 war, in which the KLA was based in Albania, its intelligence service, SHIK, was involved in sex-trafficking, Gjon said. “Groups [of trafficked women] were arriving in Durres and Fushe Kruja [in Albania], that were almost exclusively for the KLA, who were there during and after the war,” Gjon said. “SHIK escorted them. After a while some of them were shipped to Italy while others [were sent] to Kosovo. I’ve been to parties where they had to serve you all the way.”
Rexhep said he was a former proud KLA fighter and is now a successful businessman with legal and illegal businesses in Kosovo and other countries. In spite of his pride in fighting with the KLA during the war he acknowledged that SHIK and former KLA officials were involved in the sex-trafficking trade.
“Is the KLA involved? Are you kidding me? It’s all KLA or those who contributed [to the war] somehow,” he said. “All the big money flows are directly controlled by SHIK and without their blessing you better not start anything if you mean well to yourself and your family.”
GlobalPost made repeated attempts to interview the American ambassador to Kosovo, Christopher Dell, about U.S. relations with senior former KLA figures and allegations of criminality, but he declined to accept interview requests or respond to written questions. State Department officials also declined to respond to questions or be interviewed. Thaci also declined repeated requests for an interview.
Catering to the expat community
The three men involved in trafficking gave GlobalPost a rare look inside the criminal side of a trade that caters to Kosovar men and NATO troops and other international officials who have been in Kosovo in large numbers since 1999. All three men said that NATO troops, U.N. officials and other internationals working in Kosovo made up a significant proportion of the clientele for trafficked women, something repeatedly confirmed by anti-trafficking organizations. The former U.N. administration in Kosovo, UNMIK, regularly published an “Off-Limits List” of brothels, hotels, bars, clubs and other locations where staff were ordered to “STAY OUT” of. The 2008 spreadsheet lists 109 establishments and states: “By frequenting bars, brothels, strip clubs and night clubs, international representatives and by default their organizations are condoning and supporting the sexual exploitation and slavery of women and contributing to the profits of organized crime.”
Prostitution “is a state-sanctioned business with tacit approval of foreigners and for their enjoyment,” Rexhep said.
In recent years, the U.N., NATO, EULEX and the Kosovo police have improved their anti-trafficking efforts, according to trafficking experts and the State Department. But the demand from foreigners, and locals, remains strong, the three traffickers say.
Recruitment tactics
To meet that demand, the three men and their colleagues in the organized crime world looked beyond Kosovo’s borders.
“We were mostly bringing girls from Moldova, Ukraine and Russia,” said Luan, 30, who started his criminal career as a thief in Germany and Switzerland before he became a trafficker. “But sometimes we also had girls from Serbia, Romania, Czech Republic.
“In each place there’s a man who’s specialized in finding and recruiting,” he continued. “They are either girls from rural places looking for a job abroad or waitresses or those who work in some kind of administration but are poorly paid. They would take them to cafes or pubs, seduce them or give them some dope for free, mostly hashish or marijuana and later something heavier. After gaining their trust or becoming lovers or just making them dependant on drugs they would offer them ‘good and well-paid jobs abroad’ and free drugs as well. Then I would go to pick them up, usually in Bulgaria, sometimes Serbia, Romania other places.
“For each girl I would pay 2,000 to 3,000 euros. I was mostly taking groups of three girls. They crossed the borders together like any other passengers and I was discreetly accompanying them while pretending I was travelling alone. Sometimes they would be sent to cross the border illegally, if they had problems with documents or because they were underage. That’s more difficult because they have to walk through the forests. I would usually wait for them on the other side. They had no idea what was going to happen to them once they were firmly in our hands.”
Once in Kosovo, the nightmare would begin for the foreign girls and women.
“We would take them to a town hall to register them for temporary residence from three to six months,” Luan said. “It depends on what deal we make with municipal authorities and if the girls are really good-looking they stay six months. Clients don’t like to [have sex with] the same women too many times so there’s a regular rotation. When we get them registered for temporary residence we take away their passports and send them to their respective places. Most of them work as waitresses, dancers or strippers till midnight or 2 a.m. After that they have to do the other part whether they like it or not.”
When asked what happened to the women if they refused to have sex with the clients, Luan said: “There’s no ‘no’ as an answer here. They know that disobedience is really bad for them so their unwillingness is never a matter of discussion. There is no chance to refuse. We usually tried to be nice to them and give them drugs like heroin to calm them down and relax them. Well, those who become addicts can’t say no to ‘guests’ if they want their drugs.”
Luan said the men who had bought the girls and women often beat them or burned them with lit cigarettes as a form of punishment and intimidation. Rexhep confirmed the violence that some of the women are subjected to. “Girls are generally treated well but sometimes they cause trouble or want to go home before the agreed time so they have to be disciplined,” he said.
Shame and rationalizations
For thuggish men involved in modern-day slavery, Luan and Gjon are nevertheless aware of the moral challenges of their trade. Gjon, who also works frequently in Bulgaria and, like Luan, transports girls and women into Kosovo, insisted he did not enslave women. “I never ever kept a girl against her own will,” he said. He claimed he acted as their protector. “I look after the girls that I ship. No one is allowed to do them any harm or rape them.”
But Gjon’s sense of right and wrong can become suspended by his need to make a profit. “You have to understand, when I take a package and ship it over I am responsible for the damage or loss,” he said. “If she changes her mind and wants to go back I say ‘no problem’, here’s your passport and you are free to go, but I don’t intend to pay the loss from my own pocket. If she can pay her way out, or her family [can], no problem, she is free to go. Otherwise, she has to stay and obey and her passport is with me until another takes her over. It’s not I who enslave them. I am only doing shipping.”
Gjon may live in the comfort of self-justification but Luan seems genuinely ashamed of what he did.
“I wish I could rewind the tape of my life and erase that film of the past,” he said. “I was selling lives for money. That’s worse than selling drugs.”
When he spoke about his feelings he lowered his head and looked away.
“Some girls get a cut of the fee paid by clients, some don’t get anything,” he said. “It all depends on their owners. After they serve in Kosovo they are sent elsewhere because clients get tired of them and they want new flesh … . Some of them are only 16 years old.”
Five years ago Luan was arrested in Bulgaria and convicted of trafficking. Prison in Bulgaria was brutal, he said. He was released after four years. “Only depraved people feel no remorse for what they are doing,” he said. “That’s why I am not in this anymore. I feel terribly, terribly sorry for what I did.”
For now, Luan is trying to find a way to make a living in a country whose citizens have the lowest per capita annual income — $2,500 — of any country in Europe.
“I earned a lot of money,” he said, “and I spent most of it but I will find other ways to live.”
Rexhep, like Luan, has done time in Bulgarian prisons, as well as in Germany and Turkey, where he implied he was raped by other prisoners. And although he continues to traffic girls and women into Kosovo to be sex slaves, he insists he never hurts them, never gives them drugs and despises customers who abuse the women. He can, he says, empathize with them. “I was so [messed] up in Bulgaria and Turkey,” he said, “so I know what it is like to be alone and helpless.”
*Matt McAllester, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and long-time foreign correspondent, is a regular contributor to GlobalPost’s “Special Reports.” McAllester and Jovo Martinovic have both been reporting on war crimes and organized crime in the Balkans for over a decade. Their work includes investigations of Serbian war crimes during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo and the GlobalPost exclusive on the Pink Panther jewelry thieves.
(GlobalPost funding for human rights reporting on stories like these is provided in part by a grant from the Galloway Family Foundation.)
