Special Report; Arms Smuggling Routes Enhance Extremist Capabilities in South-West Balkans; Albanian Separatists Expected to Mobilize in Spring if Kosovo Does Not Get Independence

Special Report; Arms Smuggling Routes Enhance Extremist Capabilities in South-West Balkans; Albanian Separatists Expected to Mobilize in Spring if Kosovo Does Not Get Independence
Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis - January 31, 2007, Wednesday

Analysis. By Valentine Spyroglou, GIS South-Eastern Europe Station Chief. Virtually all intelligence sources in the Serbian province of Kosovo anticipate that a major upsurge in violence will occur in the March-April 2007 timeframe, and exclusive new evidence obtained by GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs highlights how Albanian extremists have developed comprehensive networks of arms supply to ensure a broadly-based conflict in both Kosovo and neighboring FYROM.

For several years, the possibility of a "hot Spring" in the Balkans, generally motivated by ethnic Albanian extremists, has been contemplated, and it has occurred in each year, although not necessarily to the degree predicted predicted. However, 2007 is likely to be the year that a large-scale violence becomes possible. The UN head negotiator for the future of the Serbian province of Kosovo, Martti Ahtisaari, is soon to present a plan of recommendations for Kosovo which is believed to say conditional independence -- which Belgrade opposes directly -- is the best course of action.

Regardless of the content of the upcoming report or the diplomatic results, the picture which emerges from media reports and GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs secure sources in Greece, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), and from Kosovo itself, shows a strong tendency towards violence in the Balkans around the March-April 2007 timeframe, directed by Kosovo and FYROM Albanian paramilitary leaders and politicians.

Their groups have been quiet until now, but the international authorities, especially those in the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), know very well that strong pressure exists from Albanian militants, who have a significant capacity to act should the province (90 percent ethnic Albanian) not get independence from Serbia in the near future.

The evidence for a resurgence of paramilitary activity in Kosovo includes the recent reappearance of uniformed and masked gunmen manning checkpoints in Western Kosovo villages; a bomb attack on a railroad line; and intercepted weapons shipments and discovered weapons stashes in rural parts of the province.

The place of the checkpoint, the village of Grci, near Djakovica in western Kosovo, was exposed on December 7, 2006. The Serbian media B-92 reported from there that Kosovo police coming to the scene after public calls engaged in gunfire with the masked men. The existence of such checkpoints, a provocation tactic which also was used in the 1997-1999 war between Yugoslav authorities and the Albanian UCK/KLA, has not gone away in Kosovo today. However, UNMIK security has recognized the danger of certain areas in western Kosovo and stopped patrolling there, which may be why reports of such activities are now not heard so frequently. A few days before the checkpoint incident, officials announced the existence of serious threats to UNMIK and KFOR (NATO Kosovo Force) installations and personnel.

The second major recent incident, an explosion near the village of Mijalic on December 9, 2006, damaged a railway line in central Kosovo. The attack was targeting about 100 passengers, mostly Serbs from central Kosovo enclaves of Priluzje, Plemetina, etc., but the bomb went off before the train arrived and the passengers were evacuated safely. UNMIK authorities restored the train line, making it a big example of how much "progress" Kosovo has made since 1999 towards a peaceful and stable society. However, for the extremists behind the attack this railroad which provides the minority Serbs with rare freedom to leave their enclaves is thus another strategic target.

Another subsequent attack which showed psychological intimidation against the minority Christians was on January 14, 2007, when a Serbian Orthodox church in the village of Gornja Brnjica near Pristina was robbed and looted on Orthodox Christmas Eve.

These small but significant recent events are only representing the tip of the iceberg, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs sources state, compared to what could come in the Spring if the Albanians of Kosovo fail to win independence. Russia has threatened to use a veto in the UN Security Council to support Serbia's position of no independence, but instead granting considerable autonomy. In this case, the Albanian secessionists have more severe methods to pressure the situation towards the result they want.

Primarily, this will involve increased attacks on Serbs and UN personnel in Kosovo, but will also involve attempts to destabilize the neighboring FYROM and Montenegro, and thus drawing in the US and Europe to the reality of a greater region-wide danger if Kosovo is not made independent. At the same time, the long-term strategy of annexing and assimilating large areas of these countries into a Greater or Ethnic Albania is being prepared.

A ranking police source in Pristina, presenting credible documentary evidence, told GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs that the extremist checkpoints - associated with the banned organization, Albanian National Army (ANA, or AKSH in Albanian) - have not gone away but instead are being encountered across Kosovo. For example, near the eastern Kosovo village of Kosovska Kamenica, in the early hours of January 12, 2006, armed and masked Albanian extremists were found running another illegal checkpoint on a local road connecting to the internal border of Serbia.

The next day, in the town of Srbica (Skenderaj in the Albanian language) in north central Kosovo, armed AKSH members stopped cars and fired at one Albanian man who did manage to escape (it is well known that this town is under the control of militias controlled by prominent politician/KLA veteran Hashim Thaci). This police source disclosed that the expansion of the AKSH activity to eastern Kosovo was meant to expand the area of provocations which the extremist group could make to pressure the political situation, and that they were related to the terrorists in the Presevo Valley of South Serbia, across the border. Albanian terrorist activity against Serbs has been seen there and, unusually across the internal border as far as Kursumlija. At the same time, over the past few months there has been a re-activation of militant activity as well in the Presevo Valley.

Illegal Weapons Smuggling Networks: The possibility that Kosovo-based extremists trying to make political pressure will destabilize neighboring countries was detected in December 2006, when KFOR announced that it had seized a large amount of weapons in and around Pec, another hotbed for radical activity in western Kosovo. The weapons were destined for Montenegro. They were discovered by Italian troops who afterwards arrested five Albanians involved.

According to news reports, these weapons included dozens of Zolja anti-tank rocket launchers and anti-tank mines, hand grenades, rifle grenades, light machineguns, pistols, various explosive, detonators and more than 9,000 rounds of ammunition. It also emerged that blasting caps were stolen from a munitions factory in Berane, northern Montenegro, and the expected shipment involved a group of Albanians allegedly preparing internal attacks in Malesija, near Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro.

Montenegro ended its state union with Serbia, the devolution of the former Yugoslavia, with a referendum in Summer 2006 but this result was largely seen as being obtained by corrupt means by the pro-independence Djukanovic Government, and especially with a strong turnout from the Albanian and Bosnian Muslims who make up around 20 percent of the Montenegro population. The possibility that a weak Montenegro, without assistance from Serbian security structures, could easily be dominated by Kosovo and Albania-supplied extremists, was not taken into consideration. The threat remains high and will continue to remain so throughout 2007.

More to the south, in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), a series of arms smuggling routes exist and are controlled by political leaders associated with the former National Liberation Army (NLA), such as Ali Ahmeti of the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI). In fact, the major convergence point for two of the biggest routes is Ahmeti's home village, Zajas, north of Kicevo town in the center-west of the country. According to three very reliable official sources in the security services, the weapons shipments are coming in regularly from Albania, through the mafia-run village of Veleshta, near Struga. This Albanian-populated village has exceptionally close clan ties with Kosovo Albanians (the residents originally came from Kosovo) and did not share the same origins and history of the other Albanian-population towns in the region.

In the village, according to one of the GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs sources, a local clan with command of 20 to 25 men has been in charge of circulating the weapons which come in through concealed containers on the Kafasan border from Albania, or through the mountains on goat-trails to the villages of Radolishta and Frangovo and then to Veleshta, where the local clan loyal to Mr Ahmeti is engaged with smuggling them north to major Albanian-controlled areas such as Tetovo, Aracinovo near Skopje, and the villages of the Kumanovo area. All in all, there are eight to 10 major bandit groups trading in weapons in FYROM among the Albanian ex-militants.

It is not clear whether this group is part of the same network which is linked with Albania-based weapons smuggling, the one which was suspected by some media and experts in Greece of supplying the the radical-left Greek terrorist group, Revolutionary Struggle ../../Terrorist/ELA.htm , with the Chinese-built RPG-7 ../../GroundWeapons/RPG7.htm rocket which hit the US Embassy in Athens on January 12, 2007. But a second GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs source provided the highly significant detail that weapons taken a long time ago from the official Albanian army stockpiles, during the 1997 anarchy in that country when the first Sali Berisha Administration was in power, have ended up in FYROM villages under the control of Ahmeti and the NLA, and that these villages are not ones which had usually been suspected of militant activity, because they are far from the "front lines" of any previous military confrontation.

In fact, the main location mentioned, Crniliste, is a small Muslim village north-west of the town of Prilep in west-central FYROM. It has not been mentioned before in the media but it should be added that a strong Islamic organization also exists there, as in some of the other areas mentioned. According to the source, weapons both new and older (from the 1997 Albanian stockpiles) are being held in discreet locations in this village and other local places. The gun-runners are using minivan-type vehicles and the small buses (kombi ) used by private companies for local transportation. They all have the PP (Prilep) license plates which do not make suspicion for the police, since Prilep municipal area is mostly a Slavic Macedonian Christian area.

The weapons are being moved from places like Crniliste, especially across the road linking Makedonski Brod-Kicevo-Zajas, where Ali Ahmeti's main stronghold is based. The strategy for the Albanian leader, whose party is currently not in power, is to manipulate the reaction to Kosovo's situation by making armed provocations on several new fronts, as well as the ones experienced during the war (Tetovo, Aracinovo, Lipkovo, etc) of 2001. The extremists have not forgotten that on several maps of the Greater or "Ethnic Albania" from a century or more ago, the borderline of the "real" Albania goes straight into the middle of FYROM, much further than was seen in the war. But over the coming year -- 2007 -- the decentralizing of the country will continue, and Albanians will take control of Kicevo, the last major town in Western FYROM not yet under their control. That will have the impact of linking the major Albanian-controlled areas of the west to the remote villages of the central mountain massif (Karadjica, Kitka, Dautica, Mokra) and creating a new "front lines" for the next phase of operations towards that irredentist goal.

In fact, according to the GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs sources, isolated villages with Albanian population in these areas are already being used as arms cache areas and rear-staging-posts for possible new actions. Unlike in the war of 2001, the Albanian strategy in future will not be to fight a "heavy" war along clear "fronts", but rather to create numerous sporadic attacks or bombings across a much wider geographical area, to confuse the authorities and to show the militants as seeming to have more support and "reach" than they actually do.

Still, despite this information, which has not yet been published in open source media, the State structures in Skopje are not reacting to the perception that Kosovo independence could destabilize their country. On January 22, 2007, the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Agim Ceku, repeated a demand from the international community to recognize the "immediate independence of Kosovo". The day after, FYROM's Security Council met and announced that it had no indications about a possible danger to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of FYROM, according to a communique from the Cabinet of the President, Branko Crvenkovski. Nevertheless, the Council urged Government institutions to "remain alert" regarding the "expected unfolding of events in the region in the near future". The Security Council report also called on the security services to take "preventive action if necessary".

A sign of possible future violence from the Ahmeti grouping in FYROM was his party's threat recently to quit the Parliament because it was not happy with its opposition role. Many administrative workers from their DUI party lost their jobs after the July 2006 election which removed the party from power, and it is possible that Ahmeti could restore the appetite for new conflict with such angered individuals.

This wealth of new information shows that international authorities in Kosovo, as well as the Montenegro and FYROM authorities, are aware that Kosovo independence movement has a potentially much bigger impact on the regional security, and that other goals are behind it, not just the "freedom" of one province. Instead, the secessionist movement for Greater or Ethnic Albania - which could reach as far south as Epiros in Greece - is in a calculated phase of expanding its logistical capacities to be prepared for action, when the order is given.

See also:

Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, February 11, 2004: Report on Albanian Criminal-Terrorist Links Providing Key Intelligence for Olympics Security, "War on Terror".

Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis, January 12, 2007: Rocket Attack Against US Embassy in Athens Signals Resurgence of Greek Leftist Terrorism .

Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis, January 19, 2007: Growing Leftist-Jihadist Linkages Highlighted by January 12, 2007, Attack on US Embassy .