Police Have Hands Full in Kosovo

It’s hard to find a fully legitimate product here on the streets of Kosovo’s capital. Right across from the main police station, vendors sell the latest bootlegged DVD movies and young boys hawk smuggled cigarettes and phone cards.

Less visible but more worrisome, officials say, are the smuggled oil, guns and trafficked women--and the corruption in government agencies that helps such illegal trade flourish.

Few international officials would have included economic crimes as a major problem confronting this majority ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, the main republic of Yugoslavia, after the devastation it experienced at the hands of Serbian security forces in the late 1990s. But as the number of ethnically motivated attacks declines, organized crime poses the biggest threat to Kosovo’s future stability, according to law enforcement officials, Kosovo businesspeople and independent observers.

Although it is extremely difficult to measure how much of Kosovo’s economy is tainted by illegality, some of the province’s business officials say it could be as much as 70%.

Belatedly recognizing the problem, officials with the U.N. mission in Kosovo who control the law enforcement effort here are beefing up their attack on organized crime.

They’re refining witness protection laws, approved only recently, and trying to obtain wiretapping equipment so they can capitalize on a new regulation allowing clandestine eavesdropping.

*

‘Zero Tolerance’

They’re bringing in more international judges and, in the most recent move, announced late last month, have recruited 10 members of the Italian financial police--experts in investigating Mafia-style business ventures--to help the international and local police force.

“We have adopted a zero tolerance for crime,” said Michael Steiner, the top U.N. official in Kosovo. “It is one of our top priorities.”

Evidence of the problems faced by law enforcement officials is everywhere. Even some of the heating oil sold here is smuggled--it comes in huge trucks through illegal border crossings and, in one case, through an illegal pipeline that was discovered and shut down, only to reappear nearby.

Other illegal activities, such as trafficking in women as well as the trade in narcotics and guns, are a continuing problem in Kosovo, still nominally part of Serbia and of the larger Yugoslav federation. Prosecutors and international officials also count rampant protection rackets and corruption of government-owned ventures, such as the electrical utility, as growing problems.

Of course, such activities are nothing new to the Balkans, and Kosovo is hardly unique. Similar problems plague all of Serbia, as well as neighbors Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. But analysts say that the U.N. authority, preoccupied with ethnic violence, was slow to get international police on the ground and even slower to get international judges and prosecutors in place.

“One of the lessons of the Balkans is that ... the rule of law isn’t something you can leave until last,” said Daniel Serwer, the director of the Balkans Initiative at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington.

“Criminality is the main threat now to the institutions in Kosovo,” he said. “The U.N. has to learn how to move faster. Now, after three years, they finally have a lot of the mechanisms in place, but it’s harder now--the criminals have had that time to get embedded.”

Still, Serwer noted, the U.N. has done a better job in Kosovo than in Bosnia, where it has taken almost six years to move forward the process of reforming the often corrupt judiciary.

*

Multiethnic Venture

In fact, law enforcement officials face an ironic problem: Crime is one of the few multiethnic ventures in Kosovo, a region where most Serbs and Albanians never speak to one another.

Several of the groups arrested for trafficking in women, for instance, have involved representatives of both ethnicities.

But the task of building crime-fighting institutions from scratch is more difficult than originally anticipated. It requires creating an effective police force and court system and writing laws that target the increasingly sophisticated criminal activity in the province.

Until this year, for instance, there were no witness protection laws that allowed people to testify without being identified or any provisions to allow reduced charges in exchange for testimony--a standard law enforcement tool in the United States.

“The problem of organized crime wasn’t really appreciated when the United Nations mission in Kosovo was built up,” said Anthony Ricci, a former prosecutor from Massachusetts, one of a small cadre of international attorneys drafted by the U.N. administration to help bring difficult cases in the province.

“The number of murders in 1999, when the U.N. got here, was overwhelming,” Ricci said, adding, “No one was going to stop a few oil shipments.”

For the last two years, the U.N. has been recruiting and training a police force from the ethnic Albanian population, but it takes time to create professionalism.

Augmenting the nearly 5,000 newly minted ethnic Albanian police officers are about 4,000 international police officers from U.N. countries. The international police presence, however, has its own problems. None of the international officers speaks Albanian, the language of most residents of the province.

And there is open scorn among Kosovo Albanians toward those members of the international police from Africa and Asia--who look utterly unlike the more familiar Europeans and Americans and whose cultures are largely alien to Kosovars.

“People only trust the local [ethnic Albanian] police officers, and they also trust the U.S. cops who are working with us, but when it comes to these cops sent from Asia or India, nobody will talk to them,” said Xhemajl Ademi, an Albanian police officer in charge of the large Western Pristina district.

Further undermining the police is a long-standing suspicion of law enforcement dating from the days when it was dominated by Serbs, who were often abusive to the Kosovo Albanians, said Derek Chappell, the spokesman for the U.N. police force.

“Part of the problem here is that the police have not been a friend of the people,” he said. “They’ve been brutal and corrupt and ethnically motivated.”

Privately, U.N. officials say one of the other obstacles they face is the popular support for former members of the Albanian guerrilla force, the Kosovo Liberation Army, some of whom are now involved in illegal activities. There is constant pressure to put them in high-ranking political jobs, and prosecution of their misdeeds is viewed by some ethnic Albanians as persecution, two law enforcement officials said.

Steiner admits that the police need to become more sophisticated and noted in a recent television interview that the criminals have high-tech means of communication, which presumably help them avoid police detection.

When it comes to violent crime, Chappell said, the statistics are encouraging. Incidents are declining sharply, with the exception of rape and assault--both of which have risen because of increased reporting, he said. Another partial success story is the U.N. mission’s customs service, which has been increasingly effective as its officers begin to use informants and have a more visible presence on the roads, said John Robertson, director of intelligence and investigation for the agency.

Income from customs tariffs, the primary revenue source for the provincial government, more than doubled between 2000 and 2001 to roughly the equivalent of $243.4 million and is on track to increase again this year.

Nonetheless, Robertson said, his officers probably intercept considerably less than a quarter of the total smuggled goods.

Fueling the economic crime problem is widespread unemployment--57%, according to U.N. statistics--and low pay in many job sectors, making crime a more attractive choice than legitimate employment, especially for young people.

“In the absence of clear anti-criminal laws and [given] the lack of jobs, the gray economy is becoming the true economy of Kosovo,” said Ismail Kastrati, the president of the Kosovo Chamber of Commerce, who estimates that as much as 70% of Kosovo’s business is not completely legitimate. “It is more efficient and much more profitable, and so the legal economy loses ground.”

An Albanian police officer is paid between $200 and $250 s month. Investigating judges, who play the role that a grand jury would usually play in the United States, are paid $400 a month. By contrast, oil smugglers can make the equivalent of $50,000 per truck of oil smuggled into the country, according to Robertson.

*

‘Special Species’

Kastrati said he and other business colleagues recently warned a friend who wanted to get into the import business to stay away from it.

“We told him: ‘The people who import these things will not talk to you, they all know each other, they are a special species. If you try to do things the legal way, you will have no chance; if you try to do them the illegal way, you won’t stand a chance either because you don’t have friends in the right circles.’ ”

If Kosovo is eventually to become self-governing, however, it will have to reduce the criminality, Steiner said. Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi is a strong supporter of more aggressive measures, especially to stop smuggling, and there is some indication that public opinion supports his view.

In the most hopeful sign on the horizon, a new program on local television modeled along the lines of the show “America’s Most Wanted” and the British show “Crimewatch” appears to be succeeding in eliciting citizens’ help in solving crimes.

After the first broadcast, the police were flooded with calls, suggesting that the distrust of law enforcement is finally on the wane. About 100 people phoned with tips about crimes in their neighborhoods as well the crimes depicted on the show, which included the assassination of a farmer and the killing of a policeman.

“It was fantastic,” Chappell said. “We know a lot of people are afraid to come to the police, and we were wondering if we would get a single phone call. We got 100 calls, and the information we got has us well on the way to solving some of the crimes featured.”