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East is not always east
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But it is.

Two different worlds converge here in Kosovo, utterly unrelated to each other. Heroin and cocaine come cheap at parties. Mercedes and BMWs, sparkling new and without license plates, cruise through the capital at dusk, packed with young men talking on cell phones. When they stop in front of key office buildings, a couple of men get out, crossing their arms as if armed and not to be messed with, while another goes inside to conduct business. The rumbling oversized tank of a British KFOR patrol turns the corner at an intersection less than 10 feet away.

Kosovo sits between two European countries overrun with organized crime. Albania, the poorest country in Europe, sits along a well-trod drug and arms trading route between Asia and Europe. The northern part of Albania, which borders Kosovo, is almost entirely in the hands of armed gangs.

To Kosovo's northeast, Serbia, after a decade of international economic sanctions and isolation, is also rife with corruption, arms smuggling and state-sanctioned theft of public funds to private bank accounts (some 300 cronies of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic have recently had their Swiss bank accounts frozen and been banned from travel to the European Union and the United States).

Organized crime loves a vacuum. Interpol now estimates that 40 percent of the heroin supply in Western Europe travels through Kosovo.

In addition, Kosovo has a past which makes it an ideal breeding ground for organized crime. For the past 10 years, since Milosevic revoked the province's autonomy, most Kosovo Albanians have been pushed out of the state sector, and forced to look for work in private ventures and abroad. Many Kosovo Albanian men went abroad to work in Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia and the United States -- some in construction and other above-board professions, others in the underworld of drug trafficking -- to earn money to send back to their extended families. An extensive network of travel agencies helped traffic money from Europe and the United States back to relatives in Kosovo.

But certain conditions of the post-war period make Kosovo even more ideal as a base for organized crime. There is an almost complete lack of civil authority here, despite the presence of KFOR soldiers. Have your apartment broken into, car stolen, neighbor murdered, and there is no one to call. KFOR soldiers dutifully come to make a report if someone's been killed. But you can call the police emergency number in Kosovo all you want, and no one comes, because for the moment there are no functioning police. To date, some 600 U.N. international police have arrived, but the international police commissioner does not plan to deploy any of them until he has most of his 3,000 men.

In the meantime, there are virtually open borders. The fact that Serbian police destroyed many Kosovo Albanians' identity papers and license plates as they were deporting them means that KFOR allows almost anyone back in, without or without a passport. To date, there are no functioning customs officers on Kosovo's borders. KFOR soldiers check cars for weapons, but do not prevent entry for people who are, for instance, importing an enormous supply of cigarettes.

Next page | Street gangs use the same techniques as the Serbs