BALKANS: Battle Against Organised Crime Stepped Up

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Oct 19 2006 (IPS) - Leaders of seven south-eastern European countries have agreed a joint battle against organised crime and terrorism.

They believe the move will also take them closer to the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), but experts warn that the fight against firmly rooted organised crime will not be easy to win.

Leaders of Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Romania agreed at the western Serbian resort Karadjordjevo this week to synchronise reforms of the judiciary, law enforcement, security and customs services.

They also agreed to hold annual meetings of justice and police ministers to review the measures undertaken, and to build further cooperation.

Romania is to join the EU next January, and Croatia is heading for membership in the next enlargement phase. The other countries are engaged in negotiations for EU membership.

“The objective put forward by the seven leaders is noble,” leading crime analyst Milos Vasic told IPS. “But it will take years to achieve it, taking into account the fact that the criminals in the region have already created a European union of their own years ago.”

Vasic and other experts say that the conditions in the region since the early 1990s have been favourable for organised crime to flourish.

“There was the fall of communism in the region, in Romania and Bulgaria, and there was the lawlessness of war of disintegration of former Yugoslavia, (Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia),” Marko Nicovic, an expert on cross-border crime told IPS.

Human trafficking and drugs smuggling remain major activities of organised crime in the region. Porous borders and widespread corruption among law enforcement agencies are largely blamed for the situation.

On the other hand, organised crime members are perfectly capable of cooperating despite ethnic animosities, thanks mainly to the extremely high profits in their line of work.

“Borders are a greater obstacle for police than for criminals,” Nicovic said. But growing cooperation between police forces in the region has brought some results, he said. An estimated 200,000 people were trafficked through Balkans annually some five years ago, but that number has “now significantly dropped.”

Smuggling of drugs is considered the biggest organised crime now.

Serbian and Bulgarian mafia are reported to have established close collaboration; so have Serbian and ethnic Albanian mafia in the southern Serbian province Kosovo run by the United Nations administration.

An Interpol report says that the annual profit from drugs smuggling in Kosovo alone is more than 100 million dollars.

Improved police investigations have led to almost daily discoveries of smuggled cocaine in Serbia. Only last week, two such cases were widely publicised in local media.

A Peruvian citizen who swallowed 72 packages of cocaine was operated on at a Belgrade hospital after he suddenly fell sick at the airport. He was headed for Italy.

A Serbian journalist was arrested with 3.2 kg of cocaine he smuggled from Germany to be passed on for further distribution in the south of the country.

“Serbia has a particularly hard task, as it has already suffered a major blow from organised crime,” Vasic said. “Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was killed by organised crime, that proved how it really ruled this country for almost a decade.”

Reform-oriented Djindjic was assassinated in March 2003 after his government created a programme aimed at fighting organised crime.

The crime rings are the remnant of the wartime era of the 1990s, when the regime of former leader Slobodan Milosevic turned prominent criminals into “war heroes” in defence of Serbs across former Yugoslavia.

Concerns continue also about terrorism in the region. Bosnia-Herzegovina is still trying to deal with the Islamic fighters who appeared on behalf of local Muslims in the 1992-95 war. They arrived from Algiers, Afghanistan, Iran or Turkey at the time. Many married local girls and obtained Bosnian citizenship.

Under international pressure, Bosnia began earlier this year to revise the cases of some 1,500 people granted citizenship, and expel foreign nationals.