Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Yugoslavia — the drug connection, again
Drugs are back in the news in connection with Yugoslavia.
Drugs have seldom been far from the subject of Yugoslavia for at
least the last four years or so.
We can all name several reasons for the Anglo-US air war on
Yugoslavia and the subsequent coup they engineered against the
Socialist Party government of President Slobodan Milosevic.
These would include destroying as a sovereign state the country
that had persistently stood up to imperialism and rallied other
"non-aligned", small or Third World countries to do the same.
Teaching independently minded governments a lesson about doing
what the US and its imperialist allies say would definitely be
one of them. Establishing a permanent bridgehead and base for
future action against Russia or any of the other republics of the
former Soviet Union would be another.
Protecting a potential future route for an oil pipeline from
Turkey and Central Asia to Europe would also be one. And
protecting the phenomenally profitable drug trade would certainly
be another.
As I have written on previous occasions, the huge amounts of
"black" money that flow into the coffers of imperialist
corporations and government agencies by means of the drug trade
are extremely useful to those agencies and corporations.
No matter what they may say publicly about "waging war on drugs",
privately there is no way they are going to relinquish such a
valuable milch cow.
The Kosovar Albanians ("Kosovians" in George Bush's immortal
terminology) are a community terrorised by a group of close-knit
criminal families involved in trafficking women for prostitution,
gun running, extortion and the drug trade.
Like its Sicilian counterpart, the Kosovar Albanian mafia depends
on poverty and ignorance as the glue that holds it together in
opposition to "the law". Both mafia organisations are
consequently bitterly opposed to Communists and other
progressives.
At the time of the NATO war on Yugoslavia, while Albanian
nationalists dreamed of establishing a "Greater Albania" and the
local mafia dreamed of setting up their own criminal-fascist
state, the US and Britain extolled the virtues of the Albanian
terrorists and falsely condemned the Federal Yugoslav Army for
"genocide".
This is why the numerous, authoritative articles at the time
exposing the Kosovar Albanian mafia's grip on the heroin trade
into Western Europe received scant attention in the bourgeois
mass media. "Hands off the drug trade" was the order of the day.
Kosovo fell into NATO's maw, and the people there are suffering
for it still. President Milosevic, who had campaigned so strongly
against Anglo-US-German machinations in the Balkans, was first
ousted in a well-organised civil coup and then kidnapped by NATO
and imprisoned in The Hague where he is to this day still "on
trial".
Drug trafficking, however, refuses to fade into the background.
Two weeks ago, the man accused of organising the assassination of
Zoran Djindjic, Yugoslavia's first post-Milosevic Prime Minister,
caused a sensation by disclosing that Djindjic had asked him to
smuggle large amounts of heroin into Western Europe to help
Djindjic's Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party, the governing party at present although
this week's elections may change that, is fiercely anti-Milosevic
and anti-socialist and just as fiercely pro-Western and pro-
capitalist.
The man the government accuses of the assassination, Milorad
Ulemek, also known as Lukovic and "Legija" ("the legionnaire"),
is a former member of the French Foreign Legion who, under
President Milosevic, headed the Yugoslav Army's Red Berets unit,
their equivalent of our SAS.
He aided the coup by refusing to order the Red Berets to defend
the Socialist Party government. No one is happy with a turn-coat,
however, and shortly after taking office Djindjic sacked him and
disbanded the Red Berets.
Lukovic denies any complicity in the assassination: "Neither me
nor any members [of the Red Berets] organised or participated in
the attack against the late Prime Minister Djindjic", he said in
a statement.
However, he claims that leading members of Djindjic's pro-Western
Democratic Party asked him to smuggle 700kg of heroin to
countries in Western Europe on their behalf in 2001. "I liked
that idea of revenge against the West for 78 days of aggression
[the NATO bombing war] so I was asked to think about ways to
transfer these drugs into Bosnia, Croatia and Romania on the way
to Western Europe."
In the first round of the current Presidential elections in
Serbia, the largest surviving piece of Yugoslavia, the Serbian
Radical Party (SRS) leader Tomislav Nikolic won 31 percent of the
vote. He will face Boris Tadic of the Democratic Party in the
run-off election for President this week.
Other candidates in the first round included the "Serbian
Berlusconi", millionaire Boguljub Karic who owns much of Serbia's
commercial media. In the race for the first time, Karic bagged
more than 16 percent.
The Radicals believe that Karic got the protest vote from many of
those opposed to Serbia's current pro-Western leadership and hope
they will swing over to the Radicals in the final round.
Europe's bourgeois press is urging support for Tadic and the
Democratic Party, labelling Nikolic a "hardline nationalist" and
— inevitably — calling on Serbian voters to "save democracy".
Tadic has a long record of anti-working class political activity.
He was jailed by the Tito Government for anti-communist
activities when he was still a student.
Today, his pro-Western platform includes closely integrating
Yugoslavia into the European Union, a move the Radical Party
opposes.
Says Radical leader Nikolic: "We want to finish the job we
started in the first round. But I am now expecting that all
criminals will rally behind one candidate — Boris Tadic.
"This is the final battle between the SRS [Radical Party of
Serbia] and the Democratic Party, between the people who want a
proud and honest Serbia and between the others who want Serbia to
continue on its current path — to continue the path Serbia has
taken since President Milosevic was toppled."