The Daily Telegraph, UK
www.telegraph.co.uk

Sunday 29 October 2000

British troops target guns and crime in Kosovo

By Philip Sherwell and David Thompson in Pristina

BRITISH troops in Kosovo have launched the biggest
purge on organised crime and secret arms dumps held by
former ethnic Albanian guerrillas since the end of the
Nato bombing campaign last year.
They want to break the spiral of violence and crime
that has swept through Kosovo since and ensure that
the former rebels can never return to arms to seek
their independence. The most significant breakthrough
came with the recent arrest of Sabit Geci, an
ex-Kosovo Liberation Army commander and alleged
underworld boss, by United Nations police after
lengthy British surveillance.

Three hundred Royal Marines sealed large sections of
the capital, Pristina, during the raid on 13 bars,
brothels and private homes linked to the Geci clan.
The swoop ended with 28 arrests and the seizure of 15
weapons and £300,000, believed to be profits from
drugs, prostitution and extortion.

A British officer said: "It is difficult to
overestimate the impact of the Geci arrest. A lot of
Albanian society is sustained by organised crime, but
there are many honest people here who want to see the
back of it." British-led peacekeeping forces conducted
another big weapons seizure operation last week in the
Drenica Valley, recovering 31 rocket-propelled
grenades, a haul of grenades and automatic rifles.

The main challenge faced by the British forces is to
track down arms caches held by the Kosovo Protection
Corps (KPC), a civil defence organisation that
replaced the disbanded KLA. The KPC wants to become
the future army of an independent Kosovo and its
commander, Agim Ceku, has boasted to international
peacekeepers that they will not be able to trace its
arms dumps. The former guerrillas have maintained an
underground network led by Albanian extremists who
still plan to fight for independence if they are not
granted international recognition.

Marines surveillance teams, including members of the
Special Boat Service, will map suspected weapons
caches in the old KLA heartland in the valley. Once
identified, units from 45 Commando, based at a former
Yugoslav army barracks on the outskirts of Pristina,
will raid the sites by helicopter.

The British are helped by their knowledge of KLA
dispositions gained during liaison operations at the
time of last year's bombing campaign. The Marines hope
to repeat the success of Operation Leatherman,
launched in January, during which 60 tons of weapons
were seized.

A British officer said: "This society is awash with
weapons. We are targeting that for two reasons. We
want to reduce the levels of casual violence that
characterise this place and to hit the ability of the
KPC to re-militarise." Brigadier Robert Fry, the
British forces' commander, said the role of the KPC
was the key to maintaining the peace in Kosovo at a
time when Albanian frustration was growing with the
realisation that statehood was not about to be
granted.

Brigadier Fry said: "The demilitarisation of the KLA
is the greatest achievement of the last 15 months. The
re-militarisation of the KPC is the greatest danger we
face in the next year."

While KPC commanders still envisage a military role
for their force, other former KLA factions are now
simply using local politics as a front for their
criminal activities. The murder of Rexhep Luci,
Pristina's respected building regulations director, is
widely believed to have been the work of an ex-KLA
gang angered when one of his decisions went against
them.

European security services, including MI5, are pooling
information on links between Albanian criminals abroad
and political groups in Kosovo. They will support a
new UN police intelligence unit that has just been set
up in Pristina where the 45-country international
police force has, until now, had a poor reputation.

KFOR insists that it is being even-handed. In
September, British troops arrested a three-man Serbian
special forces team with bomb-making equipment in a
Pristina suburb.









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