Al Qaeda, the KLA in Kosovo, and the Trans-Balkan Pipeline

CENTRE FOR RESEARCH ON GLOBALIZATION (CANADA)

Al Qaeda, U.S. Oil Companies, and Central Asia
Excerpt of a forthcoming book entitled The Road to 9/11

by Peter Dale Scott, July 30, 2005

What is slowly emerging from Al Qaeda activities in Central Asia in the 1990s is the extent to which they involved both American oil companies and the U.S. government.[1] By now we know that the U.S.-protected movements of al Qaeda terrorists into regions like Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Kosovo have served the interests of U.S. oil companies. In many cases they have also provided pretexts or opportunities for a U.S. military commitment and even troops to follow.

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Al Qaeda, the KLA in Kosovo, and the Trans-Balkan Pipeline

The U.S., Al Qaeda and oil company interests converged again in Kosovo. Though the origins of the Kosovo tragedy were rooted in local enmities, oil became a prominent aspect of the outcome. There the al Qaeda-backed UCK or "Kosovo Liberation Army" (KLA) was directly supported and politically empowered by NATO, beginning in 1998.[47] But according to a source of Tim Judah, KLA representatives had already met with American, British, and Swiss intelligence agencies in 1996, and possibly "several years earlier."[48] This would presumably have been back when Arab Afghan members of the KLA, like Abdul-Wahid al-Qahtani, were fighting in Bosnia.[49]

Mainstream accounts of the Kosovo War are silent about the role of al Qaeda in training and financing the UCK/KLA, yet this fact has been recognized by experts and to my knowledge never contested by them. For example, James Bissett, former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, said "Many members of the Kosovo Liberation Army were sent for training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan.. Milosevic is right. There is no question of their [al Qaeda's] participation in conflicts in the Balkans. It is very well documented."[50] In March 2002, Michael Steiner, the United Nations administrator in Kosovo, warned of "importing the Afghan danger to Europe" because several cells trained and financed by al-Qaeda remained in the region.[51]

As late as 1997 the UCK/KLA had been recognized by the U.S. as a terrorist group supported in part by the heroin traffic.[52] The Washington Times reported in 1999 that

The Kosovo Liberation Army, which the Clinton administration has embraced and some members of Congress want to arm as part of the NATO bombing campaign, is a terrorist organization that has financed much of its war effort with profits from the sale of heroin.[53]

Yet once again, as in Azerbaijan, these drug-financed Islamist jihadis received American assistance, this time from the U.S. Government.[54] At the time critics charged that US oil interests were interested in building a trans-Balkan pipeline with US Army protection; although initially ridiculed, these critics were eventually proven correct.[55] BBC News announced in December 2004 that a $1.2 billion pipeline, south of a huge new U.S. army base in Kosovo, has been given a go-ahead by the governments of Albania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia.[56] Meanwhile by 2000, according to DEA statistics, Afghan heroin accounted for almost 20 percent of the heroin seized in the United States -- nearly double the percentage taken four years earlier. Much of it is now distributed by Kosovar Albanians.[57]

The closeness of the UCK/KLA to al-Qaeda was acknowledged again in the western press, after Afghan-connected KLA guerrillas proceeded in 2001 to conduct guerrilla warfare in Macedonia. Press accounts included an Interpol report containing the allegation that one of bin Laden4s senior lieutenants was the commander of an elite UCK/KLA unit operating in Kosovo in 1999.[58] This was probably Mohammed al-Zawahiri. The American right wing, which opposed Clinton's actions in Kosovo, has transmitted reports "that the KLA's head of elite forces, Muhammed al-Zawahiri, was the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the military commander for bin Laden's Al Qaeda."[59] Meanwhile Marcia Kurop in the Wall Street Journal has written that "The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia."[60]

According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare,

Bin Laden's Arab `Afghans' also have assumed a dominant role in training the Kosovo Liberation Army.[by mid-March 1999 the UCK included] many elements controlled and/or sponsored by the U.S., German, British, and Croatian intelligence services.[61]

The most flagrant and revealing evidence that as late as 2004 some U.S. bureaucratic sectors were still working with veterans of al Qaeda networks came in respect to Haiti:

In 2004 a USAID Report confirmed that "Training and management specialists of the Kosovo Protection Corps, a civilian response unit consisting primarily of former Kosovo Liberation Army members, have been brought to Haiti"[62]

Why would AID bring veterans of the Kosovo Liberation Army, "a major force in international organized crime, moving staggering amounts of narcotics,"[63] to train and manage the Haitian Army, an organization traditionally "corrupted by Colombian cocaine kingpins"?[64] Whatever the answer, it is hard to imagine that AID did not have drugs somehow in mind.

[...]

A survey of U.S. history since World War Two suggests that the United States power state has consistently used the resources of the global drug traffic to further its own ends, particularly with respect to oil, at the expense of the public order and well-being of the American public state.[71] For at least two decades, from Brzezinski's backing of Hekmatyar in 1979 to Bush's backing of the Afghan Northern Alliance in 2001, the United States has continued to draw on the resources of drug-trafficking Islamic jihadists who are or were associated at some point with Al Qaeda.

In the next chapter I shall argue that this alliance with al Qaeda terrorists against the United States public order underlies the conspiracy that made 9/11 possible. But we must also look at how the military-petroleum complex came to project long-term military budgets, in the order of a trillion dollars, that its advocates acknowledged that the American public state could not be persuaded easily to support...

In the absence, that is, of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."[72]

Notes:

[1] Western governments and media apply the term "al Qaeda" to the whole "network of co-opted groups" who have at some point accepted leadership, training and financing from bin Laden (Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam [London: I.B. Tauris, 2004], 7-8). From a Muslim perceptive, the term "Al Qaeda" is clumsy, and has led to the targeting of a number of Islamist groups opposed to bin Laden's tactics. See Montasser al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Laden's Right-Hand Man [London: Pluto Press, 2004], 100, etc.)

[...]

[47] KLA representatives had met with American, British, and Swiss intelligence agencies in 1996, and possibly several years earlier (Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge [New Haven: Yale UP, 2002], 120).

[48] Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002), 120.

[49] Evan F. Kohlmann, Al-Qaida's Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2004), 79. Al-Qahtani, who was killed by U.S. ordinance in Afghanistan in 2001, had previously fought in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Israel, Chechnya, and Kosovo.

[50] and an expert on the Balkans. `Milosevic is right. There is no question of their participation in conflicts in the Balkans. It is very well documented," (National Post, 3/15/02). Contrast e.g. Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War : Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Metropolitan/ Henry Holt, 2000), 13: "the KLA, at first a small band of poorly trained and amateurish gunmen." For the al Qaeda background to the UCK and its involvement in heroin-trafficking, see also Marcia Christoff Kurop, "Al Qaeda4s Balkan Links," Wall Street Journal Europe, 11/1/01; Montreal Gazette, 12/15/99.

[51] National Post, 3/15/02

[52] Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 29. "According to Michel Koutouzis, the DEA's website once contained a section detailing Kosovar trafficking, but a week before the U.S.-led bombings began, the section disappeared" (Peter Klebnikov, "Heroin Heroes," Mother Jones, January/February 2000, http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/01/heroin.html). Speaking in Kosovo in February 1998, Robert Gelbard, the U.S. special envoy to the region, said publicly that the KLA "is, without any questions, a terrorist group" (Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, 138).

[53] Washington Times, 5/3/99. Cf. San Francisco Chronicle, 5/5/99: "Officers of the Kosovo Liberation Army and their backers, according to law enforcement authorities in Western Europe and the United States, are a major force in international organized crime, moving staggering amounts of narcotics through an underworld network that reaches into the heart of Europe."

[54] See Lewis Mackenzie (former UN commander in Bosnia), "We Bombed the Wrong Side?" National Post, 4/6/04: "Those of us who warned that the West was being sucked in on the side of an extremist, militant, Kosovo-Albanian ndependence movement were dismissed as appeasers. The fact that the lead organization spearheading the fight for independence, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), was universally designated a terrorist organization and known to be receiving support from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda was conveniently ignored..The Kosovar Albanians played us like a Stradivarius violin. We have subsidized and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early 1990s, and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today, in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around the world." Cf. John Pilger, New Statesman, 12/13/04.

[55] George Monbiot, Guardian, 2/15/01.

[56] BBC News, 12/28/04. Those who charged that such a pipeline was projected were initially mocked but gradually vindicated (Guardian, 1/15/01; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 34). See also Marjorie Cohn, "Nato Bombing of Kosovo: Humanitarian Intervention or Crime against Humanity?" International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, March 2002, 79-106.

[57] Klebnikov, "Heroin Heroes," Mother Jones, January/February 2000.

[58] Halifax Herald, 10/29/01, <
http://www.herald.ns.ca/stories/2001/10/29/f126.raw.html >. Cf. Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America [Roseville: Prima, 2001], 298: "In late 1998, despite the growing pressure from U.S. intelligence and its local allies.a new network made up of bin Laden's supporters was being established in Albania under the cover of various Muslim charity organizations..Bin Laden's Arab `Afghans' also have assumed a dominant role in training the Kosovo Liberation Army." Bodansky adds that by mid-March 1999 the UCK included "many elements controlled and/or sponsored by the U.S., German, British, and Croatian intelligence services.. In early April [1999] the UCK began actively cooperating with the NATO bombing--selecting and designating targets for NATO aircraft as well as escorting U.S. and British special forces detachments into Yugoslavia" (397-98). Cf. also Scott Taylor, "Bin Laden's Balkan Connections," http://www.realitymacedonia.org.mk/web/news_page.asp?nid=1186 ; San Francisco Chronicle, 10/4/01.

[59] Cliff Kincaid, "Remember Kosovo?" Accuracy in Media, Media Monitor, 12/28/04, http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/2393_0_2_0_C/ .|

[60] Wall Street Journal Europe, 11/1/01.

[61] Yossef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America [Roseville: Prima, 2001], 298, 397-98ZZck.

[62] Anthony Fenton, "Kosovo Liberation Army helps establish `Protectorate' in Haiti," citing Flashpoints interview, 11/19/04, www.flashpoints.net ). Cf. Anthony Fenton, "Canada in Haiti: Humanitarian Extermination," CMAQ.net, 12/8/04; http://www.cmaq.net/fr/node.php?id=19240 .

[63] San Francisco Chronicle, 5/5/99.

[64] New York Times, 6/2/04.

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[71] Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 1-105, 185-207.

[72] Project for the New American Century, "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century," September 2000, p. 51 (63), http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf . See Chapter 10.