In bed with terrorists:When 'the Snake' came to Washington

WORLD NET DAILY (USA), 16.02.2006 19:39
 
Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin by G2B contributor Aleksandar Pavic

 

Perhaps one of the main reasons why Russian President Vladimir Putin wasn't too worried about reactions to his invitation for the leaders of Hamas to come to Moscow was the fact that he could point to at least two recent instances of a political figure with a terrorist background being invited to major Western capitals.

 

Hashim Thaci, also known as "the Snake," wartime leader of the Kosovo Albanian terrorist group KLA, and now leader of UN-administered Kosovo's second largest party, the Democratic Party of Kosovo or PDK, visited Washington Jan. 13, when he was received by U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns to "discuss the situation in Kosovo, including the status talks," according to a State Department spokesman.

 

Even more interesting was Thaci's visit to Berlin in the first week of February, at the invitation of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation run by the German Social-Democratic Party or SPD, the second largest in Germany.

 

The details of his program were confidential, but it was confirmed that Thaci had meetings in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the German Parliament in connection with "planning projects in Kosovo" according to an item in the Junge Welt daily.

 

The last such "successful project" in Kosovo took place March 17-19, 2004, when coordinated Albanian mobs numbering more than 50,000 looted and burned several Serb towns and villages, destroying several Christian Orthodox churches and resulting in the deaths of more than 20 people and hundreds of injuries, with only an emergency deployment of U.S. troops preventing far worse carnage. Subsequent intelligence data, causing a small-scale scandal on the German political scene, showed that the German contingent in Kosovo had "advance warning" of the coming attacks but did nothing to prevent them.

 

The New York Times reported during 1999 that Thaci was responsible for the killings of several rival commanders within the KLA. According to a dossier of the German BND intelligence agency, "Thaci . gives orders to the professional killer Afrimi," who has carried out at least 11 assassinations in Kosovo.

 

Junge Welt reports that at the end of January, Thaci also participated at a Socialist International Conference in Athens, where his PDK is bidding for membership in that global socialist umbrella organization, "obviously under German tutorship."

 

According to a U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee Report of March 31, 1999, the KLA was closely involved with: . The extensive Albanian crime network that extends throughout Europe and into North America, including allegations that a major portion of the KLA finances are derived from that network, mainly proceeds from drug trafficking; and . Terrorist organizations motivated by the ideology of radical Islam, including assets of Iran and of the notorious Osama bin Laden.

 

Nevertheless, NATO entered an alliance with the KLA at that time, forged by Clinton administration figures Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke, during the bombing of Yugoslavia, looking to depose its president, Slobodan Milosevic.

 

Western diplomatic sources fear that a repeat of the March 2004 events is being prepared as a "contingency option," of radical Albanian circles, in case U.N.-sponsored talks on Kosovo's final status don't head in the direction of giving the province full independence and secession from Serbia. Staged violence may also be used to "push the talks in the right direction" according to these sources, as a sign that the Kosovo Albanians "are becoming impatient with their unresolved status."

 

Kosovo's Islamic extremists have learned that the way to extract concessions from the West is not in being constructive but destructive. Thus, one of the main goals in nurturing the relationship with Thaci is to minimize the potential damage to Western interests in what many expect will be a year of renewed turmoil in Kosovo.