Joint efforts of UNMIK (United Nations International Peace keepers) and Albanian Mafia offer new insight into the rule of corruption, lawlessness, provided by Macej Zeremba, celebrated Swedish journalist from “Dagens Nihiter”, by uncovering the malfeasance, inability (unwillingness) of the Multinational peace Keepers of the UN in today’s Kosovo and Metohija which both now function as a peculiar first UN State in the world, whereby the International forces not only do NOT provide any peace-keeping, and drinking water, but keep building a new order of government, all based on corruption, lawlessness, wrote Mr. Macej Zeremba, the journalist of the most popular and most influential Swedish paper Dagens Niheter, after he had spent six months in this province of Southern Serbia, that he had renamed into UNMIKistan – the country of future.

Mr. Zeremba had spoken to the past and present citizens of Kosovo and Metohija, with the past and present UNMIK representatives, people representing the local government as well as the International and Humanitarian organizations now present in Kosovo and Metohija, but recorded mostly what he witnessed on the ground having arrived at an astonishing conclusions about:

a) partnership between the criminal gangs and the United Nations forces and Albanian Mafia;
b) the total incompetence of the ground forces;
c) vast number of financial misuse of public funds;
d) violations of human rights;
e) bribery, corruption
f) gross inadequacy of people sent to protect human rights.

This International Humanitarian organization is sent to protect the human rights, the underprivileged, the homes, any endangered group of individuals irrespective of religion or nationality, to implement the rule of law and the rights of all citizens of Kosovo and Metohija, whereby the foundation of a future democracy, judiciary and a well functioning market economy would be the standards – however the effect was opposite. Kosovo and Metohija became the center of lawlessness, crime, Pan-European center in white slavery and slave trading, drug trafficking, women trafficking, drugs production and distribution, in the final analysis of this Swedish journalist of Polish ancestry.

Black Market on the rise

In the first of the four sections devoted to “Unmikistan” the author explains the Kosovo and Metohija basics. The airport where he landed is watched by Iceland’s Civil Aviation, the cell phone system is provided by the French with the area code of Monte Carlo (Monaco). Every 6km (about 3.5miles) there is a gas station “which is a terrific record which only serves as a money laundering unit from the drug trafficking and sexual slavery” notes Zeremba.

The local stores carry soap from Bulgaria, shirts from Taiwan, flour from the Czech republic, drinking water from Hungary. After 8 years and 22 billion Euros (US $18 billion) all throughout Kosovo and Metohija there is plenty of black market goods from every corner of the Earth, while the legitimate stores are in a state of total collapse.

Great majority has the use of electricity a few hours a day others not even that much.

“How is it, you may ask, that the state governed by the UN, after having invested 700 million Euros in two electrical power plants in the area rich in coal (lignite), with enough power to provide electricity for the entire Balkan, how is it they can’t produce enough for local consumption, but creates 70 times the average pollution beyond the maximum pollution allowed by EU?

After the many months stay in the area our journalist studied how the entire system works, and Zeremba offers these answers: overpaid UNMIK staff did not fight corruption or organized crime, this would have required courage, sacrifice, responsibility and the only responsibility they felt was towards their own careers, within which “they feel Kosovo, Metohija is just a stepping stone. That is why the seven different Kosovo and Metohija “Governers” – UNMIK appointed chiefs, routinely stated only about “stability” and “progress”. “This was the only way for them to advance their careers.” – as quoted by the Swedish journalist.

Crime all around

You would expect that the UN mission would be like a polar expedition, adequate equipment, highly trained experts, devoted to the single cause. You would have a right to think so considering their high rate of pay and the fact that every position offered had 299 applicants to choose from. But the UN mission in Kosovo Metohija does not have any of those qualities – notes Zeremba. He adds “who can seriously believe that the police forces composed of 44 nations – half of which come from only partially democratic societies, and came here to risk their own lives to implement Laws that were alien in their own countries?”

A British source, according to Zeremba noted that the police headquarters is inundated with complaints that nobody ever even saw, since a great majority of crimes never gets investigated. On the other hand, who would know how to investigate, even they wanted to, when you see the composition of UNMIK?

The citizens of Kosovo and Metohija are taught how to run the railroads by “an expert” from Siera Leone, where the last train stopped in 1975. The parking lot attendant is from Bangladesh, a man without a driver’s license, who only speaks Bengali, so he must have (bribed) paid handsomely, to be accepted into UN. There are hundreds upon hundreds ill-trained, poorly educated people even in the finance departments, even in the semi-functional judiciary.

Great majority of the Kosovars is bitterly disappointed by UNMIK and has no faith in them, concludes Zeremba. He even gives the following analogy:

Every cow in France is subsidized by three Euros per day, while every other Kosovar lives from one third of that sum. If a Kosovo resident is robbed, there are virtually no chances the culprit would be caught, in spite of the largest per/capita police presence in Europe. The local courts are backed up by over 30,000 unsolved cases, so in theory your house could go up in flames in front of some police unit who would “closely monitor the situation”. This has already happened – states Zeremba.

From the author of this submittal:
Examples go on and on, many with actual names of the actual staff on the ground in today’s Kosovo their actual salaries and the full outline of their duties of “how to sit on their hands”. Many people outside of former Yugoslavia never heard the word Metohija which a slightly larger province in what is commonly known as Kosovo. Full proper noun is Kosovo and Metohija. Metohija is a word of Greek origin and means “church owned lands, church possessions”. The only churches in Kosovo and Metohija are Christian Serbian Eastern Orthodox churches – there are no others, except for shiny newly built Muslim Mosques.

Translated by: Iliya Pavlovich PhD

What can the West offer the Islamic Republic of Iran in return for giving up its nuclear ambitions and kenneling its puppies of war? The problem calls to mind the question regarding what to give a man who has everything: cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, kidney failure, and so forth. Iran’s economy is so damaged that it is impossible to tell how bad things are. Except perhaps for the oilfields of southern Iraq, and perhaps also northern Saudi Arabia, there is nothing the West can give Iran to forestall an internal breakdown.

Iranian dissidents put overall unemployment at 30% and youth

unemployment at 50%. Government subsidies sustain a very large portion of the population; 42% of the non-agricultural population is employed by the Iranian state, compared with 17% in Pakistan.

Within fewer than 10 years, Iran will become a net importer, at which point the government no longer will be able to provide subsidies. Iran’s economic implosion is a source of imminent strategic risk.

What most analysts, including this writer, foresaw as a medium-term problem seems to have confronted Iran much sooner than expected. The present inflation rate of about 20%, driven by a 40% rate of monetary expansion, suggests that government resources are already exhausted. Governments resort to the printing press when they no longer can raise sufficient funds through taxation, sales of state-owned commodities such as oil, or borrowing. That is surprising, considering that Iran reported a current-account surplus of US$13 billion last year. The fact that Iran cannot stabilize its currency suggests a breakdown of political consensus within the regime, and a scramble by different elements in the regime to lay hands on whatever resources it can.

Another possibility is that the official numbers are entirely false, and that Iran already has fallen into a current-account deficit. In a May 19 statement reported by the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), President Mahmud Ahmadinejad denied a report that Iran’s imports now exceed $60 billion, against an official estimate of $45 billion. This sort of discrepancy typically occurs when capital flight is disguised as imports through fraudulent invoices and similar devices. A small current-account deficit would be of little concern for a nation with normal access to world capital markets, but Iran is unable to borrow.

That is the background to Ahmadinejad’s decree last week reducing private and state bank lending rates to 12% from 14%, that is, 5-10 percentage points below the rate of inflation. If Ahmadinejad were in the pay of a hostile intelligence service, he could not have found a more effective way to sabotage Iran’s economy. If the price of goods rises faster than the cost of money, everyone who can will borrow money to purchase and hoard goods. The result will be higher prices and reduced economic activity, and the eventual prospect of hyperinflation, which no government ever has survived. Last week’s rate reduction augmented the incentives for capital flight.

Ahmadinejad took this foolhardy step against the explicit advice of Iran’s economic authorities, which suggests that the economic suffering of his political base commanded his undivided attention. After increasing gasoline prices earlier in the month, he evidently found it necessary to throw his constituents a bone.

Iran’s prospective demographic implosion, I have argued for two years, pushes Tehran toward imperial expansion. [1] It is difficult to see a way out for Persia’s pocket empire; the country exports nothing but oil, carpets and dried fruit (excluding the growing human traffic in Persian women), and manufactures nothing the world will buy. Its most pressing problem, unemployment among the 60% of its population now under the age of 30, will turn into a much worse problem as this generation ages. In two decades Iran will have half as many soldiers and twice as many pensioners.

If a future catastrophe is inevitable, its impact has a way of leaping back into the present. Monetary disorder of the magnitude we now observe suggests an internal collapse of confidence.

What strategic consequences ensue from Iran’s economic misery? Broadly speaking, the choices are two. In the most benign scenario, Iran’s clerical establishment will emulate the Soviet Union of 1987, when then-prime minister Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged that communism had led Russia to the brink of ruin in the face of vibrant economic growth among the United States and its allies. Russia no longer had the resources to sustain an arms race with the US, and broke down under the pressure of America’s military buildup.

The second choice is an imperial adventure. In fact, Iran is engaged in such an adventure, funding and arming Shi’ite allies from Basra to Beirut, and creating clients selectively among such Sunnis as Hamas in Palestine.

I continue to predict that Iran will gamble on adventure rather than go the way of Gorbachev. A fundamental difference in sociology distinguishes Iran from the Soviet Union at the cusp of the Cold War. Josef Stalin’s terror saw to it that the only communist true believers left alive were lecturing at Western universities. All the communists in Russia were dead or in the gulags. By the 1980s, only the most cowardly, self-seeking, unprincipled careerists had survived to hold positions of seniority in the communist establishment. Only in the security services were a few hard and dedicated men still active, including Vladimir Putin. These were men who saw no reason to fight for communism 70 years after the Russian Revolution.

Iran, however, is not 70 years away from its revolution, but fewer than 30 years away. Ahmadinejad typifies the generation of Revolutionary Guards who followed the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, and now hold senior positions in the state and military.

Ahmadinejad blames the country’s economic problems on „certain elements“, presumably his opponents within the regime, alleging that government agencies have falsified statistics to discredit him. As noted, he denied reports that imports were fully a third higher than officially reported, an astonishing statement for a head of government to have to make. The president also claimed that unemployment had declined to 11.3% from 11.5% in 2006, adding, „The government is now striving hard to provide employment opportunities for the country’s jobless people.“ The IRNA report concluded with this less-than-confidence-building comment about inflation:

On [the] inflation rate, he said the government is quite successful in controlling [the] spiraling inflation rate while other factors such as the country’s development projects and worldwide price hikes should be taken into consideration.

„Unfortunately, certain elements are now issuing fabricated statistics and try to tarnish reality, but we strive to remove all existing weaknesses,“ said the president.

„Certain elements“ no doubt refers to Ayatollah Akbar Rafsanjani, his opponent in the 2006 presidential election and leader of the faction more inclined to compromise with the West. Rafsanjani continues to maintain excellent contacts in Germany, and European diplomats have placed their hopes on the prospect of his replacing Ahmadinejad. It would not be out of character for Rafsanjani and his allies to make matters more irksome for Ahmadinejad by diverting large amounts of money out of state revenues into their own pockets.

As a way of changing the Tehran regime, however, pushing Iran toward hyperinflation would be akin to cutting the brake lines of a car to spite its driver, when one is a passenger in the same car. It is easy to hasten the deterioration of Iran’s economy, for it is headed downhill in any event, but very difficult to reverse the process.

An old piece of diplomatic wisdom states that one always should give one’s enemy a way out. But I see no way out for the pocket empire of Persia. Ahmadinejad and his generation of Revolutionary Guards will fight, and cautious old men like Rafsanjani will not be able to stop them.

Note
1. Demographics and Iran’s imperial design, Asia Times Online, September 13, 2005. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GI13Ak01.html

Bosnia talks end in disarray
http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/international/ticker/detail/Bosnian_Serb_PM_rejects_U_S_backed_plan.html?siteSect=143&sid=7858357&cKey=1180054376000

Bosnian Serb PM rejects U.S.-backed plan

http://www.javno.com/en/world/clanak.php?id=47030

INTERVJU: OLIVER DULIC
I am a Yugoslav and a Croat

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/US_ready_to_push_back_against_Russi_05242007.html
US ready to ‘push back’ against Russia: official
AFP
Published: Thursday May 24, 2007

http://www.gulfnews.com/world/United_Kingdom/10127613.html
Published: 25/05/2007 12:00 AM (UAE)
Russia ‘is prepared’ to kill key Litvinenko suspect

Evening Standard

http://www.bilderberg.org/2005.htm

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/US_ready_to_push_back_against_Russi_05242007.html
US ready to ‘push back’ against Russia: official
AFP
Published: Thursday May 24, 2007

http://www.gulfnews.com/world/United_Kingdom/10127613.html
Published: 25/05/2007 12:00 AM (UAE)
Russia ‘is prepared’ to kill key Litvinenko suspect

Evening Standard

http://www.bilderberg.org/2005.htm

New war fears loom over Kosovo as Moscow threatens veto
By Peter Beaumont
THE OBSERVER, PRISTINA, KOSOVO
Thursday, May 24, 2007, Page 9

`What makes Russian thinking so important is that the Ahtisaari plan has now been tabled by the US before the UN Security Council. A point of no return has been reached.’

In Kosovo now there is only one question. What will the Russians do? It is asked in smoky cafes, on the countless building sites, and in government offices. It is asked by the majority Albanians, hoping for independence for this divided former Serbian province, who fear the Russians will torpedo the dream for which they fought the Kosovo War of 1998 to 1999.

And it is asked by the minority Serbs, who ruled Kosovo for so long and regard it as their cultural and spiritual heartland, trapped in their ever-shrinking enclaves in the south and in their last stronghold in the north around the city of Mitrovica. Their fear is that their Slav ally, which opposes the independence plan drawn up by UN mediator Martti Ahtisaari, might at the last moment abandon them through the pragmatism of international diplomacy.

It is an issue troubling the functionaries of the international community who oversee Kosovo and who are anxious to see an endgame in sight eight years after the war in Kosovo was ended by NATO’s bombing of Serbia and Belgrade.

What makes Russian thinking so important is that the Ahtisaari plan has now been tabled by the US before the UN Security Council. A point of no return has been reached. And, crucially, a Russia that is resurgent in its sense of its international importance and hostile to both the US and the EU over issues as diverse as criticism of its democracy and a planned missile shield for eastern Europe, has not only rejected the resolution calling for UN endorsement of the Ahtisaari plan, but has warned it might exercise its veto if there is a vote.

Instead, Russia is now circulating its own counter-proposal for Kosovo that would keep it within the „general sovereignty“ claimed by Belgrade and put off the question of Kosovo’s final status, risking, some say, renewed violence.

A crisis eight years in the making is unfolding with a giddy inevitability. For while the fighting in Kosovo stopped in 1999, the conflict itself, as diplomats here acknowledged, has never really ended. All that has been held in check has been forced to the surface again.

For Kosovo’s Albanians, fired up by the repeated promises of their political leaders, there is the prospect that independence may be only weeks away. It is a prospect that has forced Serbs to confront the fact that it may now likely require some act of partition on their part, a gesture that risks retaliation and expulsion of the most vulnerable Serb pockets. Suddenly all is to play for.

„During these past years we have made Kosovo. It is done,“ insisted Kosovoan Prime Minister Agim Ceku, former chief of staff of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army. „We have built functioning institutions. We have built our vision for the future. The worst case scenario now is a lack of clarity, an ambiguity.“

„If you ask me what I think the risks of partition are at the moment,“ said Naim Rashiti of the International Crisis Group, which issued a report last week warning of the risk of violence if the Ahtisaari plan was abandoned,“ I would say 50-50. And I am worried that, if there is partition, it has the potential to be very dirty, precisely because no one has any plan B.“

In an entity whose economy has survived for almost a decade on international handouts, remittances from family members working abroad, and a grey and black economy — the latter based in large part on smuggling — independence has become a kind of spell that for its Kosovo Albanian believers promises to transform a landscape of chronic underemployment and pitiful wages.

It is a fact that is underlined during a visit to the memorial to the Kosovo Liberation Army leader Adem Jashari — his bullet and rocket-wrecked compound in the village of Prekaz, where he perished with most of his family in the incident in the winter of 1998 that triggered the descent to all-out war.

The preserved ruins are being visited by Nurlje Sadiku from the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica.

„I have never worked,“ Nurlje said. „But we hope everything will be better when independence comes. Then jobs will be easier. The World Bank will help out with donations and everything will be good.“

It is an expectation that has been stoked in the years since the war by Kosovo’s Albanian politicians, many of them former fighters.

„There is no alternative to independence,“ said Hashim Taqi, the president of the biggest Albanian opposition party, the PDK.

„Any attempt to delay the process is high risk. The people are ready and want a decision. They are counting the days. We were ready yesterday. Today is too late. Tomorrow,“ he said, „is dangerous.“

Crossing the bridge into the Serb stronghold of northern Mitrovica that borders Serbia is like entering another country.

The cars that do have license plates have Serbian ones. The mobile phones are on the Serbian network. The signs are written in Cyrillic. Even the beer is different — Kneva, not the ubiquitous Peya brand drunk to the south. It reflects a society in equally dire economic straits, but one sustained not by Kosovo’s provisional institutions but by Belgrade.

And by a different dream.

For if Kosovo’s Albanian population is fixed on independence, the Serbs here, and in the scattered enclaves in central and southern Kosovo, are equally determined that they wish to remain a part of Serbia.

„The Serbs in the north around Mitrovica are not afraid,“ said Petra Miletic, a journalist turned politician. „But the Serbs in the enclaves are afraid. I am afraid for them and, yes, I do know of Serbs in the south who are selling up and leaving, as Albanians in their enclaves in the north are also selling up.“

But even if population exchanges are continuing, he has no illusions about the conditions for partition, if only in Kosovo’s north.

„For us to survive independently would require the support of Belgrade,“ he said.

It is one of Kosovo’s two as yet unanswered questions: whether the Albanian population denied independence by a Russian veto would declare independence on its own, and whether, faced with any kind of independence for the Albanian majority, the Serb minority would secede.

What it is driven by — as Miletic and many others on both sides concede — is the utter failure of any reconciliation since the year’s end.

Such failure was perceptible at the prom night for the graduating high-school class of 2007 in Pristina — a city that once had a Serb population of 40,000. As they turned out in their posh frocks and dinner jackets, it was clear that, whereas their Albanian parents could once speak Serbian, the new generation speaks it not at all. Albanians and Serbs can no longer communicate.

In his deputy director’s office in the hospital in Mitrovica, the reality is laid out by Milan Ivanovic of the hardline Serbian National Council.

„I don’t know if partition is possible,“ he said, although on his wall hangs a large map showing his movement’s claim to 38 percent of Kosovo’s land for the Serbs.

„What is true is that in the north we have a better possibility than in the Serb enclaves in the south and center. We have our own system and no contact with the Albanian institutions. And we have freedom of movement over the border into Serbia,“ he said.

„We believe that we are between two extremities — between Ahtisaari’s plan and between that of [former Yugoslavian president Slobodan] Milosevic’s plan for Kosovo. There must be room for further negotiation,“ he said.

What he means is room for further stalling.

It is what the Russians are calling for, but time is running out. For as much as Serbs are calling for more time, Albanians are desperate for results. And those who lost most in the war are most anxious for a final resolution.

In the village of Krushe e vogel, in the Kosovo Liberation Army heartland to the south and the scene of one of the worst massacres of the war, in which more than 100 residents remain „missing,“ the alternative is brutally outlined by Xhylferije Shehu, 48.

In her tomato frame among the fields, Shehu, who lost her husband among nine family members, said: „We have waited eight years for independence. I’m not optimistic that there won’t be trouble. If there is no independence, then we will have to fight again.“
This story has been viewed 231 times.