Balkanalysis.com

07/21/2006: Mafia Death Threat Against UN Police Boss in Kosovo Exposes Real Situation

07/21/2006: Mafia Death Threat Against UN Police Boss in Kosovo Exposes Real Situation

(Balkanalysis.com Security and Intelligence Brief 7) The sensational news that UNMIK Police Commissioner Kai Vittrup has been receiving death threats from the Kosovo Albanian mafia should come as no surprise. The pressure ploy has been used in the past as a deterrent whenever Kosovo’s international minders have sought to crack down on organized crime and ethnically-motivated violence directed by the province’s real owners- the mafia bosses intimately connected with the dormant UCK paramilitary leadership.

Vittrup’s comments, made for Danish television and relayed in the Balkans by Serbia’s RTS and the Bulgarian Focus News Agency on 21 July, added that the threats had been made not only against him, but was “actually a threat to all UN officials in Kosovo.”

Identifying Kosovo’s as a mafia run according to the clan principle, Vittrup lamented that it is “a closed system that is hard to track down, but we are progressing”- a depressing statement considering that the UN has been administering the province for over 7 years now.

The past year in Kosovo has seen rising and increasingly violent challenges to the UN administration, culminating in demonstrations, vandalism, explosions, shootings and a spate of ethnic attacks against non-Albanians. In response, the UN administration has assumed a siege mentality, restricting patrols to areas deemed to be safe, failing to fall up on anti-terrorist operations, and incessantly placating the Albanian power brokers, Ramush Haradinaj and Agim Ceku.

With Kosovo’s final independence now appearing within reach, the internationals are tasked with guaranteeing some sort of orderly progression of power- in many cases, putting them in direct opposition to the interests of the mafia which have been appeased for so long.

The current endgame is, among other things, the result of a Western policy that sought to endlessly placate the militant interests by turning a blind eye to violence and crime, and to defer final status resolution for as long as possible. This policy failure managed to both give the mafia a sense of entitlement that is now, with the apparent crackdown, all the more easily turning to resentment.