Косово независно од 17 февруари

"There's not such a thing as rebels and militias on the one hand and the Albanian mafia on the other. In the Albanian world -- in Albania and in Kosovo and in the Albanian-populated part of Macedonia -- you have clans and in those clans you have a mix of young men fighting for the cause of national liberation, young men belonging to the mafia, young men driving their cousins or other girls from the village into prostitution. It's absolutely impossible to distinguish between them. They obey the same clans, they have the same logic, the same world view, and to discriminate between one guy who's one day selling heroin and the next day fighting in the mountains is absolutely impossible."

"It may be true for half or one third of the day. In South Lebanon some years ago, when you asked those South Lebanese villagers: is this village Amal or Hizbollah, the guy would just laugh and say: the village is Amal by day and Hizbollah by night. In Albania, it's the same situation. You have to be as ignorant as Europe or NATO not to discover that. The guys are liberation fighters by day and sell heroin by night or vice versa. It's absolutely impossible to discriminate between the two activities."

"It's of major importance. Each time the police or the foreign powers' intelligence in Kosovo (the US army, the British army and the French army each have their own intelligence) discover a mafia network, i.e. a network selling forbidden goods, like petrol to Yugoslavia when there is an embargo or selling prostitutes to Italy or selling heroin, you see that the head of the network is in Tetovo. It's extremely easy to understand why. This part of Macedonia is absolutely out of any type of regular control and it has been for years. The state of Macedonia is very feeble. It is not a strong power. It only has limited resources to maintain law and order in the part of Macedonia that's populated by ethnic Macedonians and no way at all of controlling the country's Albanian-populated areas. So, in Tetovo, they are free to do whatever they like, no one can arrest them."

"It's worse than that. In order to achieve even a modest success against criminalised guerrillas like the UCK, you don't need an army. An army is absolutely hopeless. A criminal society like the mafia is absolutely invincible. They don't show on any radar. You cannot see them. So, what you need is a "gendarmerie" or a police force of some 12,000 people, who know how to arrest criminals. You don't need an army of soldiers who are used to do battle with guns and tanks and planes."