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In April, readers of The Express joined donors from around Europe in a wave of sympathy for the refugees from the Kosovo war. Food, clothes, medicines and other goods were sent. But now, in a scandal which is rocking Italian politics, some of that aid appears to have been sucked into the morass of criminality from which the Kosovo Liberation Army and its mafia allies in Albania emerged to fight Yugoslav rule in the first place.
I have recently returned from a fact-finding mission to Italy with the British Helsinki Human Rights group. We found that for months now, more than 900 shipping containers full of aid have been lying on the docks in Bari, Italy's major port on the Adriatic coast opposite Albania. They contain medicine, food, blankets and other items donated by British, Italian and other organisations. There are a further 1,000 containers lying in Vlore, the Albanian port some 50 miles away.
While there is no doubt that large quantities of aid did get through, there is some that never reached the refugees who have now returned home anyway. British donors, who sent aid in the spring, were promised that it would be in Albania within days. The Italian military had said it would ensure an air bridge from a military base near Milan straight to the Albanian camps. Arcobaleno, the organisation responsible for shipping the aid, is theoretically a non-governmental body but in reality it operates out of the Italian prime minister's office in Rome. As a result, the prime minister, Massimo D'Alema, has been severely embarrassed by the scandal and has had to write entire articles in the Italian press excusing himself.
Mr D'Alema has now promised that the aid will be sent to help earthquake victims in Turkey instead. But a date has still not been fixed for its transport. Questions are being asked in Italy by the public prosecutor about the nearly £50 million which Italians donated in cash and which remains unspent. Meanwhile, the Italian social security department is paying thousands of pounds every day in rental for the containers which are lying idle on the dockside.
It is possible that the aid was left at the port simply through negligence. Certainly, so much flooded into Albania during the Kosovan war that there was simply not enough space for any more of it in Vlore.
But there is also evidence that organised crime may have been responsible for diverting some of the aid that did leave Italy. Many of the clothes and medicines were stolen by the Albanian mafia and can now be purchased - at market prices -in ordinary shops in Albania. Indeed, according to Sokol Kociu, a prosecutor in Albania, the millions of pounds worth of aid became part of an ugly deal between the Albanian and Italian mafias, in which the Italian mafia paid off the Albanian mafia for various favours, including the supply of prostitutes.
The scandal demonstrates two things. The first is that the war against Yugoslavia continues to generate severe fall-out, affecting innocent people. Because Western governments needed to maintain public support at fever pitch for their attacks on Yugoslavia, they used the media to dramatise the humanitarian situation to the fullest possible degree. This meant that the amounts of cash and goods donated turned out to be vastly in excess of requirements.
By the same token, western governments - especially our own - systematically played down the fact that the KLA was in fact controlling the refugee camps we saw on our television screens every night. Away from the cameras, during the war, pimps kidnapped girls from the camps to sell into prostitution in Italy; and once the war was over, refugees had to pay the KLA a fee to be allowed to leave the camps and go home. It is inconceivable, under such circumstances, that aid could have got to the refugees without the KLA stealing it.
The second point highlighted by the scandal is the stranglehold the Albanian and Kosovo mafia wields over the Adriatic region. The Strait of Otranto and the east coast of Italy are its springboards into Europe. Every evening you can see the motor boats on the beach in Albania waiting to make the short night hop across the Adriatic into Italy. The strength of the extended family structure in Albanian society - it is divided into elaborate "clans" - makes it well suited to mafia activities. In recent years the Albanian and Kosovan mafias have made great strides in displacing even the biggest Italian mafia organisations.
The Albanian and Kosovan mafias now control the traffic of migrants, prostitutes, cigarette smuggling and drugs into Europe. Interpol confirms that 80 per cent of the heroin market in central Europe has been in the hands of Kosovo Albanians for years: control of the brothels in Brussels (where Nato and the EU are based) has also fallen into their hands.
The power of these mafia gangs will be boosted further by the Albanian victory in the Kosovan war because Kosovo has long been a central transition point for the heroin and cocaine trades.
As the chief Italian prosecutor with responsibility for the Albanian mafia in Italy told me, "Europe is being submerged by a tidal wave of organised crime from Albania" - a sentiment confirmed by the British National Criminal Intelligence Service, which warned that Albanian mafia gangs were preparing to move over here too.
The power of the Albanian mafia is also relevant to the current influx of asylum seekers into Britain - more than 200 people a day are now coming here as refugees. Those who cross the Adriatic have all paid the mafia smugglers between £300 and £500 for the short trip. I have visited a number of these "asylum seekers" in Dover, Calais and in southern Italy in recent weeks: not one of the Kosovo Albanians I met said he or she was a victim of political persecution; they all wanted to come to Britain to work.
Amassive 80 per cent of those who make an initial application for asylum in Italy never see it through because they travel on immediately to Germany and Britain instead. Because the European Union has abolished border controls on the Continent they can be in Calais within 24 hours. The only significant group suffering real persecution are the Kosovar gypsy refugees, chased out of their homes by Albanians on the rampage. While there is nothing wrong with wanting to go to a richer country like Britain to seek your fortune, it is certainly wrong for the present mass influx to be occurring thanks to an abuse of an asylum process which was set up to help genuine victims of persecution.
The Yugoslav war was fought on the basis that the Serbs were diabolical beasts and that the Albanians were passive victims. Both visions were exaggerated for the purposes of propaganda. During the war, this led to civilian deaths on both sides and to the impoverishment and disruption of the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians. But now it has also led to the swindling of thousands of well-meaning Britons as well.
FROM PHILIP WILLAN
IN ROME
ITALIAN opposition politicians have called for a parliamentary inquiry into the scandal. In the Sicilian town of Ragusa and in Bari, magistrates have opened investigations into possible corruption and incompetence in Italy's aid programme for Kosovo.
In Ragusa, officials are investigating allegations that out-of-date medicines were distributed to refugees and that Kosovar women were exploited as prostitutes at a camp set up in the former US air base of Comiso.
In Bari, a magistrate is attempting to discover why 920 containers of aid were left to rot in the hot August sun.
Significant quantities of aid went astray in the lawless conditions of Albania. "I saw huge quantities of supplies being sold in the markets of Vlore and Durres," said Italian senator Fiorello Provera.
Attempts to avoid pilfering led the Italian authorities to stock containers end to end so that they couldn't be opened - even by the authorised relief agencies.
But despite these difficulties, the Italian people responded rapidly to the plight of the Kosovar refugees who flooded across the border into Albania. Not only did the goods they supplied go to those in refugee camps but more than 3,000 homes in Kosovo have been rebuilt as a result of Italian financial aid.
The government decided to hold back containers because Kosovo's roads were blocked by military traffic and there were no aid organisations in place to distribute the supplies, according to Italian officials.
Staffan De Mistura, the UN representative in Italy, said: "In the implementation of this mission there were no mortal sins committed, only venial sins," he said. "Italy's only mistake is not to have admitted that."