Organized Crime in Southeast Europe

Ekavi Athanassaopolou, Ekavi Athanassaopolou

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317999447
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Europäische Geschichte

In recent years, organized crime has become endemic in the countries of southeast Europe giving rise to an urgent debate on what needs to be done to fight it. This collection of essays contributes directly to this debate. The discussions range over national and regional policies, the west European dimension of the phenomenon, and the less often discussed role that the media and civil society can play in the battle against organised crime.This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.

Fighting Organized Crime in SEE

EKAVI ATHANASSOPOULOU

The subject of organized crime is enormous. It has been called the new communism, the new monolithic threat.¹ Through violence and corruption it penetrates like a fast-spreading virus the legal economy and corrodes the regulatory apparatus. Its spread diverts resources away from the formal economy, undermines the central power essential to make the system work; it destroys the spirit of social collectivism. Controlling it depends as much on the resistance of social values and on a healthy economic environment as it does on policing and law enforcement. In geographical extension it neither starts nor ends in southeast Europe (SEE). Nonetheless the region is more than just another link in the chain of global crime; it has become an important bridge in criminal networks spanning from western Europe to Asia and Africa.

Since the 1990s SEE has emerged as the major gateway to Europe for the smuggling of thousand of illegal immigrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa as well as for the trafficking of women and girls from the area and the former Soviet Union for the sex industry. It has also become a linchpin in the European cigarette-smuggling business and the bridge in the drugs route from Central Asia and Midlle East to western Europe.

In the context of the transition of the countries in SEE to market economies, stable democratic institutions and the rule of law, organized crime and the corruption it generates have been identified as the most serious obstacles to legal, political and economic reform.

In the last 14 years organized criminal enterprises have become established in SEE countries via the development of a strong criminal infrastructure supported by criminal groups and patronized through corruption by ruling elites. Often enough the criminal edifice has been kept in place with the aid of state institutions. The result is the creation of autonomous power structures which operate with imputiny from prosecution, extort payment from legally operating businesses, manipulate the starved-for-funds media and control political parties. These structures which are exemplars of multi-ethnic collaboration have also the capacity, we now understand, to disturb peace and sow the seeds of ethnic conflict in order to secure the environment within which they operate. Most alarmingly their thriving has been possible because of toleration and cynicism, in the best of cases, but also active involvement by a significant part of the public under the pressures of severe unemployment and minimal prospects for future employment opportunities. Thus the distressing possibility that a number of countries in SEE, instead of becoming integrated with the rest of Europe, will become permanent pariahs in the European system with their criminal organisations feed into world-wide criminal activities and the tide of terrorism which lives on them, is a very real one.

In the last five years regional governments, under increasing pressure from the international community and with an eye to having their countries accepted as members of the European Union, have been making a greater effort than ever before to break the back of organized crime in their territory. Transnational and international cooperation on border control has increased; the right pieces of legislation have been enacted; better coordination between the government and various law-enforcement bodies has been sought. This is a beginning; we still have to wait for concrete and permanent results.

The criminalization of politics in most SEE countries is so profound that it leaves little room for great optimism. Breaking the control structures that crime has built in these countries since the early 1990s and changing the kind of mentality that goes with them is a huge challenge. It demands unfailing commitment on the part of regional governments, but also crime-control initiatives that go beyond imposing supply-side solutions on demand-driven problems. Organized crime is market-based crime and never in history has an illegal market been defeated from the supply side. Indeed the essential message of most of the essays in this volume is that policing may be essential to fight organized crime in SEE but cannot solve the problem alone.

This collection makes no pretence at a comprehensive survey of the varied aspects of the battle against organized crime in SEE. Rather it concerns itself with certain understudied themes within the context of this battle, seeking to make a contribution to the debate on how to ‘win the war’ against organized crime in SEE. It is hoped that it will also help readers interested in contemporary SEE understand something of this big challenge facing individual countries in the area as well as the region as a whole.

The first chapter, by Suzan Woodward, focuses on the need for systematic conceptual analysis as a prerequisite in the fight against organized crime. Woodward underlines an essential but largely unnoticed problem: the agenda of the battle against organized crime in SEE gives the impression of being driven by politics and policy, not by knowledge and research results. In other words, it is devoid of a conceptualization of the deeper causes of crime and the wider effects of policy choises, without which a proper policy and public debate cannot develop. Woodward shows that a lot of the assumptions, upon which policies against organized crime in SEE rest, are problematic and makes the case for a specialist community which can ‘establish standards of proof, identify causality, and promote priorities based on a set of shared normative and principled beliefs’.

In the following chapter Krassev Stanchev offers an interesting review of the economic — formal and informal — background to the rise of organized crime in SEE. He reminds us that in the 1990s all Balkan countries failed to follow policies which might have promoted sustained economic growth and prosperity. Even when growth was experienced for certain periods ‘it was insufficient to compensate for previous periods of decline and deconstruction’. Thus for some time now most countries in the area have been characterized by chronic malfunctioning of the economic system and artificially generated employment which guarantees only extremely low salaries and sizable fiscal deficits. Given such an unhealthy economic environment in the SEE countries and the lack of serious prospects for economic growth soon, the author predicts that illegal economic activities will continue to offer the way out of poverty. In other words, organized crime in SEE is there to stay for some time.

Stanchev's conclusion does not mean that governments in SEE and the international community should consider the battle against organized crime futile. What it reminds us of is that organized crime is very different from predatory crime (robbery, fraud, etc.). There is a very broad social consensus that predatory crime acts, through which wealth is passed from one person or a group of person to another by use of force or fraud, are wrong. However, organized crime offences, particularly when they are related to a weak economic environment, involve mutually acceptable exchanges between criminals and a large segment of the population. Thus the social consensus against organized crime is much weaker if it exists at all. Therefore crime control initiatives need to move away from the cops and robbers, crooks and victims mind-set and address a whole range of problems including the basic question of how to stop poverty.

Misha Glenny's essay moves the debate right into the heart of public economic policy by touching upon perhaps one of the most sensitive issues in western Europe today: migration policies and more specifically access of the SEE labour force to the western European market. The essential message here is that organized crime in SEE has thrived against high rates of unemployment and stagnant economies. While the peoples of SEE are in dire need of employment the EU urgently needs to rejuvenate its labour force. However, only a tiny perecentage of immigrant visas are given to SEE citizens. ‘In general, the EU has confirmed or in some cases made harder access to the EU for Balkan citizens.’ ‘The relationship between unemployment and organised crime in South Eastern Europe has not yet crossed into the discourse over visas and the labour market’ in the EU. It will not be easy for Brussels to move in the direction of easing visa requirements for the labour force from SEE. Nonetheless, some creative thinking can go a long way towards benefiting both sides: for instance short-term contracts for seasonal workers from SEE. While long-term solutions to organized crime can only be found through systematic policies the importance of such steps is enormous.

The next four essays concern themselves with currently hot topics: organized crime in Kosovo and the institutional preparedness of the UN interim administration in the province (UNMIK) to fight against it; transborder human smuggling and trafficking between Turkey and Greece; customs corruption in SEE; and the anti-organized crime and anti-corruption efforts in Serbia.

Radoslava Stefanova's essay, the product of field work in Kosovo, the notorious criminal capital of SEE, gives us new insights into the extensive web of criminal activities there, their regional connections and the institutional battle against them. The unique position that the international community has in Kosovo has produced results but not the successes one would expect and hope for. What clearly emerges from Stefanova's research is that unless serious legal gaps are addressed and the links between organized crime and politics are broken UNMIK's fight against the well-established criminal networks in the province will be wrong-footed.

Human smuggling and human trafficking from Turkey to Greece (one of the eastern gates to Europe) has been a new thorn in Turkish-Greek relations for almost a decade although it never receives the international spotlight which is reserved for more longstanding problems between the two countries in the Aegean. Icduygu's examination of this important but neglected issue provides interesting information about the human smuggling business and the nascent Turkish-Greek cooperation against organized crime. His research highlights the complexity of human smuggling operations which often are individual-run operations and contrary to general belief are not conducted within the framework of a wide, centralized criminal organization. Understanding this complexity, the author argues, is essential for control policies to yield proper results.

Fighting customs corruption in SEE is the subject of the next essay by Emi Velkova and Saso Georgievski. Clearly the serious links between corruption and organized crime in SEE are to be found in higher places than the offices of customs and borders officials. Nonetheless, it is obvious that rooting out corruption in customs is an essential step in the direction of controlling transborder crime. The authors look into the successful anti-corruption in customs reforms in central and eastern Europe (CEE) and suggest that the CEE experience might provide some solutions for the reform of customs in SEE given certain similarities between CEE and SEE countries.

Aleksandar Fatić switches the spotlight on Serbia, where organized crime and corruption were recently identified as enemy no. 1 to the security and prosperity of the country. The author offers a good account of the efforts of the government in Serbia since the ‘democratic revolution’ of 2000 to improve criminal justice legislation and generally reform the public administration system in order to strengthen it in the fight against crime and corruption. The conclusion is that, although important measures have been taken, the effort has not been as systematic or coordinated as it should be. Many reasons account for this, the reaction of vested interests to reform being one of them. While it is clearly up to the society of Serbia to make sure that reforms are pushed forward the author points out that the impementation of reform policies depends a lot on international financial assistance as Serbia lives currently on foreign aid.

Finally, Plamen Ranchev looks at non-governmental organisations in SEE and their pivotal role in fighting organized crime and corruption by raising public awareness and contributing to an informed public debate. As he points out, although civil society in SEE is still not mature, a growing number of NGOs in the area have identified the battle against corruption, a relatively new priority in public agenda, as one of their interests. ‘This involvement is facilitated by the fact that anti-corruption projects increasingly attract the attention of potential Western donor organizations’. When it comes to fighting organized crime, so far civil society in SEE has been met with its own limitations. Nonetheless, the NGO's contribution in terms of analytical research has to be noted.

As this volume is put together, events unfolding in SEE are constantly changing the parameters around which the battle against organized crime is being fought. The biggest challenge in this battle is to outsmart sophisticated criminals by being ahead of them rather than always trying to play catch up. Therefore it is important that policy-makers in the region and the EU are constantly aware of the multiplicity of factors, both internal and external to SEE, which facilitate the growth and spread of organised crime. To this end we hope firstly that researchers of diverse disciplines will continue to look into these factors to help sharpen our knowledge and understanding. Secondly, that academic research will seek to be in close tune with policy makers in the EU and their priorities in the fight against organised crime both at home and in SEE in order to have a major practical impact. In the final analysis pressure on SEE governments to enact and enforce the legal and institutional reforms to assist the curbing of organised crime has come from the international community and the EU in particular. Local governments have so far shown that they lack the political will and resolve to seriously commit themselves to that task at their own initiative.

REFERENCES

Centre for the Study of Democracy (2002): Corruption, Trafficking and Institutional Reform: Prevention of Trans-Border Crime in Bulgaria (2001–2002) (Sofia: Centre for the Study of Democracy).

Freedom House (2000): Nations in Transit 1999–2000 〈htt­p:/­/ww­w.f­ree­dom­hou­se.­org­〉.

Golstock, R. (1993): ‘Organized Crime and Corruption’, Corrupt...