Kosovo, Serbia Point Fingers

Published: 31 March 2009

By Beth

To hear Kosovo and Serbia tell it, the other party bears the sole blame for crime in the former Serbian province.

At the UN last week, reported Reuters:

Kosovo accused Belgrade of stirring up crime in its northern areas.

Serbia, in response, said an "ethnic-Albanian mafia" was involved in human trafficking, arms-smuggling and drugs.

Neither Kosovo Foreign Minister Skender Hyseni nor Serbian President Boris Tadić managed to acknowledge either of their own shortcomings on Kosovo organized crime. Hyseni said the “lawlessness” in the north was a concern, never mentioning the strength of Albanian-dominated organized crime throughout the province. Tadić blamed the Albanian narco-mafia, declining to note that his own people were recently busted for smuggling in the north.

Also last week, Serbia hosted a regional justice and security conference and pledged with Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Montenegro to cooperate in fighting organized crime. The UN Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the Serbian Interior Ministry organized the conference. That in itself explains why Kosovo wasn’t invited (Serbia doesn’t recognize Kosovo, and the UN technically doesn’t either), though UNODC considers Kosovo the heart of the region’s drug-trade  route and Serbia considers Kosovo the root of most organized crime in the region, if not in Europe and throughout the world.

Chechen Killed in Dubai

In the fourth murder of a prominent Chechen in six months, an opponent of the pro-Russian Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov was killed in Dubai last weekend.

Sulim Yamadayev, 36, was shot in the underground parking lot of a luxury residential complex in Dubai. Yamadayev had broken ranks with Kadyrov and lost his job as commander of an elite security battalion before fleeing to the United Arab Emirates.

The Daily Telegraph had more:

While there were contradictory details about the killing, experts on Chechnya alleged that the sophistication and planning involved in the attack suggested the involvement of Russia's FSB intelligence service, once headed by (Russian Prime Minister Vladimir) Putin.

Coming only six months after Mr Yamadayev's brother, Ruslan, was shot dead outside the British embassy in central Moscow, the murder is another sign that Chechnya's increasingly bloody gangland war is being fought beyond the Russian republic's borders…

Questions are now being asked in Moscow about whether the murders are happening solely on orders from within Chechnya, or whether they have the FSB's blessing. "I am fairly convinced that there must be some level of cooperation between the Chechen authorities and the FSB with so many killings happening in so many parts of the world," said one observer of Chechnya.

Aside from the Yamadayev brothers, those murdered since September included Umar Israilov, a former bodyguard for Kadyrov who had accused him of torture. He was shot dead on a street in Vienna in January. Last month, a former deputy mayor of the Chechen capital Grozny was shot dead in Moscow. A Russian lawyer who had represented the family of a Chechen woman murdered by a Russian army officer was also shot dead in Moscow earlier this year.

While speculation is rife that Kadyrov, if not the Kremlin, has something to do with the string of murders, Kadyrov and his Moscow-backed government have denied any connection to the killings.

Yamadayev’s murder came as Russia is thinking about loosening curfews, roadblocks and searches in Chechnya, citing improved security under Kadyrov, who has subdued the large-scale rebel resistance.

Forbes: Kyrgyzstan Corruption

Kyrgyzstan nearly topped last week’s Forbes list of the world’s most corrupt countries, but was beaten out by the heavily foreign-reliant military dictatorship in Chad.

The Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan, where president Kurmanbek Bakiyev faces mounting opposition brought to a fevered pitch by recent allegations that his administration organized the assassination of a former administration official. Others in the top 10 include Azerbaijan, Venezuela, Cambodia and Ecuador.

President Kurmanbek Bakiyev faces mounting opposition inside the central Asian country, brought to a fevered pitch by recent allegations that his administration organized the assassination of a former administration official.

Azerbaijan also made the list, with Forbes saying:

Lax enforcement of anti-corruption rules plagues this nation, which shares a border with Russia and Georgia. Western firms have been driven away. A court recently garnished 15% of the wages earned by a newspaper editor it alleges made libelous claims of government corruption.

Banking Scandal Hits Kazakhstan

Authorities in Kazakhstan have opened an investigation into the country’s largest bank, alleging that its senior managers dabbled in money laundering and racketeering. The bank, BTA, was nationalized earlier this year, and that’s when the investigation was launched. From what prosecutors have said, it looks as though former chairman of the board of directors Mukhtar Ablyazov and deputy chairman Zhaksylyk Zharimbetov had been using the bank as a private cash cow.

The prosecutor’s office has since released more details of the suspected crimes, alleging that from 2005 to 2008 Ablyazov and colleagues stole BTA funds by issuing fictitious credits worth at least $1 billion to firms they privately controlled. A prosecutor’s office official said March 24 that Ablyazov, Zharimbetov and others were suspected of being part of an organized crime ring, begging the question of how a mafia-style group could have operated at the country’s top bank for so long. Ablyazov fled abroad immediately after BTA’s nationalization, accusing the government of "corporate raiding" and later describing the charges against him as "baseless and politically motivated."

Armenia Police: Corruption Surges

Corruption cases in Armenia more than doubled last year, according to the head of the country’s organized crime directorate.

Police recorded 392 so-called corruption crimes in 2008, up from 171 such cases in 2007, Col. Hunan Poghosian told a news conference. Many of these cases – more than one third – were crime related to tax evasion, but more than 130 others involved bribery, abuse of power and the embezzlement of public funds. Police solved about 30 bribery cases in 2008, up from just two the year before.

Poghosian said the sharp rise (in corruption cases) reflects not only increased government corruption but also better crime registration and greater government attention to the problem. He claimed that the fight against graft and bribery in particular has become the main focus of the work of his police unit.