The problem has been evolving for years. By 2004, the magazine reports:
the image of a single author creating viruses in a parents' basement fell out of favor, replaced by organized crime operations with financial ties to porn and bulk pharmaceutical companies. (In 2005, PCWorld wrote a series on the problem, "Web of Crime.") Groups such as the Russian Business Network (RBN) ran sophisticated spam campaigns , including pump-and-dump penny-stock spam.
That threat has become so serious that US intelligence is putting the finishing touches on a major report detail the threats international organized crime groups pose to US national security, reports a website that covers the US Department of Justice. Officials apparently decided two years ago to address international organized crime with a National Intelligence Estimate – a consensus from the US’s 16 different intelligence agencies – because Eurasian criminal groups were suspected of infiltrating energy markets. Now, reports Main Justice, the focus has broadened to include cybercrime and the links between organized crime and terrorism.
“Globalization has done great things for organized commerce, but it’s also helped organized criminal groups to advance as well,” said one senior Justice Department official, who spoke in general terms about the threat.
The threat was underscored in recent weeks, as reports emerged of an FBI investigation into a major cyberattack on Citibank Inc., which Citibank denies. And the Justice Department announced drug charges in New York against alleged Al-Qaeda associates arrested in Ghana during a Drug Enforcement Administration sting.
Because NIEs are classified and only top policymakers get to see the entire text, it’s impossible to know if the US has commissioned one on international organized crime before. However, Main Justice reported that the National Intelligence Council was expected to release a public overview when the assessment comes out.
Louise Shelley, the director of George Mason University’s Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, applauded this, saying it would mean international organized crime receives more attention and funding. This is important, since a few sources told us a few years ago that most funding had been diverted to terrorism only after Sept. 11, 2001 – which was short-sighted given the links between terrorism and international organized crime. The entire article is very worth reading for its coverage of Russian threats, the links between energy and organized crime and the Obama administration’s approach to the problem.
On the continent last week, European police cooperation agency Europol became a formal EU agency for the first time in its 15-year history . The agreement means that Europol has increased powers to collect information, but also means that the European Parliament will be able to set the agency’s budget and have more scrutiny over what it does.
Bosnia broken?
The row that started when Bosnia’s international proconsul decided last month to extend the mandates of the top court’s international judges and prosecutors for war crimes has continued, with the proconsul telling the Bosnian Serbs who object to the decision that they’ve violated the peace agreement that ended the 1992-1995 war.
Other international judges and prosecutors handling such matters as organized crimes will be replaced by Bosnians, although many will stay on as paid advisors.
The Bosnian Serb parliament last week rejected top diplomat Valentin Inzko’s decision to allow the international jurists working on war crimes cases to stay in Bosnia until late 2012. The Serb prime minister, Milorad Dodik, also told reporters he wanted to hold a referendum on Inzko’s decision in March or April. But holding a referendum on any decisions by Inzko – who has the power to impose laws and fire officials – is against the Dayton Peace Accords, Inzko said.
Inzko is the current High Representative, a position created by Datyon that gives him veto power over all aspects of government in the country.
This latest ratcheting-up of tensions prompted one of Inzko’s predecessors, the UK’s Paddy Ashdown, to co-author an op-ed last week that outlines what’s at stake if Bosnia continues down this reckless path:
What happens in Europe's backyard matters: the consequences of Bosnia's disintegration would be catastrophic. The breakdown of the country into independent ethnic statelets would not only reward ethnic cleansing - surely a moral anathema - but would also risk the creation of a failed state in the heart of Europe; a fertile breeding ground for terrorism and crime, and a monstrous betrayal of all those who survived the concentration camps, mass graves and displacement of the 1990s. Bosnia will not solve itself, nor will the prospect of EU integration be enough to pull the country back from the brink.
Ashdown and the other authors have some recommendations for how to get out of the mess, including that the US and the EU should appoint special envoys and not be afraid to sanction recalcitrant politicians. But the mess is worrying. It comes at a time when another election – those quadrennial exercises in nationalism and fear-mongering – is slated for the autumn, and the economy is in the toilet. Balkan Insight has its dim prognosis for 2010 here. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty feels similarly, ranking Bosnia fourth on its list of last year’s major foreign affairs challenges.
Serbia round up
Serbia marked the new year by swearing in around 1500 judges to permanent positions as part of reforming the country’s judiciary. Just under 900 judges were also sworn in to three-year terms, reported B92. The reforms mean that the number of judges in the country has been halved, reported Radio Serbia; municipal and district courts have also been abolished, replaced by basic courts, reported Focus news agency. While it might seem strange that Serbia is only now reforming its judiciary, more than nine years after autocratic leader Slobodan Milosevic was deposed, none of the governments that followed Milosevic bothered to reform the judiciary until now.
Nor has anyone bothered with any striking reforms of the security services – which under Milosevic basically became an organized crime group, involved in drugs and weapons trafficking, assassinations and kidnapping. It’s this legacy that makes some observers opine that the unreformed security services are helping hide the country’s most wanted fugitive, war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic:
The Department of State Security, as it was known, was renamed the Bureau of Security and Information (BIA) after Milosevic's arrest in 2001. But it remains inscrutable to most Serbs.
Military analyst Ljubodrag Stojadinovic says the secret behind Mladic's 14 years of freedom lies inside this agency.
"I believe that the forces at work here are to be found precisely within these unreformed secret services, whose ideological imperatives and raison d'etre are essentially unchanged since the time of their creation," Stojadinovic says.
"It seems obvious that Ratko Mladic is not being protected by individual accomplices or groups ready to use force to defend him. Rather, he is being kept safe by the withholding of crucial information by precisely those operative centers that should be helping bring him to justice."
And in other news of old dogs possibly up to old tricks, a Swedish think tank implicated a prominent Serbian arms dealer in dodgy dealings surrounding a Georgian-registered Russian plane loaded with 35 tons of missiles and rockets from North Korea. Thai police seized the plane last week and arrested its Kazakh and Belorussian crew for listing the cargo as “oil drilling equipment.” (North Korea has been forbidden from selling weapons as per UN sanctions imposed in 2006 and 2009.) The Swedish group, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said the Ilyushin-76 seized in Thailand had been most recently registered to a company called Beibars, linked to Serbian arms dealer Tomislav Damjanovic.
Whether or not the plane belongs to Damjanovic, whom the UN has said sold weapons to Liberia and Somalia’s Al-Qada-linked Islamic Courts Union, a Serbian official last week said Serbia has no control over the 145 or so private arms dealers registered in the country. Serbian daily Blic asked Stevan Nikcevic, director of Jugoimport SPDR, a state company that trades in arms and military equipment:
Q: Does the state have any control over them (arms dealers) and can it inspect their operation?
A: The state issues the permit. But of course, this does not have anything to do with your question… This has nothing to do with the state. It is not realistic to expect from the state of Serbia to have control over business deals of private companies, especially somewhere in the world. This is simply impossible.
Hardly reassuring. Even if Damjanovic is not involved in the North Korea deal in the slightest, Serbia should have more oversight over its arms dealers simply because the country’s track record in the arms department is so appalling. In the 1990s, Milosevic and friends bilked the federal customs service and funneled the money to Cyprus and a web of front companies to buy arms from Ukraine and Israel, among other places.
Regional corruption round-up
Observers chalked up the ruling conservative party candidate’s poor showing in Croatia’s Dec. 27 election – she came in third – to voters who are sick and tired of Croatia’s corruption. On Jan. 10, law professor and Social Democratic candidate Ivo Josipovic, who ran on an anti-corruption platform, will face off with Zagreb Mayor Milan Bandic for the presidency. The Economist wrote that as of last summer:
…the watchword in government and now in the election campaign has been anti-corruption. Ines Sabalic, a well-known columnist wryly notes that, “anti-corruption is the new nationalism,” in that everyone is trying to outdo each other in proving how much they will do to clean up Croatia. It is a big and unenviable job.
In Greece, widespread corruption is prompting the new government to ask experts to come up with a law that would regulate a large new anti-corruption agency. But if neighboring Macedonia is anything to go by, perhaps the Greeks shouldn’t bother: A news website notes that, Macedonia’s anti-corruption commission did not help press any charges against suspects last year, nor have the cases that have come to trial ended in any spectacular sentences.
