Kosovo Parliament Urged To Probe Former Secret Agency

 Florin Krasniqi, member of the Kosovo Parliament from the Vetevendosje party

Πηγή: Balkan Insight
By Fatmir Aliu
March 30 2012

An opposition Self-Determination MP has started gathering signatures to get parliament to fully investigate the workings of the ruling party's former secret agency.

Self-determination (Vetevendosje) Movement MP Florin Krasniqi presented the request on Wednesday to parliament, saying the public needed the full facts about the workings and legacy of the Shërbimi Informativ i Kosovës, or SHIK.

Krasniqi said an inquiry would also handle claims that other political parties had their own secret services.

The SHIK emerged from the ranks of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, following the end of the war with Serbia in 1999, and then became the intelligence arm of the now ruling Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK.

The secret service is widely believed to have eliminated political rivals to the PDK during 2000 and 2001, though this was not proven in court.

Two alleged former SHIK agents, Nazim Bllaca, a self-proclaimed hit-man and Naim Miftari, an investigator, have already confessed their roles in the service.

Krasniqi has asked other MPs to sign his initiative and so force parliament to shed light on the way that SHIK functioned and who financed it.

By law he needs at least 40 signatures to table the initiative to the legislature, which will then formalize the commission.

“We need to find out what the structures and the hierarchy of this service were, who financed it, how much people were paid, and what they did with the money," he said.

"Did it compile files and for whom did it compile these dossiers? These are the most important elementary questions for the people and state of Kosovo,” Krasniqi added.

The former head of SHIK, Kadri Veseli, in a TV appearance in 2009, said that different businesses financed the SHIK and denied any links to political murders. SHIK claimed in June 2008 that it had officially disbanded.

But a US expert on Albanian issues, David Phillips, released a report back in 2010 on the agency, quoting an anonymous source claiming that the supposedly defunct body was still receiving $200 million a year from bribery, extortion, racketeering, and protection services.

The report by the former senior advisor at the US State Department’s Bureau for European Affairs has since been published by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy.

Krasniqi, a former gunrunner and fundraiser for the KLA, who was then living in New York, has been widely fingered as the source of the information.