The region in southern Fujian is called Da Shan (Big Mountain) and it is home to some of the biggest and more lucrative counterfeit factories in the world. These facilities, built deep into the mountain, produce millions of cigarettes a day. ibid.
Tung’s cigarette-smuggling enterprise alone ships between 20 and 50 40-foot container loads of international brand-name cigarettes each month ... Tung owns or controls three container ships, as many as seven ocean-going tankers, and an unknown number of other vehicles. ibid.
The Balkans – war-ravaged, impoverished and traumatised – were about to be transformed into a smuggling and criminal machine that had few, if any, parallels in history. While the world wrung its hands and fretted over the terrible nationalist urges of the Yugoslav peoples and their leaderships, the Balkan mafias started putting aside their ethnic differences to engage in a beathtaking criminal collaboration. ibid.
Throughout most of the 1990s Djukanovic’s country, Montenegro, with a population of just 600,000 (regarded by the rest of the Balkans as a legendary indolent people), was the focal point of a multi-billion-dollar criminal industry that generated income from America through the Middle East, Central Asia, the Maghreb, the Balkans and Western Europe.
Week after week, several tons of illegal cigarette shipments would land at the country’s two main airports. ibid.
The Balkan cigarette trade was linked to the money-laundering of Colombian drugs money. ibid.
Washington was now telling him that if he wanted closer relations with NATO and the EU, it was time to get out of the cigarette business. ibid.
During the 1990s, Spasojevic had established a monopoly on the heroin trade in Belgrade so that, according to the local police, ‘He was processing about 100 kilograms of hard drugs monthly – this was bringing in tens of millions of dollars.’ ibid.
Spurred by his success in moving heroin, Spasojevic wanted to expand his operations by trading in another drug: cocaine ... Spasojevic soon realised that he had hit a goldmine. Cocaine usage in Europe was rising everywhere, with significant new markets opening up in the former communist countries of the East. Spasojevic quickly understood that he was not alone in wanting to exploit the Balkans’ collapsing infrastructure. Another group of people had begun to monitor it very closely. These people lived far away in Colombia. ibid.
It was in the Balkans that it all began nearly a hundred years ago. The First World War: To Arms, Channel 4 2003
Serbia wanted the break up of the Empire. She welcomed national unrest particularly in Croatia and Bosnia. ibid.
Serbia had scattered the Austrian army. ibid.
‘I’ve always wanted to kill legally.’ Inside Story: Dogs of War, BBC 1992, British mercenary
‘A lot of the time you’re doing it for the buzz.’ ibid.
The bloody Yugoslavian civil war has become a magnet for many men attracted to violence. Not since the Spanish Civil War have so many foreigners signed up for another country’s cause. ibid.
‘… Liberated two televisions and a video …’ ibid. mercenary
‘You’re going to get riff-raff; a lot of them.’ ibid. Carl
‘I’m very choosy about the people I work for.’ ibid.
The Hague Netherlands 22 November 2017: A UN tribunal will imminently deliver its long awaited verdict in the war crimes trial of former Serb military commander Ratko Mladic. Storyville: The Trial of Ratko Mladic, news report, BBC 2019
In the 1990s a series of brutal wars raged across the former Yugoslavia. 130,000 people are killed; 4 million were displaced. During the conflicts the United Nations established a court to prosecute war crimes suspects; General Ratko Mladic became their most wanted. ibid. captions
The indictment charged two counts of genocide and five counts of crimes against humanity, namely, persecution, murder, extermination, deportation and inhumane acts of forcible torture. ibid. court judge
President Josip Broz Tito ruled Bosnia and the rest of Yugoslavia for 35 years. His policy of ‘brotherhood and unity’ suppressed ethnic tensions. Following his death in 1980, the country began to fall apart. ibid. captions
Ratko Mladic was in hiding for sixteen years. During that time he suffered a heart attack and two strokes. The Defence will not allow him to testify due to his diminished physical and mental state. ibid.
Peter McCloskey is in charge of the Srebrenica genocide case. General Mladic is accused of murdering over 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. ibid.
The Balkans: President Clinton’s representative, Richard Holbrooke, brought the question out into the open. Suppose elections are free and fair, he said, and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists. That is the dilemma. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head IV: But What if the People are Stupid? BBC 2021
The Balkans, what we tend to call the former states of Yugoslavia, have been a battleground for thousands of years … The former Soviet states began to crumble, and a delicate peace was broken … The most uncivil of civil wars raged. Tony Robinson, Britain’s Forgotten Wars II: Bloodshed in Bosnia, Channel 4 2021
Around 100,000 people lost their lives during the three-year-old bitter, brutal and bloody war. ibid.
Many leaders in the West weren’t sure how to intervene in his highly charged and highly sensitive conflict. ibid.