Tobacco.org

Criminal gangs running the Balkans 

For under the pressures of war, sanctions and economic collapse, south-eastern Europe has become one vast factory of criminality, turning over vast quantities of migrants, prostitutes, tobacco, guns and drugs, most of which are destined for the world's largest market - the European Union.

The Balkan mafias have sunk their claws into every limb of the former Yugoslavia. Cigarettes produced in Macedonia's three tobacco enterprises are packaged illegally as perfect Marlboro replicas and distributed via Serbia to central Europe and, above all, via Kosovo and Montenegro into Italy.

Behind every apparent nationalist crisis in the region lies a much seedier squabble between mafia bosses . .

The Macedonian crisis, when Albanians and Macedonians almost went to war in late March and early April, was sparked in part by a dispute over the control of the lucrative illegal tobacco smuggling operation into Kosovo.

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