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Thomas R. Mockaitisemerged as democracies during the past decade and a half. Large areas of theireconomies are black or grey, generating little or no tax revenue. As a result,governments can devote few resources to controlling long, porous borders.Low pay for police and civil servants invites corruption, which facilitates illicitactivity.Organized Crime: Transnational organized crime poses the greatest threat tothe security and stability of individual states and the region of South EasternEurope as a whole. The region’s location at the crossroads between Asia andEurope and the weak governance factors already identified make it an idealsmuggling route. Organized along ethnic/kinship lines, crime syndicatesnonetheless have achieved a degree of cooperation beyond anything achievedby states. Criminals move contraband cigarettes, gasoline and compactdiscs throughout the Balkans and into Western Europe. However, the mostpernicious activities are trafficking in narcotics, human beings and weapons.Opium (and the morphine and heroine derived from it) constitutes the bulkand the most profitable of narcotics trafficked through the Balkans. Removalof Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which had suppressed poppy cultivation, andthe continued instability of the country have caused production to skyrocket.In 2006, Afghanistan accounted for 92% of the world’s opium production,most of it bound for Western Europe (World Drug Report 2007, 10). Thedrugs move west along three main routes: directly to the United Kingdomvia Pakistan, northwestward through Central Asia and Eastern Europe,and westward through Iran, Turkey and the Balkans with the Balkan routecarrying the greatest load (World Drug Report 2007, 45). Within that regionKosovo has emerged as a staging area, where opiates arriving from Albania andMacedonia can be stored and repackaged for shipment into Western Europe viaMontenegro and Serbia (Anastasijevic 2006, 4).This distribution route gives a competitive advantage to Albanian criminalgroups, whose ethnic community has large populations in Kosovo andMacedonia, as well as Albania proper and large diaspora communities inTurkey, Austria, Germany and Switzerland (Anastasijevic 2006, 4). Albaniandrug lords cooperate closely with their Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgariancounterparts. They typically ship heroin into Kosovo from Macedonia,storing it in towns along the eastern border with Serbia. They thenrepackage the narcotic and smuggle it across the loosely controlled borderto the Serbian town of Presvo, just fifteen kilometers from the international27