The Bara Free Zone, like similar areas in Dubai and other ports, was originally intended to help it become a transshipment hub, avoiding lengthy customs procedures for goods destined for onward transport. Instead, it became a haven for smugglers, the New York Times reported.
In the text, they emphasize that Montenegro now says that it is determined to stop cigarette smuggling, but also that it is a dangerous business.
"Smoking kills, but the millions of cigarettes that slipped through the concrete warehouses of the main port of Montenegro on the Adriatic Sea were particularly deadly. A long list of journalists and investigators have lost their lives, as have criminals involved in the illegal cigarette trade that, with the tacit blessing of the United States, has been a major industry for Montenegro since the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Now Montenegro says it is determined to shut down the smuggling trade," NYT reports.
"Everyone knew what was happening, but no one wanted to touch it," the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of security told their reporter. Dritan Abazovic.
He told them, as he writes, that everyone talked about smuggling, but that no one did anything: "Including the international community...When you don't want to do something, you always say there is no alternative."
The text states that European countries lost billions of dollars in tax revenue because cigarettes, both real and counterfeit, were stored in the Adriatic port of Bar and transported from Montenegro to the west with the help of forged documents.
Abazović also told the NYT that he received death threats because of his anti-smuggling efforts:
"This is a very dangerous job".
The NYT points out that one of the reasons why cigarette smuggling has survived intact for so long is that it was protected and even controlled by the country's longtime leader Milo Djukanovic, who first became prime minister in 1991 in Yugoslavia, which included Montenegro.
Đukanović told them that there was "a lot of exaggeration" regarding cigarette smuggling.
"Initially an ally of the nationalist leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic - who was later accused of genocide and died in a cell in The Hague in 2006, Mr. Đukanović turned against Mr. Milošević in the early nineties, becoming a favorite of the West. He was particularly close to the United States, which tolerated smuggling activities that earned money that helped strengthen the position of the Montenegrin leader towards Serbia," writes the NYT.
The NYT recalls the recent statement of the former US ambassador to the state union of Serbia and Montenegro William Montgomery - that then they turned their heads and decided not to see the smuggling:
"Everyone knew what was happening, but we allowed it because he brought Đukanović the money he needed against Milošević," Montgomery told Croatian Nedjeljnik at the time.
He declined to discuss the matter with a NYT reporter.
"They convinced people that this is a state job. They pushed the story that the money from smuggling was intended for pensions and the state," Abazović told them, adding that it was not true: "They stole this money from the country."
Abazović also told them that the new government will try to identify those responsible for unexplained murders from the past, which could be the work of the "tobacco mafia", but he added: "People connected with smuggling are extremely strong".
That newspaper reports that cigarette smuggling was initially aimed at Italy, where gangsters there joined forces with Montenegrin smugglers to transfer cigarettes across the Adriatic by speedboats, but that in recent years it has shifted to other destinations throughout Europe and the Middle East.
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