Word: funded
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some help is beginning to flow in from overseas Albanians. At the head of these multinational fund-raising networks are men such as Switzerland-based Jashar Salihu, a thickly mustached Albanian with a sharply dimpled smile that gives him the aura of a Balkan Tom Selleck. Salihu's Homeland Calling Fund, which has offices around the globe, often channels the money it raises--by courier, in cash--to K.L.A. field commanders, who use it to buy weapons and supplies. Sometimes the flow approaches several million dollars a month, he claims...
Another key fund raiser is Bujar Bukoshi. One of the two would-be Prime Ministers of a still nonexistent Republic of Kosova, the Bonn-based Bukoshi claims that his government-in-exile has spent more than $4 million on arms and supplies for the K.L.A. in the weeks since NATO bombings began. At Bukoshi's request his "finance minister"--extremely nervous and clearly on edge--presents a computer printout that he says documents part of the Republic of Kosova Fund's holdings in a bank in Tirana, Albania: more than $33 million...
Though each disparages the other's methods and motives, Bukoshi and Salihu say they are doing everything they can to get money out of the Albanian diaspora and into Kosovo. The contributions they elicit fund both humanitarian aid to Albanian civilians and, according to Homeland Calling's chief for Germany, military aid for the K.L.A...
Overseas Albanian fund raising, on a much smaller scale, has been going on since the early part of the decade, when Milosevic began cracking down on the province. From 1991 onward Bukoshi's "government" was collecting a tax of 3% from most of the estimated 600,000 Kosovar Albanians who worked in Western Europe, especially Germany and Switzerland. (Patriotic Kosovars were encouraged to set up standing orders with their banks to pay the tax every month...
...hard to sort out how much of the millions of dollars raised overseas is spent for weapons and how much for humanitarian aid. K.L.A. fund raisers in the U.S. insist that the money they contribute to Homeland Calling is used for medical supplies and food. But last year the Swiss government froze one Homeland Calling bank account because Salihu refused to promise its funds would not be used to buy arms...