A leading criminologist said yesterday that the rebels fighting in the hills of Macedonia and southern Serbia were the paramilitary wing of an Albanian mafia exporting drugs and trafficking in humans to Europe and beyond.
"Every mafia needs two things - a safe home territory, and a diaspora. The Albanians now have the diaspora through the refugees from the Kosovo war.
"Their home base is in these areas," said Mr Xavier Raufer, a researcher at the Paris Institute of Criminology and author of The Albanian Mafia.
The guerrillas' stated aim is to protect the ethnic Albanian minority in Macedonia, which they claim is oppressed by the Slavic majority, and although their latest offensive has been condemned around the world, international bodies have called on Skopje to do more to ensure equal rights.
But Mr Raufer said that since NATO and the United Nations took over Kosovo, it has become a lawless paradise for organised crime.
The latest guerrilla offensives on the margins of the province were a fight to control two key points on a smuggling route known as the "Balkans Golden Triangle", he said.
Guerrillas based in a demilitarised zone on the Kosovo border last year seized control of the southern Serbian town of Veliki Trnovac, which experts regard as a key depot on the route bringing heroin and immigrants from Turkey and central Asia into Europe.
The rebel-held town, which Mr Raufer describes as a "Balkan Medellin", is a prosperous settlement connected to Kosovo by forest tracks.
In January, armed rebels in the uniform of the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac were seen guarding the route and teams of civilian workmen were maintaining the forest roads.
The rigorously enforced honour code of the Albanian clans - the so-called "besa" - is as strong an incentive to keep quiet as the Mafia's law of omerta but some Albanian Kosovars privately admit that Veliki Trnovac is a drug-smuggling centre.
And one Western intelligence expert said of the town: "It is always one of the points marked in red in maps of the international drug routes."