The Brooklyn Connection

a film by Klaartje Quirijns

 

The Brooklyn Connection tells one man’s story of building a guerrilla army. Florin Krasniqi, a successful 40-year-old immigrant from Kosovo now living with his family in Brooklyn, helped launch the Kosovo Liberation Army in the late 1990s. He did it by raising some $30 million and buying high-powered sniper rifles – weapons that were and still are legally purchased – in the United States. He transported the weapons to Albania, again legally. From there, Krasniqi and his gang smuggled the weapons on donkeys or horses to Kosovo.

You might think that the laws passed since the 9/11 terrorist attacks might have rendered it impossible for Krasniqi to do today what he did then. But if Krasniqi were to shop for a guerrilla army today, not only would he remain as unhindered as he was then, he would have access to an even wider variety of weapons because Congress let a 10-year ban on assault rifles expire in September.

And in fact Krasniqi is still shopping. Although the war ended in 1999, Krasniqi says there is still unfinished business to take care of in Kosovo. The current situation remains  unacceptable both to Serbs and Albanians.
“If we don’t get independence, there will be another war. Probably in a year or so. We were capable of luring NATO into our war, so I think we’ll be capable of pushing the UN out if we need to,” Krasniqi says.
At the same he and his compatriots are preparing for war, they are also actively lobbying powerful American politicians. Both Wesley Clark and Richard Holbrooke recently attended one of their fundraising events.

In The Brooklyn Connection, Krasniqi gives a lesson on how to use the United States as a launching pad to wage war abroad, how weapons available on the open market in the United States often fuel guerrilla armies, terrorist organizations and organized crime beyond America’s borders. When it was broadcast in the Netherlands in September, one of the leading Dutch dailies, De Volkskrant, called it “overwhelmingly good...The ease with which he is able to buy the guns is terrifying. The crew had tremendous access to film everything and showed how Krasniqi operates.”

The film was inspired on Stacey Sullivan’s book Be not afraid for you have sons in America, the remarkable story of how a small group of young men in Kosovo backed by a network of émigrés in the United States started a guerrilla army that lured the world's most powerful military alliance into fighting their war and changed the course of history in the Balkans forever. The film was first shown on September 5 2004, as the season’s first episode of the Tegenlicht strand of documentaries presented by VPRO, a Dutch national broadcaster.

The film is produced in association with P.O.V./American Documentary Inc. and was presented in P.O.V., PBS’s award-winning non-fiction showcase in the Summer of 2005.

For more information see the PBS/POV website.

The Brooklyn Connection was selected for the prestigious IDFA Festival (Amsterdam, November 2004), for the Full Frame Festival (North Carolina, (April 2005) and the Tribeca Film Festival (New York, April 2005). The film was awarded The Special Jury Prize of the 3ème Festival International du Film des Droits de l'Homme, in Paris (March, 2005).

 

Director - Klaartje Quirijns
Camera - Martijn ‘t Hart
Sound - Robert Poss, Francisco LaTorre
Editor - Katerina Wartena, Rob Fruchtman

Produced by George Brugmans, Klaartje Quirijns

A Quirijns/Amago/VPRO/Sullivan/’t Hart production

Distributed by Films Transit International   

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