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Trump Pretends To Be Running US Foreign Policy From Mar-a-Lago

Trump Pretends To Be Running US Foreign Policy From Mar-a-Lago

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday suggested he's running a shadow government out of his Mar-a-Lago golf club in Florida, saying he sent an "Envoy Ambassador" to the Kosovo-Serbia border to help the two nations work toward "peace."

"The great people of Serbia and Kosovo have overcome tremendous obstacles in their pursuit of economic normalization," says a statement released by Trump's Save America PAC in which he describes himself as the "45th President of the United States."

Trump says, "The agreements my administration brokered are historic and should not be abandoned, many lives are at stake. The region is too important and the people have waited too long for this work to be cast aside. Today, my Envoy Ambassador Ric Grenell visited the Kosovo-Serbia border to highlight this important agreement."

Trump's statement raises eyebrows, not least because in 2019 he accused former Secretary of State John Kerry of violating the Logan Act for talking to Iran when Trump was president and called for Kerry to be prosecuted over it.

The Logan Act, enacted in 1799, prohibits unauthorized American citizens from conducting foreign policy. The law states:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

"What I'd like to see with Iran, I'd like to see them call me. John Kerry speaks to them a lot, and John Kerry tells them not to call. That's a violation of the Logan Act, and frankly he should be prosecuted on that," Trump said at the time, adding, "Only the Democrats do that kind of stuff."

The leaders of Serbia and Kosovo visited the White House in September 2020 to highlight the "Washington Agreement," two separate documents each signed by one of the countries that Trump called "a major breakthrough." The "agreement" was aimed at normalizing relations between Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, and Serbia, which has so far refused to recognize it as a sovereign state. The agreement has not put an end to ongoing issues between the two, including continuing violence at their shared border.

Now Trump is apparently sending Grenell — a Trump defender who came under fire during his three months as acting director of national intelligence during the Trump administration for politicizing American intelligence — to conduct foreign policy on his behalf.

What's more, Grenell himself also attacked Kerry during an appearance on Fox News in April, accusing him of "constantly undermining what the Trump policy was" on Iran.

It's unclear whether Trump is actually violating the Logan Act. When he accused Kerry of doing so, experts said he was misinterpreting the law and using it for partisan purposes.

"Folks will be upset at this as Trump violating norms, undercutting U.S. foreign policy, and hypocritically doing what his administration castigated others for doing when he was POTUS," Daniel Drezner, an international politics professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, tweeted. "I will instead be laughing at 'envoy ambassador' and the permanent beclowning of Ric Grenell."

In a statement to reporters, the White House dismissed Trump's claim that he had an "Envoy Ambassador" traveling to the Kosovo-Serbia border.

"Outside of his very active imagination, Donald Trump is no longer President and doesn't have any 'envoy ambassadors' representing the United States," an unnamed White House official said, according to Bloomberg News' Jennifer Epstein.

Updated to include a statement from the White House.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

In Syria, The First Step Down A Dangerous Road

In Syria, The First Step Down A Dangerous Road

For the moment, Donald Trump’s bombing of a military airfield in Syria has earned him a measure of success that has eluded his bumbling and malevolent administration during its first three months in office. No doubt he is thrilled by admiring coverage on cable television; by endorsements from voices on the left and right, outraged by Bashar Assad’s latest atrocity against the Syrian people; and by the ultimate distraction from the Russia investigations, the failure of Obamacare repeal, and the ongoing warfare within his White House.

 Whatever Trump’s motives, he was hardly alone in wanting to punish Assad for the chemical weapons attack on Khan Shaykoun. Millions shared the fury that Trump claimed to feel when he saw video of children and infants who died terribly in that village. And the more sober imperative, to discourage the use of poison gas by any regime, is longstanding American policy for good reason.

 But impulsive military action, lacking any strategic plan or even broader rationale, is no more likely to end the Syrian civil war than the lack of action after Assad’s last, and even worse, chemical assault outside Damascus four years ago. Having opposed President Obama’s initiative to punish Assad following that attack, Trump clearly has no idea what to do now that his missiles have landed. Nor do Congressional Republicans, whose enthusiastic support for Trump’s action today rings hollow for anyone who remembers how they rejected Obama’s request to authorize military force in 2013.

 By now, such partisan vacillation about military action is all too familiar, especially among Republicans. In 1999, when Bill Clinton decided to act against Slobodan Milosevic’s incipient genocide against Muslims in Kosovo, nearly every Republican on Capitol Hill denounced his interventionism in the most strident terms.  According to them, the worst war crimes in Europe since World War II were simply not America’s concern. Carping Republicans mounted a series of absurd arguments on the floor of Congress.

If the NATO bombing campaign against Serb forces didn’t achieve surrender within a week, it had failed, they said. If NATO nations weren’t ready to send in ground troops, they should do nothing. And if the West didn’t prevent genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, and East Timor, then Western nations should ignore catastrophic violence and the threat of a far wider war. Fortunately, Clinton ignored them.

But only three years later, the same Republicans who had opposed Clinton’s surgical policy in Kosovo endorsed a wholesale invasion of Iraq, with calamitous consequences that both the United States and the entire Mideast must endure. It didn’t matter to them that Bush had essentially ignored the United Nations and violated his own pledge to allow UN weapons inspections to be completed before any US military action. Indeed, it didn’t matter that the entire rationale for the war — the supposed existence of chemical, biological, even nuclear weapons in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal — was premised on exceptionally weak evidence.

Worse still, the Republicans permitted Bush to invade Iraq in March 2003 — which he ordered after contemplating regime change there since early in his presidency — without a plausible exit strategy. The war’s advocates promised a “cakewalk,” a chance to profit from Iraq’s oil, an easy war and an easy way out, which many found persuasive at the time, apparently including Donald Trump. We all know how that worked out.

What will happen this time?  It is impossible to predict what kind of policy will be pursued by Trump, whose previous declarations about Syria (and Russia) probably encouraged Assad to think he could escape accountability for any crime he commits. He issued one strident tweet after another, demanding that Obama stand down after Assad’s 2013 gas attack. (Maybe he didn’t look at the videos, or they didn’t show enough children dying.) It is possible to predict, however, that inconsistent actions motivated by presidential emotion are sure to fail. Already the airbase struck by US missiles on Thursday appears to be back in service — and Assad has exercised many other methods of massacring civilians, including tens of thousands of children. Symbolic retaliation doesn’t accomplish much.

So have Republicans — or hawkish Democrats — learned anything from the military and diplomatic history of the past two decades? At least some politicians of both parties appear to understand that rushing into conflict with Russia and Iran — without an international coalition, without any United Nations support, without conclusive proof that Assad perpetrated the chemical attack, without any notion of a strategy to end the war, instigated by an understaffed administration whose commander-in-chief has absolutely no idea what he is doing — marks the first step down a very dangerous road. 

Extremists Worry The Balkans, Europe’s Muslim Heartland

Extremists Worry The Balkans, Europe’s Muslim Heartland

By Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

GORNJA MAOCA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — One day in early February, the black flag of the Islamic State appeared on the roof of a dilapidated home in Gornja Maoca, an isolated hamlet in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The flag was gone when the police arrived, and whoever hoisted it was never found. But the episode reaffirmed to Bosnian officials and Western intelligence agencies that the settlement, peopled by followers of Saudi Arabia’s puritanical brand of Islam, known as Wahhabism, has ties to the networks that have recruited hundreds of Muslim men from across the Balkans to fight in Syria and Iraq.

“It is fair to say that it (Gorjna Maoca) is perhaps the biggest center of extremism in Bosnia,” said a Western intelligence official. He spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss sensitive information with a journalist. While the region hasn’t seen the kinds of mass terrorist attacks that have shocked France, they wouldn’t be a surprise, the official said: “We’ve seen aspirational plotting.”

Most of the men who’ve left the Balkans to fight in the Middle East come from Bosnia and Kosovo, parts of former Yugoslavia whose independence was secured by U.S.-led military interventions in the 1990s. Nearly half of Bosnia’s 3.8 million people are Muslim. Kosovo, whose 1.8 million population is 95 percent Muslim, arguably is Europe’s most pro-American country. A statue and massive portrait of former President Bill Clinton overlook a thoroughfare named after him in the capital, Pristina, where there’s also a street named for George W. Bush and a boutique named for Hillary Clinton.

Since the wars, the United States and its European partners have spent billions of dollars and years of diplomacy trying to help build the two nations into stable democracies. Yet both countries are mired in dysfunctional governance, pervasive corruption, ethnic divisions and poverty-fueled despair, conditions that have boosted the appeal of hard-line Islam, the seeds of which were planted, ironically, with the help of some of America’s closest Arab allies.

And even as Balkan men fight in Syria and Iraq, mostly with the Islamic State, fundamentalists at home are intensifying attacks on the legitimacy of the liberal version of Islam that’s evolved in the Balkans over centuries. The result is mounting fears that the assault on traditional Islam will intensify, fueling insecurity, and that Bosnia and Kosovo could become pathways to the West for deeply radicalized jihadis.

“For these conservative radical groups, their first purpose is to take over the Muslim community of Kosovo,” said Ramadan Ilazi, the country’s deputy minister for European integration and an expert on political Islam. “It’s a real challenge.”

Even if they don’t indulge themselves, most Balkan Muslims tolerate drinking and smoking. They eschew Islamic-style beards and veils and rarely — if ever — attend mosque. They freely mix with the opposite sex and members of other faiths, and marry non-Muslims.

Some traditional clerics who’ve spoken out against extremism have been harassed, assaulted and forced out of their mosques. They’ve had their sermons disrupted and have been denounced as infidels on videos and radical websites that condemn traditional Islam as apostasy.

On Monday in Bosnia, an alleged Islamist extremist died in an attack on a police station that killed a Bosnian Serb officer. In November in Kosovo, two American women serving as Mormon missionaries were assaulted by suspected extremists, two of whom were later charged, along with five others, with plotting terrorist attacks. An expatriate Kosovar was convicted of raking a bus with gunfire in 2011 at Frankfurt Airport, killing two U.S. soldiers, Germany’s first fatal attack by an Islamist. In 2013, a Bosnian court convicted a Wahhabi of planting a bomb that killed a Bosnian Croat police officer.

Reporters who’ve investigated Islamist groups and the recruitment of fighters, and politicians who’ve sounded alarms about creeping fundamentalism, have received death threats.

“Anyone who is not like them is (considered) a nonbeliever,” said Alma Lama, a Kosovo Assembly member who’s sought police protection for herself and her family because of “thousands” of threats triggered by her denunciations of hard-line Islam and its denial of women’s rights. “These guys are inciting hatred between religious groups and gender hatred.”

“The radicals are threats to us traditional Muslims, not to Serbs and not to Croats,” said Shaykh Edin Kukavica, a Bosnian cleric of Islam’s mystical Sufi branch who recently received a text message warning him that “the arrow is on its way.”

While the number of hard-line Islamists in both countries is very small, officials agree that just a few who acquire combat skills in the Middle East is too many.

“Even if only one person had gone, it would be a problem, and we are taking this problem very seriously,” said Amir Veiz, the director of counterterrorism for the State Investigation and Protection Agency, the Bosnian state police.

Both countries have stepped up crackdowns on extremists, officials say, and are coordinating closely with U.S. and European intelligence agencies to throttle the flow of men and women to Iraq and Syria, where as many as 160 Bosnians and some 300 Kosovars, some with their families, are said to be fighting. A few joined the Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s Syrian wing, but the bulk enlisted with the Islamic State.

Still, Kosovo, with its small population, remains the largest per-capita European contributor of fighters to the Islamic State, and some experts say both governments initially minimized the problem to cover up their failures to act earlier and to avoid alienating powerful religious conservatives.

“I had information that 150 to 200 people were fighting, but the government said there were only 10,” said Vehbi Kajtazi, a journalist at Kosovo’s main independent newspaper, Koha Ditore, who charged that he was pressured to stop writing about the issue. “The government was trying to suppress this, but they couldn’t because the problem is a big issue for Kosovo.”

“We are already a bit late, I think, and this is why this is an emergency situation in terms of the need for a response, a response that is comprehensive economically speaking, socially, politically,” said Ilazi, Kosovo’s deputy minister for European integration.

Hard-line Islam was carried to the Balkans by hundreds of mostly Arab foreign fighters who helped Bosnia’s Muslim-led government, hamstrung by a U.N. arms embargo, resist the country’s dismemberment by Serbia and Croatia in a war that lasted from 1992 to 1995. A much smaller number joined the ethnic Albanian rebels who fought for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.

The foreigners — many of whom later are thought to have joined al-Qaida — were Takfiris, radicals who embrace violence in rejecting secular politics, culture and other faiths, and seek to return to the “pure” Islamic rule that they believe was founded by the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh-century Arabian Peninsula.

They were backed by funds from Saudi Arabia and other U.S. Arab allies, and their proselytizing was reinforced by a flood of Islamist charities offering money, food and educational training in return for devotion to their hard-line practices.

Virtually all the foreigners eventually left — a few married Bosnian women — but the charities stayed. Flush with cash in struggling, war-damaged societies, they won devotees by expanding aid programs, rebuilding mosques and constructing new ones, supported by officials who welcomed the money and the patronage of powerful Muslim countries, experts said.

The charities “found a fertile place here,” said Denis Hadzovic, the head of the Center for Strategic Studies, a Sarajevo policy institute. “They began to be more aggressive in their behavior and their efforts to promote another approach to Islam.”

While the Bosnian and Kosovar governments shuttered more than a dozen Islamist charities during crackdowns last year, the organizations’ influence is widely apparent.
Skullcapped men wearing Islamic-style beards and Arabic dress now are a common sight in the villages and cities of Kosovo and Bosnia, where their baggy, calf-length trousers are derided as “floodwater pants.” Young local clerics trained in fundamentalist seminaries in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries are running mosques.

Stores selling Islamic women’s garb — including veils and head-to-toe coverings — religious texts and videos, halal food and other Arabic goods are clustered around Pristina’s Ottoman-era mosques, sharing streets with Western-style boutiques and bars offering martinis and mojitos.

In Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, sidewalk vendors hawk the same wares outside the Saudi-built King Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud Cultural Center, the largest of its kind in the Balkans.

The center — with its Saudi-style mosque — is run by Saudis with diplomatic status, adding to the discomfort of many Sarajevans unnerved by the Gulf-funded mosque-building and Arab property investments such as the Hotel Bristol, where alcohol is banned.

“I try not to have any contact with these radical people in mosques or elsewhere,” said Adnan Talic, 54, a cobbler whose tiny shop in Sarajevo’s centuries-old Ottoman market is thick with the sweet scent of newly tanned leather. “We are afraid of them, but ignoring them is my way of fighting radical Islam.”

Several men in Gorjna Maoca denied any ties between the village and violent groups.

“We are good Muslims. We are true believers, and just as we don’t want anything bad to happen to us, we don’t want anything bad for anyone else,” said a bearded, skullcapped man working in his driveway. Like the others, he declined to give his name during a recent visit by McClatchy.

“More attention is being given to the way we look than is warranted. More attention was given by the media to that flag, and it represented nothing. Maybe the children put it there,” the man replied when asked about the display of the Islamic State flag, pictures of which were published by local media.

Current and former Bosnian security officials tell a different story, saying the hamlet is linked to extremist networks that run from Western Europe through the Balkans into the Middle East.

More than a dozen men associated with the village are among the Bosnians who’ve gone to fight in Syria and Iraq, they said. One of them, Emrah Fojnica, 23, blew himself up last August, killing 23 people in Baghdad. In 2011, the settlement hosted a Muslim from Serbia who’s now serving an 18-year jail term for spraying more than 100 bullets at the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.

Possible U.S. ties to the extremist networks were highlighted in February, when a federal grand jury in Kentucky indicted six Bosnian immigrants on charges of sending money, military uniforms, combat boots and other military goods to Bosnians fighting in Syria and Iraq.

Political analysts, moderate clerics and other experts in Bosnia and Kosovo blame senior political and religious leaders, charging they ignored the creeping extremism for years. The leaders were happy to let Islamist charities reconstruct war-damaged mosques, build new ones, and provide aid and educational programs in return for devotion to their brands of Islam.

The few Bosnians who spoke out were publicly denounced by some political and religious leaders as “Islamophobes,” said Senad Pecanin, a co-founder of Dani, a crusading investigative magazine that he left in 2010 to practice law. “For years they were attacking anyone who was warning about the threat.”

In Kosovo, moderate clerics and political experts charged that the official Islamic Community, the independent body that oversees Islamic affairs, had been taken over by conservatives who’ve been replacing moderate imams with fundamentalists in a bid to appease radical elements and ensure continued financial support from the Middle East.

“I saw that I couldn’t get help from anyone, from the government, from the Islamic Community,” said Musli Verbani, 49, a moderate cleric whose car was fire-bombed in 2006 in what he charged was an intimidation campaign that led to his 2011 replacement by a hard-liner as imam of the main mosque in the southern Kosovo town of Kacanik.

Vedat Sahiti, an adviser to Kosovo’s chief Islamic cleric, Naim Ternava, denied that the Islamic Community had succumbed to Islamist influence and said the organization didn’t accept foreign aid.

“We don’t take money from the Middle East,” said Sahiti, shortly before proudly pronouncing that the organization’s new headquarters and seminary were built with funds from the Saudi and Qatari governments.
Critics noted that 15 clerics, including the then-grand mufti of Pristina’s main mosque, were among 55 people detained in August and September crackdowns for allegedly promoting violent extremism and recruiting fighters for Syria and Iraq.

Shpend Kursani, a senior researcher at the Kosovar Center for Security Studies, a policy institute in Pristina, said the crackdowns last year had slowed the flight of young men to Syria and Iraq but that now he was seeing whole families going.

As part of an in-depth study, Kursani has been interviewing young Kosovars who’ve returned from Syria and Iraq. One has a master’s degree in international relations, while 37 percent had police records before they embraced radical Islam, he said.

What they all shared, he said, was little hope of a better future and bitter disillusionment with the corruption and nepotism that infect all levels of Kosovo’s political system. Even the anti-corruption mission in Kosovo run by the European Union is under investigation on suspicion of corruption.

Another factor contributing to radicalization, experts and officials said, is that many Kosovars feel betrayed and isolated by the West.

The country’s 2008 declaration of independence still hasn’t been recognized by the United Nations or all 28 EU members, making Kosovo the only Balkan country whose citizens need visas to travel to EU countries. They can, however, travel without visas to nearby Turkey, the crossing point to fight in Syria and Iraq.

Meanwhile, Serbia refuses to renounce its claim to its former province, and it continues to exert enormous political influence through Kosovo’s tiny Serbian minority and its representatives in the legislature.

“We have all the elements of a failed state,” said Kursani. “The state cannot provide security to its citizens.”

(c)2015 McClatchy Washington Bureau, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: An elderly woman begs on the main pedestrian thoroughfare in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, Europe’s poorest country. (Jonathan Landay/McClatchy/TNS)

Special-Effects Expert’s Hollywood Path Began In Albania With Detour In Warring Kosovo

Special-Effects Expert’s Hollywood Path Began In Albania With Detour In Warring Kosovo

By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — Gunfire from a dying war echoed in the distance as Ergin Kuke, who didn’t know it at the time but was destined for Hollywood, hustled through a mountain night. Tanks clattered. Paramilitaries roamed. Kuke had spent days translating for journalists. He had escaped death at least once, and now, with a bump of cash in his pocket, he hailed a battered cab at the Kosovo border and headed south.

He arrived in Tirana, Albania, hours later, stepping into the house of his father, a well-known director. Although he spoke six languages, Kuke had been aimless before the war. He partied too much and drifted through the cafes of Europe’s poorest country. But upon his return from Kosovo in 1999, he spent long hours in his father’s studio and grew fascinated by the art of special effects.

“You had to teach yourself. There was no Internet, no way to learn it,” said Kuke, a child of communism who embraced an emerging democracy by shaving question marks in his hair and binge-reading Jack Kerouac. “Whoever went abroad brought a book back on technology.”

Kuke today is creative director and special-effects supervisor at Mind Over Eye studio in El Segundo, California. He was part of a team nominated last year for an Emmy for the documentary “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.” He has worked on big-budget films, including “The Polar Express” and “Superman Returns,” commercials for Jaguar and Chrysler, and music videos for Britney Spears and Beyonce, whom Kuke described as “her own perfectionist.”

Countless roads lead to Hollywood. Many are straight shots down interstates, some squiggle through the heartland, and others are curious odysseys spanning cultures and nations. Few arrive at fame, but livelihoods are built, passions sated. Kuke landed here 14 years ago with the promise of a green card and acceptance into Gnomon School of Visual Effects not far from Paramount Pictures. He moved in with his best friend from back home, Dorian Ahmeti, a poet and film student.

Hollywood parses success in uneven degrees. Actors and celebrities can become global brands, but most of its workers, like Kuke, make their names in smaller, specialized worlds. They are the unseen forces behind the spectacle: artists, designers, writers, programmers, gaffers, and armies of others whose ingenuity propels ideas, scripts, music — and often whole franchises — into the mass consciousness.

“This business is like any other. It has its dirty laundry, but if you work hard you can make it,” said Kuke, 39, who is skilled in live-action and animation. “I’m not a special-effects director racking up Oscars. I’m respected in my profession for what I do, and I think I’m good.”

“He’s a phenomenal hybrid,” Jennifer Chavarria, head of production at Mind Over Eye, said of Kuke. “He’s a great artist and can visually conceptualize. He’s extremely passionate and driven. There’s a certain honesty in his passion that is rare in this industry.”

Kuke’s journey has had its dark parts and ragged stretches. Years ago, he told a reporter he was traveling with in Kosovo that one day they’d meet in L.A. Several months ago they did. Kuke smiled and said, “Man, it’s been a while. A lot’s happened.” The two sat in a downtown tavern and talked. It was a warm night and Kuke’s sleeve was rolled up, revealing a tattoo on his forearm written in his mother tongue: “We are getting ready for the new crusades. We are captains of starships.”

Kuke is lean, speaks in whispers, moves like candlelight; he has combed-back hair, an on-again, off-again beard and the sly charm of a Balkan cardsharp. He has taken to L.A., flitting through traffic on a Kawasaki motorcycle, a satchel slung over his shoulder. He looks to his homeland with a vagabond’s nostalgia.

Albania is a land of clans and mountain myths. Kuke grew up in the capital, Tirana, a city of drizzle and fascist-inspired architecture that drew in communists, gangsters, and provincial men with outsized ambitions. Albania was Europe’s most hermetic nation, led for decades by Enver Hoxha, an invasion-fearing former partisan who built hundreds of thousands of army bunkers that rose like gray blisters across the land. Hoxha died in office in 1985 and the ensuing years were marked by a shift from state control to capitalism that culminated in a series of pyramid schemes that bankrupted peasants and professionals and sparked an uprising.

Kuke’s father, Pali, who accepted a loan from a tribal baron to buy studio equipment imported from Germany, was known for documentaries and television shows. “It took us five years to pay back the loan,” said Kuke. His mother, Zerina, was a TV variety host and a book editor. “There were always books around.” he said. “I wrote poetry in high school and published an underground newspaper. I was also into sci-fi and fantasy.”

He eventually won a scholarship to the American University in Bulgaria in the unsettled era that followed the end of the Cold War.

“Angst, that was our lives,” he said. “Generation X-type bull. No money. My room was a library of stolen books. We were out every night. I started using heroin and by my third year in college ended up failing four out of five classes. I lost my scholarship and returned to Tirana.”

He worked for his father, designing computer graphics and conjuring “spinning globes” on TV shows. Kuke had known film and television since he was a child. When he was 10, he auditioned and won the lead in a “communist family movie” but didn’t take to acting. His favorite boyhood scent, he said, was not the spotlight but the “dust burning off the back of overworked tape decks and studio racks.”

Kuke was 24 when war broke out in neighboring Kosovo, another in a string of unresolved territorial disputes from the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. Journalists streamed into Tirana to pick up supplies, fixers, and translators before heading north into the mountains. It was good money for the locals, especially multilinguists like Kuke. He hired on with two U.S. journalists, following tanks into villages, stepping past mass graves, watching tracers streak the night. The images have bothered him ever since.

“I’ve tried to block that out,” he said. “But it’s like a film in the back of my memory.”

Upon his return from Kosovo, Kuke stayed busy with studio work. Despite his lack of training in anatomy and color theory, he was accepted as a part-time student at the Gnomon school. He received his visa on September 10, 2001. “The next day my dad woke me up,” he said. “He told me, ‘You won’t believe what’s happened.'” Two weeks later, Kuke was on a plane to Los Angeles, where for a century foreign artists and filmmakers had been welcomed by Hollywood. He moved in with his friend in Valencia.

“Ergin was a scrawny guy who smoked like a chimney,” said Yas Koyama, a fellow student at Gnomon who later started a special-effects company with Kuke. “He’s artistic and has a great eye. He always had a knack for visual effects, color correction, and finalizing shots.”

School tuition and other expenses rose to $40,000. Gnomon couldn’t grant Kuke an extended student visa because he wasn’t enrolled full time, so even though he spoke perfect English, he signed up for a Korean-English language school to get one.

After graduation from Gnomon, he worked at Sony for two years, most of it spent on the special-effects team for “The Polar Express.” He was hired by Rhythm & Hues Studios in 2005 and spent six months of 12-hour days to perfect special effects on five shots that amounted to about 15 seconds of screen time for “Superman Returns.” Kuke grew restless. “I was a prisoner of the visa,” he said. “Whoever I worked for held my visa. But I wanted to be out on my own.”

Retracing the past was like pulling out a long ago map of blurred lines and indelible symbols. Kuke paused. His eyes wandered and came back. He had stopped using heroin before he left Albania, a promise to his father. But the drug stayed part of his life in unexpected, tragic ways, the kind of ways people find difficult to fit into the narrative of who they’ve become.

“The only option for a green card was a fake wedding,” he said. “I met a girl online. We had been dating for about two months. She agreed to marry me so I could get a green card. We were wed in a strip mall in the city of Industry. We had fake flowers and lollipop rings. She was a photographer and ex-junkie. She was a tortured soul….I went with her to police stations and rehabs. But I couldn’t take it anymore. We divorced.”

Kuke also lost his best friend, Ahmeti, the countryman he shared an apartment with. “He didn’t make it in L.A. and he returned to Albania’s gloom and doom,” said Kuke. “He went back to the bad ways. He became self-destructive, and he died. He was a mad poet. He was epic. Something in him gave up.”

Kuke pushed his hair back and looked ahead.

In 2006, he and Koyama started Angst Vfx, a visual-effects company. Angst was a play on words; shorthand for “angstrom,” a unit to measure wavelengths, that also described the anxiousness around a venture founded in Kuke’s bedroom with two computers and a few USB sticks. Their first big job was for McDonald’s, followed by music videos.

The company moved to an office in Venice, but the recession hurt business and Angst folded in 2009. Kuke said he was free of obligations. He decided to take a trip across his adopted land. He and the woman he had fallen in love with, Allie Nelson, packed up a motorcycle and drove 16,000 miles in 41 days, traveling the four corners of the U.S., from the glacier region of Montana to the Florida Keys.

“What is America?” he said. “It’s good people doing their thing. It’s massive. You go from pockets of civilization to (he smiles) Texas.”

The couple returned and Kuke signed on with Mind Over Eye, a multiplatform media company where surfboards and guitars hang on the walls and the staff works with drones and 3-D augmented reality and things that blip and buzz in a long building that has the blue-glow aura of the inside of a submarine. Kuke has lately been concentrating on “anthem films” — three- to four-minute clips for car companies that feature sleek men and women, shiny automobiles, cityscapes, and mountain vistas.

He and Nelson married and live in the Miracle Mile. They have a daughter and another child on the way. He occasionally thinks of returning to Europe. “But it will always be there,” he said, sitting in his office. “There’s no rush.” He looked toward his bookcase. Behind science fiction paperbacks stood a framed photograph of a cup of espresso next to a snifter of brandy. He smiled.

It reminded him of Tirana and of all the stories, songs, and poetry that slipped across countless cafe tables and carried him and his friends — the frustrated, restless children of a new era — through long evenings as rain fell and plans were made for escape.

Photo: Don Bartletti via Los Angeles Times/TNS