Balkan Express

REDUX

George Szamuely wrote on Saturday how the Macedonian crisis was a replay of NATO’s 1998-99 conquest of Kosovo. In many respects, he was right: an Albanian militant movement arises seemingly out of nowhere, claims to be a "Liberation Army" fighting for human and ethnic rights, then demands negotiations and international military protection.

If Jiri Dienstbier was right, and the NLA fought not for rights, but a Greater Albania, does that mean the KLA fought for Greater Albania as well? Just as – gasp – Slobodan Milosevic and his government had claimed?

A NATO CREATION

It is obvious even to the uninitiated that without NATO intervention, the KLA would have been destroyed and pushed into Albania. What is less known is that it might never have been formed to begin with. There would have been no Kosovo war, no Presevo valley, no Tetovo.

The truth is something much worse altogether: NATO (with the US government pulling the strings) actually helped create and train the KLA as we know it, after the destruction of the initial movement in 1998. This new KLA was no more a tribal Jashari militia, but a force at NATO’s beck and call.

London’s Sunday Times reports on March 18 that the KLA cadres now fighting in Macedonia were trained by the British SAS "in the secretive training camps that operated above Bajram Curri in northern Albania during 1998 and 1999" – that is, before NATO began its war over Kosovo!

A genuine American war hero, Col. David Hackworth (Ret.), says as much in his recent WorldNetDaily column:

"For months our CIA has secretly trained, funded and supplied former Kosovo Liberation Army rebels conducting a guerrilla campaign into southern Serbia to undermine former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic – exactly the same kind of operation our spooks supported before and during the war against Serbia over Kosovo." (emphasis added)

Not only did the US train the "new" New KLA in Presevo – it had done so in Kosovo to begin with.

So there it is: the US trained and funded, in Hackworth’s own words, "one of the most cutthroat gangs of terrorists in the world," then launched a war of aggression on its behalf two years ago. The result was an occupied Kosovo, ethnically cleansed of most non-Albanians, where Serb, Jewish and Roma houses burned along with the hundreds of their churches and synagogues, and the KLA was in charge.

The evidence is preponderant, damning, and impossible to ignore – unless one is a paid shill or a fervent believer in NATO’s cause (whatever that might be), methods and ethics be damned.

NATO and the United States bear the largest share of responsibility for the events of the past two years – the destruction, the ethnic cleansing, the destruction of culture and history, but also terrorism, separatism and environmental poisoning. And now, for the Albanian insurgence that threatens to destroy what little fragile peace may be left in the region.

GIANTS IN THE PLAYGROUND

There is plenty of credible evidence for the claim that Western influence was crucial for the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Third Balkan war (1991-1995), with its policy of recognition and support for separatist client states. Yugoslavia may have been condemned to failure because its national question had never been resolved, but the US policy that supported that collapse certainly made it much worse.

People of the Balkans, however flawed, appear to have been nothing but pawns in a deadly game of imperial politics, played for higher stakes than some villages or a couple of square miles of territory.

This game took its toll on the Serbs, as the only pawns that refused to play as they were commanded. Serbia is now deteriorating by the day, as it turns out that the Milosevic disease was also its life-support mechanism. But other, more pliant and cooperative peoples have been through hell as well. Empire’s glory road has been paved with the bones of Balkan vassals, as well as enemies.

THE FORLORN

Croatia is in an economic abyss, selling off state property and treasures to the lowest bidder just to scrape enough money for next months’ pension payments, not to mention foreign debt servicing. Few have the luxury to remember the days when Croatian legions marched against exhausted Serb civilians in a glorious campaign to bring peace to Bosnia by destroying it.

Bosnia itself is a paradoxical confederacy, a colony-protectorate ruled by kleptocrats and foreign adventurers, the number of its people steadily dwindling as they leave for countries where one can believe in something more than survival. Montenegro is still a gangsters’ paradise, at least until the US aid trough is empty and the impatient, emboldened minorities present the butcher’s bill.

Even Macedonia, which had steered wisely through the Balkan maelstrom and avoided bloodshed, colonization and crushing poverty, has now come under attack by an enemy within – an enemy trained and equipped by the West for a different purpose, the same West which "protected" Macedonia for all these years and used it as a parking lot for invasion armies and refugees with high propaganda value.

JUDGED BY HISTORY

In all likelihood, NATO and the US are not destroying Macedonia out of malice. They are just unable to react as their trained attack dogs are doing the destroying, because that would mean disavowing their allies, confessing to their disastrous policy, and admitting their responsibility for what is happening. Washington’s political creed has always been "Deny everything," while the US in general suffers from a pathological denial of responsibility, lest it be used against them in a court of law. The court of history, however, is not nearly so forgiving.

The Macedonian Army’s "final assault" on the NLA around Tetovo is likely to mark the beginning of a bloody war in that country. The blood of that war will be squarely on NATO’s hands.

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Macedonian Maelstrom

EMPTY WORDS, HOLLOW PROMISES

DISTRACTION TACTICS