Recent mass protests are being held in Skopje, capital of Macedonia and these are buttressed with terrorist acts by US trained terrorists, and it just happened that the bloodletting occupied on the 9th of May. There is more involved here than protestors demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski over a series of issues, most notably a series of wire-tappings of political opponents. Gruevski denies these allegations and also makes the usual wild claims about shadowy foreign intelligence services being behind the protests, as if every Macedonian is really behind him.
The line “A stage, big screen and massive sound system are all in place.” raised my eyebrows
no prizes for guessing which wealthy financier is funding the opposition… Vicky’s involved, of course… as I read recently, “Macedonia is another key element in any potential future pro petro-dollar pipeline route, and destabilizing that country may well be the Neocons next agenda”
Naturally Gruvski would deny all allegations things, wouldn’t he? The trouble is, as both Gruevski and his opponents well know, the country was only set up to destabilise others. Like the camel, it was designed by a committee to suit a range of purposes, each one being to cause trouble to a different one of its neighbours rather than achieve anything positive of its own.
Macedonia, like Israel, has been designed to have no future but to provide the source of perpetual conflict, a proverbial flash point, for OTHERS to exploit on an as needed basis. When this is understood, these protests are seen to bear all the marking of something being inflicted on Macedonia by its so called “friends” as they all that its creation is fit for their own needs. If foreign secret services are NOT behind the Skopje protests their heads will be sacked for being asleep at the wheel.
All things to all men
The very existence of a “State of Macedonia” is anathema to many of the people living next to it. Several countries claim all or part of its territory, whilst recognising the de facto state simply to annoy another claimant. Macedonia is a region in Greece that that used to be part of Greece in ancient times. After Macedonia split into a separate independent country it became unrelated to Greece but it kept the name “Macedonia” and refused to change their name to FYROM (former Yugoslavia Republic of Macedonia, which is more politically correct.
In the Western perception, as expressed by the term “Balkanisation”, the Balkans equals an instability which gives the West the right to intervene whenever it wants to restore order. An independent Macedonia keeps the pot boiling nicely on what diplomats would regard as slow news days in the region.
Theoretically the independent state is still known as the “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”. After everything the West did to ensure that Yugoslavia ceased to exist it imposed a name including the word “Yugoslavia” on a newly-independent state. One wonders whether the US would ever accept having its name forcibly changed to “The Former British Colony of the United States of America”.
The name was adopted as a means of pacifying the Greeks, for whom “Macedonia” refers to an historic region of Greece, or something close, to the homeland of the undoubtedly Greek Alexander the Great. Greece has always objected to the use of Macedonian Greek symbols by the modern state, claiming these people who don’t want to be Greek are stealing their heritage.
This issue is more actual in Greece than elsewhere because Greek history has greater continuity than that of most nations, the pre-Christian era being seen as the day before yesterday rather than being separated from now by the mists of time, as it is in most countries. Macedonians claiming Greek heritage whilst insisting they are independent from Greece is an attack on the Greeks of today, not merely history professors. But despite the official use of “FYROM” Greeks are unimpressed and maintain that if there is a Macedonian identity it is a Greek one, however far back you have to go, so the case for an independent state is more than dubious.
Bulgaria has a similar problem. After it had ceased being ruled by Greeks Macedonia was settled by Bulgarian people in what Greeks still refer to as the “Bulgarian occupation”. The official position of the Bulgarian state, and many individual Bulgarians, is that Macedonians are actually Bulgarian and their language is a Bulgarian dialect.
This has been a hot political point in Bulgaria for generations, with Macedonians having been denied a distinct status in Bulgarian administrations of any colour. It is also a practical issue, with many Macedonians regarding themselves as Bulgarian and having Bulgarian relatives, only to now be told they are somehow betraying the new state they have never been citizens of.
Studies carried out by Bulgarians in the West have indeed demonstrated that contemporary Macedonians have far more Bulgarian blood in them than Greek or any other. Consequently, when Macedonia was declared independent Bulgaria immediately recognised the new state but declared that this did not imply recognition of an actual Macedonian nation. It won’t say it, but Bulgaria still dreams of integrating Macedonia into Bulgarian territory, having as much reason as Greece to do so.
Immediately prior to independence Macedonia was part of Yugoslavia. Like the other non-Serb republics it was used to keep the Serbs in check and its separateness was encouraged, provided that separateness was within the context of Yugoslavia, not a greater Greece or Bulgaria.
One of the stunts pulled by Tito was to establish an independent Macedonian Orthodox Church, separate from that of Serbia. This was not recognised by other Orthodox churches, or by many in Macedonia itself. Yet as soon as the country became independent this body demanded recognition as the legitimate national Orthodox Church, regardless of what Church Canon Law says. For Serbs Macedonian independence implies national humiliation, and the imposition of this by the West, the attitude of all former Yugoslav republics towards it being dictated by their own imperatives deriving from the Balkan War.
Faced with such claims independence would seem to be the only way out for Macedonia. But its independence is guaranteed only for as long as it can be held against other nations and cause them to fight amongst themselves. One day the West may not be interested in that. The protests against the long-serving Prime Minister imply that there are other priorities now, and direct control of Macedonia is more important than using it to control others.
Too good to be true
The protestors think they have a multitude of things to accuse the Macedonian government of. Since February opposition leader Zoran Zaev has released a steady stream of recordings of phone conversations by politicians, judges and election officials which he claims are wiretaps, covert surveillance conducted on Gruevski’s orders. Monitoring your opponents in this way is illegal, Zaev claims.
The question remains how Zaev himself got hold of this material. Assuming it is all genuine, he must have access to these tapes which others don’t have, or other agencies such as press bureaux would have released them. Maybe he has a trusted source in the Justice Ministry who is illegally releasing these illegal wiretaps to him. Or maybe they are being released by those who made them to discredit Gruevski, which makes it very unlikely that Gruevski himself authorised them.
It is not difficult for anyone with the right equipment to tap phones. The world knows how Princess Diana had her mobile phone conversations recorded by an amateur sleuth who simply tuned his domestic radio equipment onto the appropriate band within a certain geographical area. If secret service operatives are behind this, as all sides are claiming, it would not be hard for them to produce such material even by splicing together unconnected recordings of the same person.
The fact that these recordings are going straight to the opposition leader, and the government which is supposedly making them is powerless to stop them, indicates that they are either being made by the opposition itself, equally illegally, or by a foreign intelligence service, also illegally. This raises questions about their true purpose as well as their genuineness. Gruevski may in fact be guilty as charged. But what then? Why are so many people seemingly so keen for him to be brought down without the inconvenience of holding an election?
Friends in low places
For instance, Nuland has been charged by Macedonian intelligence with conspiring with Zaev of the Macedonian Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM), (CIA) and Soros operative with all kinds of dirty tricks. Familiar entities are also involved: NGO laundry and dirty tricks operations including the National Democratic Institute (NDI), National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and Freedom House, among others “to foment a themed revolution against Gruevksi’s right-of-center VMRO-DPMNE government.”
These bodies have a track record of changing regimes, and there is a high body count to measure their success. It is public knowledge what lengths will they go to prove American Exceptionalism and no holds barred methods. They get away with murder, regardless of the democratic will of the electors and the political will of those countries on their current hit list. They’ve done it in Ukraine, they did it in Georgia and Central Asia, and they’ve been doing it for as long as they have existed, capitalising on genuine local concerns and turning them into revolutions which espouse something quite different.
Macedonia is another US “friend” in Eastern Europe, so probably believed it was immune to such attacks. That is until Gruevski expressed “reluctance” to go along with sanctions against Russia over Ukraine. He hasn’t actually refused, merely not followed the lead so far. But the US thought it had bought him off, so is now applying its funding and energies to Zaev’s opposition party, despite the fact they are the former Communists, strange bedfellows for American conservatives who actually proclaim some principles; however, ones they fail to practice.
Protesting too much for a reason
One characteristic of people who are trying to find any justification for their actions is to exaggerate the situation to suit themselves. For example, everyone knew who would win presidential elections in Communist Albania, but still the official figures had to say that over 95% had voted for the incumbent to justify the repressive policies of that regime, which knew very well they were morally wrong and not actually supported by most Albanians.
Gruevski’s opponents maintain that he has wiretapped 20,000 people. The German reporter who broke the original story claimed such figures were impossible, but saw his story altered by other hands to serve some other agenda. Gruevski maintains that this is further evidence of a foreign-directed plot against him. When he rounded up the alleged ringleaders they were found with large amounts of US money in their bank accounts, which tends to confirm his suspicions, as Macedonians’ have nothing to sell Americans but cheap labour.
But that is ultimately the point. All the things the unelected and unaccountable Nuland-Soros axis are interested in have one common theme – energy. The people who complained about Russia’s “energy blackmail” of Ukraine when it tried to claim the money it was owed and stop thefts are now seeking the means of doing exactly the same thing to everyone else.
Unable to control world energy supplies, and therefore those who receive them, through Russia’s pipeline projects the West has come out with a number of half-baked schemes for bypassing Russia which their own investing governments are lukewarm about, even when it is greatly to their political advantage to support them. Will we ever see NABUCCO, for instance? But for any of them to actually work, they will have to involve Macedonia’s territory and labour.
Conclusion
The US thought that by guaranteeing Macedonian independence it would win an eternally grateful ally and keep other countries in the region at bay by creating a mutually destructive tinderbox of fires waiting to ignite. Macedonia is taking “independence” so it must be neutralised by any means possible, as to go up against Turkey and Greece is too much to handle. The proposed alternative pipeline needs to be blocked, at any cost, so to punish Russia, Turkey and Greece for not toeing-the-line. This will send a message to other countries what will happen to them if they step out of line.
But how will that message be interpreted now? The US is banking on the growing tide of anti-EU and anti-Western feeling in both halves Europe being made to go away with cash, as it has been before. But the Greek elections have already shown that this can’t be relied on any more. A US-funded coup in its own creation might just unite all the enemies of that creation into a collective force too great for any number of pieces of silver to resist.
Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
