While the world’s attention is focused on the Middle East, as usual, where ISIS – the creation of Washington’s Saudi and Gulf allies – is the focus of the latest alleged “terrorist threat,” a potentially more dangerous crisis is being ramped up by our professional regime-changers in the volatile Balkans.
The Russian-Turkish plan to pipe Russian gas through Turkey and then on to Macedonia and thence into southern Europe has long been opposed by the West, which is seeking to block the Russians at every turn. Now the Western powers have found an effective way to stop it: by overthrowing the pro-Russian government of Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski.
The original plan was for the pipeline to go through Bulgaria, but Western pressure on the government there nixed that and so the alternative was to pipe the gas through Macedonia and Greece. With the Greeks uninterested in taking dictation from the EU – and relatively impervious, at the moment, to Western-sponsored regime change – the Macedonians were deemed to be the weak link in the pro-Russian chain. That was the cue for the perpetually aggrieved Albanians to play their historic role as the West’s willing proxies.
After a long period of dormancy, suddenly the “National Liberation Army” (NLA) of separatist Albanians rose up, commandeering police stations in Kumanovo and a nearby village earlier this month. A 16-hour gun battle ensued, with 8 Macedonian police and 14 terrorists killed in the fighting. The NLA, which reportedly received vital assistance from Western powers during the 2001 insurgency, claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Simultaneously, the opposition Social Democratic Union party (SDSM) – formerly the ruling League of Communists under the Stalinist Tito regime – called for mass demonstrations over a series of recent government scandals. SDSM has lost the last three elections, deemed “fair” by the OCSE, with Gruevski’s conservative VMRO-DPMNE (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity) enjoying a comfortable majority in parliament. But that doesn’t matter to the “pro-democracy” regime-changers: SDSM leader Zoran Zaev declared “This will not be a protest where we gather, express discontent and go home. We will stay until Gruevski quits.”
Sound familiar?
Macedonia has a long history of manipulation at the hands of the NATO powers, who nurtured the Muslim-Kosovar insurgency to impose their will on the components of the former Yugoslavia. As in Kosovo, the Albanians of Macedonia were willing pawns of the West, carrying out terrorist attacks on civilians in pursuit of their goal of a “Greater Albania.”