The Republic
of Macedonia was rocked by a large-scale terrorist attack on Saturday
when over 40 armed individuals fought with police for control of the
city of Kumanovo close to the country’s capital.
The attackers were
from the so-called “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA), a former terrorist
group that was thought to have been disbanded after NATO occupied the
Serbian province, and Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski said that some
of them had received their militant training in the Mideast.
The combined
carnage wounded 37 police officers and killed 8 of them, while
ultimately eliminating 14 terrorists and leading to the capture of 30
others.
The
fighting has raised serious concern that the flailing Color Revolution
attempt ongoing since January may desperately coordinate with the
ethnically shaded Unconventional War, as both destabilizations are
directed from abroad and have the shared objective of regime change.
If they
succeed in overthrowing the government, then the forces behind them can
sabotage Russia’s Balkan Stream project and formalize the creation
of Greater Albania.
Complex Contexts
The chaotic
events in Macedonia are occurring in a complex environment, but the
contexts associated with them can roughly be divided into the domestic
and international categories:
Domestic:
Democratically
elected Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and his government have been
fending off a Color Revolution attempt since the beginning of the year,
and thus far, they’ve been relatively successful in avoiding the
“opposition’s” provocations to escalate the crisis.
Zoran Zaev,
the Color Revolutionary figurehead, was charged at the end of January
with conspiring with an unnamed foreign government to stage a coup
d’état, yet this hasn’t stopped him from continuing to call for regime
change. His campaign has sought to cultivate and exploit youth
grievances in order to acquire the illusion of critical mass needed
to attract overt international (Western) support for his plot.
Their
loyalty is exceptionally important because ethnic Albanians constitute
over a fifth of the country’s population and largely inhabit the border
regions with Albania and the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo, thus
meaning that their defection to the regime change movement would be
catastrophic not just for the government, but also for the country’s
very existence.
The main
reason they support the authorities is because the government endows
them with the best minority rights afforded anywhere in the world as a
result of the 2001 Ohrid Agreement. They largely understand that their
forced incorporation into Greater Albania would do away with these
generous privileges and subordinate them to second-rate citizens in the
irredentist state, thereby doing away with their former role
as first-rate ones in multiethnic Macedonia.
In fact,
they may not even feel like citizens at all in a Greater Albania,
since if Albanians in “Kosovo” are any indication, then hundreds
of thousands of them may flee from their failed “state” and completely
abandon it to the terrorist and criminal gangs that made it
“independent” in the first place.
International:
This brings
about the necessity in discussing the project for a Greater Albania,
which Tirana threatened to bring about as recently as last month.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama warned
that his country would “unite” with the Serbian province of Kosovo
whether the EU supports such a move or not, calling the forthcoming
annexation “inevitable and unquestionable”.
In what
Albania would like the world to believe was just a completely random
occurrence, the dormant KLA terrorist group was suddenly revived and
carried out what now appears in hindsight to have been a test-run terrorist attack late last month near Gosince.
It should be clear
at this point that the two pervious provocations are intimately
interconnected with the catastrophe in Kumanovo, and that all three
of them combine to form the war cry for a Greater Albania.
But there’s
an even larger international component at play here, and that’s the US’
obsession with derailing Russian-European energy cooperation via the Balkan Stream pipeline, the de-facto successor of South Stream. Envisioned as an expansion of Turkish Stream, it’s projected to carry Russian gas from Greece to South Stream’s former Serbian hub, critically passing through Macedonia en route.
Accordingly,
if Macedonia is thrown into chaos and/or its government is illegally
removed, then Balkan Stream becomes a pipedream (pun intended) and would
never get built, hence why the combined Color Revolution and
Unconventional War have been unleashed on the geostrategic country. The
destabilization in Macedonia is thus essentially a Western proxy war
against Russia in the context of the New Cold War.
Not Civil War, But External War
Many in the
foreign media are saying that the terrorist attacks could herald in a
possible civil war between Albanian and Slavic Macedonians, but such an
assessment is misleading, and in the case of Western reporting,
purposely so.
To channel Syrian
President Bashar Assad as regards his own country’s conflict, what is
happening in Macedonia “is an external war carried out by internal
elements.”
Most of the
attackers were Macedonian citizens (the others being Albanian and
“Kosovan”), but many of them received their highly specialized training
in the Mideast, a euphemism meant to signify ISIL.
Their adept
and lethal handling of sniper rifles, explosives, and automatic weapons
proves that they weren’t run-of-the-mill drug-trafficking thugs and
lends convincing credence to this claim.
Furthermore,
these terrorists were professionals and were planning to carry
out coordinated large-scale attacks against soft targets such
as sporting events and shopping malls prior to their interception by the
authorities, and they had already stockpiled loads of arms (many
of which were consequently used against the police) in anticipation
of this.
The
revival of the KLA and its latest terrorist violence are meant
to provoke Albanian Macedonians into abandoning the government and
siding with the militant irredentists.
The concept
of Greater Albania is an emotionally charged tool designed to increase
the country’s destabilization and consequently facilitate regime change
in conjunction with the simultaneous Color Revolution attempt. It
endeavors to craft the illusion of consensual acceptance by all
Albanians, even though this clearly isn’t the case at all.
In fact, it
can be said that the resort to ethnically affiliated terrorism indicates
desperation on the side of the external anti-Macedonian actors,
since they recognize that this is the last option they have in trying
to get the Albanians to turn against the government and instigate a
racial and religious division of society.
The
conspirators wouldn’t utilize such extreme methods if they felt they
could achieve their objectives in a simpler manner, such as through
intelligence-front NGOs or by ‘legitimately’ winning them over to the
side of the Color Revolutionaries.
The violent,
last-ditch effort to christen Greater Albania through a sea of killings
testifies to the fortitude of Albanian Macedonians in heretofore
resisting this tempting Fascist-era ideology,
hence the need to export Wahhabist ISIL terrorists to this latest New
Cold War theater in order to mangle Macedonia and break Russia’s Balkan
Stream plans.
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