Macedonia: "Greater Albania" Rises?

 
Sputniknews

10:45 06.05.2017

Andrew Korybko

The recent actions of the pro-Albanian opposition in the Republic of Macedonia have renewed the years-old Balkan fear that foreign powers are trying to create “Greater Albania” by hook or by crook.
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The SDSM opposition party and its Albanian allies tried to swear in former ethno-supremacist militant Talat Xhaferi as the Speaker of Parliament during a closed and illegal session, but were prevented from doing so at the time by the throngs of Macedonian patriots who swarmed into the building and chased them out of it. The legitimate authorities denounced this blatant attempt to assemble a ‘shadow government’, though the US openly supported it, creating yet another rift between Washington and Skopje. Many in Macedonia have accused the US of being behind the country’s two-and-a-half-year-long political unrest, and the American move convinced a lot of people that the US is pursuing its own interests at their expense.

The popular perception is that the two Color Revolutions which Macedonia has beaten back since 2015 were organized by the US and its Soros ally in order to topple the government and thereby disrupt Russia and China’s Balkan megaprojects which are planned to transit through the country. When these schemes failed, speculation has been rife that the US ordered its SDSM proxy to partner up with the Albanian minority in the country in order to tip the long-awaited parliamentary elections in their favor. The ruling VMRO-DPMNE party narrowly won but was unable to form a governing majority because its traditional Albanian political partners suddenly refused to join them in a coalition. In fact, all Albanian minority parties were ordered to go to the Albanian capital of Tirana where they received strict instructions from that foreign government about the conditions that they would place on their membership in any coalition.

These demands have been rightly called the “Tirana Platform”, and they include radical socio-political changes to the diverse country’s political fabric, going far and beyond the generous privileges afforded to the Albanians by the 2001 Ohrid Agreement and calling for what would eventually amount to the internal partition of the country. Macedonians of all political stripes were justifiably very concerned when SDSM agreed to these conditions and sneakily succeeded in getting Xhaferi in office, frighteningly seeing this as the first step for carving a “Greater Albania” out of their ancient country.

Marija Kotovska, Macedonian TV news reporter currently working as a correspondent in Athens, and Goran Putica, former editor-in-chief of influential Skopje radio station Chanel 103, supporter of Civil Initiative for United Macedonia, commented on the issue.