One
year ago, those who spoke of a possible return to Balkan rivalries
would have been dismissed as fear mongers, nationalists, or worse,
but lo and behold, 2015 has vindicated those individuals and provided
irrefutable proof that intra-regional tension is brewing in the Balkans.
The overwhelming surge of refugees traversing the region en route
to the EU was initiated by Turkey, which made the political decision
to release interned Syrian refugees and send them westward.
Erdogan's intent was to use the resulting
problems they'd create as a form of blackmail in ‘negotiating' an
accelerated path to EU membership for Turkey, and judging by the latest
meeting he held with Merkel, the bloc is cowering in the face of his
bullying and seems ready to cave in.
Everybody's talking about the two nodes of the refugee crisis —
Turkey and Germany — but it seems like the world has forgotten about the
unwilling geographic link between them, the Balkans, which has had
to bear the brunt of this human flood much more than any of those two,
and is now at serious odds with itself over this manufactured crisis.
The Turkish Strongman Is Strong-Arming The EU
Erdogan knew what he was doing when he finally set the hundreds
of thousands of interned Syrian refugees loose from their camps, and it
was to engender such humanitarian, social, and political crises in the
EU that the bloc would be forced to grovel before him in begging the
strongman to stop the flow at any cost. That's what happened when he
traveled to Brussels and made the outrageous demand that the EU pay his
country billions of dollars and give it a shortcut into the
organization, proving that he intended to use the calculated refugee
flows as blackmail all along.
There's a geostrategic aspect to all of this too, and it's that
Turkish membership in the EU would totally transform the balance
within it and create yet another obstacle to its possible reconciliation
with Russia.
The EU would be so internally weakened, and its powers so diluted,
by Turkish membership that a country with only 3% of its given territory
in the continent would be in a position to indefinitely spoil any
of its future outreaches to Russia.
This would obviously play to the US' grand strategy of separating the
EU and Russia, so it's for this reason why the US takes such outlandish
actions as
bombing a power plant in Aleppo.
It keenly knows that the worse it can make living conditions in Syria,
the more refugees it can motivate to flee to Turkey, and with this, the
more human pawns Erdogan can sacrifice in his quest to checkmate the
European continent.
"Good Fences" Make Bad Neighbors
There's a common aphorism that "good fences make good neighbors",
but that surely doesn't hold true for the Balkans. The former Yugoslav
states, despite the 1990s history of internecine violence between some
of them, had been carrying on quite peacefully with one another in the
past decade, and that's without any fences between them. Once they
started coming up this year, however, that's when regional relations hit
a downward spiral, and as is typical in Balkan history, some states
started blaming and teaming up against Serbia.
Hungary
couldn't take the refugee flows any longer and controversially fenced
off Serbia this summer, which diverted the refugee flows to Croatia and
Slovenia. Zagreb is now following the lead of its former imperial
sovereign in Budapest in constructing its own anti-Serbian fence, and
Slovenia has just called in the military to reinforce its border
with Croatia and is provocatively entertaining he possibility of its own
"border fortifications".
What's being forgotten amidst the ‘fence race' is that Serbia isn't
the cause of the problem, it's Turkey, and that Greece is the
‘frontline' country most responsible for halting this flow.
Athens hasn't ever tried to do anything constructive to stem the
refugee tide that's been crashing into the Balkans, but the tiny
Republic of Macedonia is a different matter. It took a valiant stand
in protecting all of Europe last August by temporarily closing its
border with Greece, but after a vicious information campaign was waged
against it and its requests for international help were largely
rebuffed, it had to backtrack and reopen the border. Greece has proven
itself to be a lost cause for border control by this point, but if the
EU and its Croatian, Hungarian, and Slovenian members really wanted
to halt the refugee flows, they'd urgently help the Republic
of Macedonia build its own border fence, the only one that could make a
real and effective difference.
Refugee Riots
The situation is very critical at the moment, with thousands
of disaffected refugees on the verge of rioting all throughout the
region. Although they were only in Slovenia for just a couple of days
already, refugees there
torched one of their own camps
in a sign of just how uncontrollably frustrated these "new neighbors"
are becoming. Serbia is worried that the Hungarian and Croatian border
fences will turn the country into one big refugee camp, with tensions
at risk of boiling over both because the country doesn't want them and
the stranded refugees don't want to be there in the first place.
In such a situation, Serbia wouldn't become a refugee camp, but a colony.
Evidence from analogous camps and ‘host' countries all across the
world proves that refugees are more likely to procreate the longer they
remain in one place, and Serbia would be no exception. If one defines a
colony as being created when a large foreign population enters a region
and begins populating it against the desires of the native inhabitants,
then Serbia is at risk of being colonized. This process already happened
in the Province of Kosovo with tragic results, but now it's occurring
all throughout the country, and the "new neighbors" once more don't want
to assimilate or integrate.
All
of this is perfectly okay with Turkey, however, since it seems to have
given up on its Neo-Ottoman dreams in the Mideast and has now set its
sights back toward the other land that it had previously occupied
for centuries, the Balkans. Its neighborhood proxy in Tirana has its own
regional ambition of Greater Albania that would greatly facilitate what
Turkey is trying to achieve, and it's telling that both Balkan
troublemakers are NATO members. Disturbingly, however, some Albanian
forces have taken to terrorist means to achieve this shared goal, as was
witnessed by the "Kosovo Liberation Army's"
deadly shootout
in the Macedonian city of Kumanovo in May. The return of Albanian
terrorism and Turkey's plans to geo-culturally transform the Balkans
raise serious concerns about what kind of regional disaster could unfold
if the KLA armed disaffected refugees stranded in the Balkans and
provoked them to riot in order in advance of this grand strategy.
The refugees themselves are not personally at fault for their
plight — one must remember that they're just pawns in a larger game
being orchestrated by the US and Turkey — but one should also keep
in mind that just as the US was created by European "refugees" in North
America, so too might a Neo-Ottoman Empire be revived by their
contemporary Mideast analogues in the Balkans.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the
author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
Protesters took to the streets of Podgorica to call for the
resignation of the country’s prime minister, Milo Djukanovic, over
alleged election fraud and corruption, urging the formation of a
transitional government.
