RT: Kosovo wants to establish an army and has received several Humvee armoured vehicles from the USA. Although there was official NATO restraint, how much is the establishment of a Kosovo Army a fixed development?
Marcus Papadopoulos: Kosovo is, effectively, a NATO protectorate today – and has been ever since Belgrade lost control of this Serbian province in 1999. It follows, therefore, that the illegal entity which is the Republic of Kosovo will begin the process of creating its own armed forces so that, in time, Kosovo will gain entry into NATO.
RT: The EU has rejected the introduction of Kosovo sanctions against Serbia and is concerned about the Kosovo army. How will the militarisation of Kosovo affect Serbia’s relations with the European Union?
MP: The European Union, at the behest of the US and NATO, is pursuing Serbian membership of the economic bloc so that this will greatly enhance the West’s control of the Balkans. And the Serbian Government, which is a pro-Western puppet one, is publicly condemning developments in Kosovo but in private is preparing the ground to recognise the independence of Kosovo, possibly through amending Serbia’s constitution so that Kosovo is left out of it, or on the basis of a land-swap between Belgrade and Pristina. Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, who has very close ties to Germany and the US, wants to deliver to his masters in the West Serbia’s recognition of Kosovan independence so that he can indefinitely preserve his hold on Serbia.
RT: The question of the Serbian minority in Kosovo remains unresolved. Still it is an important leverage for Belgrade in Kosovo. However, there are no concessions from Pristina that rejects an autonomy status. In which direction is this dispute moving, which also depends on the question of Kosovo’s independence?
MP: The illegal authorities in Pristina might be prepared to enter into a land-swap with Belgrade in order to allow Serbia to recognise Kosovo’s independence. We must be aware that the authorities in Belgrade and Pristina are firmly in the West’s political orbit hence both want to satisfy their Western masters (the West wants harmony between its colonies – Serbia and Kosovo – hence why it must resolve the issue of Serbia recognising Kosovan independence). A possible land-swap could involve northern Mitrovica going to Serbia and the Presevo Valley going to Kosovo.
RT: Do you think President Vucic will finally be forced to recognise Kosovo’s independence?
MP: Vucic cares about two things and two things only: maintaining his leadership of Serbia and satisfying his Western masters hence why he has permitted NATO to have supervisory offices in key Serbian institutions, such as the Defence Ministry. Vucic cares nothing for Kosovo and Metohija; if he did, he would have nothing to do with both NATO and the EU and he would not participate in meetings with American and European officials about Kosovo’s future. Kosovo and Metohija is legally, politically and historically an integral part of Serbia hence there is nothing to discuss about its future, especially with the very parties who tore the province away from Serbia.
One of the very few Serbian politicians who sincerely cared about Kosovo and Metohija was Oliver Ivanovic but he was assassinated in January of 2018. No one has been charged with his murder. It is widely believed that those responsible for his murder are hiding in Belgrade, with full protection from Vucic’s government. My own suspicion – and one widely shared by Serbs – is that he was murdered by the Serbian state because he stood in the way of Serbia’s recognising Kosovo as an independent country (Ivanovic was very popular amongst ordinary Serbs in Kosovo and Serbia in general).
RT: The Kosovo army will be a relatively small one, which, at first sight, will be less of a challenge to the Serbian security forces. What is Belgrade’s real concern when it comes to establishing an army in Kosovo?
MP: The concern amongst genuine Serbian patriots is that the illegal authorities in Kosovo could ignite an arms race between Serbia and its Kosovan province, which could ignite a war between the two and draw in neighbouring countries. The Balkans is one of the most volatile parts of the world. Furthermore, the illegitimate army in Kosovo will be manned and led by people who were members of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, a terrorist and organised crime network.
RT: What role would the Kosovo Army play from a regional perspective, bearing in mind that Croatia, Montenegro and Albania have joined NATO? After all, Serbia also conducts military exercises with NATO, but doesn’t that also create the feeling of being surrounded?
MP: As a result of Montenegro being a member of NATO, this means that NATO, in effect America, now controls the Adriatic Sea, which is of immense geo-strategic importance – this is what past empires had vied with each other, over hundreds of years, for control of, including the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. By Kosovo having its own army, this will pave the way for the province to eventually join NATO and thereby strengthen the West’s stranglehold of the Balkans. And one day, after Serbia has recognised Kosovan independence, Serbia will join NATO, too.
RT: To what extent is Russia, which is on Belgrade’s side on the Kosovo issue, perceived as an alternative political partner to Western actors among political elites in Serbia?
MP: Vucic says that he is carrying on Tito’s policy of non-alignment, meaning that Serbia is aligned neither with the West (US and NATO) nor the East (Russia). In practice, however, Vucic has moved Serbia even deeper into the West’s sphere of influence. And Russia is only too aware of the duplicitous game that Vucic is playing hence the tension between Vucic and Putin. But in reality, Russia doesn’t have as much influence in the Balkans as some people think. The West took hold of the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s and early 2000s, when Russia was reeling from the end of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Alas, it is very difficult for Russia to operate in the Balkans now, including in Serbia and Montenegro which are both run by governments whose key personnel have been chosen by Washington and Brussels.
RT: In addition to Russia, Serbia is cooperating increasingly closely with Turkey and China. This cooperation is primarily of an economic nature, but Turkey is also regarded as one of Kosovo’s biggest supporters and is now increasingly investing in Sandzak. Is there any hope in Belgrade of persuading Turkey to make political concessions in Kosovo in the long-term?
MP: Serbia is not run by patriots but by traitors, crooks and mobsters who have sold the country’s industries and resources to foreign players, including Turkey. The Turks are historic foes of the Serbs so there should be very little cooperation, if any, between Belgrade and Ankara but, alas, Serbia’s leaders do not care about their country, people, history and culture; rather, they care about preserving their positions of privilege and keeping their colonial masters happy. After all, why would the Serbian Government allow Turkey to stir up tension in Sandzak if they cared about Serbia’s territorial integrity? Turkey is a key strategic ally of the West hence the treacherous authorities in Belgrade are told to cooperate with Ankara. What has happened in Serbia since October 2000, is extremely sad and depressing.
Originally published on 2018-01-06
About the author: Dr. Marcus Papadopoulos specializes in Serbia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia.
This article was originally published on RT Germany in Deutsch.
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Last movie by famous French movie maker Paul Moreira on Canal+ (France) broadcasted 01/02/2016.
Some French citizens are now shocked after discovering the truth about the Odessa massacre and the Euromaidan bloody coup in 2013/2014.
Interview to Paul Moreira:
http://www.humanite.fr/derriere-les-masques-de-la-revolution-ukrainienne-597568
Preview screening on January, 20th 2016 at FIPA Biarritz 29th edition, selected out of competition in Reportages and Investigation – Panorama of Creation category.
Without them, there would have been no Ukrainian revolution.
In February 2014, paramilitary groups fought against the police in the streets of Kyev and ousted President Yanukovych. They settled a new government.
According to the western media, they were the revolution heroes. They ...
Terrorists attacked the Macedonian city of Kumanovo on 9 May, but one wouldn’t know that by reading the Western media’s reaction to the tragedy, despite the fact that they typically mention that 8 police officers were killed and another 37 wounded during the firefight. The media’s disingenuous ‘reporting’ reeks of ulterior motives, which is evidenced most visibly by their reluctance to use the word terrorist without putting it in questionable quotation marks, but also takes more subtle forms such as casting suspicion on the government for complicity in the attack and/or inferring that the attack was some type of legitimate ...
“Reform always provokes rage on the part of those who profit by the old order.” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order
Who are the anti-Trump protesters besmirching the name of progressives by pretending to be progresives and by refusing to accept the outcome of the presidential election? They look like, and are acting worse than, the “white trash” that they are denouncing.
I think I know who they are. They are thugs for hire and are paid by the Oligarchy to delegitimize Trump’s presidency in the way that Washington and the German Marshall Fund paid students in Kiev to ...
Many articles in the US press have speculated at length in an attempt to define a new ideology called “Putinism.” The pieces serve as an attempt to fit Putin into an outdated Cold War narrative, as if some new ideology in the Russian Federation is playing the role that Marxism-Leninism once played in the Soviet Union, though the current Russian constitution forbids this.The notable leaders of history are rarely ideologues. History judges people mainly by what they achieve, not what they write or say. As Chinese President Xi Jinping recently put it: “The worth of any plan is in its ...
What one native American can tell you.
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Marko Attila Hoare rejects and suppresses this factual image of Bosnian history in favor of a fantasy or delusional image from a television comedy. The real Heinrich Himmler (Heimlich Bimmler) reviewing the real or “historical” Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division Handzar, 1943.
Did the Bosnian Muslim Army and Government reform or recreate the infamous Nazi SS Division Handzar or not? Based on Martko Attila Hoare’s response to my article, Hoare now concedes that, indeed, there was a formation in the Bosnian Muslim Army termed the “Handzar Division”.
Let me reiterate that. Hoare admitted that the Bosnian Muslim Government did indeed reform the ...
According to Israeli Intelligence News Source
This article was first published in September 2014. Can we believe Hollande and Cameron? Evidence confirms that NATO is behind the recruitment of “jihadist terrorists
While NATO leaders in Newport Wales [September 2014] debate the Atlantic Alliance’s role “in containing a mounting militant threat in the Middle East”, it is worth recalling that in 2011 at the outset of the war in Syria, NATO became actively involved in the recruitment of Islamic fighters.
Reminiscent of the enlistment of the Mujahideen to wage the CIA’s jihad (holy war) in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war, NATO headquarters ...
The grossest thing in American society is the reactionary sentimentality that fill our gossip infected hearts with a chemical reaction every time one of our supposed war heroes moves on to a more peaceful place. The carefully rehearsed statements from useless political figures numb our minds as all those who are sane must collectively wonder what on earth has a fusty bag of bones like John McCain ever done for us? Donald Trump was once new to the political scene and was still capable of burning bridges that were worth burning. It was Mr. Trump’s finest moment when he said ...
Introduction
Despite having the biggest military budget in the world, five times larger than the next six countries, the largest number of military bases – over 180 – in the world and the most expensive military industrial complex, the US has failed to win a single war in the 21st century.
In this paper we will enumerate the wars and proceed to analyze why, despite the powerful material basis for wars, it has led to failures.
The Lost Wars
The US has been engaged in multiple wars and coups since the beginning of the 21st century. These include Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Palestine, Venezuela and ...
Russia, Oil and Revolution
By the 1870s, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Empire had a virtual monopoly over the United States, and even many foreign countries. In 1890, the King of Holland gave his blessing for the creation of an international oil company called Royal Dutch Oil Company, which was mainly founded to refine and sell kerosene from Indonesia, a Dutch colony. Also in 1890, a British company was founded with the intended purpose of shipping oil, the Shell Transport and Trading Company, and it “began transporting Royal Dutch oil from Sumatra to destinations everywhere,” and eventually, “the two companies merged ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.Save
A few months ago I received a message from a professor at the Khomeini Institute for Education and Research in Tehran, Iran, informing me that my 2010 book “War and Empire: The American Way of Life” (London, Pluto Press) had been translated into Farsi. He requested that I write an Introduction for Iranian readers. What follows is that Introduction. Two years ago the Xinhua Peoples’ Press in Beijing, China also published a translation in Mandarin.
In the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s 1991 attempt to annex Kuwait, the U.S. deliberately destroyed much of Iraq’s water and sewer infrastructure. The Pentagon even admitted ...
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1. Kosovo is not ancient Albanian landIts very name comes from the Serbian word “kos,” meaning blackbird. Its Albanian name, “Kosova,” means nothing whatsoever.Kosovo was the heartland of medieval Serbian state and the site of the 1389 battle in which both the Serbian prince and the Ottoman sultan died, checking the Turkish expansion into the Balkans for almost 70 years. Ethnic Albanians were settled there by the Ottomans over the intervening centuries, and became a majority due to pogroms and persecution of Serbs – which began under Ottoman rule but continued under Austro-Hungarian occupation in WWI and German/Italian occupation in ...
General Draza Mihailovich with the people during the WWII. Contrary to General Mihailovich, Communist leader "Marshall" Josip Broz Tito posses no one photograph with the people of Yugoslavia from the wartime
In 1971, the movie Klopka za generala, A Trap for the General, was released in Yugoslavia directed by Miomir “Miki” Stamenkovic starring Rade Markovic, Ljuba Tadic, and Bekim Fehmiu. The screenplay was by Dragan Markovic and Luka Pavlovic. The film was produced by the Sarajevo-based company Bosna Film of Yugoslavia and featured a cast made up of Serbian, Bosnian Muslim, and Albanian Muslim actors. The film was released in ...
As explosions from detonated mines continued in the background a Syrian general confirmed in some detail an ugly truth: Washington and its close allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel backed the ISIS takeover and destruction of Palmyra.
Most of the weapons ISIS used were from the US , with some ammunition from Israel . ISIS had US Hummers, spinning explosive projectiles and military rations from the US , Turkey and Saudi Arabia .
That should not have been a surprise. US officials admitted in 2014 that their allies Turkey , the Saudis and Qatar were backing every single armed group in ...
The massacre of 22 people—12 doctors, nurses and other medical personnel, along with 10 patients, three of them children—in Saturday’s airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) medical center in Kunduz, Afghanistan is an appalling war crime for which the US military and Obama administration are responsible.
On Monday, the top US commander in Afghanistan admitted that a US warplane carried out the deadly attack, while seeking to shift the blame onto Afghan puppet troops for calling it in.
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This article first published in March 2014 at the very outset of the Ukraine crisis explains the nature of the Kiev proxy regime. we are dealing with a Neo-Nazi government supported by “Western democracy” and the “international community”.
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“Flowering Democracy, Revolution”? The grim realities are otherwise. What is a stake is a ...
Whether the information originated from hacked e-mails and computer files or Freedom of Information Act requests, the revelations about the political and business activities of Hillary and Bill Clinton and their cronies hearken back to another era, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the crime spree of another unscrupulous couple: bank robbery desperados Bonnie and Clyde.
Aside from Hillary Clinton running her own lucrative «off-the-books» foreign policy via her private email servers and e-mail chain of associates and flunkies, it was her and her husband’s joint Clinton Foundation and Teneo Capital operations that scream out the word «corruption.» The servers ...
Preface
The current war conflict in Syria and constant warfare between the Israeli state and the Palestinians which recently erupted once again in Gaza strip brought the region of the Middle East to the world attention once again. However, the Middle East is a natural-geographic continuation of the Mediterranean Sea basin and, therefore, it is a part of the broader Mediterranean geopolitical game. Nevertheless, the geopolitical and geostrategic importance of the Mediterranean Sea basin is probably of the highest level from the global perspective.
An importance of the Mediterranean Sea area in geopolitical and geostrategic standpoint one can understand from the very ...
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