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.
We 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.
There have been at least two countries in Europe in recent history that undertook ‘anti-terrorist’ military operations against ‘separatists’, but got two very different reactions from the Western elite.
The government of European country A launches what it calls an‘anti-terrorist’ military operation against ‘separatists’ in one part of the country. We see pictures on Western television of people’s homes being shelled and lots of people fleeing. The US and UK and other NATO powers fiercely condemn the actions of the government of country A and accuse it of carrying out ‘genocide’ and ’ethnic cleansing’ and say that there is an urgent ...
Exclusive: The U.S. government and the mainstream media rushed to judgment again, blaming the Syrian government for a new poison-gas attack and ignoring other possibilities, reports Robert Parry.
With the latest hasty judgment about Tuesday’s poison-gas deaths in a rebel-held area of northern Syria, the mainstream U.S. news media once more reveals itself to be a threat to responsible journalism and to the future of humanity. Again, we see the troubling pattern of verdict first, investigation later, even when that behavior can lead to a dangerous war escalation and many more deaths.
Before a careful evaluation of the evidence about Tuesday’s tragedy ...
The Serbs stepped again onto the historical scene in the years of the European wars that swept the continent from the forests of Ireland to the walls of Constantinople in the late 17th century. The Turks finally withdrew from Hungary and Transylvania when their Ottoman hordes were routed outside Vienna in 1683. The disintegration of Ottoman rule in the southwest limbered up the Serbs, arousing in them hope that the moment was ripe for joint effort to break Turkish dominion in the Balkans. The neighboring Christian powers (Austria and Venice) were the only possible allies. The arrival of the Austrian ...
While it is certainly true that the Jewish people have relatively deep roots in the land that is today known as Palestine and Israel, this area has been a crossroads since the origins of the human species. In fact the oldest known Homo sapiens fossil outside of Africa was recently found in modern-day Israel, dated at approximately 180,000 years old. Neanderthal bones have also been found in the Levant.In historical times the Palestine region or parts of it have been controlled by numerous different peoples and regional powers, including the Canaanites, Amorites, Ancient Egyptians, Israelites, Moabites, Ammonites, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, ...
Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, ...
Last Thursday, news reports were largely devoted to the March 22 Brussels terror bombings and the US primary campaigns. And so little attention was paid to the verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for (former) Yugoslavia (ICTY) finding Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic guilty of every crime it could come up with, including “genocide”. It was a “ho-hum” bit of news. Karadzic had already been convicted by the media of every possible crime, and nobody ever imagined that he would be declared innocent by the single-issue court set up in The Hague essentially to judge the Serb side in the ...
The details are supplied in an exhaustive 1,000-page biography of Jean Monnet by Éric Roussel, which was published only in France in 1996, and which seems to have been successfully suppressed. It has never been translated, and has no reviews even at Amazon. However, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of UK's Telegraph newspaper has provided some of the core information from it. Furthermore, Richard J. Aldrich's 2003 The Hidden Hand also provides key details, such as by Aldrich's saying, on page 366, about the American Committee for a United Europe: ACUE, more than any other American front organization of the Cold War, was a ...
The Catalan identity and Catalonia Catalans are the people who live in the territories of Spain in the autonomous-historical region called Catalonia. Their significance for the Spanish inner politics can be understood as the best if we know that Catalonia (Catalunya) is being since 1975 the most politically and economically powerful autonomous self-governed region in the Kingdom of Spain – during the last 20 years, basically, a kind of “a state within the state”. As a matter of fact, Catalans are the most integrated ethnohistorical groups of Spain together with Basques.[1]What makes Catalans so interlinked could be understood if we know ...
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949 on the pretext of “containing Soviet influence”, has almost doubled in size within the past two decades alone. In 1998, NATO comprised 16 member states, but with repeated expansions up to Russia’s very borders, it now contains almost 30 countries.Though seldom mentioned in mainstream discourse, NATO is a US-dominated organization, whose orders are issued from Washington and customarily obeyed. The US is by far the largest contributor to the alliance, spending more than all other member nations put together.One of the critical reasons behind NATO’s formation almost 70 years ago, was ...
Author’s Note
US and NATO forces invaded Afghanistan more than 16 years ago in October 2001. It’s has been a continuous war marked by US military occupation.
The justification is “counterterrorism”. Afghanistan is defined as a state sponsor of terrorism, allegedly responsible for attacking America on September 11, 2001.
The war on Afghanistan continues to be heralded as a war of retribution in response to the 9/11 attacks. US troops are still present and deployed in Afghanistan.
The legal argument used by Washington and NATO to invade and occupy Afghanistan under “the doctrine of collective security” was that the September 11 2001 attacks constituted an ...
The great deception of “a real democracy” in the Ukraine, which the New York Times insisted on 31 March 2019, shows little sign of relenting. For five years, Western populations have been consistently misled through skewed and slanted reporting, assuring the readership that what is unfolding in Kiev is a “fledgling democracy”, as a Washington Post editorial further outlined on 6 April 2019.In reality it was a United States-funded coup d’état. During the months prior to Viktor Yanukovych‘s February 2014 ousting, elite American organizations bankrolled the “anti-government protests”, revealed as much in December 2013 by Victoria Nuland, then a high ...
The so called "Croatian scenario", is something that has been periodically brought up after the start of the armed conflict in Donbass. (Among other instances, yours truly noted this in articles from this past December 17 and August 24, 2015.) Promoted at Johnson's Russia List, the December 28 Euromaidan Press article "What Ukraine Can Take from the 'Croatian Scenario' of Conflict Resolution", omits some key factors for being apprehensive about the probability for success of an Operation Storm like strike against the Donbass rebels.In 1995, the Serb Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, had essentially dropped the Krajina Serbs, with the hope that he could improve his relationship with the West. At ...
On April 7, two U.S. Navy battle ships USS Porter (DDG-78) and USS Ross launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at al-Shayrat military airfield in Syria’s Homs province from the Eastern Mediterranean. The U.S. strikes particularly targeted the main landing strip, aircraft, radio locators, air defense system and fuel stations.
The strike was approved by U.S. President Donald Trump, who said that the Syrian Air Force used affiliated al-Shayrat air base to prepare chemical attack on the city of Khan Shaykhun in Idlib. “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and ...
If the Trump phenomena showed anything, it showed the consensus reality the mainstream media attempted to create concerning Hillary’s certain victory, as well as the consensus reality erected for decades, is not omnipotent.In fact, the earliest days of mass print media were erected on a famous fraud known as the “Great Moon Hoax” of 1835 – something researcher Chris Kendall has long called attention to – wherein the “educated,” “elite” widely accepted the mainstream publications’ claim bat people inhabited the lunar surface.In our day, a similar hoax still reigns, as mainstream media is literally as credible as Weekly World News’ Bat Boy ...
Russia and its President, Vladimir Putin, a little more than a year ago, in July 2014 were the focus of attention in Europe and North America, accused, without a shred of forensic evidence, of shooting down an unarmed civilian Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine. The Russians were deemed out to restore the Soviet Union with their agreement to the popular referendum of Crimean citizens to annex into the Russian Federation and not Ukraine. Western sanctions were being thrown at Russia by both Washington and the EU. People spoke of a new Cold War. Today the picture is changing, and profoundly. ...
On the eve of the Conference on Cyprus, we feel compelled to express our views on the Cyprus negotiations on behalf of the Hellenic American Leadership Council (HALC), the International Coordinating Committee Justice for Cyprus (PSEKA), the Federation of Cypriot American Organizations (FCAO), the American Hellenic Institute (AHI), the American Hellenic Council (AHC), the Hellenic Federation of New Jersey, and the Coordinated Effort of Hellenes (CEH). Our community has worked with successive US Administrations on behalf of a workable and lasting solution on Cyprus. In 2004, when we warned that the flawed Annan Plan was headed in the wrong direction, ...
Britain is gripped by fear, panic and anger, after being struck by three terror attacks in the space of three months. Innocent men, women and children have been killed in the terror rampage, filling many homes with tragedy and despair. Martial law has practically been declared in many regions of the country, with troops now being a common site on the streets of Royal Britannia. Many are looking for someone or something to blame, as rage is increasingly triumphing over reason.
Lost in all this hysteria however, there sits a glaring connection that needs to be illuminated: the connection between these ...
The U.S. government and U.S. media explained the mass murders of Kosovo Serbs, Roma, and other Kosovo minorities as “revenge murders”. They were “revenge attacks”. The expulsion of over 250,000 Kosovo Serbs, Roma, Gorani, and Jews was simply censored and deleted using the infowar technique of Emphasis. These infowar techniques have no basis in criminal law and violate fundamental values and tenets of morality and ethics.
The U.S. rationale was spurious: Because Yugoslav police were defending themselves and Kosovo civilians against what the U.S. State Department itself declared were “terrorists”, the Albanian Muslim population of Kosovo had some sort of right ...
The Yugoslav Youth Movements
The idea of the Yugoslav unification became a leading ideological force of several youth movements among all Yugoslavs either of those living in an independent Serbia and Montenegro or of those living in Austria-Hungary. Their political-ideological inspiration was a pan-Italian unification movement – Young Italy (La Giovane Italia), established by Giuseppe Mazzini in 1831 in France.
The Yugoslav youth movements flourished between 1903 and 1914 by having different regional or other names but not exclusively ethnic ones in various Yugoslav lands like Omladina (Youth), Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), Mlada Dalmacija (Young Dalmatia), etc.[1] The Austrian general of the ...
The following text is a point by point thematic summary of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky‘s presentation at the Science for Peace Conference, Academy of Sciences, Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur, 15-16 August 2016.IntroductionHistorically, science has supported the development of the weapons industry and the war economy. “Science for Peace” indelibly requires reversing the logic whereby commissioned scientific endeavors are directed towards supporting what President Eisenhower called “The Military Industrial Complex”.What is consequently required is a massive redirection of science and technology towards the pursuit of broad societal objectives. In turn, this requires a major shift in what is euphemistically called “US Foreign Policy”, namely ...
SHORT LEGAL DISCLAIMER: The website’s owner & editor-in-chief has no official position on any issue published at this website. The views of the authors presented at this website do not necessarily coincide with the opinion of the owner & editor-in-chief of the website. The contents of all material (articles, books, photos, videos…) are of sole responsibility of the authors. The owner & editor-in-chief of this website is not morally, scientifically or legally responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in the contents of all material found on this website. The owner & editor-in-chief of this website is not responsible for the content of external internet sites. No advertising, government or corporate funding for the functioning of this website. The owner & editor-in-chief and authors are not morally, scientifically or legally responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in the text and material found on the website www.global-politics.eu
