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The Eurasian Politician - Issue 4 (August 2001)

A SPOOKY CAMPAIGN IN THE BALKANS?

By: Patrick Moore
Source: RFE/RL, 2^nd August 2001

Press reports have appeared in Macedonia and elsewhere in the Balkans in recent weeks suggesting hat NATO is actively helping the ethnic Albanian rebels of the National Liberation Army (UCK). The U.S. is often singled out as playing a particularly active role.

One recent anti-NATO report claimed that a KFOR helicopter landed arms for the UCK on Macedonian territory. This story brought a protest to NATO from the Macedonian authorities -- and a swift denial from Secretary-General Lord George Robertson. He called the account "entirely and totally false."

Even some Western publications have suggested that NATO’s policies are not all that they seem. In its 30 July issue, the German weekly "Der Spiegel" argues in the article "The Americans’ Hidden Agenda" that the U.S. is aiding the UCK. The article adds that this alleged American role in fomenting the conflict in Macedonia is irritating "the Europeans," meaning the EU or parts of its establishment.

The story is cobbled together into what one German expert calls a collection of old information from the 1999 Kosova conflict, more recent statements by unnamed "leading German military personnel," and things that can politely be described as hearsay. The CIA is mentioned as playing a role, and there are other references to "secret services."

The article adds that the German government in general, and Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping in particular, are upset with Washington’s extensive but unpublicized support for the rebels.

In yet another twist, the Serbian news agency Beta reported recently that the U.S. authorities recently approached two top Serbian officials to request a "99-year lease" on the Camp Bondsteel area in Kosova and on several Yugoslav military facilities, including a radar base. The U.S. Embassy in Belgrade and Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic denied the report. Unfortunately, the Beta story had already appeared as a front-page headline in "Danas," which is Serbia’s most reputable newspaper.

Is it by accident that all these "leaks" and stories are appearing at a time when tensions continue to mount in Macedonia – and ethnic passions with them? Might anyone have an interest in polarizing the Macedonians – and perhaps other Orthodox peoples of the Balkans – against the U.S. and NATO?

This kind of campaign is nothing new to the region. Following the Atlantic alliance’s entry into Kosova in 1999, the propaganda machine of former President Slobodan Milosevic regularly reported on alleged collusion between Western peacekeepers with local ethnic Albanian guerrillas. One also recalls the anti-NATO and anti-U.S. "Balkan syndrome" campaign at the start of 2001. And in any event, Belgrade’s propaganda mills have long played up almost every case of violence against Serbs by ethnic Albanians in the province as evidence of NATO’s incompetence – or worse.

The bottom line from Belgrade, both under Milosevic and under the present leadership, is that Serbian troops should be allowed back into the province. There is very little chance of that happening in the near future, as Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic recently acknowledged. So the ongoing campaign against NATO troops and UN administrators seems to have only one purpose: to maintain and intensify tensions and polarization.

Is it too far-fetched to ask if anyone in Moscow might have an interest in all this? Russia (and earlier the Soviet Union) has long regarded the Balkans as perhaps the one place where its role as a great power is unquestioned. Moscow made this clear even during the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when its influence was rapidly receding everywhere else.

Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov visited the Balkans in March. His message was vintage Gromyko: militantly negative and anti-Western. He stressed unswerving support for Belgrade, and has more recently expanded his message to be firmly pro-Skopje.

Russia has little or no influence among the ethnic Albanians of the region, nor has it shown much interest in cultivating any. Is Moscow unwittingly making the same mistake as Gromyko made in the Middle East and allying itself so strongly with one side so as to preclude any influence with the other?

Or might it believe that its future as a great power in the Balkans lies in promoting rifts between the region’s Orthodox countries and the West? The idea might sound old-fashioned, but with communism dead as a exportable ideology and the Russian economy bankrupt, perhaps the Third Rome does not have any other option to pursue.

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