Days later the State Secretary of Serbia's Foreign Ministry, Oliver Ivanovic, denounced the agreement signed behind his nation's back and said, "The signing of this agreement is useless because Macedonia will have to negotiate with Belgrade on that issue. [14]
In Ivanovic's view "Macedonia and Kosovo signed the agreement under pressure by foreigners who did not account for the fact that this may worsen the already complex relations between Serbia and Macedonia." [15]
The following day the architect of this latest carve-up weighed in on the affair: "The U.S. warmly welcomes the establishing of diplomatic relations between the Republic of Kosovo and the Republic of Macedonia as well as the successful completion of the demarcation of their joint border," according to State Department spokesman Ian Kelly. [16]
Only a few days later, on cue as it were, officials in Kosovo turned their attention toward Montenegro and a "flawed marking of the border," demanding another redrawing of national boundaries. Montenegro's Interior Ministry responded on October 23 insisting that the nation's leaders would "not hand over an inch of their territory to anyone". [17]
To further illustrate the West's role in undermining and inflaming most every sector of former Yugoslavia, in the middle of the month Kosovo Serbs gathered almost 50,000 signatures demanding that the European Union Rule of Law Mission [EULEX], devised by the West to transition Kosovo from United Nations administration to control by former KLA operatives and their NATO patrons, leave the province.
A leader of the initiative rightly observed of EULEX that "the mission's goal is to complete the Albanian state and regarding the petition announced that in addition to presenting it to the government of Serbia "We're also taking it to the Russian ambassador for the embassy to hand it to President Medvedev, given that the Russian Federation is sometimes more consistent and principled in trying to defend and keep Kosovo within our country. Russia is a great country and has the right to a veto in the Security Council. I personally think that they can be of great help in revealing the real truth behind the work of this mission. [18]
NATO's drive toward complete subordination of the Balkans proceeds apace.
On October 8 Serbian Defense State Secretary Igor Jovicic announced that his nation would appoint a permanent ambassador to NATO within the next few weeks, stating "Based on a proposal by the Foreign Ministry, the Serbian government has endorsed a proposal for a Serbian ambassador to the NATO alliance. A ˜silent procedure' is under way, where our proposal will be looked at by member-states, and then we could have an ambassador to NATO by the end of the year. [19]
After the October 22-23 NATO defense ministerial in Slovakia, Macedonia confirmed it would offer the Alliance 80 more troops for the war in Afghanistan, bringing the diminutive nation's total to 240.
At the same time Bulgarian Defense Minister Nickolay Mladenov "offered his counterparts from neighboring countries to use the joint Bulgarian-U.S. military training facilities in Novo Selo" where it was recently revealed that the Pentagon is going to spend $60 million to expand and modernize the base. [20]
The Bulgarian defense chief was addressing a meeting of the Southeastern Europe Defense Ministerial (SEDM) in his country. The nations he invited to train under U.S. military forces were full SEDM members Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Macedonia, Romania, Slovenia, Turkey and Ukraine and observer states Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro and Serbia. The United States is the ringleader of the regional defense bloc although it is over 7,000 kilometers removed from the region.
When NATO began its bombardment of Yugoslavia on March 23, 1999 on Bill Clinton's orders not only a war but a war cycle began, one which persists to this day and has no end in sight. Only months after the cross-border conflict in Macedonia, itself a consequence of the Kosovo war, ended in 2001 the invasion of Afghanistan was launched, and the U.S. and its NATO allies have been in state of perpetual armed deployments and conflicts ever since.
The war against Yugoslavia was waged under false pretenses and with ulterior motives but has had predictable consequences. The United Nations has been weakened to the point of being reduced to a paper organization only consulted when it is time to clean up after the West's wars. The Helsinki Final Act and the entire post-World War II order have been undermined and effectively destroyed.
As the late American scholar Sean Gervasi foresaw and warned against more than three years before the event [21], NATO exploited the crisis in former Yugoslavia to assert itself outside of its previously defined area of concern to expand throughout Eastern Europe and penetrate the Caucasus into Central and South Asia and much of the rest of the world. At that time, January of 1996, no one could have anticipated that there would be Bosnian troops in Afghanistan, Croatian troops in Iraq, Albanian troops in Chad and Bulgarian warships off the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon. That there would be NATO bases in the Central Asian countries of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. A strategic American air base in Bulgaria, a massive military compound in the Serbian province of Kosovo, marines in Georgia and Patriot missile batteries in Poland.
A few weeks ago an article appeared in an Indian publication which included these comments:
"Russia has rebelled against Kosovo's independence because it sees it as part of US efforts to dismantle the post-Second World War international system based on respect for state sovereignty and inviolability of borders enshrined in the supremacy of the UN in resolving international disputes. Kosovo's independence is also against the Security Council Resolution 1244 of 1999, which gave the UN jurisdiction over Kosovo....It has been noted that such 'independence' enables the Americans to maintain a strategic military base at Camp Bondsteel in the breakaway region " the largest American military base to come up in Europe over the last generation." [22]
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