– West and Soros Rely on «Extreme Balkanization» to Prevent Turkish Stream Pipeline (Strategic Culture Foundation, April 25, 2015):
By Wayne Madsen
The Obama administration interventionists, content in the knowledge that they have, at least, another year-and-a-half remaining in power, have decided to resort to extreme ethnic-based Balkanization to throw up a road block to the Russian «Turkish Stream» pipeline that is to bring natural gas from Russia through Turkey and into Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, and Hungary. The Obama administration has set about to foment another «color revolution», this time in Macedonia.
The strategy of the Obama/George Soros interventionists is to bury the Macedonian government of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski with unfounded charges that it engaged in massive wiretapping of some 20,000 Macedonians, including leaders of the opposition. The source of the transcripts of intercepted communications of Macedonian citizens allegedly came from the former chief of the Macedonian intelligence service, Zoran Verushevsky, who may have had assistance in collecting the wiretaps from his friends in British, German, and U.S. intelligence. The intercepts have been used by Social Democratic opposition leader Zoran Zaev, a favorite of the Soros network and the U.S., to hammer Gruevski for allegedly eavesdropping on the opposition. Somehow, Zaev gained possession of copies of the intercepts, which he then used to attack the government.
Although 20,000 targeted individuals seems like an excessive amount of intercepted communications and not within the capability of Macedonian intelligence, such a task is certainly within the grasp of the National Security Agency (NSA) and its FIVE EYES alliance. A well-publicized report from Germany that the German «Bundesnachrictendienst» (Federal Intelligence Service) agreed to eavesdrop on 800,000 European citizens on behalf of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) indicates that 20,000 Macedonians being targeted by the NSA and BND, with the recordings of voice communications possibly being provided to Zaev and his associates in Skopje, was well-within the capability of the American and German eavesdroppers. The NSA sent the BND a large number of «selectors,» that is, email addresses, Internet Protocol (IPO) addresses, mobile phone numbers, and various other identifying data, on hundreds of thousands of European politicians, business leaders, engineers, and others. NSA systems, including PRISM, PRINTAURA, and UPSTREAM, are used to «select» particular communications of interest to NSA and allied signals intelligence analysts.
The collection of phone calls and emails of Macedonians based on NSA «selectors» could have easily amassed 20,000 intercepts by the BND in Pullach, Germany and NSA in Fort Meade, Maryland. If NSA intercepts were provided in sanitized format to Zaev and his loyalists, it would represent a new tactic by the U.S. Intelligence Community: the provision of metadata to blackmail sitting elected governments.
The U.S. and Soros Balkans destabilization strategy has also seen the rise of Albanian nationalist irredentism along the fragile Kosovo-Albanian border with a recent attack on a Macedonian police border post at Gošince by 40 armed men wearing the insignia of the outlawed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). That action came at the same time that Kosovo’s Foreign Minister, Hashim Thaci, the former leader of the KLA, defied threats by Serbian authorities to arrest him on a 1997 conviction on terrorism if he visited Belgrade to attend a George Soros-funded NGO conference sponsored by «NGO Youth Education Committee». The April 24 conference, designed to counter growing Serbian-Macedonian cooperation in the face of Western pressure, was, unsurprisingly, titled «European integration of the Western Balkans – together we can do better». The foreign ministers of Serbia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, in addition to Thaci, were invited to attend the conference. An arrest of the Kosovo foreign minister, which the invitation to Belgrade was meant to trigger, could have set the stage for another NATO/EU confrontation with Serbia, a critical partner in not only the Turkish Stream pipeline but the Chinese-funded Balkans railway part of the Silk Road project that will link the Greek port of Piraeus to Budapest through Macedonia and Serbia. The «NGO Youth Education Committee,» in withdrawing Thaci’s invitation, cited «pressure and threats» from the Serbian government as the reason. The group mentioned nothing about Thaci’s terrorism conviction.
The attack by the restored KLA on the Macedonian border post, where Macedonian police officers were briefly held hostage before the Albanian raiders returned to Kosovo, could not have been possible without the knowledge of Kosovo’s military protector, NATO, which operates its largest military base in Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo. In 2001, when KLA forces, allied with Macedonian Albanian nationalists, fought Macedonian forces in the town of Ara?inovo, Macedonia, forces of the U.S. private military firm, Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI) were involved with both sides. The Ochrid Agreements saw Macedonia grant generous autonomy rights to its Albanian population in an effort to keep the violence that wracked Kosovo and Bosnia from spilling over into generally peaceful Macedonia. The attempt by the Soros network to foment violence within the Albanian community is a clear attempt to pry away the Albanian party, the Democratic Union (DUI) led by Ali Ahmeti, from the six year-old VMRO-DPMNE-led coalition government led by Gruevski.
The U.S. ambassador to Macedonia, Jess Baily, has made waves in Skopje by publicly supporting the putsch being called for by former Social Democratic prime minister and president Branko Crvenkovski, a native of Sarajevo, Bosnia who has been at the forefront of calling on Macedonian youth and college students to hit the streets of Skopje to stage a color revolution against the democratically-elected government of Gruevski. If all this sounds familiar, it should. It was U.S. ambassador to Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt who, working with his boss, State Department European Affairs Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland, who conspired with Ukrainian opposition leaders in late 2013 and early 2014 to organize the Euromaidan protest that eventually saw the democratically-elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, toppled from power and the subsequent outbreak of the Ukrainian civil war.
By stoking opposition desires for a similar color revolution in Macedonia, Baily is playing with fire by also fomenting problems by using Albanian nationalists. Such a combination would start a violent civil war that would rival that between Kiev and the Russian population of eastern Ukraine. Macedonian and Serbian Slavs pitted against Albanians in Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia’s Sanjak region and Presovo Valley would not only bring another violent war to the Balkan Peninsula but would also spell the end of the Turkish Stream pipeline through the Balkans and the Chinese-financed rail link from Greece to Budapest. The Balkans would remain a NATO frontline war zone under the total domination of the United States and European Union. Two Albanian political leaders, Prime Minister Edi Rama and former Prime Minister Sali Berisha have spoken out in favor of a «Greater Albania», consisting of Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and parts of Greece. The message for the Balkans is clear: if it continues to entertain the Turkish Stream pipeline plans and the Chinese rail project, the Albanians will rise up and resort to civil war to protect NATO’s and the EU’s domination over the peninsula. The Albanians, it should be noted, were the most loyal people of the Balkans in providing support for Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
After Verushevksy was arrested for being the source of the communications intercepts and Zaev was caught with his passport in hand while he was attempting to flee Macedonia, the Soros-financed color revolution teams switched strategies to foment problems with the country’s large Albanian minority, representing a third of the population. Today, Macedonia teeters on the brink of renewed ethic violence, with Nuland and her gang of neo-conservative warmongers waiting anxiously for the beginning of a new Balkans body count.