Greater Albania or Greater Rights?
The Conflict in Macedonia
An Epistemological Analysis
By Carl K. Savich
Following the modus operandi or identical strategy used in the Kosovo conflict, KLA veterans crossed the border into ***** or Macedonia in January, 2001, launching a guerrilla insurgency. First, a police station in Tearce in western Macedonia was attacked, killing one policeman and injuring three. Then the KLA veterans, now styled the NLA, the so-called National Liberation Army, the “CIA’s bastard army”, attacked the northern border village of Tanusevci and occupied the region, killing three Macedonian soldiers and a police officer. When attacked by Macedonian forces, the “new” KLA redeployed to western Macedonia, crossing the border from Kosovo and attacking and besieging Tetovo, the “capital of Greater Albania in Macedonia”. As ABC News reported, the NLA guerrillas used the same routes the US Army used to patrol the border. The US Army monitored their movements and redeployment to Tetovo but otherwise did nothing to impede their attacks or movements. During the Tetovo siege, the US sent a drone reconnaissance airplane over the region to monitor the attack. Western political leaders and the Western media stated that this insurgency threatened to “destabilize” Macedonia and the Balkans region. Many Western leaders warned of the possibility of “another Balkan war” and the dangers of having the conflict escalate into full-scale war. Even the “Balkan domino theory” of Strobe Talbott was invoked and trotted out, a sort of model of the Vietnam domino theory, the propaganda/ideological rationalization for the Vietnam War. In the Balkan domino theory as originally enunciated, if the US did not militarily intervene against Serbia to support the Kosovo Albanians and Bosnian Muslims, Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, and Turkey would be drawn into the conflict. In the newest invocation of the theory, the Albanian insurgency would trigger a wider war, bringing in Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. The question was then how to contain the “violence”.
The US State Department “condemned” the new KLA guerrillas in a statement by Robert Boucher. US President George W. Bush was “deeply concerned about the extremism of the Albanian insurgents.” This followed the pattern or MO of the Kosovo conflict when the US government similarly condemned the “old” KLA of being “terrorists” when the KLA insurgency began in Kosovo in 1998. Macedonia “won EU backing for a military response” against the NLA when three Macedonian soldiers were killed by NLA gunmen near Tanusevci. Javier Solana, the defense and foreign policy chief of the EU, after a meeting with Macedonian president Boris Trajkovski, gave EU permission or “blessing” to use “proportional” military force against the “terrorists”. The use of “proportional military force” against the NLA and “restraint” as advised by NATO and the US allowed the NLA to re-deploy its troops freely under US Army supervision to the Tetovo area. A proportional response of restraint also enabled the NLA to kill three Macedonian soldiers and policemen and to boost NLA morale. The US was advising the Macedonian government in resolving the conflict. The US had given Macedonia $46.5 million in aid, $13.5 of which was earmarked for military aid, while “the rest goes for democracy building” in the fledgling new democracy. Macedonia was a US client state, a kind of Balkan Banana Republic. The US, thus, was managing the crisis. But why was there renewed fighting in the Balkans? US humanitarian military intervention, the new “military humanism”, was supposed to establish stability and, above all, peace in the Balkans. How was this new threat to stability and peace and the danger of a new Balkan war to be explained?
The armed insurgency of the Albanian guerrillas that concentrated on occupying and seizing all lands inhabited by ethnic Albanians bore a striking resemblance to the Greater Albania ideology and strategy formulated by the 1878 League of Prizren, a strategy that has guided Albanian nationalism and political aims in the Balkans for over a century. In a January, 1992 referendum in Macedonia, the ethnic Albanian majority had voted to create an “Autonomous Region of Western Macedonia” or the “Republic of Ilirida” or Illirida. The concept of Autonomous Regions and autonomy are Communistic/Stalinist anachronisms, failed attempts to “solve” the “nationalities question” in the USSR and Yugoslavia. Nevzat Halili, chairman of the Party for Democratic Prosperity (PDP), declared that the ethnic Albanian minority in Macedonia demanded “cultural and territorial independence”, the operative term being territory. In other words, the Albanian population demanded to secede western Macedonian territory from Macedonia. In short, Albanian political aims and objectives in Macedonia, as in Kosovo-Metohija, are separatist and secessionist aims. Was the NLA “extremist” insurgency based on the long-standing Albanian nationalist goal to create a Greater Albania? Reuters and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Associated Press (AP) media reports stated that Albanian insurgents were seeking to enlarge the borders and territory of NATO/UN-occupied or “UN-run” Kosovo, uniting western Macedonia with southern Serbia, where there was a second insurgency by another group of KLA veterans, to form a “Greater Kosovo”. An AP news story stated that the Albanian minority in Macedonia “shares the aspirations” of Kosovo Albanians “for self-determination and independence in a ‘greater’ Kosovo expanded with ethnic Albanian parts of Macedonia and Southern Serbia.” Was the insurgency motivated by a strategy to create a Greater Albania or a Greater Kosovo?
In the Agence France Presse news report “Albania rebels are fighting to protect mafia interests: expert”, Xavier Raufer, a researcher at the Paris Institute of Criminology and the author of “The Albanian Mafia”, concluded that the NLA “rebels” are the “paramilitary wing of an Albanian mafia exporting drugs and trafficking in humans”. He dismissed the stated goals of the NLA guerrilla insurgency “to protect the ethnic minority” who are “oppressed” by the Slavic majority in Macedonia. He noted that international bodies have pressured Skopje to “ensure equal rights” for the Albanian minority. The motive for the NLA attack, according to Raufer, is to “ease smuggling operations” in the Balkan Golden Triangle, that includes Veliki Trnovac, the “Balkan Medellin”, occupied by the LAPMB in the Southern Serbia buffer zone and Tetovo. Despite the besa or honor code of silence of the Shqiptar clans, like the law of omerta of the Italian mafia, Albanians involved in the smuggling operations have admitted that drugs and “kidnapped sex-slaves” and prostitutes and illegal immigrants have been smuggled in the Tetovo drug smuggling route. According to Raufer, the KLA, the NLA, the LAPMB, former members of the Albanian secret service, SHIK, and Balkan Shqiptar clan chiefs are linked together in a “criminal conspiracy”. He offers evidence that 70% of the heroin consumed in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, is “brought in by Albanian gangs.” The British news network ITN reported that Balkan Albanians had organized prostitution rings and had imported prostitutes from Eastern Europe to Britain. According to Raufer, the motivation for the NLA insurgency in Macedonia is to create greater drug and prostitution smuggling operations.
The link between the Albanian insurgents and organized crime has even been analyzed by the so-called mainstream media in the US. In “A Different Kind of War”, in the March 26, 2001 issue of Newsweek, Rod Nordland wrote that the “aim of many guerrillas is … organized crime”, that they are “driven by greed”, “raw greed”. Nordland quoted “foreign officials” who stated that the Albanian insurgency was “partly about control of a growing Albanian-run criminal empire.” The ethnic Albanian police chief of Tetovo, Rauf Ramadani, termed the NLA insurgents and “rebels” as “criminals and pseudo-patriots.” Nordland noted the link between the NLA and the “officially disbanded” KLA: “Many of the extremists up in the hills surrounding Tetovo are veterans of the Kosovo Liberation Army---the ethnic Albanian group that was NATO’s ally in the 1999 war---here going by the name of the National Liberation Army.” Newsweek bureau chiefs reported on the death of ethnic Albanian resident Suleyman Ramadani, killed by a sniper from the NLA which is described as “just random death”. The UN itself reported that Kosovo has been “carved into seven mafia-style fiefdoms, roughly conforming to the KLA’s seven operational zones during the war.” These mafia-style fiefdoms are “run mostly by former KLA commanders, who “started as thugs”, these “bosses” now form part of the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), the Kosovo security force. According to Nordland, the Albanian leaders in Kosovo were “exporting insurrection” who sought to create “a kind of Greater Kosovo”, “their own ethnically pure nation”. To these Shqiptar mafia kingpins, “peace is bad for business.” Nordland concluded that the Bush Administration was trying to “walk a fine line”, sending military advisers to Skopje, but seeking to appease the NLA. While the KLA had been the “ally” and client and surrogate army of the US and NATO, the “CIA’s bastard army”, according to Nordland, “the enemy of NATO today is Albanian extremism.” The US government had to walk a fine line diplomatically because both ethnic Albanian insurgents and the Macedonian government were clients, a kind of Albanian contra-death squad pitted against a fragile Balkan Banana Republic. US policy was motivated by a desire not to alienate either but to appease both. The US was, in short, helping both sides to the conflict, a conflict between two clients.
The US media characterized the insurgency as an attempt by the ethnic Albanian population to attain “greater rights”. National Public Radio (NPR) stated that Albanian insurgents were besieging Tetovo to obtain “greater rights.” The NPR view mirrored the demands of the NLA itself in a communiqué which the insurgents released to the media, describing themselves as the “National Liberation Army---Tetovo branch”. The NLA “rebels” stated that the guerrilla war was a “fight for our rights”. The AP reported that “substantial numbers of the minority feel they are treated as second-class citizens” in the “Slav-dominated nation.” AP also reported that the Albanian insurgency by the NLA is an “armed struggle for more rights”. According to this report, merely to “feel” as a “second-class citizen” justifies attacking and invading a foreign, sovereign nation and occupying its second largest city, moving across international borders as if they did not exist.
By contrast, if the Albanian minority in Macedonia are second-class citizens, what are the Serbian minority in “UN-run” Kosovo, where they are hunted down like animals and subhumans, or untermenschen, and brutally murdered? Branko Jovic, 70 years old, and his wife, Saveta, 65 years old, were found by their grandchildren murdered in their own home near Kosovska Kamenica, the elderly Serbian couple died from axe wounds to the head. The so-called Western media reported that “an expert team is on the crime scene trying to determine the reasons for such an attack on the Jovic family.” These elderly Kosovo Serbs were axed and bludgeoned to death like wild animals or cattle. In fact, the Western media paid more attention to an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease and mad cow disease than they did to the slaughter of the Serbian Orthodox population in Kosovo. Cattle and sheep garnered more media coverage than the coverage of human beings. A primary component of all propaganda or information technology is to dehumanize the “enemy”. In an AFP report, “UN warns Kosovo Albanians to stop hunting down Serbs”, Eric Morris, the head of the UNHCR refugee agency, stated that “it seems the minority community is being hunted down one by one and extreme members of the society will not rest until the province is ethnically cleansed.” The term “seems” is significant here. “Seems” means to appear true or to appear as a fact without necessarily being true or a fact. The terminology employed is self-delusional and psychologically entails denial and repression. KFOR commander General Carlo Cabigiosu stated that “extremist Albanians want an ethnically cleansed Kosovo.” On February 16, All Soul’s Day, eleven Serbian civilians were killed and 40 injured, many seriously, after Kosovo Albanians detonated a remote-controlled bomb weighing 220 pounds that destroyed a bus in a convoy to visit Serbian Orthodox graves in Gracanica. Killed in the blast was the entire Cokic family, the father, Njegos, his wife, Snezana, and their two year old son, Danilo. Many of the dead could not be identified because of the intensity of the explosion that ripped apart the bus and the bodies of the passengers on it. The reaction in the West towards this planned, systematic, willful, premeditated and malicious mass murder of Serbian civilians was as if the Albanians had killed rats or vermin and not human beings. The New York Times reported that they were ongoing “revenge killings” and revenge attacks. The Albanian minority in Macedonia is treated as second-class citizens but the Serbian minority in their own country is treated like wild animals to be hunted down and exterminated like vermin or rats. Nikola Dimitrov, the national-security adviser to Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski stated that there is “no rule of law, no ethnic tolerance, no human rights, not even an economy” in “UN-run” Kosovo, “except foreign aid and organized crime.” In Newsweek, Rod Nordland described UN-run, in fact, NATO-occupied, Kosovo as a “gangster state” and “a lawless land”. How is this moral calculus and selective morality to be explained?
The Western media reports characterized Macedonia as “Slav-dominated” and not Slav–majority. This analysis follows the propaganda modus operandi of the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts. In those conflicts, Serbian majority was never used in any analyses of the conflicts. Instead, “Serb-dominated” was used instead, such as, “Serb-dominated Yugoslavia”. But the media never used the terms Muslim-dominated Bosnia or Muslim-dominated government, or Croat-dominated Croatia or Albanian-dominated Kosovo-Metohija. The media chose these terms: The internationally and UN recognized Bosnian Government and borders, the UN and internationally recognized Croatian Government and borders, and the “Albanian majority” of Kosovo, who made up 90% of the population. After the US/NATO intervention, ethnic Albanians make up 100% of the population of Kosovo. The remaining Serbian Orthodox population lives in a ghetto and apartheid enclave in Kosovska Mitrovica. Over 230,000 Serbian Orthodox have been driven out or ethnically cleansed, along with the Roma, Slavic Muslim, Turkish, Jewish, and other non-Albanian populations, since NATO occupied Kosovo. By contrast, the UN and internationally recognized borders of Yugoslavia and of Serbia are “disputed borders”. This is how the co-called Western media reported on the boundaries of the former Yugoslavia. The question to ask is: Is the media qualified to make decisions and judgments about the borders of sovereign nations? What are their guidelines and criteria? Are these decisions and judgments by the free world media arbitrary or systematic? This is the crucial epistemological question. The infowar strategy here is to de-legitimize the Serbian position. The term “majority” has a positive appeal while the term “dominated” implies domination and control, a pejorative term. The NLA-Tetovo branch communiqué stated that the Albanian minority in Macedonia was “insulted, discriminated against and banned from all civilization traditions in Macedonia.” “The first thing we want is a dialogue”, stated the NLA. Steven Erlanger noted in the New York Times that “Western diplomats” have pressured the Macedonian government “to move quickly to make Albanian an official language, to de-centralize local government, and to create more new jobs in Albanian areas.” In other words, telling the Macedonian government to capitulate to the NLA demands, and to thereby show that terrorist methods and killing policemen and soldiers would be rewarded.
The terms to describe the conflict that emerged in the US media and Western media, ABC News, CNN, NPR, NBC News, CBC, BBC, were that the Albanians were fighting for “greater rights”, for “more rights”, greater or “more power”, for greater human and civil rights, to end discrimination, to end treatment as “second-class citizens”, to gain “equality”. According to the description in the Western media, the Albanian insurgency was based on and motivated by a movement to achieve “greater rights”. Four contradictory views of the NLA insurgency thus emerged: 1) the insurgency was inspired by a desire to obtain “greater rights” (the US and so-called Western media position, the “free press” of capitalist democracies); 2) the insurgency was inspired by a desire to create a Greater Kosovo ; 3) the insurgency was motivated by the desire to create greater drug and prostitution operations; and, 4) the insurgency was inspired by a desire to create a Greater Albania. Which one is correct? Is the insurgency motivated by a desire for greater rights or a desire for Greater Albania? Greater rights or Greater Albania? Which is it?
Former assistant Secretary of State James Rubin stated on CNN that the NLA insurgents were “extremists and some were criminals” who were striving to create “a sort of Greater Albania.” Rubin, along with his wife, CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, was at the forefront of the US/NATO humanitarian intervention in Kosovo, conceded that the Albanian minority in Macedonia had adequate minority rights, noting that an Albanian party, the Albanian Democratic Party, was part of the governing coalition in Macedonia, i.e., the Albanians were part of the government. He stated that the Albanian minority could seek to achieve greater freedom or greater rights through political channels in Macedonia instead of a guerrilla war, by means of democratic methods. The mayor and police chief of Tetovo, with an Albanian majority population, were ethnic Albanians. Tetovo had an Albanian language university established in January, 1995 with the help of former US Congressman from New York Joseph Dioguardi, vice-president of the US-Albanian Friendship Society and the leader of the powerful and influential Albanian lobby in the US, Yugoslav “dissident” Mihajlo Mihajlov of George Washington University, and Jerry Klein of the US delegation. Under the Macedonian constitution, instruction at the primary and secondary level in the Albanian language was provided for. The Macedonian government subsidized Albanian-language newspapers, television programs, and other media. Gjuner Ismail, a spokesman for the Macedonian government, stated that the creation of the Albanian-language university in Tetovo violated the Macedonian constitution and was politically motivated: “Their activities are political.” Dioguardi was accused of supporting and sponsoring Albanian separatism and secession and his political activities on behalf of the Albanian population of Macedonia constituted “a direct interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state.” The International Helsinki Federation of Human Rights (IFH) delegation noted “a map depicting ‘Greater Albania’ appears on the wall of the Dean’s office” and that an academic curriculum at the school is non-existent. Instead, the university is a “parallel institution”, based on the model or MO established in Kosovo with the university of Pristina. The university in Tetovo is a political center for separatist/secessionist agitation and organization like the university in Pristina had been. The Kosovo model was applied in Tetovo. The university would function as a political focal point for Albanian independence/secession/separatism/autonomy/republic status, that is, for the creation of a Greater Albania. In July, 1997, the Albanian mayor of Gostivar raised an Albanian and Turkish flag over the town. These unconstitutional provocations signaled a desire to create a Greater Albania and a return to the Ottoman Turkish Empire status quo, when Albanians converted to Islam and thereby gained privileged positions that allowed them to take over the lands of the subhuman rayah and kaurin and to dominate and control the Orthodox Slavic populations, the Christian cattle. When the police intervened to remove them, rioting resulted in Gostivar and Tetovo which left three people dead. The Macedonian Helsinki Human Rights Committee argued that there should be a “public debate” on the issues. George Soros, the philanthropist, the founder of the so-called Open Society Institute, supported making Albanian the official second language in Macedonia giving the Albanian minority equality and parity with the Macedonian Slav majority, making Albanians a constituent nation, even though the Albanian population was a minority, and unlike the Macedonian Slavs, already had a homeland or nation of their own, Albania, established in 1912. The IHF published a report on the Gostivar and Tetovo disturbances finding “evidence of police brutality” and the use of excessive force by the Macedonian police. The violations of the Macedonian constitution by the Albanian rioters were, by contrast, not condemned by the so-called international community and human rights groups.
How is the conflict in Macedonia to be explained and understood? Is the conflict motivated by a desire to create a Greater Kosovo, consisting of western Macedonia and southern Serbia, a desire to create greater drug and prostitution smuggling operations, a desire to create greater rights for the Albanian minority, or by a desire to create a Greater Albania, made up of the Albanian-settled regions of Southern Serbia, or the “Presheva” region, western Macedonia, or “Illirida”, including the second-largest city in Macedonia, “Tetova”, Kosovo-Metohija, or “Kosova”, northern Greece, or “Chameria”, and southern Montenegro?
The Macedonian conflict presents an epistemological issue, an issue of understanding and knowledge. Every image, word, and description embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph embodies a selection process, the photographer chooses a selected image or setting from an infinite range of potential images and settings.
How can the Macedonian conflict be simultaneously analyzed and characterized by the Western media and political and diplomatic leaders by self-contradictory and mutually exclusive paradigms and explanations? Are the Western media and press giving an accurate picture of the conflict? Or, on the contrary, is the media of the free world creating confusion, vagueness, and obfuscation? Do we need freedom of the press or freedom from the press as Wilson Bryan Key has argued? Or as Robert Cirino asked in Don’t Blame the People, “Can democracy survive the mass media?” The mass media bombards us with contradictory and self-serving explanations, an endless barrage of terms and terminology: “Greater Kosovo”, “Greater Albania”, “autonomy”, “independence”, “dialogue”, “negotiations”, “repression”, “oppression”, “greater rights”, “more rights”, “minority rights”, “human rights”, “criminal empire”, “kidnapped sex-slaves”, “drug smuggling”, “mafia-style-fiefdoms”, “Albanian grievances”, “raw greed”, “Slav-dominated”, “more power”, “greater human rights”? We are inundated with terms, scenarios, rationalizations, characterizations, justifications, and explanations? We are all like Hamlet. When Polonius asked Hamlet, “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet replied: “Words, words, words.”
We are daily inundated with information, information, information …words, words, words …. news, news, news ….News updates, analyses, commentaries, dispatches, broadcasts …CNN, NPR, ITN, CBS, ABC, NBC, CBC, BBC, AP, AFP, Reuters …There are cable news networks, network news programs, National Public Radio, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), CIA-controlled radio broadcasts, newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, satellite news broadcasts, cyberspace news … We live in the Information Age, an electronic era of mass communication and instantaneous information … The world has become, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, “a global village” or a globalized or globalization village … We have a massive and unprecedented amount of information but has it really increased our level of understanding and perception? Instead of greater understanding and perception, what have resulted are the opposite, obfuscation, confusion, and a degraded sense of perception, morality, and judgment? Like Hamlet, we read words, words, words. We view images, images, images. We hear noise, noise, noise. But we understand and perceive less, less, less. Why is this so? Perceptional and sensory overload is designed into news media. Sensory overload is not by accident, but is an inherent part of mass communication. It creates the illusion of diversity of views and opinions. It conceals the uniformity and conformity underlying all mass media. The medium itself strait-jackets and alters our perception and the way processing of stimuli occurs: The medium is the message.
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