Greece’s growing political and economic problems have its small neighbor FYROM sensing an opportunity to push hard for joining NATO, a move that has been stalled for years thanks to Athens’ opposition because of disputes over FYROM’s name.
Defense Minister Zoran Jolevski told POLITICO his country would be prepared to apply to join NATO using the ungainly name “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” which is insisted on by Greece.
“All NATO member countries recognized that Macedonia had by that point met the NATO membership criteria,” said Jolevski. “Unfortunately our southern neighbor added one more criterion to that summit, the name.”
Greece argued that its northern neighbor should instead be called New Macedonia or Upper Macedonia, whereupon Macedonia sued Greece at the International Court of Justice and won in 2011. But its moment had passed.
The alliance’s formal position is that the country “has to find a mutually acceptable solution with Greece to the issue over its name before it can be invited to join NATO.” But with Greece in meltdown, FYROM sees a chance to break the stalemate by announcing that it’s willing to join NATO as FYROM, while pointing out that its forces have served alongside NATO forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In a flat out provocation against Greece, US Senator (and well known war-monger) John McCain on the weekend suggested that FYROM should refer to itself as as it sees fit, meaning as "Macedonia", and left it to be understood that it can do so by disrespecting international treaties, laws as well as Greece!
More specifically, while answering a journalist's question at the GLOBSEC convention in Bratislava, Slovakia, on whether or not FYROM should join NATO, together with Montenegro, he said that “both countries fulfill the criteria but (FYROM) Macedonia [sic] is obstructed by Greece because of the name issue”.
“My personal opinion is that the name of the country is up to people of the country and that decision is made by the people of the country, not by any other country, including Greece”.
In other words, Mr. McCain blames Greece for FYROM's exclusion from NATO, never once taking into consideration that the name that this country has chosen to call itself violates international treaties. The correct name of this republic is Vardaska, and whether some want to accept it or not this is what is stipulated in the interim agreement and it must be respected. If not, then why do we have the United Nations for? The American defence industry cannot dictate to the Greek people what name FYROM will have, because anyway they cut it, shape it and serve it, Macedonia is, was and will always be Greek!
These are the words of American Senator John Mc Cain (Republican), former soldier, presidential candidate (2008) and a member of the Senate of USA. Let us keep in mind that Mr. McCain is a loud voice for the American defence industry and someone who who all know -from the evidence in the press- has close ties with the barbarians who call themselves the moderate "Free Syrian Army" (but who we all know are far from being moderate). Indicative are the three reports, click HERE, HERE, and HERE.
HellasFrappe understands why Mr. McCain would advocate for FYROM. We realize that he wants NATO to have more clients to sell its
defence systems, but this does not give him any right to state his
opinion on delicate foreign affairs. Shame on him for disrespecting Greek
history, the Greek people and the nation of Greece. FYROM has a duty to respect the interim agreement of 1996 and any action to bi-pass this agreement will only hold repercussions against the neighboring country. HellasFrappe also
hopes that the American Diaspora takes McCain's words into consideration when they
head for the polls in the next US elections.
The unrest in FYROM was unexpected to the uninitiated. They started with an opposition party announcement that police is covering up the killing of a young man by prime minister's security detail in 2011. Several experts have linked this sudden unrest, which threatens to destabilize not only FYROM but the Balkans as a whole, with the country's refusal to join sanctions and Skopje's support for the Turkish Stream. This version assumes, at the conspiracy level theory, that the unrest was inspired by US intelligence services which are trying to make life difficult for Russia.
Expert Aleksandr Sobyanin, the Director of Strategic Planning Service of the Border Area Cooperation Association, rejected it. In his view, the unrest in FYROM has nothing to do with Turkish Stream. Paradoxical, isn't it? But if we are to dig deeper, we'll realize the aims of the complex game played by the world's intelligence services in the Balkans, including the Turkish MIT which is playing the first fiddle.
Background Note: MIT is the National Intelligence Organization of Turkey, or the National Security Service.
For starters, the Balkans are penetrated by the extensive spider web of the Albanian Mafia which is wholly controlled by MIT. The Albanians' business in Europe consists of drugs and other smuggled goods.
Kosovo Albanians control 70% of Germany's and Switzerland's heroin market.
The Balkans have become a transit corridor which originates in South-Eastern Asia. The so-called Balkan Route carries 80% of all drugs sold in Europe. Albania, Kosovo, and western FYROM have become a large drug warehouse.
Opium from Afghanistan and Pakistan is processed in Turkey, then sent to Europe via Kosovo and Czech Republic. Then the Balkan Route continues to Great Britain through the French port of Calais. Turkey supports the Albanian drug trade on state level, through its embassies, consulates, and cultural centers.
Albanian Mafia is today the most powerful in Europe, having crushed even the Cosa Nostra and become a de-facto branch of Al-Qaeda in Europe.
It is invulnerable to police infiltration because it is built on familial clans which gives the criminal network and the Turkish intelligence that is backing it considerable ability to destabilize the situation in any European country.
Some claim that the Albanian, and, therefore, the Turkish trail, should be sought even in the Charlie Hebdo affair. It can't be ruled out that's what the two investigators from Limoges, who committed suicide in suspicious circumstances, were trying to unravel.
On May 10th a group of Albanian militants invaded Kumanovo, which is populated by a concentrated Albanian minority, in order to launch a separatist uprising. The police was able to neutralize the intruders with some difficulty. Eight police died.
The Prime Minister of FYROM Nikola Gruyevsky was then accused of inability to deal with the Albanian Mafia, which provoked additional unrest.
Europe right now is gravely worried about the possibility of a big war in the Balkans. There are good reasons for such worries. Albanians have always gotten what they wanted and their dream is the creation of Greater Albania.
Background Note: Greater Albania is the pan-Albanian idea of uniting all territories which are or were at any point in time inhabited by the Albanian ethnos. Most of Greater Albania is located on the territory of former Yugoslavia. In the event of successful implementation of the project, the contemporary Albania would be joined by north-western portions of FYROM, southern areas of Serbia including Kosovo and Preshevo valley, and the southern regions of Montenegro which are populated by Albanians. It should also be noted that Albanian nationalist ideologues consider northern parts of Greece their territory as well.
The likelihood of unrest expanding to the point of reaching the stage of controlled chaos is quite high in several Balkan states. It can't be ruled out that European great powers, France and Germany, will turn a blind eye on it, hoping that the Albanian nationalists will neutralize the tendency by several small European states, including FYROM but also Greece and Serbia, to pursue an independent economic and political course. But the real beneficiary of the next big Balkan war would be Turkey.
Its president Erdogan, who is backed by the army, concluded an alliance with Turkey's Islamists as part of a general effort to restore the Ottoman Empire.
Already five years ago Turkey's Prime Minister Akhmet Davutoglu described Turkey's geostrategic vectors:
"We'll make the Balkans, Caucasus, Middle East together with Turkey the center of future international politics. This is the objective of Turkey's foreign policy and we will reach it. There are more Bosnians in Turkey than in Bosnians, more Abkhaz and Chechens than in Abkhazia and Chechnya, more Albanians than in Albania, because that's our Ottoman inheritance."
The Albanians are being used as an instrument. Their task is to create chaos in the Balkans, and turn them into Europe's Somalia.
Right now Ukraine is being "somalized".
The Balkans are next in line.
When the suffering of the Balkan peoples becomes unbearable, when a genuine humanitarian catastrophe starts unfolding, then Turkish peacekeepers will appear "on a white horse." The Turkish Army will harshly suppress Albanian crime networks, stop the bloodshed, and will de-facto control problem territories. Thus re-establishing Ottoman possessions in Europe.
The second vector of Ottoman expansion is the Middle East.
Here the Turks can get only as far as Syria, which Russia will never give up, not to the Turks nor to ISIS. Likewise Turkey has no prospects for success in the foreseeable future in the Caucasus, and their leaders understand it.
Therefore Russian diplomacy, which understands the "Turkish game" perfectly well, is conducting itself in a correct and even calm manner when commenting on Balkan events.
As of right now Turkey's schemes don't threaten Russia's interests. Moreover, Russia's intervention in the Balkans would be too big a burden to bear, considering our current stand-off with the West. The US is limiting itself to general editing of the Balkan scenario because they, too, would benefit from controlled chaos.
Nobody talks out loud about their intentions. Everyone is calling for peace. And, as often happens in such cases, war is becoming inevitable.
According to this geopolitical analyst, Bosnia was once a magnet for foreign jihadists during its 1990s war, while today the nation is more or less grappling with the threat from home-grown extremists wooed by the conflicts in Iraq and Syria.
by Rusmir Smajilhodzic (RIMSE) - While most Bosnian Muslims are moderates, a few thousand have adopted the ultraconservative Salafist brand of Sunni Islam introduced by the fighters who flocked to Bosnia from North Africa, the Middle East and Asia during the 1992-1995 conflict between Serbs, Muslims and Croats.
Most of those foreign fighters, or "mujahedeen", left Bosnia when the war ended.
But the seed had already been sown. Twenty years on, the radical preachers giving fiery sermons in "mesdzids", or improvised prayer halls, are no longer foreigners.
Those taking up arms are also local men.
On Monday, a gunman shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is greatest" in Arabic) opened fire on a police station in the eastern town of Zvornik, killing one officer and wounding two others before being killed in a shootout.
The assailant, identified as 24-year-old Nerdin Ibric from a village near the northeastern town of Zvornik, was suspected of links to radical Islamist groups. Another man, said to have travelled to Syria, was arrested Tuesday over the attack.
Suspected Islamist extremists had made their presence felt before in the Balkan country.
In October 2011, a gunman opened fire on the US embassy in Sarajevo, wounding a policeman before being injured himself and arrested.
In June of the previous year, a man set off an explosive device at a police station in the central town of Bugojno, killing one officer and wounding six others in what the government called a "terrorist act".
Prayer room recruitment
Would-be jihadists are suspected of being recruited by radical preachers, operating through a network of informal prayer rooms.
"There is no doubt that the recruitment process is possible due to the existence of a network of such places of worship," Esad Hecimovic, a local journalist who has reported extensively on the subject told AFP.
Hardliners, whose numbers are estimated by the authorities at around 3,000 followers, represent just a fraction of Bosnian Muslims, who make up around 40 per cent of the population of 3.8 million.
But their ranks are suspecting of supplying scores of fighters to the wars in the Middle East.
Terrorism spreading
Reacting to the attack on the police station in Zvornik Security Minister Dragan Mektic warned terrorism had become "a serious problem".
"We need to use all our capacity to stop this terrorism that has been spreading in Bosnia," he said.
"Either we defeat terrorism or it will defeat us."
Some 150 Bosnians are believed to have joined jihadists groups in Iraq and Syria, while some 50 others have already been and returned from the battlefield, according to the intelligence services.
Two men arrested at Sarajevo airport in February were charged with attempting to join the Islamic State group, which has sown terror throughout the Middle East and North Africa and executed several Western hostages.
"Those who return to the country are very dangerous. They are of course under surveillance but the danger is that they start to recruit others," said Jasmin Ahic, a professor at the Sarajevo University Faculty of Criminology.
Stiff sentences
To prevent their departure, parliament last year introduced sentences of up to 20 years in prison for jihadists and their recruiters.
In January, a radical imam in the northwestern town of Buzim was the first person to go on trial accused of recruiting people for jihad.
Husein Bosnic, a former member of a mujahedeen unit in Bosnia's war, replaced Nusret Imamovic as leader of the country's Salafists after Imamovic left for Syria in late 2013, according to intelligence sources and the US State Department.
Imamovic, who is named on a US State Department terrorist list, is believed to be the third-in-command of Al-Qaeda's Syria affiliate Al-Nusra Front.
Testifying at Bosnic's trial in Sarajevo, the relatives of several youths who travelled to Syria or Iraq, some of whom have died in fighting, said their kin attended his sermons.
The prosecution accused the cleric of receiving "significant" funding from unnamed backers in Arab states.
Bosnia's Balkans neighbours Albania, Serbia and Kosovo have also swooped on jihadist networks in recent weeks.
Fifteen men went on trial in Serbia and Albania in March accused of recruiting and financing volunteers for the war in Syria.
"For the first time in the region, people who call on others, in a very sophisticated way, to go to foreign battlefields and commit crimes, are being tried," Ahic said.
"What will come out of these trials has yet to be seen."
In the dialectics of several months long acute struggle between the ruling VMRO-DPMNE and the opposing leftist party in FYROM, the Social-Democratic Union of FYROM, some Greek observers formed an opinion that political victory of SDSM – which in local political standards translates into “forming a government and giving mandate to a Prime Minister” – would have positive impact on Greece. The presumption is based on the ignorance of the position of SDSM on the name and identity issue of the major ethnic group of FYROM, an ignorance created by overt emphasis on bombastic and absurd identification of VMRO-DPMNE with Greek classical identity.
by Vladislav Perunović (olympia) - There’s no need to introduce a retrospective of these acts – renaming of streets and public object, erecting statues of important persons of northern Greek classical antiquity, semi-official use of Sun of Vergina, publication of pseudoscholarly books by circles that may be called members of the “official academia”. Observers of the latest years of the symbolic conflict generated by FYROM’s claim on classical antiquity know those facts well enough. However, the usage of the reasoning that VMRO-DPMNE reached a zenith of historical forgeries and that no single political option that would replace it can be worst is based on the false reasoning. The first and the most important is that, if domestic public in FYROM is excluded, these ‘ethnological theories’ formulated by VMRO-DPMNE have some worth in the realm of serious international academic circles.
For all 9 years of their promotion, not a single archeologist, a historian, linguist outside FYROM has accepted even partially those “theories of continuity”. A review of the most authoritative academic reference books produced outside Balkans in this period do not even quote those views as debatable stances, as theories worthy of mention. The only reason why some circles in Greece think that political elimination of this energetic forging of history by VMRO-DPMNE and affiliated (formally non-governmental organizations as well as private individuals) is the offense for the usurpation of the ancient cultural heritage of Greek people. However, what is forgotten is that, although this usurpation is offensive in itself, it is more of an indicator of anti-Hellenism in FYROM than a viable set of theories, models and hypothesis that have potential to sever the classical heritage of Macedon from the Greek historical narrative. What seems omitted by its critics is the fact that Gruevski’s identity politics alienated historical, linguistic, archaeological academic circles in stable academic environments (primarily in liberal democracies) which slowly, but steadily, begun (not without exceptions, but still in a majority) to accept the mainstream Titoist theories of separate “Macedonian” ethnicity which was produced in former Yugoslavia in 1940’s and 1950’s.
These sympathetic academics, most of them exponents of Western cultural liberalism or even cultural (as opposed to political) Marxism, are appalled in contemporary times by the unsubstantiated, vulgar theories of “ancient Macedonian continuity” which are groundless and established in total disregards of scholarly methodology. These academics, supportive of idea of separate “Makedonci” nationality, qualitatively different from Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks, formed their opinions on the premises of notion of “self-determination” and similar philosophically Marxist and existentialists theories of ethnic genesis. The chief factor facilitating this development was the fact that among nationalisms in communist Yugoslavia, all were forbidden in the name of pan-Yugoslav “brotherhood and unity”, except the “Macedonian” nationalism, which was deemed necessary in order to weaken Serbia, sever ethnological ties to Bulgaria and position the young nation against Greece, or, more precisely, against Greek integrity in the North Aegean. This Marxist approach exported energetically in Yugoslavia (and, unfortunately, not challenged by official Greece, in time when Yugoslavia was west’s useful buffer zone against the Soviet bloc) was promoted by the “Communist Party of Macedonia” (KPM), the single political body of southern Yugoslav republic.
Today, its historical, philosophical, sociological and politicological descendants is the SDSM. This party today espouses, after criticism in 1990’s that it was “Pro-Serbian”, “anti-national”, “anti-patriotic” and subsequent reforms, based primarily upon leadership of relatively young people for which Yugoslavia is some sort of distant abstraction from the past, a reformed continuity of “Macedonian nationalism”. Precisely because this variant is very, very different from the bizarre ethnocentrism promoted by VMRO-DPMNE, it is more insidious for Greek long-term interests. Namely, this “Macedonian nationalism” of present-day SDSM is based on the idea of fundamental distinction of Slavic tribes of medieval period, which culminated in revolt by leftist intellectuals again “hegemonic expansionism” of Athens, Belgrade and Sofia, which gained popularity among masses which were ‘tired of fratricidal servitude to neighboring centers of power’.
This variant of “makedonski patriotism”, although ultimately also flawed, has an advantage that it is receptive for western liberals and postmodernists in present day. It is espoused in FYROM by such thinkers of SDSM as Denko Maleski, Ljubomir Frčkovski, Miroslav Grčev, Ljudmil Spasov et al. It has a tradition of institutional formation from 1944 to 1998. SDSM, regardless of the apparent “labourist”, “socialist”, “liberal” political ethos, is, due to the fact that Albanians, Turks, Vlachs, Serbs, Roma and others have their own national parties, still a party almost exclusively composed of people which are “Makedonci” of the Slavic kind. To sum the issue, it is a dilemma for Greek public what is more “acceptable”: the outrageous, bizarre and megalomaniac nationalism of VMRO-DPMNE or the “sociological” Marxist construct cherished by SDSM, which asserts that there is a ‘case’ for ‘Makedonci’ history and culture in a manner that may have some sort of appeal of ‘realism’? Finally, the ongoing struggle of VMRO-DPMNE and SDSM is about such issues as ‘freedom of speech’, ‘corruption’, ‘nepotism’ – neither of both party doesn’t challenge the consensus that “Makedonci” exists for centuries and have a ‘historical right to nationhood’.
Thus, the prospective factors that may bring a fresh change relevant for Greece are the already visible trends of rehabilitation of Bulgarian and Serbian patriotism inside FYROM, both of which have historical tradition based on ethnonym, language and culture.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday that Moscow sees the worsening situation in FYROM as tied to the country’s refusal to join economic sanctions against Russia and its support towards the construction of the Turkish Stream gas pipeline.
“I cannot judge with a final definition, but objectively it turns out that these events in FYROM are developing on the backdrop of the FYROManian authorities’ refusal to join in the sanction policy against Russia, as well as on the backdrop of its active support that Skopje showed in regard to the planned construction of the Turkish Stream gas pipeline, which many in Brussels and those overseas are against,” Lavrov said during a joint press conference with Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic in Belgrade.
Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State of USA (1997-2001) and the first woman to hold that position, during Bill Clinton’s administration, acting in capacity of professor of international relations at Georgetown University, recently stated her opinion on the name issue of FYROM as well about recent events in Kumanovo. Albright characterized the name problem, i.e. implicitly the Greek position is “one of the craziest debates of all times”.
In a video segment from the morning news of FYROM’s public TV house, MRT, Albright apparently stated that within the American administration the name “Macedonia” was solely used for reference to the former Yugoslav republic, even prior to its recognition by USA under its constitutional name in 2004.
Commenting the recent violence in the town of Kumanovo, Albright expressed the view that this action was instigated either by Kosovo Albanians (and believe it or not) she also said that it could have also been instigated by Greeks!
She concluded her explanation with a conclusion that the name issue is not a priority now, in light of the security crisis in FYROM.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I could never understand the madness about the issue with the name, but today we all call the state “Macedonia”, said the former American Secretary of State Madeline Albright, revealing details from 20 years ago, when she was an American Ambassador in the United Nations.
The question was where alphabetically "Macedonia" [sic] shall be placed, was it suppose to be under “l”, because it is close to “m”, as in “Macedonia” or in “f’ like in “former”. Seriously, this debate was ongoing and ongoing and it was one of the craziest debates of all times. I have no idea when the issue shall be solved, but we all call it today “Macedonia”.
After the terrorist attack in Kumanovo, "Macedonia" [sic] has a greater problem than the name issue, Albright declared.
When we read about the events from the last week, it is really upsetting. Again it is about some extremist activities and divisions in various ethnic groups. The question is whether Kosovo is involved or the Greeks. I think that the name issue is not the most important question in this moment. We don’t want to see escalation and now it is time for us to take some measures, and not when the situation becomes more difficult. Source: olympia
Editor's Note: If anyone with a half a brain takes anything that this woman says seriously then they really need psychiatric help. What the hell would Greece have to gain by causing chaos in the Balkans? The is mere stupidity. What sinister plans are they up to again? Is this what the imperialists want so that they can easily threaten us -with a possible spillover- so that we can behave like good little countries and do everything that they want? Well it sure looks like it. Greece would never want any chaos at its borders. Why doesn't she ask her friends in Albania who is instigating chaos in the Balkans? Or her good friends at the Soros-backed Brookings institute which we all know consists of war mongers. I am sure they are rubbing their hands with glee for once again for destabilising the Balkans. Conspiracy? Oh really? Is Kosovo a conspiracy? Are the maniacs who run around and behead people in the name of their God a conspiracy? We here at HellasFrappe think not! If this is their last straw -meaning geopolitical nasty war mongers- who will stop at nothing to keep Europe under control so that it will never turn towards other countries then they are really sick. Still think she is a cute little old lady who wants to spread peace and democracy? Think again! A while back she had also said on live camera that it was worth it to kill 500,000 people (mostly woman and children in Iraq) to finally get at what the imperialist neocon forces she serves wanted. Before that, and during a book signing event she was verbally challenged by Orthodox Serbians who asked her about the unjust war in Yugoslavia and she treated them like an Ebola virus. -All this material is on YouTube check it out- Frappers, war mongers will never cease to exist, but thankfully we can expose them every so often for the stupidities and outright lies they say. Trouble is that there are still too many people who get duped by them. This is by far the biggest battle we need to fight. As for the events that are unfolding in the Balkans, or about to unfold, we suggest that you read some of the links posted below so that you can get a better understanding about the why and the how. Pay attention to the first two articles... and yes the second article is about the same V.Nuland who apparently has orchestrated the chaos in the Ukraine. CHAOS IN FYROM - The Gears of War Grind for Greater Albania
The massive terrorist attack in Kumanovo is the latest provocation in the quest to create a Greater Albania and simultaneously sabotage Russia’s Balkan Stream project.
(sputniknews) - FYROM was rocked by a large-scale terrorist attack last Saturday when over 40 armed individuals fought with police for control of the city of Kumanovo close to the country’s capital. The attackers were from the so-called “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA), a former terrorist group that was thought to have been disbanded after NATO occupied the Serbian province, and Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski said that some of them had received their militant training in the Mideast.
The combined carnage wounded 37 police officers and killed 8 of them, while ultimately eliminating 14 terrorists and leading to the capture of 30 others.
The fighting has raised serious concern that the flailing Color Revolution attempt ongoing since January may desperately coordinate with the ethnically shaded Unconventional War, as both destabilizations are directed from abroad and have the shared objective of regime change.
If they succeed in overthrowing the government, then the forces behind them can sabotage Russia’s Balkan Stream project and formalize the creation of Greater Albania.
Complex Contexts
The chaotic events in FYROM are occurring in a complex environment, but the contexts associated with them can roughly be divided into the domestic and international categories:
Domestic: Democratically elected Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and his government have been fending off a Color Revolution attempt since the beginning of the year, and thus far, they’ve been relatively successful in avoiding the “opposition’s” provocations to escalate the crisis.
Zoran Zaev, the Color Revolutionary figurehead, was charged at the end of January with conspiring with an unnamed foreign government to stage a coup d’état, yet this hasn’t stopped him from continuing to call for regime change. His campaign has sought to cultivate and exploit youth grievances in order to acquire the illusion of critical mass needed to attract overt international (Western) support for his plot. Importantly, however, the two main Albanian opposition parties have refused to go along with Zaev’s conspiratorial actions and have continued to support democracy and the legitimately elected government.
Their loyalty is exceptionally important because ethnic Albanians constitute over a fifth of the country’s population and largely inhabit the border regions with Albania and the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo, thus meaning that their defection to the regime change movement would be catastrophic not just for the government, but also for the country’s very existence.
The main reason they support the authorities is because the government endows them with the best minority rights afforded anywhere in the world as a result of the 2001 Ohrid Agreement. They largely understand that their forced incorporation into Greater Albania would do away with these generous privileges and subordinate them to second-rate citizens in the irredentist state, thereby doing away with their former role as first-rate ones in multiethnic FYROM.
In fact, they may not even feel like citizens at all in a Greater Albania, since if Albanians in “Kosovo” are any indication, then hundreds of thousands of them may flee from their failed “state” and completely abandon it to the terrorist and criminal gangs that made it “independent” in the first place.
International: This brings about the necessity in discussing the project for a Greater Albania, which Tirana threatened to bring about as recently as last month. Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama warned that his country would “unite” with the Serbian province of Kosovo whether the EU supports such a move or not, calling the forthcoming annexation “inevitable and unquestionable”.
(HF readers may recall that Edi Rama was -and still is- very good friends with Mr. Socialist George Papandreou. And we all know that good old George never worked for Greece's interests but rather for others.)
In what Albania would like the world to believe was just a completely random occurrence, the dormant KLA terrorist group was suddenly revived and carried out what now appears in hindsight to have been a test-run terrorist attack late last month near Gosince.
It should be clear at this point that the two pervious provocations are intimately interconnected with the catastrophe in Kumanovo, and that all three of them combine to form the war cry for a Greater Albania. But there’s an even larger international component at play here, and that’s the US’ obsession with derailing Russian-European energy cooperation via the Balkan Stream pipeline, the de-facto successor of South Stream. Envisioned as an expansion of Turkish Stream, it’s projected to carry Russian gas from Greece to South Stream’s former Serbian hub, critically passing through FYROM en route.
Accordingly, if FYROM is thrown into chaos and/or its government is illegally removed, then Balkan Stream becomes a pipedream (pun intended) and would never get built, hence why the combined Color Revolution and Unconventional War have been unleashed on the geostrategic country. The destabilization in FYROM is thus essentially a Western proxy war against Russia in the context of the New Cold War.
Not Civil War, But External War
Many in the foreign media are saying that the terrorist attacks could herald in a possible civil war between Albanian and Slavic FYROManians, but such an assessment is misleading, and in the case of Western reporting, purposely so.
To channel Syrian President Bashar Assad as regards his own country’s conflict, what is happening in FYROM “is an external war carried out by internal elements.”
Most of the attackers were FYROManian citizens (the others being Albanian and “Kosovan”), but many of them received their highly specialized training in the Mideast, a euphemism meant to signify ISIL.
Their adept and lethal handling of sniper rifles, explosives, and automatic weapons proves that they weren’t run-of-the-mill drug-trafficking thugs and lends convincing credence to this claim.
Furthermore, these terrorists were professionals and were planning to carry out coordinated large-scale attacks against soft targets such as sporting events and shopping malls prior to their interception by the authorities, and they had already stockpiled loads of arms (many of which were consequently used against the police) in anticipation of this.
The revival of the KLA and its latest terrorist violence are meant to provoke Albanian FYROManians into abandoning the government and siding with the militant irredentists.
The concept of Greater Albania is an emotionally charged tool designed to increase the country’s destabilization and consequently facilitate regime change in conjunction with the simultaneous Color Revolution attempt. It endeavors to craft the illusion of consensual acceptance by all Albanians, even though this clearly isn’t the case at all.
In fact, it can be said that the resort to ethnically affiliated terrorism indicates desperation on the side of the external anti-FYROManian actors, since they recognize that this is the last option they have in trying to get the Albanians to turn against the government and instigate a racial and religious division of society.
The conspirators wouldn’t utilize such extreme methods if they felt they could achieve their objectives in a simpler manner, such as through intelligence-front NGOs or by ‘legitimately’ winning them over to the side of the Color Revolutionaries.
The violent, last-ditch effort to christen Greater Albania through a sea of killings testifies to the fortitude of Albanian FYROManians in heretofore resisting this tempting Fascist-era ideology, hence the need to export Wahhabist ISIL terrorists to this latest New Cold War theater in order to mangle FYROM and break Russia’s Balkan Stream plans.
With regard to the production of geopolitical discourses, the field of critical geopolitics distinguishes between the "intellectuals of statecraft" and the "dissident intellectuals". The intellectuals of statecraft are those whose activities are directed toward the extending and deepening the power of the status quo, whereas the dissident intellectuals endeavor to demystify and deconstruct the existing networks of power and privilege.[1] The former are the creators of official manipulations and lies, while the latter seek to reveal the hidden truths behind them. While the latter write for Boiling Frogs Post on a voluntary basis, the former work for the government agencies for a lot of taxpayers' money. This article is about one such intellectual of statecraft and the little known aspect of her geopolitical activities.
Filip Kovacevic (Boiling Frogs Post) - Victoria Nuland attained global spotlight relatively recently in connection to the Euromaidan events in Ukraine in early 2014. Her expletive regarding the EU travelled around the globe within minutes of the appearance of the leaked telephone conversation between her and the US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt on Youtube.[2] The very day the conversation became public, I took part in the panel discussion on the geopolitical significance of the events in Ukraine at the Center for Civic Education in Podgorica, Montenegro.[3]
In my presentation, I stated that we would be able to judge as to whether there was any commitment to political accountability and sensible diplomacy in the US State Department by Nuland's subsequent professional fate. I claimed that if she did not resign after such an outrageous diplomatic scandal, it would mean that the moral decay and corruption, coupled with imperial and aggressive disregard for all differences in approach and opinion, took hold within the State Department and was now beyond repair. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what happened. Nuland held on to her post and her brand of "diplomacy" appears to have become the norm in the US relations with both the allies and the supposed opponents in Europe and beyond.
Even though Nuland became a high-level functionary of the State Department only about a year and a half ago (she was appointed assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in September 2013), she has been active in the US foreign policy establishment for more than two decades.[4]
She began her career in the US embassies in Russia and Mongolia and later worked in the US Mission to NATO. From 2000 to 2003, she was the US deputy permanent representative to NATO, and she became the (18th) US permanent representative (ambassador) to NATO from 2005 to 2008. In between the two NATO stints, she advised (who else but) the imperial chief strategist, the US vice president Dick Cheney.
Obviously, she has been involved in formulating and implementing the expansionist geopolitical policies of NATO from the late 1990s. In this manner, she contributed a great deal to current political and economic instability on the European continent.
Together with her husband Robert Kagan, a well-known neoconservative author and one of the founders of the imperialist/globalist Project for a New American Century (PNAC), Nuland has been a member of the Washington inner circle of those who think that the US should make the entire planet serve its imperial interests. The government, professional, and academic networks of the Nuland-Kagan couple show that there is basically no distinction between the Democrats and Republicans when it comes to the goals of the imperial foreign policy.
In addition, just like some of the most powerful "intellectuals of statecraft" in the recent US history, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright, Nuland has family roots in Eastern Europe (Odessa, Ukraine) and this may in part explain (but cannot justify) her distrustfully aggressive attitude toward Russia, its national interests and foreign policy goals. In fact, considering that the reductive anti-Russian worldview propelled the careers of both Brzezinski and Albright, the same could be anticipated in the case of Nuland as well. If the US foreign policy continues going down the current, ultimately destructive path, I would not be very surprised to see her appointed as the secretary of state in the next presidential administration.
While Nuland's geopolitical activities on the rimlands of Russia are well covered by the alternative and anti-imperial media (e.g. distributing monetary aid to the pro-imperial political forces in Ukraine and, more symbolically, cookies to the Maidan protesters),[5] not much has been written about her activities in the Balkans.
This article aims to remedy that significant lacuna. In my opinion, the US-NATO extensive involvement in the Balkans is just as important for the success of the overall imperial agenda as the heavily militarized engagement on the borders of Russia and its Central Asian allies.
Nuland in the Balkans
In her capacity as the assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland visited the Balkans for the first time in the mid-July 2014. The general aim of her mission was two-fold. First, to further the imperial goals of strengthening the US-NATO hold over the region, and, secondly, to oppose the historical Russian and the emerging Chinese influences, using all the means at her disposal (from open threats to promises to look the other way while the attacks on free thought and human rights are being perpetrated by the Balkan governments).
Nuland first landed in Croatia and took part in the Croatia Forum in Dubrovnik on July 11, 2014. The Croatia Forum is a decade-old annual gathering of the foreign ministers and other political dignitaries from Europe and beyond involved in the formulation of foreign policy. Considering that Croatia is a member of NATO since 2009, it is not surprising that Nuland called it "a fantastic ally".[6] However, on the issue of gas and oil industry, Nuland cautioned the Croatian allies to be careful and make "smart decisions".
This was an implicit reference to the talks going on at the time on the possible business deals between the Croatian oil and gas companies and the Russian Gazprom.[7] Also, at the time, the building of the South Stream oil pipeline was still in the cards and Nuland was concerned that Croatia's involvement in its future operations would lead to its developing tighter and mutually profitable economic links with Russia. As is known, the pipeline was later cancelled after the intense political pressure by the US and EU officials on the Bulgarian government.
Obviously, in this respect, Nuland got what she wanted, but this outcome will lead to the imposition of heavy economic costs on the ordinary citizens of the Balkans left without a source of cheap(er) energy.
Even though Nuland did not visit Bosnia-Herzegovina, she did not miss the opportunity to mention it in her Dubrovnik speech by calling for the strengthening of the country's unity, a code phrase for the revision of the 1995 Dayton Agreements which ended the civil war. She publicly contradicted her "fantastic ally", the Croatian prime minister Zoran Milanović who, at the same forum only a day earlier, said that the revision of the B-H constitution was "unrealistic".[8] However, Nuland's statement points to the existence of a policy disagreement between the "allies", and therefore we could expect more political and economic instability in B-H in the coming period in order to suit the US imperial "strategy of tension".
The next stop on the Nuland's Balkan tour was Podgorica, the capital city of Montenegro. Nuland met with all the top corrupt political dignitaries, the prime minister Milo Djukanović, a long-time CIA asset, the "president" Filip Vujanović, illegitimately elected in the rigged elections in April 2013, and the "usual puppets," the ministers of foreign affairs and defense, Igor Lukšić and Milica Pejanović-Djurišić.[9] She vexed ecstatic on the "political progress" in one of the most extensively mafia-controlled countries in the world and of course promised her help to get Montenegro an invitation to NATO membership by the end of 2015. Needless to say, Nuland also praised Djukanović, who has been in power since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and is known to have been involved in the massive war crimes as well as many organized crime operations over the last 25 years.
From Podgorica, Nuland went to Tirana, the capital of Albania where she met with the top level Albanian officials, the prime minister Edi Rama, the president Bujar Nishani, and the speaker of the Parliament Ilir Meta. All three thanked Nuland on the continued US support, while Rama also mentioned the US support for "the Albanian people in the region".[10] This mention is of extreme relevance as it has to do with the relations between Albania and Kosovo, which have become very close since Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008. In some circles, the increasing economic and political integration between the two conjures up the fear of a "Greater Albanian" state, the efforts on behalf of which by certain influential Albanian political elites (both in the region and in the US) could seriously destabilize the Balkans.
In Montenegro and Albania, Nuland also met with the leaders of the parliamentary opposition. These leaders brought up serious charges against both Djukanović and Rama, which were no doubt the source of cynical laughter among the US Embassy officials after the end of the meetings. In both countries, the US puppets are in power, and, no matter how corrupt they get, while they remain puppets, they will get all the support they need to keep holding on.
After Tirana, Nuland's next stop was Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo, which many have called a "NATO state", considering that Kosovo's separation from Serbia was heavily supported by the US and its NATO allies. However, it is important to point out that not even all the NATO states have recognized Kosovo, which shows to what extent its recognition by other states (close to 110 at this point) was the result of the US imperial arm-twisting and not based on international law and relevant procedures. Is it surprising then that Nuland was herself lavished with praise from the Kosovo political leaders, including the suspected war criminals, Ramush Haradinaj and Hashim Thaçi? The president of Kosovo Atifete Jahjaga thanked Nuland on the US support for Kosovo's "broad Euro-Atlantic integrations", which is a code phrase for the close cooperation with NATO military and intelligence networks.[11]
On July 13, 2015, Nuland visited Belgrade and met with the Serbian president Tomislav Nikolić as well as with the foreign minister Ivica Dačić. Nikolić stressed that Serbia wants to have good relations with both "the West and the East", which is definitely not what Nuland wanted to hear.[12] The US imperial interests demand that the Balkan countries cut off all good and mutually beneficial relations with the East. At the end of the day (unless, in the meantime, there is the End of the World), this will no doubt turn out to be a Quixotic quest on the part of the US, but not before much more economic and political instability is imported into the region as the preferred weapon of imperial control.
In contrast to Nikolić, Dačić, the close ally of the former Serbian authoritarian leader, Slobodan Milošević, was - perhaps due to the past sins in the US eyes - more amenable to Nuland's rhetoric. He talked about the strengthening and extending the relations with the US on various economic and security issues. Nuland returned the "compliment" and asserted that she was "impressed" with the progress of Serbia and the "ambitious reform plan of the Serbian government". Is it necessary to point out that the ambition of this plan consists only in further applying the neoliberal austerity measures on the already heavily impoverished population of Serbia?
The last segment of Nuland's Balkan trip was in Skopje, FYROM. She met both with the president George Ivanov and the prime minister Nikola Gruevski. Predictably, the topics of discussion included the "Euro-Atlantic" integrations and the implementation of neoliberal economic policies.[13] Not much was mentioned about the prevailing corruption and human rights abuses in the country, but Nuland stressed that more needed to be done by the FYROManian government to alleviate the concerns of the "Albanian regions". This emphasis should be enough to explain the praise Nuland received both in Albania and Kosovo for the continued US support. No doubt the location of one of the newest and biggest US military bases in Europe (the Camp Bondsteel) in Kosovo, not far the FYROManian border, has something to do with it.
Nuland has not visited the Balkans since July 2014, but there are some indications that she will visit again this summer.[14] However, since her visit, she often met with the Balkan leaders either in Washington, DC or at the margins of various international political gatherings, such as, for instance, the Munich Security Forum. This means that the two-fold Cold War agenda of keeping the US-NATO Empire in, and all the others (including the autonomous populist forces) out, is in the full swing at this time.
However, if we take into consideration the political events in Greece since SYRIZA's coming to power, this agenda has hardly any long-term viability.
Filip Kovacevic is a Boiling Frogs Post contributing author and analyst, a geopolitical author, university professor and the chairman of the Movement for Neutrality of Montenegro. He received his BA and PhD in political science in the US and was a visiting professor at St. Petersburg State University in Russia for two years. He is the author of seven books, dozens of academic articles. He has been invited to lecture throughout the EU, Balkans, ex-USSR and the US. He currently resides in San Francisco, and can be contacted at fk1917@yahoo.com
NOTES
[1] See for instance Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Simon Dalby, and Paul Routledge (eds.). The Geopolitics Reader. New York: Routledge, 1998, especially Tuathail's "Introduction", pp. 1-14. This geopolitics reader is incomplete as it does not include the classic and contemporary writings of the Russian (Eurasian) geopolitical school.
The following clip shows Aristotel Tentov, FYROM professor of engineering, who gained “fame” in nationalist circles by performing pseudo-archaeological and pseudo-historic research which explains the emergence of the FYROManian people as a Divine work, superior in all aspects from the rest of humankind. This is a part of his recent interview on a talk-show on the channel of extremely pro-Gruevski television station SITEL in which Tentov postulates a Divine cosmogony which elevates “Makedonci” people of FYROM as a special creation, hierarchically over all other humans.
For many FYROM citizens, especially among the younger generation, the “new reading of history” is a basic fuel of nationalism and suprematism which is cultivated through pseudo-history in a very energetic manner since the onset of Nikola Gruevski’s VMRO-DPMNE rule since 2006.
Soros has worked his magic here indeed.
Editor's Note: Silly you and you thought God only created Adam and Eve and the world in seven days. Thankfully this man enlightened us. Truth is... We have no words, even science does not have an explanation about his condition.
At the exact same time that Greece has received a guarantee for billions of cubic meters' worth of Russian gas, FYROM is being rocked by the threat of a renewed Albanian insurgency designed to offset Russia’s pipeline plans.
Andrew Korybko (Sputnik) - Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller announced that Russia will guarantee 47 billion cubic meters of gas a year to Greece via the Turkish Stream, which would then go onwards to supply the European market. While it's not yet specified exactly which path the pipeline will take from Greece to the EU, it's more than likely that it'll go through FYROM en route to the former South Stream's envisioned Serbian hub, and thenceforth through Hungary, Austria, and beyond, just like Russia originally anticipated last year.
There's one major obstacle to that strategy, however, and it's that the US is attempting to transform its failed Color Revolution in FYROM into an Unconventional War to neutralize this geostrategic route, utilizing the specter of an Albanian terrorist campaign modeled off the Syrian template to achieve its destructive goals.
From Color Revolution to Unconventional War
In the years since the War on Yugoslavia, the US has perfected and patterned a novel method of regime change that proceeds according to pre-established escalation checkpoints. Washington first issues either a direct or implicit/covert ultimatum to the targeted government, the rejection of which serves as the ‘dog whistle' for activating the dormant Color Revolution social infrastructure present in the country. Should that plan come to fail, then some of the associated destabilizing actors are transitioned into launching an Unconventional War.
The final step, should that fail and a Great Power doesn't diplomatically intervene (as Russia did with Syria in September 2013), is to repeat the Libyan Scenario of a conventional intervention that leaves no doubt as to the success of its regime change odds.
Adapting this template for the FYROManian application, it can be seen how the country has thus far successfully repelled the Color Revolution attempt by Zoran Zaev, which in turn led to concrete Russian investment in the country's pipeline infrastructure that set the stage for the Putin-Tsipras agreement earlier in April. Now that the Balkan Stream pipeline plans are rapidly gaining traction, the US realized that it needs to act quickly to in order to sabotage them, hence the sudden reemergence of Albanian terrorism in FYROM.
While this problem was previously so serious as to push the country near civil war in 2001, it's generally subsided since then, with only a handful of extremists unhappy with the generous Ochrid Agreements that guaranteed the Albanian minority vast political and social rights. Nonetheless, that hasn't stopped the country of Albania, the US' regional Lead From Behind proxy, from threatening regional destabilization in order to create Greater Albania.
An international scandal rocked the Serbian capital of Belgrade last fall when Albanian nationalists used a drone to fly a Fascist-era Greater Albania flag through a football stadium during a heated match, threatening to rekindle ethnic tensions that had long remained on edge in that corner of the Balkans. The provocation thankfully didn't result in any deaths, but it did raise fears that the same style of World War II historical revisionism from Ukraine was slithering down to the Balkans with implicit US strategic support, opening up a new geo-ideological front in the New Cold War.
Earlier this month, (friend of George Papandreou and socialist) Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama confirmed that Fascist-era thinking is indeed alive and well in Tirana when he officially pushed for the creation of Greater Albania. He spoke of his country's plans to annex the Serbian Province of Kosovo (which he calls "unification"), saying that it was "inevitable" and "unquestionable", and that the only question is "Will it happen in the context of the EU as a natural process and understood by all, or will it happen as a reaction to EU blindness or laziness?"
The Serbian government rightfully responded with indignation, warning Albania against "banging the war drums" and saying that the two entities would "never unite".
This was just the opening salvo of Tirana's regional agitations, however, as a short while later, Hashim Thaci, the former political leader of the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army and Foreign Minister of the unilaterally self-proclaimed government of Kosovo, said he would travel to Belgrade to attend a conference he was invited to. Serbian Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic warned that "If he turns up in Belgrade, the Ministry of Interior will act according to the law and bring him to justice", since Thaci had been convicted in absentia of terrorist-related offensives in 1997 and sentenced to a decade imprisonment.
Not even a week later, about 40 individuals identifying themselves as members of the thought-to-be disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army, the same group that Thaci himself once led, crossed over from Kosovo (now under NATO occupation and no longer administered by Serbia) and raided a FYROManian police post near the border. They took a couple police officers hostage and ominously declared that:
"We will have an Albanian state", before scurrying back to their NATO protectorate after a few hours.
Thus, just as Albanian nationalism threatened to make South Stream a pipedream, so too does it seem poised to do the same with Balkan Stream, as in the course of only six brief months, Albania and its Kosovo satellite have shockingly:
Flown a Fascist-era flag over Belgrade;
Openly declared their intentions to unilaterally impose a Greater Albania on the Balkans;
Revived an irredentist terrorist organization;
And staged a violent border incursion into FYROM.
The most destabilizing aspect is that the US, EU, and NATO haven't condemned any of this whatsoever, and in fact, Albania and Kosovo enjoy de-jure and de-facto NATO support, with the former being an official member and the latter being occupied by one of the US' largest bases in Europe, Camp Bondsteel.
These disturbing facts reveal implicit Western support for Albanians aggressive actions, adding credence to the analysis that they are indeed being coordinated by the US in order to sabotage Russia's Balkan Stream project.
Forecast Indicators And Coming Consequences
Here's what to monitor as the situation further develops:
Possible expansion of terrorist raids into Serbia's Albanian-populated Sandzak and Presevo Valley border regions;
Albanian/Kosovar/NATO/US military reactions and official statements to the terrorist incursion (whether in FYROM and/or Serbia);
The loyalty of Albanian political parties to the democratically elected government of FYROM;
And the ‘second wind' potential of the FYROManian Color Revolution and its possible transformation into a EuroMaidan-like meltdown.
Other than the possible disruption of Balkan Stream's construction and the violent formalization of Greater Albania, the consequences of renewed ethnic destabilization in the Balkans could include:
A strengthening of Serbian-FYROManian ties centered on shared victimhood;
Intensification of CSTO/SCO/Eurasian Union outreaches to beleaguered non-NATO and non-EU members Serbia and FYROM;
The threatening of China's Balkan Silk Road plan for high-speed rail from the Greek port of Piraeus to Budapest (via FYROM and Serbia);
And subsequently, possible Chinese shadow mediation at settling the conflict before it spirals out of control.
Finally, be on the lookout for US/EU ‘mediation' attempts that are nothing more than ‘good cop' diplomatic tricks to pursue their ‘bad cop' geopolitical designs. Also, be wary of any initiative or statement that could be interpreted as a subversive invitation for US/NATO military intervention in Serbia and/or FYROM.
Although the Greek economy is classified as an advanced high income
economy, this has done very little in convincing its Eurozone partners, creditors
and especially the markets, that Greece is anything but ‘’fiscally
undisciplined’’. Since 2009, the country has been following an externally
imposed policy of fiscal austerity, spearheaded by the ‘’fiscally disciplined’’
Germany.
Exclusive to HellasFrappe
From Vasillis (Basil) Tomaras
Leading economists, business leaders, fund managers and even the
current SYRIZA government, all agree that policies have done very little to
improve the situation of the Greek people. The levels of unemployment levels,
the prime indicator of the effect austerity has on the ground , are/is still at
an appalling 26% and a vast majority of which is youth as half of the
population between 15-24 is currently unemployed.
The
‘’welfare state’’,
the myth and the real causes
A common and dominant narrative about Greece and the causes of the
crisis is that it is a generous over- bloated welfare state. According to the
OECD’s statistics for social expenditure over GDP, this is not the case:
The full Greek state expenditure is at close to 48.7%, which is marginally
higher than the EU-15 average (estimated at 0.6%). However, budget deficit is approximately
4.3% higher than the EU-15 average. What does this all mean? In simple terms,
it’s not state expenditures that heightened the economic crisis in Greece but
rather state revenue, or to be more precise a lack thereof.
Traditionally, tax evasion in Greece has been described as a
‘’national sport’’ by even the highest ranked government officials. The problem
of corruption and tax evasion in Greece is well known and is influenced by many
factors.
Austerity,
the real shock economics!
Without a doubt, the impact of austerity has been felt in all
aspects of life and in all sectors of the economy:
Recession with no end in sight: The
continuous drop in GDP, the lowest in the entire post-war period, led to the
lowest reduction in domestic demand and consumption. Ensuing decrease in production
led to the loss of thousands of jobs in the private sector (at one point even numbering
in the thousands daily).
Rapid labour decline: This resulted
from the steep increase of insecure and uninsured work, degrading wages,
decline of workers’ rights and also from the deregulation of workers accords.
·The slow killing of the middle class: Traditionally, the middle class economy consisted of small and
medium sized businesses that were generously funded in the past by the banking
sector which had no apprehensions about granting generous loans and overdraft
lines with minimal collateral and oversight. After these financial institutions
were respectively starved of funds, a lethal combination of liquidity depletion,
decline in consumption and introduction of ‘’emergency’’ taxes, resulted in most
of these middle income enterprises subsequently closing down (65.000 in 2010
alone).
Migration push factors and ‘’brain drain’’: In contrast to the usual yellow press publications of the ‘’lazy’’
Greek, the truth is that the workforce in Greece is among the best educated in
Europe and the most productive, actually surpassing their German counterparts.
While those studying in academic institutions abroad were discouraged from
returning to Greece after graduating, many already educated and skilled
professionals also left the country.
·Homelessness: Along with the
pre-crisis immigrant homelessness which was largely unreported, newly austerity
borne destitute also joined their ranks. People and families with medium and
higher educational backgrounds who previously belonged to the middle class.
Notably, homelessness increased 25% between the period 2009-2011 (over 20.000
by NGO estimates).
·Record level of suicides: One can
only feel sorrow and sympathy for Dimitris Christoulas, a retired pensioner,
who publicly committed suicide in early April 2012 at Syntagma square, just
outside the Greek Parliament, leaving his family in complete sorrow. This
gentle, cultured and above all sane man cited in a politically fueled suicide
letter, that he preferred a dignified end to his life in lieu of an undignified
existence after government austerity measures slashed his pension. Sadly, he is
not the only victim of this crisis, as austerity driven suicides skyrocketed as
much as 40% between the period 2010-2011.
·Disintegration of the health services: The health care system also suffered greatly, through reduced
access to health care services following massive cuts. As a result, HIV
infections increased by 52% between the periods 2010-2011, while drug
prevention centers and psychiatric clinics shut down after tough budget cuts.
The
Shadow economy of Sandanski and how Bulgaria is benefitting from the crisis
Greece and Bulgaria have very different social and economic environments.
In the interest of not confusing the reader with national quantitative data, I
will rather limit indication to a bite size measure by making reference to
Sandanski.
To most Europeans and Greeks alike, the Bulgarian border town of
Sandanski may not be on their radar, but to the inhabitants of Northern Greece,
the town is very well known. This is due to the fact it has benefited extremely
well from the Greek financial crisis. Thousands of Greek vehicles cross the border
every day to fill up on gas since it is 40% less expensive; Housewives do their
grocery shopping; Dentists, many of whom have relocated from the capital Sofia,
have opened up offices in Sandanski to service Greek patients bearing Euros;
etc.. Additionally, scores of Greek pensioners made a permanent move to
Sandanski simply because their reduced pensions were not enough to live on in
Greece.
The most notable migration trend to Sandanski of all are Greek
businesses. The traditionally bustling Northeastern Greek town of Serres, 50Kms
south of the border has become a shadow of its former past as many businesses
moved north to Bulgaria. According to Dimitris Giannakis, the president of
Serres’ Chamber of Commerce and industry, at least 5.000 Greek businesses were struck
from the registry over the past five years. It’s painfully obvious where they
moved to (according to the Bulgarian Register these estimates could be as high
as 8.000). This is not taking into account migration to other countries such as
FYROM, Albania, Romania and Serbia. As it stands, Greece is the third largest investor
in Bulgaria after the Netherlands and Austria.
So the obvious question is, why did all these Greek businesses move
to Bulgaria? And what are the Bulgarians doing better which the Greeks are not?
Taxation
- Greece’s Achilles heel.
Two
countries with radically different taxation policies put into debt perspective.
Bulgaria - When Bulgaria exited the Eastern-Bloc sphere of influence in 1991,
it had just over €10 Billion state debt, which represented 180% of GDP. Bulgaria
entered the EU in 2007 after maintaining a decade long policy of budget
surpluses and reforming their tax codes in the process, after which public debt
reached a record low of 13.7% over GDP (the second lowest in Europe after
Estonia). Although Bulgaria was not immune to the European financial crisis, thanks
to sound fiscal policies and the resulting €4.3 Billion state fiscal reserve,
they managed to ride out the financial storm and maintain a public debt of only
18%. These post crisis deficits levels are comparable to
those of Norway, Sweden and Austria.
Greece - Although Eurozone entry had ‘’strict’’ criteria for government to
GDP ratio of under 60%, we can all agree that 14 years down the line and omitting
creative accounting practices of the past, the true present situation is
anything but Maastricht compliant.
Balkan
economic wars
Bulgaria has benefited from major investments. Here are a few
examples.
·Montupet automotive (for those who
remember the DeLorean) has invested €100M in Bulgaria and employed almost 1.000
people.
·The telecommunications arm of
AIG invested $2B in several plants.
·American Standard - $240M.
·AES Energy Generation Corp -
$1.4B.
·NU Image Film Productions -
$28M.
·Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and
IBM have their European call and service centres in Sofia.
·Turkish companies Sisecam and
Alcomet opened plants that employ 2.000 people (blue & white collar) combined.
·Germany’s SAP opened SAP labs,
an ICT facility in Bulgaria employing over 500.
Bulgaria is not the only country that did the prudent thing by
lowering its taxes and simplifying their tax codes. Albania and FYROM both have 10%, while Romania
and Serbia have 16% and 15% respectively. Add to the mix, the brutal Greek 23%
VAT rate and the fact that you can open a limited liability company in Bulgaria
with just €1 share capital (€4.500 in Greece), it’s no wonder why Greece is
losing the economic war against its Balkan neighbors.
In conclusion, and according to very conservative estimates, a
combination of intolerable tax rates, a high VAT rate and inflated payroll tax
has driven one quarter of the Greek economy underground by tax evasion,
transfer pricing practices etc., while the more honest ones in the formal economy
are either forced to shut down or move to other countries such as Bulgaria. What’s
more, massive migration of businesses from Greece continually gains momentum
and at the same time delivering a huge blow to the state coffers in the
process.
The
call to reduce taxes and tackle reforms
The promises made by the previous ND-PASOK administration that there
would be a return to markets in 2014 has yet to materialize. It also hasn’t
silenced market experts and economists alike who claim that this will not be attainable
in 2015 either, since a third bailout package is looming on the horizon.
As EU-IMF bailout packages come with painful reforms and demands,
there is no doubt that Greece will once again be forced into a vicious storm of
austerity amidst a tranquil sea of more competitive economies right smack on its
borders.
There has recently been several appeals by the likes of economists
such as Nathan Lewis and even Steve Forbes to adopt measures that will not only
stem the exodus of businesses, but also provide a stimulus to foreign
investment and economic development.
Adoption of a flat tax on
personal income and corporate profits (which will also deter tax evasion. After
all, who in their right mind is going to evade 10%?).
Axing the ridiculously high
payroll tax from 45% to 10%.
Reducing VAT to 15%.
The current leftist-led coalition government of SYRIZA which claimed
victory during the January elections did so largely on a radical platform of
taxing the wealthy, easing tax burdens on the poor and more state interference
in the economy. This approach is a trip down the wrong avenue known in
economists’ circles as Sweetwater economics and is doomed to fail. It will not
only deteriorate the already toxic situation, but it is also going to alienate
valuable investors (domestic and foreign).
Is the Greek government seriously seeking a development stimulus
that will bring in foreign investment, deter tax evasion and fill up the state
coffers? Are they willing to learn from Bulgaria’s proven model? If yes, then they
should follow Bulgaria’s approach by reducing taxes, simplifying tax codes and
axing bureaucracy. The question is, will the government eventually get a grip
of reality and pick up the courage to fearlessly serve it to the EU and IMF on
a take it or leave it basis?
All self-respecting Greeks, who either live in Greece and/or abroad,
need to unite and make a stand to promote this policy by lobbying to their MP’s
and other interest groups. We also need to do this now as time is Greece’s number
one enemy and a commodity that our nation simply does not have.
The Russian pipeline carrying natural gas via Turkey and Greece does not in any way compete with the Vertical Gas Corridor (VGC) which is planned by Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, Productive Reconstruction, Environment and Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis assured his counterparts in Sofia, Bulgaria on Wednesday.
Speaking one day after his meeting in Athens with Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller about the Russian pipeline project - which is to traverse Greece and supply gas to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Serbia, Hungary and the rest of central Europe - Lafazanis pointed out that the two pipelines would cross and supply different countries on their path. Lafazanis was in the Bulgarian capital for the first meeting of the high-level group on the VGC, attended by his counterparts from Bulgaria and Romania.
The minister presented a detailed report on the government's plans on energy connections, noting that Greece was in talks for its potential participation in the construction of the Russian pipeline "in accordance with European law and the third energy package." The project is intended to replace the existing Russian natgas route via Ukraine to central Europe, which will cease operating in 2019.
He noted that the VGC linking the natgas systems of Greece, Bulgaria and Romania was not only potential solution in the case of an energy crisis but promoted the interlinking of the region with "Europe's energy arteries, putting an end fo the isolation of our countries" and promoting a convergence in gas prices.
Referring to the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (IGB), he said this would provide southeast Europe's most efficient access to new sources of natural gas, from various areas and not just the Caspian Sea. He also noted the possibility of supplying the Balkans through the Liquified Natural Gas station at Revythousa in Greece.
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