What is going to happen in Kosovo?
The official spokesmen, the experts have been wrong
so many times in the last many months that they have achieved,
paradoxically, a positive result: normal people have lost any remaining
confidence in their credibility.
The once omnipotent Marti Ahtisaari had put his hand
on the fire proclaiming the unstoppable “independence” of the province.
He lost that hand. Washington political and diplomatic leaders from
George Bush on down had spoken in the curt language characteristic of
the “sole superpower” that the Olympus had taken a decision and minor
gods (such as those lingering around the UN Palace) had to accept the
fait accompli or else.
The European gnomes from London to Berlin to Paris,
like the cat in Pinocchio kept repeating the last words of the US fox
explaining to the naïf Balkan natives the unchangeable and
unchallengeable nature of the decision taken by the supreme powers:
“It’s a done deal, see? Nobody can change the decision.”
Instead, it was all but a done deal! Ahtisaari has
been forced to abandon the stage where he tried to play the part of the
hero in an historic drama. On the contrary, rotten eggs, tomatoes, and
cat calls have put an end to a pathetic farce of corruption and shame.
Still, no “done deal”.
It was the moment, then, to deploy the local
messengers of Olympus. The “experts” dutifully obliged writing in
newspapers and enjoying the sound of their voice on TV: there is
nothing anybody can do., Kosovo will be “independent.” Is there the
risk that this will become a precedent that destroys some basic tenets
of international law? So what? The antiquated discussion on what is
right and what is wrong has been abandoned long ago. It is a new world
now. For our own good, the rule now is Might Makes Right.
Still, no “done deal”.
Then the threat arrived: If you people do not accept
what has been decided for you then there will be an explosion of
violence. The UCK – remember the UCK – could reemerge bigger and
bloodier than ever. The Albanians could start mass violence if they do
not get what they want. And you Macedonians, do you remember how things
started in Tanusevci after the Kosovo war of ’99? Things can start
again, and who will defend you then? Better you push for an immediate
and unconditional implementation of the decisions. This threat was
accompanied by the sub-threat of the partition of Macedonia if the
“independence” of Kosovo was not realized according to the decisions.
If, for example, an area of Kosovo was to be administered by the
Serbian population.
And still, no “done deal”.
On the contrary, Serbia, that had been democratized
and westernized, now seems not be even interested in the offer of
membership in NATO and European Union that once were the idols in front
of which all the former so-called eastern European countries would
genuflect and pray. Now, the Serbian leaders are challenging the
decision taken in Washington. They are closing ranks with Russia and
are openly accusing Washington of establishing, not an independent and
democratic regime in Kosovo, but … a NATO puppet state. The revelation
of the secret everybody knew but no official leader dared to say began
with Aleksandar Simic, an adviser to Serbia’s Prime Minister Kostunica:
“it can be concluded that the implementation of Ahtisaari’s plan would
call for Bondsteel to practically be the capital city of an independent
Kosovo.” Of course, Camp Bondsteel, is the enormous US military basis
whose construction started when Kosovo and Serbia were still smoking
from the 1999 bombing (i.e., the blueprint must have been ready before
the Kosovo war).
The Macedonian public knows very well how strategic
is the position of Bondsteel in the context of the transportation
corridors and pipelines running north-south and east-west in the
Balkans. Few can believe that such a gigantic base would be built only
for a temporary operation and then, the sovereignty would be given to
the independent Kosovo government. Before going to Moscow to discuss
the Kosovo issue, the Serbian Minister for Kosovo Slobodan Samardzic
urged Washington to give up "the project of creating a satellite, army
barrack, state on foreign territory.” The "creation of the NATO state"
was the real goal of NATO's 1999 air war against Serbia over Kosovo."
And the spokesman of Kostunica, Branislav Ristivojevic insisted in his
nationalist rhetoric: "We won't give up Kosovo, nor one inch of Serbian
territory, for any kind of international integration process, whether
it's NATO, the European Union or anything else… Kosovo's real capital
would be Camp Bondsteel.”
Behind Serbia, the Russia of Vladimir Putin stands
firm with its warning of using its veto power in the UN if the issue of
independence is put to vote. China, one of the five permanent members
of the UN Security Council is reportedly ready to do the same. The US,
that fought its most ferocious war (1861-65) to stop the secession of
the southern states, tried to threaten a unilateral recognition of
Kosovo’s “independence.” It soon had to back down and deny it ever did
so. Meanwhile, Russia is stating every day in more clear terms its
opposition to any unilateral declaration of independence, and the more
the US and the Euro-bureaucrats call for respect of the decision, the
more a subtle but increasing split is becoming visible in Europe.
Officials in several European capitals are expressing their opposition
to the hard line on independence while in publish the dissent is taking
the form of the research of a not-better-defined compromise.
Why is the Sole Superpower not able to impose a
“done deal”? Why does the normalized Serbia talk back to Washington and
say publicly what was supposed to be discussed only in private? And
more in general: how come that until now the Anglo American strategy
ended up winning all the games and now it is shooting more and more
blanks?
End of the Hegemony
The answer to this question is the solution to the
present Kosovo paradox. The Kosovo situation is not the consequence of
local factors, just as it was not local factors that produced the main
wars and strategic cataclysms in the Balkans since before WWI. The main
cause was the clash of several empires fighting for supremacy in that
geo-strategically crucial area, often manipulating local population to
fight each other, and always determined to keep the area divided,
“balkanized”.
After the fall of the end of the Soviet Union, there
was only one cowboy left with a big gun in the global saloon: the
Anglo-American pistolero. No matter how short sighted, wild, and
brainless, the lone gunman started and won all the fights he felt like
provoking. The international institutions set up as compensation
chambers among the international powers (read U.N.) came to resemble
more and more the impotent drunk sheriff of old western movies. The
Anglo-American gunman created new justification for his undisputed
hegemony. A vast and unbridled propaganda machine could transform
overnight an old tool (e.g. Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden) into the
personified evil, perfect to justify a war with any means and no
legalistic restrictions. All the other unarmed cowboys would fall on
each other in the attempt to propitiate the gunman.
All over the globe, and in Europe and in the Balkans
in particular, several semi-demential experiments were set up with the
declared purpose to reshape the map of the world. Countries were to be
dismembered, ethnic and religious groups incited to fight each other,
powerful imperial bases placed as control centers in the most strategic
areas (such as Camp Bondsteel), no obstacle, even a potential one could
have been allowed to survive. Every too strong a country was to be cut
into pieces, defanged and boxed into a “defensive alliance” (NATO)
dominated by Washington and London.
In the crucial area of the Balkans it was not
difficult to find ethnic, religious, cultural differences to be
manipulated. After the first moment of euphoria in which the victorious
US forces brought democracy and freedom to the oppressed people taking
over the historical mission from the impotent Europeans, the “oppressed
peoples” began to realize that they had been given neither freedom, nor
democracy. Rather, they had been boxed in to an unstable situation in
which the future was always more dangerous and scary than the present.
The Kosovo war, for example, was followed by the
surfacing of the UCK Mafioso-terrorist structure that had acted as a
paramilitary force in the army of Wesley Clark and Madeleine Albright.
The post-war became more dangerous that the pre-war. The UCK took over
Kosovo and pushed away any moderate force. At this point Kosovo is a
mixture of military power mostly emanating from Bondsteel and a
mafia-like economy that includes every sort of criminal and illegal
activity one could find in a penal code. As always, a mafia structure
is contagious, the corruptive power of huge sums of money rapidly
accumulated in the hands of the top criminals is infecting broader and
broader areas. The booming opium production in the liberated
Afghanistan is distributed in the form of heroin by the Albania or
Kosovo mafia. Misery, instability, oppression presented as freedom,
pending threats of future violence and wars is the daily reality.
This has been the result of the great experiment
organized by Washington and London. Like in the old horror movies when
the mad scientist conducts his atrocious experiments, Kosovo
“independence” was just a necessary step toward a greater horror.
However, something strange happened. The guinea pigs refused to follow
the script and begin to rebel. No independence. The power of the mad
scientist is called into question. The experiment is stopped.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization
The reason that the independence scenario has been
blocked for the moment at least, is not due to a moral rebellion -- to
the fact that what has been imposed is repulsive and criminal. The very
large majority in Macedonia and many other countries knew how wrong and
immoral the scenario was. Various unharmed prophets repeated things
that were well known. This, however, did not stop the criminality. What
stopped it was the creation of a counter power, the arrival in the
global saloon of another armed cowboy.
This new counter power, this bizarre Machiavellian
prince, took the form a of an alliance between Russia and China, the
two final victims of the worldwide balkanization plans. China and
Russia started a series of meetings seven years ago creating a
progressively more institutionalized organization that includes also
four other Asian countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan. The last meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO) took place in the middle of August in Kyrgyz Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
The official observer countries included India, Pakistan, Iran and
Mongolia.
A total of ten presidents of member and candidate
countries were present. Many others sent observers and asked to be
considered for membership. The novelty this year was that the SCO also
became a military alliance -- Collective Security Treaty Organization
(CSTO) -- and Vladimir Putin and the Chinese President Hu Jintao
presided over substantial military maneuvers, “Peace Mission 2007,”
with mostly Russian and Chinese troops that intended to demonstrate
that local countries are going to defend and patrol” their strategic
space, without need of US or NATO. Reportedly, the US asked to
participate as observers. But their request was rejected. At the end of
the first ever military maneuver of this kind, Putin announced: “I have
decided that Russia's strategic aviation will resume patrols on a
permanent basis. At midnight today, August 17, 14 strategic missile
carriers, support and refueling aircraft took off from seven air force
bases in different parts of the Russian Federation and began a patrol
involving a total of 20 aircraft. As from today, such patrols will be
carried out on a regular basis. These patrols are strategic in nature."
The US and European media were not able to come out
with a clear line on the Shanghai group. Political and military
spokesmen were at a loss to quantify what had just happened. Someone
called it, the NATO of the East. Others called it a new Warsaw Pact.
But such definitions are, both at the same time limitative, and
overblown. The new alliance is just making the first steps and it is
not comparable to either NATO or the defunct Warsaw Pact. At the same
time, the implication of such an alliance (with many countries formally
allied with the US knocking insistently at the door of the new
organization to be accepted.
First of all, it is remarkable that China and Russia
concluded such a substantial alliance. The traditional mistrust between
the two countries is well known. Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon were
able in the 70’s to play the China Card against the Soviet Union
playing on that mistrust. It was the beginning of the end for the
Soviet empire. Recently an insider observed that the Shanghai Group was
exactly what Kissinger and Nixon did everything to prevent. And yet,
the crazy Anglo-American cow boy succeeded in forcing Moscow and
Beijing to overcome any disagreement and conclude a solid alliance.
More solid than the wild mixture known as NATO.
The new alliance is not an ideological entity. Its
raison d’etre is, first and foremost, the necessity to defend oneself
from the unchained and irrational hubris of the present Anglo-American
elites. The Russian elite indeed tried to become “capitalist.” To
accept privatizations and rock& roll, free market and McDonald’s.
We know how the Yeltsin adventure ended up: a bankrupt country, taken
over by corruption and organized crime and ready, in the opinion of
geopolitico supremo, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to be partitioned into
several chunks and used as a producer of raw materials controlled by
Western companies. China was to end up in the same way. The Russian
elite does not have any doubt, at this point, that the Anglo-American
elite does not hate communism, it hates Russia. A similar way of
thinking dominates in Beijing. This is why no matter which threats will
be unchained against the new alliance, Russia and China will not
surrender. They have already done that and they know that they would be
smashed. No diplomatic magic can change that.
A superficial observer could conclude that the
China-Russia alliance corresponds to a simplistic East versus West
scenario. Accustomed to the reductionist formulas of the dominating
propaganda, a geographic location becomes an ideology and a philosophy.
In fact, there are plenty of leaders, factions, institutions in the
West that are looking with great hope to the new counter-power.
Anything but the destructive irrationality of the crazy cowboy. The
more, for example, Putin confronts his strategic rivals, and the more
the so-called Atlantic solidarity shows cracks and breaks.
The question of Kosovo made the point clear. Just
few weeks ago Europe was aligned and obedient. Now, after Moscow
repeated that unconditional independence is not going to be accepted,
we see different opinions and dissent, both in private and publicly.
What can Washington do? The fait accompli of unilateral recognition? It
would lose even more allies. Military means? A campaign of boycott and
propaganda against Putin the “dictator”? Already tried; and it doesn’t
really work. It doesn’t work because now, contrary to 1999, there is a
real force capable of defending itself on several fronts: diplomatic,
political, propagandistic, and military. This is going to decide what
will happen in Kosovo. Even the option of unchaining violence through
UCK and other mercenary forces is not a totally practicable option.
Special operations such as non-orthodox warfare can only work if there
are none capable or willing to react. by denouncing. When there is an
institutional entity with intelligence and media capabilities, a
special operation could easily become a liability because it can be
publicly revealed and its controllers unmasked. This is the objective
limit in the use of terrorist cut out. It could lead to its controllers.
Even if some form of independence is accorded to
Pristina, it will not be the end of a process; it will be the beginning
of a new confrontation because there is an independent power able and
willing to challenge the fait accompli.
To be noted that the only Asian country totally
aligned with the Anglo-American elites, Japan, has recently dropped its
anti-China line and called publicly through its new Prime Minister for
closer relations with Beijing.
China’s Nuclear Option
Indeed the clash between the former Sole Superpower
and the new emerging Russian-Chinese alliance does not concern only the
political and military aspect. Actually the most important front is the
economic and financial one. The Anglo-American elite took a decision
long ago to de-industrialize their countries, use cheap (or slave)
labor from Third World countries, mostly China, and thus stop paying
normal wages to their countrymen. In the immediate term this meant
gigantic profits. China was producing goods for almost nothing. But in
so doing, the genial economists achieved two things; first, they all
but destroyed their qualified labor, and second, they gave to China the
goose that that lays the golden eggs, i.e. their productive apparatus.
The masochistic geniality of these financial experts
contemplated also the idea of issuing an infinite number of US Treasury
Bonds that could finance an increasing mountain of debts. Who would buy
it? Well, mostly the Chinese. So, in a sort of vicious circle, the
Chinese labor would do most of the work from which US companies would
extract a large profit. The money accumulated by the Chinese would then
go to finance further US debt.
This system, presented here in a simplified form,
could work while the dollar system could impose itself with the
political and military strength controlled by Washington. There is only
one Achilles heel in all of this. If China, or all the other countries
that have huge reserves in US treasury bonds and dollars (Russia, Saudi
Arabia, European Countries, and every rich producer of oil and raw
materials including Venezuela and Iran) decide one day to dump them,
then the whole genial scheme that allowed them to become rich without
working, would collapse.
This, however, was not even considered a
possibility. The military power of the US was without comparison and
anybody who could even remotely challenge it would be smashed. Besides,
there was a grand strategic design that would put the whole world under
their direct control. Once the Soviet Union had been dismantled, it was
time to smash the most populous and doggedly cohesive developing
countries, the Muslim countries. It was called the Clash of
Civilizations. Then, once the last vestige of independence in those
countries was canceled and there was no obstacle to full looting of oil
and other materials, it was the moment to start the long march to take
over Russian and China. The countries would have been partitioned,
balkanized and then used as a reserve of raw material and semi-slave
labor.
The Balkan strategy with the enlargement of NATO was
only part of a new Operation Barbarossa to encircle, isolate and then
take over Russia. No raw materials were to be exported from Russia
independently, without the mediation of an Anglo-American company. This
made Kosovo and Macedonia, -- points of transit for transportation
corridors and pipelines -- crucial locations.
Even if the continental European countries do not
know it or try not to see it, they were the last stage in this deranged
grand design.
All of this depended on the ability to prevent the
establishment of even a limited form of independent power. But the
clumsy strategists relied mostly on computer and formal logic,
forgetting history and culture. In 1999, it was the NATO/US victory in
Kosovo that triggered deep changes inside the Russian leadership that
had concluded that Washington could not be trusted. The result was the
rapid eclipse of Yeltsin and the emerging of the unknown Putin who took
over Russia with the mission of re establishing its independent power
with every means. But already during the last phase of the Kosovo war,
the Russian military had taken over the Pristina airport. Their
determination, even at that low point gave a healthy scare to the
British General Michael Jackson who refused the order given by the
American general in charge, Wesley Clark, to stop the Russians with the
words: "I'm not going to start the third world war for you,"
Eight years later, the danger highlighted by the
British general, is possibly more real than it has even been during the
whole cold war. China and Russia (and possibly silent partners in high
places in Europe and elsewhere) have put together an unrefined but
effective military power and are expanding it as fast as they can. It
is a desperate race in which they think they cannot surrender. The
military dimension, again, is only a part of the game. The financial
side of this war is even more important.
China gave a demonstration of it. After having been
pressured by US to continue its role of playing sewer system for US
debts and after having been asked to sacrifice its economy and risk
financial destabilization by buying the worthless sub-prime mortgage,
the Chinese went for the “nuclear option”. If the US insists in
destabilizing our financial system, the academician He Fang stated,
Beijing “could be forced to sell the dollar... which may lead to a mass
depreciation of the dollar. Another official, Xia Bin, declared that
the huge Chinese reserves in dollars and treasury bonds could be used
as “bargaining chips.”
The pressures on China stopped for a while, while a
campaign on the danger of Chinese produced toys was launched in the US
media. However, in the US stock market the Dow Jones index went down
after the statements. The US monetary authorities were forced to go for
a policy of low interest rates that will provoke a growing inflation.
When the worthless sub prime mortgage collapsed, Beijing announced
proudly that they had disinvested from that sector. The threat this
time had not worked. An immense self created weak flank, the growing
mountain of treasury bonds and dollars that can be dumped at time, has
become a reality of the ongoing war.
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