[A-List] Cunning Of History In The Balkans: Russia Gets Its Warm-Water Port

["tony black" <tal@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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From: Rick Rozoff
To: Stop NATO
Sent: Saturday, January 27, 2007 3:53 PM
Subject: [stopnato] Cunning Of History In The Balkans: Russia Gets Its 
Warm-Water Port


http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=10395

Balkanalysis.com
Antiwar.com
January 26, 2007

Russia Gets its Warm-Water Port
And Other Balkan Ironies for the Year Ahead
by Christopher Deliso

A number of simultaneous recent events and trends in
the Balkans evidence a startling yet indisputable
conclusion: that across the board, the Western
influence that had for so long seemed so hegemonic is
on the wane, or has at least encountered very serious
stumbling blocks.

Quietly, almost unexpectedly (at least for those who
had hubristically expected domination ad infinitum),
non-Western powers have expanded their "spheres of
influence" in the region. Yet you would not know it
from the gathering mass of yes-men crowing imminent
victory – a fact that has as much to do with internal
American politicking as it does with any realities on
the ground in the Balkans.

And so as the region marches forward bravely to the
imagined greatness of "Euro-Atlantic integration," a
sort of retrograde motion has instead begun; with
every year that we get closer to 2012, and the
one-hundred-year anniversary of the Balkan Wars that
drove out the Ottoman Turks and set the stage for
World War I, it seems the situation in the Balkans is
resembling more and more the chaotic decades that
preceded that dissolution, which were characterized by
a sordid tug-of-war by the Great Powers of the day.
Then as now, this power play is being carried out
largely by outside interests, though it has not
stopped the media and governments from assigning the
responsibility and the blame to the outcome of local
decisions and citizens.

Montenegro Up for Grabs

One of the most striking recent trends adding credence
to this argument is what has been going on in
Montenegro, that Adriatic jewel which elected, in a
tightly contested referendum, to break off its state
union with Serbia last spring. This secession, long
hoped-for and championed by the West, represents the
antepenultimate act in an almost two-decade policy
against Serbia, the final manifestation of which is
expected to be the severing of Kosovo from its
historic identity as a Serbian province. This long and
worn-out policy has taken on a life of its own,
propelled consciously by political ideologues, many of
them linked in one way or another with the Balkan
interventions of the Clinton administration, and
subconsciously, in the collective public sentiment
instilled in Western audiences for a very long time by
a pliant media: that the Serbs were and are
warmongering barbarians, who deserve whatever they get
(or whatever they get taken from them). These
ingrained beliefs and the policy they gave birth to
have had several serious repercussions, however.

> From at least the 17th century, the wars and foreign
policy of imperial Russia in the Balkans were
motivated partially by a vital goal: access to the
so-called "warm-water ports" of the Adriatic, Aegean
and/or Black Seas. Inevitably, the response of
European rivals, such as Great Britain or the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, was to check this ambition,
either directly or through policies hostile to
countries identified at various times as Russia's
advance guard. Examples of this high intrigue include
the revision of the San Stefano Treaty at the 1878
Congress of Berlin, which drastically limited the
territorial gains of Bulgaria after the Russo-Turkish
War of 1877, and the creation of Albania, under heavy
Austrian lobbying, as a means of preventing
then-Russian ally Serbia from gaining access to the
Adriatic in 1912. The later incorporation of Romania
and Bulgaria into the Soviet fold following World War
II greatly enhanced Russian warm-water ports on the
Black Sea, though since the downfall of Communism
these two countries – which joined the European Union
on January 1, 2007 – have moved decisively into the
Western camp (though neither was realistically
prepared for EU membership).

In recent years, the geopolitical brinkmanship of the
US has also manifested in the greater Balkan/Black Sea
region with the "color revolutions" in Ukraine and
Georgia, and their archetypal predecessor in the
"democratic opposition" and youth movement that led to
the downfall of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
in October 2000, little over a year after his
capitulation to NATO's air war on Serbia and Kosovo.
The reckless desire of hawks in the West to expand
NATO to far-flung Ukraine and Georgia, both of which
have important Black Sea positioning, owes almost
completely to the post-Soviet policy of "containing"
Russia at a time when energy security has come to
replace collective self-defense and humanitarian
policing as NATO's raison d'être. The basic premise is
that the threat of military force along Russia's
borders can prove an effective bargaining chip in
guaranteeing unfettered Western access to Russian
energy at good prices, and can protect alternative
suppliers and supply routes from Russian influence. It
remains to be seen how effective this dangerous
resurrection will be.

In Ukraine, the West would like to dislodge Russia's
Black Sea Fleet, by treaty allowed to stay until 2017
while in Georgia, it would like to eliminate Russian
support for Abkhazia, the breakaway province that
Russia is comparing (along with Georgia's other
self-declared autonomous entity, South Ossetia) as an
analogous situation to Kosovo: if the latter deserves
independence, then why not the others? And why not the
ethnically Russian east of Ukraine, for that matter?
Of course, the US has heatedly denied any similarity
between the two cases though, as we will see,
regardless of the veracity of the argument the
oft-cited fears of "Balkan instability" if the West
doesn't get its way in Kosovo are bound to be realized
– regardless of what happens.

Before moving on to the morass that is Kosovo,
however, it pays to take a look at the situation in
Montenegro, where independence was gained by the
decision of ostensibly pro-Western, anti-Serbian
political leaders and citizens. However, as a recent
New York Times article revealed, things are not
exactly as they seem:

"As Russian investments here grow, Moscow has sought
to exert more political influence. In August, Russia's
emergencies minister, Sergei Shoigu, warned in an
interview with a Montenegrin newspaper that relations
between the countries would be damaged if the
Montenegrins continued to pursue NATO membership.
Later that month, [then-Prime Minister Milo]
Djukanovic met with President Putin in Sochi, a
Russian Black Sea resort, and discussed the
possibility of creating a military-technical
agreement."

The investments mentioned include a huge buy-up of the
Montenegrin Adriatic coast by Russian firms allegedly
linked to mafia interests, as well as investments in
the industrial sector. By stealth, not by force of
arms, Russia has expanded its influence in warm-water
Montenegro, its "investors" bearing down on one of the
most legendarily corrupt Balkan statelets, "carrying
four, five or six million euros in cash apparently
without any form or official control." While Western
property buyers, particularly British and Irish have
also made noticeable acquisitions in the "new"
Montenegro, it is the Russians who are causing the
biggest stir – and who, unlike the latter, seek
perhaps something other than retirement homes by the
sea.

In Montenegro, the surreal situation has thus become
one of a pro-Serbian opposition sounding the alarm
against eastern incursions, while an allegedly
pro-Western leadership continues to be seduced by the
Russians. Then there are the Albanian and Bosnian
minorities, both of which are Muslim and both of which
cast the crucial votes for independence. Within the
latter group especially there has quietly developed,
in the Sandzak border area with Serbia (as well as on
the other side of the border), an indigenous radical
Islamic Wahhabi community that is strongly
anti-Western and supported by Saudi Arabia, Iran and
other Muslim states.

As for the former, the Albanians, numerous arrests in
both Montenegro and neighboring Kosovo linked with
extremist groups who would like to annex
Albanian-populated parts of the fledgling state, or at
very least raise the specter of such an act to
expedite the independence of Kosovo, have been made
since September. Major weapons seizures and arrests of
alleged would-be assassins and terrorists illustrate
that the threat is real and will continue to intensify
throughout 2007.

Kosovo: Turning the Tables

If the West's policies in Montenegro seem to have had
somewhat unexpected results, the same can be said even
more so for the situation in Kosovo. It was "the year
everything changed," according to Antiwar.com's
Nebojsa Malic, referring to the failure of Kosovo's
Albanians to achieve independence throughout 2006.
This setback for the interventionist policy in the
Balkans had to do both with strengthened Russian
diplomatic opposition, the unlikely appearance of a
Serbian lobby in Washington late in the game, and the
essentially tepid support of the Bush administration –
its apparent support notwithstanding – for the
creation of a mafia-run Muslim statelet in Europe.

Supporters of Kosovo independence – essentially, the
same crowd of Clinton-era acolytes who see it as
justified punishment for "Serb aggression" –
apparently have become so enamored of their own
position that they have neglected to see the trouble
it is about to cause them. All that Belgrade and
Moscow have to do is to continue opposing
independence, which requires very little energy
compared to those who are increasingly desperately
pushing for independence and an overturning of the
legal reality (that Kosovo is a part of Serbia). It is
this reality that Albanian lobbyists such as Joe
DioGuardi ask the world to overlook when justifying
independence by recourse to "the facts on the ground"
(a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of Serbs and
other minorities which has left Kosovo an almost
entirely Albanian-populated province).

Yet who will suffer if Kosovo does not become
independent? Not Serbia. The Western-led UN
administration in Kosovo and NATO troops are the ones
who will be caught in the crossfire if Albanian
maximalist demands are not met. For well over a year,
in fact, the UN mission has been scapegoated by local
Albanian leaders and covertly-led youth groups as the
enemy, as a bunch of obstructionist outsiders blocking
their ambitions. The irony is that when the last
Russian peacekeepers pulled out of Kosovo several
years ago, it was depicted as a sort of triumph for
the West, as the final scene in a dramatic struggle
for possession that began during the 1999 NATO air
campaign, when Russian troops briefly seized Pristina
Airport. Now, however, the reality is that there are
simply no Russian troops for angry irredentists to
shoot at in Kosovo, whereas there are plenty of
Western ones.

Indeed, since 1999 there have been very many terrorist
attacks carried out against UN and NATO personnel and
installations in Kosovo by the Albanians they
supposedly came there to protect. While in that time
violence against the minority Serbs has certainly been
steady, there has not been a single terrorist attack
in Belgrade or Serbia proper (if we do not count the
various armed altercations in a contained area of
South Serbia – "East Kosovo" to the Albanians). This
is no doubt in keeping with the same orders that the
ragged Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) were given by NATO
in 1999: if you want our help, help your PR by
limiting your activities to your home turf. And indeed
the Albanians have proven extraordinarily disciplined
in doing so and have thus avoided the sort of censure
that befell classic separatist groups such as the IRA
in Ireland and the Basque ETA in Spain. Now the
pressure is more intense than ever on the Albanians to
keep up "good behavior" if they want to be free. Yet
what if the West can't deliver?

Enter the Democrats

What is now influencing the whole issue in Kosovo, and
the Balkans in general, is a phenomenon going on half
a world away: the sudden resurrection of the
Democratic Party in Washington and its new resolve
against a formerly strong president now on the ropes
over the quagmire in Iraq. Several of these Democrats,
such as Sen. Joseph Biden, also have presidential
ambitions. And so it is no surprise that partisan and
personal politics are being crafted out of the
imagined past and perceived future of American foreign
policy in the Balkans.

In short, the Democrats are eager to hold up a shining
example of a foreign policy success that can be
attributed to themselves as a party, while their
individual leaders would like to highlight their
personal contributions to these alleged successes. The
Clinton-era interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, which
fed the current chaos in the region, are being held up
more and more in speeches and media reports as
examples of America at its best – thus accentuating
what the Clintonites view as a contrast to Bush's war
in Iraq. However, seeing the obvious folly of the
latter does not mean one must automatically accept the
former.

Nevertheless, as the presidential elections of 2008
draw closer, we are going to be hearing a lot of
hyperbole and self-aggrandizing rhetoric from
Democrats about how much better off the Balkans is
because of their interventions there. And, while it
does not take much to make Bosnia or Kosovo appear
better off than a country where US troops and Iraqi
civilians are being blown apart by the dozens each
day, they are not taking any chances: the "final
status" of Kosovo, and the continuing consolidation of
Muslim rule in the tripartite Bosnian Federation, must
be accomplished so that the whole "Mission
Accomplished" narrative can be completed.

In a grandiloquent Financial Times opinion piece
published a day after he became head of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, the longtime Albanian
lobbyist and now presidential candidate Joseph Biden
fired off a predictable enough such broadside about
Kosovo. The senator, or his speechwriter,
fantastically claimed that "adroit diplomacy to secure
Kosovo's independence could yield a victory for Muslim
democracy, a better future for southeast Europe and
validation for the judicious use of American power."
These justifications, long considered by critics to be
more or less hidden motivations, are apparently not
even to be kept secret anymore, so confident are the
Clintonites of their Balkan successes.

Ironically, the West's plea to Serbian voters during
their recent elections was to look to the future, not
the past, by choosing the "pro-Western" Democratic
Party of President Boris Tadic, rather than the
"hard-line nationalists" of Vojislav Seselj's Radical
Party. Yet the Serbs' castigators in Washington are
apparently not following their own prescribed course
of action; as the Biden piece shows, their vision for
the future of the Balkans is almost entirely
necessitated by the past, by the need to validate a
botched series of interventions to shore up their own
legacies, as well as to have something to present as a
foreign policy success in contradistinction to Bush's
Iraq fiasco.

Tortuous Contradictions

Of course, to pull off such a magic trick is to
suppress or ignore entirely certain realities. For
since those Clinton-era interventions took place,
local and foreign organized crime, not to mention
Islamic fundamentalists, have established a pervasive
presence. The demand for drugs and prostitutes soared
with the arrival of affluent Western peacekeepers,
whose don't-rock-the-boat mentality has meant a
lackadaisical approach to both mafia groups and
Islamic extremists. At the same time, sluggish
economic growth and festering nationalism in Kosovo
has kept the situation tense, with everyone aware that
it only takes one order from militant leaders to set
the province ablaze as in the March 2004 riots.

To conceal these (and other) failings, the
opportunists on the Hill have to put the blame
elsewhere. And so Sen. Biden asserts, "there is a
growing risk that Serbia and Russia will conspire to
seize defeat from the jaws of victory" by continuing
to block Kosovo independence. This panic has also
apparently induced schizophrenia. The ICG, which has
been one of the most consistent and hysterical
institutional supporters of Kosovo independence,
calling since 1998 for the province's eventual
independence, has curiously reversed its position on
Islamic extremism in Kosovo; while once downplaying it
as little more than "Serb propaganda," the group's
latest report discloses that unless Kosovo is freed
this could become a threat, as could the more
traditional nationalist form of Albanian violence.
"Nervous Kosovo Albanian leaders worry they may not be
able to contain public pressures beyond March," says
the Dec. 20, 2006 report, adding that:

"a botched status process that fails to consolidate
the prospect of a Kosovo state within its present
borders and limits the support the EU and other
multilateral bodies can provide would seed new
destructive processes. A sense of grievance would
become ingrained among Albanians throughout the
region, strengthening a pan-Albanian ideology
corrosive of existing borders and possibly even
enriching the soil for radical Islam."

So let's get this straight. The ICG is now warning
that unless Albanian maximalist demands are met, both
of the dangers which their critics have long warned
about – and the existence of which the ICG has
steadfastly denied – will come true. The bizarre
conjuring act shows to just what tortuous lengths the
apologists for intervention will go to push their
position while ignoring their own self-contradictions.
Nevertheless, pulling rabbits out of hats is a slick
political specialty. And so we are asked to believe
that Kosovo Muslims could pose a threat if they are
not given independence, while on the other hand (as
Biden writes) the situation will be miraculously
reversed if they are allowed to create their own
state. "The people of Kosovo – already the most
pro-American in the Islamic world – will provide a
much-needed example of a successful US-Muslim
partnership," the senator confidently asserts. If this
approximation were even true, one has to wonder just
who needs this "example" – the people of Kosovo, or
the American Democratic Party, as it prepares its 2008
election campaign strategy?

Conclusion: A Checkered Future for Western Supremacy
in the Balkans

If we believe former Clinton staffers like John
Norris, the Kosovo war marked the definitive victory
of the West (that is, NATO) over Russia. Yet if we
take a look at the actual situation today, it is easy
to see that Russia's position in the Balkans has never
been stronger. It has established itself financially
and politically in Montenegro and has, with its
opposition to independence in Kosovo, perpetuated an
already intractable problem for the same Western
powers who have sought so hard to "liberate" the
province, and internationalized it with its threats to
replicate independence with similar secessionist
movements in areas of strategic importance to Western
energy security, especially the Caucasus – as well as
in Europe itself, as The Guardian recently noted. At
the same time, Moscow has expanded its influence
through energy projects – its chief concern – which
can also buy political influence, for example in
Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey and Greece.

Apparently, the end of the Cold War did not result, as
some prominent thinkers imagined, in the one-way
ascension of the West and its values. The forcible
breakup of Yugoslavia made sure of that. The "end of
history" would be deferred for a long time to come.
But there was too much giddiness in the reunified
Germany (+ Austria), eager to make a return to its old
imperialist position on the Continent, to see it; thus
their irresponsible recognition of an independent
Slovenia and Croatia and the arming, ironically, of
Bosnian radical Muslims and the Croat neo-Nazi Ustashe
movement, responsible for the biggest ethnic cleansing
campaigns perpetrated in Europe since the German Nazis
in World War II. Now, the final chapter of the sad
tale of Yugoslavia is being written in Kosovo, a
narrative which shows the utter impotence of the West
and its inability to solve complicated strategic
problems in its own backyard. Russia (not to mention
China) can just sit back and laugh.

Indeed, behind his trademark icy demeanor, it was hard
to miss the glee in President Putin's recent comments
about the "grave consequences" of Kosovo independence
for the current international order:

"There is a huge temptation, like it was after the
World War II – three or four people with pencils in
their hands were dividing Europe and the entire world.
Now [the] winners in the Cold War, sensing their
innocence and strength, want to redistribute
everything on their own. There is a huge temptation.
It is very hard to predict the consequences."

Putin's message: if you want chaos, we'll give you
chaos. But the West in the Balkans is now past the
point of no return; in Kosovo, for various reasons
neither the status quo (protectorate) nor the other
two options (Serbian control, independence) are
viable. It is a black hole run by the mafia, a place
with no economic future, and with a small but growing
Islamic fundamentalist movement that was allowed to
take root because UN occupiers were not vigilant about
keeping Arab financiers out. If it is independent,
Kosovo will have to start paying for a whole lot of
things (such as international debts) for which Serbia
is currently paying, and its citizens will no longer
be able to claim the Serbian passports which currently
allow them a modicum of international travel. In
short, an independent Kosovo would become even more of
a walled ghetto than it already is today.

However, in the 1990's ambitious Western
interventionists were unable to, or else chose not to
see that such things would inevitably result from any
forcible change of the regime. They did not consult
the history books, which would have confirmed certain
chronic social and economic patterns that simply
cannot be changed by wishful thinking and humanitarian
zeal. They made Serbia's administrative problem their
own – ironically, a major relief for Belgrade which is
being exploited by Moscow to the detriment of the
Western do-gooders. If Kosovo does gain some sort of
autonomy or independence, you can bet that Russia will
exact some major concessions in the process. The irony
is that before NATO's bombing in 1999 Moscow had no
leverage, whereas now it does, and simply by doing
nothing but opposing Western plans.

In Serbia, used as the main scapegoat for why Kosovo
is not still independent, the West has meanwhile
played into Russian hands with its intransigent
position on Kosovo and with its incessant demands for
Belgrade to send alleged war criminals Radovan
Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to the Hague – even though
they are, more likely than not, hiding out in
Montenegrin or Bosnian territory. Constantly demanding
that Serbia do the impossible has of course bolstered
the right-wing Radical party, which advocates closer
ties with Russia and China and which won over a
quarter of the vote in the recent elections. Western
fears of a conservative and retrospective political
movement blocking "Euro-Atlantic accession" thus
become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

To return finally to the deceptive commentary of Sen.
Biden in the Financial Times, we can conclude with his
strange assertion that an independent Kosovo is
justified because Balkan residents are "mentally
prepared" for it, and that Serbian politicians should
accordingly recognize that. "Historically, trouble in
the Balkans is almost always the result of false
expectations," opines the senator and presidential
candidate.

Indeed. Everyone has expectations; it is left to
history to sort out whose were false and whose came
true. Will it prove that the Kosovo Albanians had
false expectations of getting an independent state out
of NATO's bombing in 1999? Indeed, it is the need to
preclude such a dawning realization that is pushing
the ICG's advocacy and the interventionist rhetoric
demanding independence for Kosovo. In short, it is of
the essence that, when the dust clears, history has
proved the "false expectations" to have been on the
Serbian rather than the Albanian side. Otherwise there
will be hell to pay – and especially for the Western
administration in Kosovo, which is directly in the
line of fire from disgruntled paramilitaries.

In actuality, however, the real "historical" source of
trouble in the Balkans has always been foreign
intervention and intrigue. For at least the past two
centuries, there has not been a period of even fifty
years without a war, uprising or state persecution of
one kind or another. In every case, foreign hands,
sometimes hidden, always bloody, are to be found
behind it. The sad truth is that the people of the
Balkans have never been left alone to sort out their
own affairs. And with the continued struggle of the
Western Great Powers and Russia for dominance in the
region, just as happened a century ago, it is clear
that they won't get the chance to do so any time soon.

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