Comment / Opinion – by Sasha Uzunov, Editor, Alternate Comms
Years ago, I dismissed any conspiracy theory about foul play, including US involvement, in the plane crash that killed Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski – twenty years ago -on 26 February 2004 in Bosnia. To me at the time it seemed far-fetched….and was a genuine accident.
But what has aroused my curiosity was on 25 December 2023 – Christmas – when a hardcore pro US pundit in Macedonia Blagojce Atanasovski began to threaten Macedonians with violence if they did not obey the US and implied the US sabotaged Trajkovski’s plane.
That was an extraordinary outburst to make. He was forced to “walk back” (pardon the US term) that claim for obvious reasons. Atanasovski’s explanation was he was indulging in hyperbole and sarcasm. But it still raises doubts about what caused the Trajkovski plane crash.
This is the translation in English from the Macedonian where Atanasovski implies the US was involved in taking the President Trajkovski’s plane:
“Explained in the simplest terms with a few sentences, it is about the fight of the Americans with the Serbian influence here (as an extension of the Russian one), and they will fight that fight ruthlessly and unscrupulously until the end, even if we have to search again for bodies of downed planes near Mostar, as morbid as it sounds, but it is the reality.”
„ Најпросто објаснето со неколку реченици, станува збор за борба на Американците со српското влијание овде (како екстензија на руското), и тие таа борба немилосрдно и бескрупулозно ќе ја водат до крај, макар да треба пак да пребаруваме тела на паднати авиони крај Мостар, колку и морбидно да звучи, но таа е реалноста.
The bizarre thing is President Trajkovski, a Methodist, was not pro Serbian nor pro Russian but staunchly pro US, even taking part in Christian prayers with the then US President George W. Bush (2001-09) during a visit to the White House in Washington. How and why Atanasovski has linked him with a conspiracy involving Russia and its “proxy” Serbia in a purported battle for control of the Balkans with the US is baffling and downright nonsensical, considering Trajkovski’s pro US stance.
Assuming that Atanasovski’s Freudian slip is valid despite him walking it back, then the US allegedly assassinating Trajkovski must have been for another reason.
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I’ve been compelled to reassess my original thinking on the plane crash. I’m honest enough to re-examine my previous assessments.
There was speculation that Trajkovski, a loyal US supporter, was removed – via the plane crash – because he had become disillusioned with this patrons over their demand that Macedonia create a de facto Albanian statelet within Macedonia. This was known as the Territorial Re-organisation of Macedonia, which created areas populated by an ethnic Albanian minority but who were in a majority in these artificially created areas. A deliberate ethnic gerrymander.
Trajkovski was President during the 2001 right wing Albanian Neo Nazi uprising in Macedonia, which led to Ohrid Framework Agreement which in turn led to the territorial re-organisation in 2004.
1995 GLIGOROV HIT
I spent months researching the 1995 attempted assassination of Macedonia President Gligorov. I went through any documents I could get my hands on. The circumstantial evidence pointed me to Greek intelligence.
The 26 February 2004 plane crash in Bosnia which killed Macedonia President Trajkovski I accepted as a genuine accident. President Trajkovski was staunchly pro US & close to US President George Bush, which is why I initially believed the plane crash was an accident.
But President Trajkovski, it was rumoured, was not happy with certain currents in US policy towards Macedonia, in particular pro Albanian bias.
Be that as it may, in December 2023 a hardcore pro US pundit in Macedonia Blagojce Atanasovski let slip that the US was behind it. It made me rethink my original assumption.
Atanasovski is one of those “shake and bakes” (pardon the US phrase) – “instant” experts created by the US financed NGO/media complex in Macedonia – he has no links to Russia or Putin or China – who is wheeled out in the Macedonia media to read the script given to him etc etc.
Therefore what he said must carry some weight – even though he has walked back (pardon the US phrase) the claim!
What adds spice to 2004 plane crash that killed Macedonia President Trajkovski is his then advisor Stevo Pendarovski (pictured below), an ex counter intelligence officer & now Macedonia President and a US proxy, flew on different flight. Pure Luck. Pendarovski is believed to be a CIA asset.
Trajkovski was President of Macedonia from 1999 to 2004, and only its second Head of State since independence in 1991. His predecessor was Kiro Gligorov, who served as the first President from 1991 to 1999 and a survivor of an assassination attempt in 1995 in which he lost an eye.
HYPOTHETICALS
My initial view was the 2004 plane crash that killed Macedonia’s President Trajkovski was an accident. Let us assume that it was not an accident but an assassination. Let us work on the assumption that pundit Atanasovski’s “freudian slip” about US involvement is correct.
First and foremost, it would be the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which would have the capability to sabotage President Trajkovski’s plane.
Executive Order 12333 signed by US President Ronald Reagan in 1981 forbids assassinations by the CIA. If the US allegedly killed Macedonian President Trajkovski in 2004 via a plane crash then this would be a serious breach of EO 12333. The US Attorney General should open an investigation.
Or the CIA could have “sub-contracted” the hit to a friendly foreign intelligence service, say Britain’s MI6 or Germany’s BND and avoid US Congressional scrutiny. To emphasise the point again, this is wild speculation on my part and might be wrong.
THE KNOWN KNOWNS
On 26 February 2004 – Trajkovski and eight others died in a plane crash en route to an economic conference in Mostar, Bosnia-Hercegovina. The aircraft- a twin turbo-prop Beechcraft Super King Air 200 – crashed in thick fog and heavy rain on a mountainside in southeastern Hercegovina near the villages of Poplat and Vrsnik eight miles (15km) south-south-east of Mostar.
What we do know for certain is Macedonia, since its independence from the collapsing Yugoslavia in 1991, is CIA intelligence turf. The 2003 kidnapping on Macedonian soil and later brutal CIA rendition/torture of innocent Lebanese German tourist Khaled El-Masri confirms this.
“It is fashionable to pin various conspiracies upon the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) such as the Kennedy assassination and even bizarrely 9/11 attacks on New York City. One thing is for sure tiny Macedonia has been under US control ever since it broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991.
“To highlight this, there is the 2003 Khaled El Masri scandal – where a visiting German Lebanese man was taken into custody by the Macedonian authorities and handed over to the CIA to “render” – that is torture – in the mistaken belief that El Masri was a terrorist linked to Al Qaeda. He was flown to Afghanistan. That went pear-shaped when it was discovered the US had the wrong man…”
Macedonia’s current President Stevo Pendarovski (pictured below) is a US proxy. He was also a national security advisor to the late Macedonia President Trajkovski. He would have been complicit in the El Masri scandal.
PROXIES & PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY?
Whether you believe the plane crash that killed Macedonia’s President Trajkovski in 2004 was a genuine accident or deliberate sabotage, what is not in doubt is the fierce external pressure – including death threats – put on Macedonian Heads of State, Presidents, and Heads of Government, Prime Ministers to follow a particular internal and foreign policy path.
An example from some year ago was the ferocious attack on, and racist campaign orchestrated by the United States against Macedonian President (2009-19), George Ivanov, a native indigenous Macedonian, who stood as an obstacle to US “interests,” namely of its proxies Greek and Bulgarian and Albanian nationalists.
To call Branko Trickovski, a Macedonian, bizarre is an understatement. He is a pro US pundit in the Macedonian media who supports right wing Bulgarian nationalist negatory views against Macedonia, is a Holocaust Denier and an anti Semite and hates his own Macedonians. Formerly he was a hardcore Pro-Yugoslavist, pro Tito and a communist sympathiser and anti US and NATO and anti-Macedonian. His transformation, a 180-degree ideological turn, has been extraordinary but his anti Macedonianess has remained constant.
Trickovski, by now a pro Bulgarian racist, called for Macedonia President Ivanov to be lynched in public, hanging from a chandelier or a flagpole, and for the death of two prominent female Macedonian academics Solza Grceva and Biljana Vankovska. Vanovska is now running as a candidate in the 2024 Presidential election in Macedonia.
There hasn’t been any action from the Interior Ministry, which runs the police in Macedonia, against Trickovski’s behaviour.
THREATS OF VIOLENCE EVER PRESENT
A cover image of the tabloid newspaper Slobodan Pecat (Free Press), a US State Department mouthpiece in Macedonia, depicted by ironically using an ethnic and racist Asian stereotype of US State Department envoy Hoyt Brian Yee as karate-kicking a hesitant President Ivanov into accepting the terms of a new government in 2017, formed by Zoran Zaev who was very loyal to Washington.
Then there is a pro US Serb pundit in Macedonia, Borjan Jovanovski, who in 2018 called for the “chemical cleaning” of President Ivanov’s office, a nasty indirect reference to Nazi Germany’s use of chemical Zykklon B in “cleansing” Jews, as in gassing Jews to death.
In 2020 I questioned ex-President Ivanov during a doorstop interview when he was on a visit to Melbourne, Australia. He remained cagey but did not deny that pressure had been applied on him.