KOSOVO ROAD GAME, ROAD TEST IN MACEDONIA

US STATE DEPARTMENT DEEP STATE CAN JUMP

Analysis/Opinion – Sasha Uzunov, Editor, Alternate Comms.

All roads lead to Rome, they once said about the omnipotence of the Roman Empire long ago. Roads and lines of communication are important symbols of imperial or superpower hegemony. Take for example China’s belt and road initiative and then there is the US construction giant Bechtel and its contract to build new highways in Macedonia.

Road game is an American sports term. It refers to a team playing away from home. In Australian English it is called an away game. There is also the phrase to road test or trial something, as in an idea, proposal and so forth.

The President of Kosovo, Vjosa Osmani was in Macedonia recently on the road so to speak, as in she was away from Kosovo, but she acted as though she wasn’t in a “foreign state” but a part of Kosovo! Her visit to the Macedonian town of Tetovo, predominately ethnic Albanian, generated a lot of controversy. There were Albanian flags, no Macedonian flags in sight, and controversial statements were made which angered the majority Macedonians. Some cynics would say that this was a road test- to generate ethnic tensions and reinforce the perception that Macedonia is a failed nation-state, there by needing to be partitioned by the US or European Union.

The popular American film, White Men Can’t Jump, has as its plot a scam or hustle where a white man presents himself as not being good at basketball but then draws in African Americans in waging money and playing against him in a game of basketball. The same “scam” or hustle is used by the US in having Kosovo President Osmani do the US’s bidding.

Without getting bog down or side tracked , pardon the road puns, suffice to say Bechtel, though a private company, has a long history with US intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency. Two of its ex company directors George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger became ministers or Secretaries in the administration of US President Ronald Reagan (1981-89)

Bechtel has a controversial contract to build 2 highways in Macedonia. In a previous op-ed:

How does this all tie up with the new roads being built in Macedonia, you might ask? Without indulging in conspiracy theories, a prominent US academic Professor Daniel Serwer, testifying in front of US Congress in 2017, laid out on the table a hypothetical worst possible outcome (US term -worst case scenario) in which the US or European Union could be called in militarily to occupy Macedonia and partition it should nation-state building fail in Macedonia. Disingenuously, Professor Serwer left out that the US has deliberate made Macedonia dysfunctional and divided along ethnic grounds. It is the old Roman Empire/British Empire principle of divide and rule. 

Having excellent roads in Western Macedonia makes it easier for US or NATO military armoured vehicles to move around and implement this hypothetical. Let’s hope that this scenario only remains a hypothetical! But the signs are not good. It was the US which imposed name change of Macedonia in 2018 to get it into NATO by responding to Greek opposition and the US also supports Bulgaria’s blackmail demands which in reality mean Macedonia and Macedonians acknowledging they are Bulgarian and Bulgarians.

The Kosovo President’s visit to Macedonia is a trial balloon to see how Macedonians react to part of its territory “aligning” with Kosovo. So in effect, this is coming from the US State Department, as Kosovo is a US protectorate. It does what Washington tells it to do.

Moreover, -the optics, spin, public relations, PR, propaganda, call it what you will – the recent visit of Macedonian Prime Minister Dimitar Kovacevski to the US and having his photo taken with US Secretary of State Antony Blinker was to present the image that the US “cares” about Macedonia. The truth is quite the opposite. The US has never taken off the table the option of partitioning Macedonia between Albania and Bulgaria. How do we know this?

The US Embassy in Macedonia stubbornly refuses to condemn the WWII Albanian Nazi statues which symbolise a Greater Albania put into effect by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in WWII. These statues were built post 2006 by an Albanian extremist called Nevzat Bejta, who, surprise, surprise, has been endorsed by the US, UK, EU, Germany, France, Netherlands, NATO and so on