Crossfire War – Athens – Belgrade – Sofia Watch – Southeast Europe Theatre: Athens – Moscow – Belgrade – Banja Luka – Sofia – Kosovska Mitrovica/(Brussels – Vienna – Warsaw)/Pristina – Tirana – Skopje – Ankara – Tehran; Greece – Serbia Special Forces Hold Exercises – Sofia – Belgrade Sign Defence Agreement – Macedonian Albanian Veterans Support Kosovo
Night Watch: NIS – The Greek defense journal Peripolis (Hellenic Defense, now linked to Crossfire War) has reported military Special Forces from both Greece and Serbia have been holding joint exercises near Nis.
The linked article mentions this is a continuation of years of military cooperation between the two governments. Greece and Serbia have a long history of cooperation largely due to their following the same Orthodox ritual. There is also a regional identity at work which has made Southeast European governments opposed more to Brussels-Vienna than they are to each other.
It has been mentioned, during the first wars in the former Yugoslavia from 1991-95, there were actually Greeks fighting alongside Serbian units, but it was kept secret as much as possible. That is why NATO unity exists on paper only. [SERBIANNA]
As a parallel development, Sofia News Agency reported Monday the governments of Serbia and Bulgaria signed a military cooperation agreement in the Bulgarian capital Sofia. Representing Belgrade was Serbia Defense Minister Dragan Sutanovac, while Sofia was represented by Bulgaria Defense Minister Vesselin Bliznakov.
The agreement was made in the name of Kosovo security and to support Belgrade’s attempt to prevent any attempt to make the province independent. Sofia obviously disagrees with the European Union – Brussels and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe-Vienna, and the continuation of their wars and policies attacking Serbia. Those power-projection schemes and campaigns have been the primary cause of conflict in the region since the Cold War ended in 1990. [SERBIANNA]
All this year news is constantly indicating it will be veterans of the first wars in the former Yugoslavia that will begin the fighting again. First Serbian veterans formed militia-paramilitary groups, then veterans of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) announced their willingness to fight for independence and now veterans of the Albanian-Macedonian National Liberation Army are stating they are also “ready to fight for Kosovo” independence.
A senior official from Macedonia’s main opposition party, Fazli Veliu has said, “We have at least five thousand volunteers in Macedonia that are willing to fight for Kosovo if necessary.” Veliu is head of the Veterans Association of the National Liberation Army (NLA), which started the war against the government in Skopje in early 2001. The NLA represented the Albanian community in Macedonia and some of them actually admitted they were fighting to restore the ancient kingdom of Illyria, most of which was in present day Albania. This is the Albanian counterpart of the Greater Serbia ambition that is still the aim of some of Belgrade’s government, the restoration of Serbian rule over all of the former Yugoslavia.
Veliu outlined their targets by saying, “First of all Serbia then its allies.” But there are Albanians in Kosovo who do not welcome military support from the NLA. A Kosovo war veteran responded, “We don’t need these 5,000 men from Macedonia, we have enough men of our own.” [BIRN]
Reason is obviously not going to prevail and unreason began in 1991-92 with the completely unreasonable recognition of Yugoslavia’s division into six countries. Kosovo now demands to become the seventh or is it the eighth and I suspect a lot of them have been saying, they – the UN-EU recognized Croatia and its twisted boundary, so why not Kosovo.
Ethnic-nationalistic groups are saying that all over the continent and the first capital willing to recognize them will be Tehran. Europe is headed for a World War III version of the Guns of August, the conflicts that led to the First World War 1914-18 that exploded in the same Balkan flashpoint, one that outside powers were eager to enter.
www.crossfirewar.com
