04/27/10 – Chris Deliso – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
By the way, I am really excited to talk to my guest on the show today.
Chris DiLisio from Antiwar.com, Balkanalysis, and ChrisDiLisio.com, and a couple other websites.
He's the author of the books The Coming Balkan Caliphate, The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West, Culture and the Customs of Serbia and Montenegro, Hidden Macedonia, and does a lot of travel writing.
So if you ever want to find out where to go visit in Europe, the guide that you read will have been written by Chris DiLisio.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you?
Very well, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us.
Now, I guess we could talk about all kinds of wide and varied things, but I sort of just wanted an update as to what's going on in the Balkans these days, and particularly in regards to the American Empire, UN forces, NATO forces, and who's backing which government, and how deep into that quagmire we remain stuck.
Well, I have a big question.
Of course, it's a very fluid situation right now.
In fact, it's probably the most fluid situation I can recall for the last couple of years.
As a sort of a point of reference, I can mention that right now I'm looking in Skopje over the Ottoman Turkish Castle, which was for five centuries a symbol of the Ottoman occupation of this country.
The new U.S. Embassy is down about 700 yards on the other side of the hill, which is one of the largest in the world, they say.
So the U.S. has taken quite a strong interest in, as they say, preserving the stability of this country, which is quite small, 2 million person population, right in the middle of the Western Balkans.
So there are a lot of current issues that are going on, which is why I said that it's a bit of a fluid situation.
We have to the south Greece with a lot of economic problems.
You probably have read the Germans and the IMF and so on are bailing them out of a huge budget problem.
Right.
We have continuing problems in Kosovo, mostly with the international management of it, and infighting between the different international organizations that are in charge of continuing problems with Bosnia.
And I think we will even start to see more ethnic tensions returning in Macedonia itself, between the Albanians and Macedonians.
And why is that?
Well, partly it's been suppressed in a way for the last couple of years, because there was such a strong emphasis put on this name issue with Greece, which was probably the only thing I forgot to mention, which is that Greece says that Macedonia, the Republic of Macedonia, does not have the right to use this name, since it's also the name of the northern province of Greece.
And they claim that the Macedonians are stealing their history, referring to Alexander the Great 2,300 years ago and so on.
So this process has been in UN negotiations since about 1995, and they keep saying that it will be solved and it will be solved, but it hasn't, because certain people benefit from not having it solved, and also because it's a sort of intractable problem, which is if they come up with any compromise, it'll make one of the sides look bad, and that will be bad for their own local voters.
Because of this, there's been a huge amount of media attention since about 2006, and especially 2008, when Macedonia was not allowed to join NATO, because the name issue was unresolved and the Greeks vetoed it.
So a huge amount of the media, both local and international, has focused on the bad blood between Macedonia and Greece, and so the Albanian issue, which had of course been involved with the 2001 conflict here, was swept under the rug a bit.
Now it starts to...
Well, let me ask you real quick about that name issue there, Chris.
Yeah.
Now, I understand, you know, the Macedonian Empire and this and that.
On the other hand, though, and I'm just a dumb Texan, I don't know, but how come it's such a big deal?
I mean, if you ask the Greeks, who can't stand Macedonia calling itself Macedonia, what do they think it should be called?
Stupid Land or something?
They think there's already a name that should belong instead?
You know, it's a bit difficult to explain the local mindset to the outside world in a way that will be sort of coherent in a soundbite-length reply, but for the Greeks it's a matter of pride, but it's also an issue where they don't feel they have to make any compromise since they're not being held hostage by anything.
It's Macedonia that wants to join NATO.
It's Macedonia that wants to join the EU, and Greece is already in those clubs.
And so there's been a sort of ingrained feeling that they don't have to change anything, and since it doesn't impinge upon their citizens' lives, the average Greek is not very interested in the problem, whereas the average Macedonian has it sort of hanging over their head like a sword every day, and they're constantly thinking about the issue.
I see.
Now, is there another name that Macedonia could go by that would somehow get rid of this issue for once and for all, or something?
Not really.
The latest suggestion, or informal suggestion, was to call it Northern Macedonia, because the Greek foreign ministry last year was saying that Macedonia is a geographical region and therefore one country cannot call itself, you know, to exclude the others, which is basically what I asked in my book Hidden Macedonia some years ago.
I asked my Greek cohort, well, if the Macedonians call their country Northern Macedonia, does that mean you're going to call your province Southern Macedonia?
They said, of course not.
So what this actually is about is about nation branding and the brand name of Macedonia.
Now, there's sort of a human rights and, you know, happy people doing happy things group called the Council of Europe, which doesn't really have any power, but it's sort of a nice organization for EU and non-EU states, and Macedonia, as luck would have it, is supposed to start on May the 10th or the 11th for their honorary presidency, and they've decided they will call it the Macedonian presidency.
And, of course, the Greeks get all bent out of shape about this, saying that, you know, they cannot call it the Macedonian presidency.
And it gets worse because there's mutual mistrust, and the Macedonians are thinking it's not just the name of their country, but their language and their identity that is at stake, and that they do not want to recognize a Macedonian minority in their country and that this is all what's behind it.
So it's a very sort of intractable problem, and people have been saying for years, as long as I can remember, that a solution is just around the corner.
But I don't know.
It's very hard to predict.
The only thing you can say from this is that the Albanians are claiming that they're getting more fed up because they're being held back, Albanians in Macedonia, that is, because they feel that this problem is holding them back from joining NATO, which Albania itself joined last year, or 2008, and that they're making their political leaders and grassroots groups saying we're not going to stand for this.
So this is why there's a huge amount of pressure now from all of the sort of Western diplomatic community and these major organizations to resolve the name issue, because they're afraid lest any of these ethnic tensions blow over again and they are faced with a security problem.
Well, and you know, that's really the key, right, is this is why this is important to America.
I mean, here I've got to stand up and walk over and go look at a map to even get my Albania and my Macedonia and everything straight.
I know where Greece is.
I know where Italy is.
But the Balkans are a pretty obscure kind of place.
It might as well be on the other side of the Caspian Sea or something for most Americans.
But the reason it's important is because of our NATO alliance, and that's what this is all about, is our empire, and whether or not the individual Balkan states will be fully integrated into the empire.
And the European Union, because this is both competitive as a bloc for the U.S. but also as sort of a reliable ally in different ways that they want to keep cohesive.
And the Balkans is where numerous empires in the past have come undone, and there is now this rush to get everyone into the EU or NATO or at least on the path to that, to keep these small countries with rival ethnicities together, because this means keeping the whole of Europe together.
It's not so simple as do the Macedonians and Greeks learn to love each other or the Albanians and Serbs or whatever.
It's a much bigger issue because the EU is having a lot of problems within itself, a lot of Euroscepticism within its own member states.
And maybe you've followed some of the elections in other political parties as they go through different elections in European countries.
There's been a sort of tendency towards far-right and far-left positions, and the average people who are feeling frozen out economically as the economy worsens are blaming the Euro-elite, who seem to be a small number of people who are basing diktats from Brussels, and there's an increasing disconnect between the average European and their leadership.
Yeah, well, it looks like there's going to be a lot of pressure to even, or a lot of difficulty in the years ahead in even keeping the EU together, because, well, for example, you've got the Germans bailing out everybody.
They're not happy about that at all.
Right.
I mean, they really thought of themselves as just Europeans.
I guess they, you know, like Texas, paying the bills for Alabama or something like that.
Right.
But it's not going to be that easy.
Well, you know, Germany, they also want to keep the Euro going.
And the feeling is that if they let Greece go to the dogs, then Portugal or Spain could go next, and there could be a real problem, and the Euro could disintegrate, which would be fine with me, because we would have all those wonderful, colorful currencies that American travelers used to have in the old days.
But for their interests, they believe that having a strong currency, a single currency, is good for them.
So they'll do everything they can, including bailing out Greece, to keep the Euro afloat.
Oh, you think so, huh?
For how long?
Like indefinitely?
Or, I mean, at some point, Germany's interest is going to be in no longer bailing out Greece, Portugal, and everybody else, right?
Well, in a way, yes, that is true, but also Germany is the lead country in the EU.
This is sort of their carpeting two dilemmas.
If there's going to be a strong Germany, it should be more or less in charge of a strong EU, whereas if you have a bunch of individual countries, they're losing a lot of their prestige on the greater global level.
All right, everybody, it's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Chris DeLisa.
You can find a lot of his old stuff at Antiwar.com slash DeLiso, and you can also find his websites, Balkanalysis, like Balkan, and Analysis, only combined, Balkanalysis.com.
Very good stuff.
And Serbianna.com, S-E-R-B-I-A-N-N-A.com.
Some old stuff, yeah.
Lots of stuff out there, and also, again, one of the world's most successful travel writers, so if you're planning on traveling around that part of Europe, you know, even if you just grab a travel guide, it will be by Chris DeLisa.
He's the one who tells you how to get around there and have a good time.
All right, now tell me about Turkey, because this has been a thing that's been going on for years and years and years, is whether they will be allowed into the European Union as a full-fledged member or not.
They've, of course, been a NATO partner for 60 years or something.
Yeah, they will never be in the EU.
Why is that?
Because the EU is not eager to have a Muslim country with 70 million people join.
It used to be the theory was that's exactly what they wanted, so that Turkey could be kind of the bridge civilization between the West and the Muslim world, and see, we're not so bad, we get along with the Turks, that kind of thing.
This is very much a U.S. goal.
I think the U.S. wants to have Turkey, to have Bosnia, to have Kosovo, Macedonia, have them as symbols of successful, more or less secular, Muslim governments, so that they can increase their standing with the rest of the Muslim world, at least that's the plan.
But if you're in the EU parliament, and if you're Germany and you have the majority of the seats, you're going to have a big problem if Turkey becomes the second largest country by demographics.
And don't forget that a lot of people who are ethnic Turks from, say, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, or whatever, I don't know what the percentage is, but a bunch of these people have Turkish passports as well, which they could use foreseeably in elections and so on.
Right on.
Now, every, what, two or three weeks there's a headline about a coup, or a possible coup, or some coup plotters were arrested, or some coup plotters got away with it, and the old guy got arrested.
What happened?
What is going on over there, man?
It's been a, I don't know, five or six, maybe more year war between the government of Erdogan and the AKP party, which is sort of the Islam Light Party, against the army, which is the typical, traditional balance of power in Turkey.
You know, since Ataturk, who is basically the secular founder of modern Turkey, made a very strong distinction between church and state, or mosque and state.
Since then, the army that he was, you know, in 1922 or 1923, when they founded the Turkish Republic, on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, which had been a military theocracy more or less, like the Byzantine Empire before it, there's always been this tension within Turkish society, which makes it very intriguing, a very intriguing place to watch.
But it seems now that the AKP party and the government has gotten the upper hand over the army for the first time, because there has been, as you said, many military coups in the past.
But this sort of roundup of military officials, who they claimed were, you know, trying to subvert the government and to make false flag terrorist attacks and so on, and then blame the Muslims for it.
I talked with a lot of Turkish people and some diplomats and so on about this, and there's a sense that this is an internal struggle, more than necessarily an actual coup that was foiled.
Because at some point, it's all a little bit too perfect.
You know, you hear that this general had allegedly written this, you know, bombastic document in his own hand, saying first we're going to attack this, and then we're going to attack that, and you know, you're going to do this, my lieutenant.
The kind of things where if you were really plotting a coup, you would never commit to writing, and certainly you would never sign.
So there's a lot of fog about this, this whole issue.
And nobody really knows, except that the people who are in the government now in Turkey, some of them were remnants of an Islamic government that lasted for a very short time in the late 90s, before they were basically shut down by the army.
So there's a lot of bad blood between these two groups that goes back a long time, and the current government has benefited a lot by its connections with businessmen in Anatolia and smaller cities in Turkey.
They've taken control of the police, which was an important thing.
If you want to investigate the army, you can't do that unless you control the police.
So this is, you know, a wider social issue.
And it seems that the U.S. is supporting the government, as you said before, for making an example of a winning Islamic country that you could show to the Iraqis or Iranians or something as, you know, see, we do like Muslims after all.
But I'm sure that we're going to see more from Turkey because it's never dull.
That's one thing about it.
It's a great country, very interesting, and never boring.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it certainly doesn't seem to be a boring place, from what I can tell.
I wonder whether you think having a secular military where, you know, that seems like their overriding mandate or whatever is just to hold their monopoly on force and make sure that it's a secular state monopoly on force and not a religious one.
But I wonder, like, does that end up kind of radicalizing the population itself, like where they would rather have an Islamic government and they see their own military as kind of being forced on them by the U.S. or anything like that?
You know, I don't know if there's polls or something or what the exact pulse of the people is about this.
But there's a strong – I mean, Turkey has a strongly secularist trend.
And, you know, for example, we get these Turkish soap operas beamed in every night and they're hugely popular in the Balkans.
And, you know, watching this, you know, 50 episodes, I've never seen one headscarf.
And, you know, it looks like furniture is made in Ikea and so on.
It's very Westernized.
You have a more fundamentalist interior, especially in the southeast where the population is mostly Kurdish and quite, you know, living in underdeveloped villages and so on.
So when you hear about the occasional honor killing or, you know, there was a horrible thing with a girl who was buried alive by her father a few months ago.
It's usually in places like that that are outside of the Turkish mainstream.
The reason why the army was created as a sort of bulwark against Islam was because Ataturk himself was reacting to the prevailing realities of an Ottoman Empire that had failed in 1923 and was steadily losing territory.
And, you know, he and his cohorts saw this as an example of, you know, backwardness of religion's control over society when everything around there was, you know, Western modernization and so on and so forth.
And it's just this institution has survived for so long.
It's quite remarkable, despite all the other changes that have gone on in the world.
So I don't know.
I don't think we've seen the end of this particular discussion.
It does alarm Turks when the government makes laws or they try to make a law, for example, banning the sale of alcohol in city centers and people sort of said, well, you went too far there.
So I don't think there's a danger of Turkey becoming any sort of dangerous Islamic country.
But they want to have this sort of ability to serve as a bridge, you know, to sort of be a bridge between the U.S. and Iran or with the Balkan countries to show different friendship in places that they've had before, to be an honest broker or whatever, to show themselves as being basically the only country that's capable of having trust of both sides.
There's the trust of Israel occasionally, although that relationship has, you know, suffered a bit in the last year.
They're still trying to show themselves as the, you know, indispensable party for the U.S.
And in some ways, I think this is correct.
Right.
Now, all the, you know, the American empire and NATO and all the security arrangements and weapons transfers and all that stuff aside, just in terms of, you know, East versus West and that kind of thing, the inevitable clash of civilizations that we must win.
The Turkish, you know, Asia Minor there, again, never mind really the state, but that society there, they really put the lie to that, don't they?
They really prove that there is no inherent reason that we are set on a collision course of conflict with Islam.
You know, I used to live in Turkey.
I've traveled quite a bit there as a journalist and to see friends.
And it seems perfectly normal.
What I see is there's a general Balkan mentality stretching from Serbia through Turkey, which is to do with the shared Byzantine and Ottoman legacies.
And there's a mentality of the people here that is very similar, whether you're in Bosnia or Greece or Turkey or wherever, that is not similar with Northern and Western Europe.
So a lot of times the miscommunications that people have, and the diplomats especially, which is very remarkable for me considering that diplomats should know this stuff, is a completely different set of cultural norms.
Now here, despite all the bad news that we hear and the gloom and woe, it's still very safe.
You don't feel, you know, danger of street crime or anything bad will happen to you if you go out at night or something.
Whereas, you know, there's probably large parts of many Western cities that I would not want to be around day or night, you know?
So things do move along.
Yeah, I mean, the thing is, the people who push this clash of civilizations thing, I mean, I guess there's some people who just believe it for whatever reason.
You know, Arabic just sounds so strange to their ears or what.
They just figure, you know, these people might as well be Martians.
And, you know, well, like they say when they talk about Iran or Iraq or any country they want to bomb, they're crazy.
They can't be dealt with.
They only understand one thing, violence.
And so that's what we have to give them and that kind of thing.
And, you know, I haven't traveled all around that part of the world or any part of the world, really.
So I don't really know for sure.
But it just seems like the U.S. existed for 200 years without inherent clash of civilizations with Islam.
So somehow we avoided it up until the end of the Cold War when we decided to invade the Middle East.
So it seems like maybe, you know, that whole clash of civilizations thing is just PR for people who want more wars, you know, rather than something that's based in fact.
More wars.
If you're a military contractor or something like this, you want to have, of course, you want to have another justification for your services.
Right.
And speaking of which...
I would be more concerned...
No, I was just going to say, you're speaking, you know, about the perceived danger from Iran or Iraq or whatever, but I would be much more concerned if I was living in America with the danger from New York City, if we're talking about the South Park thing, for example.
And for me, that's just... it just beggars belief in a way, because we're talking about fighting abroad to protect Americans at home, and you have a guy in New York who's threatening another guy in New York, and, you know, government doesn't really seem to care about that.
Well, you know, I've got a couple of interesting things to say about that.
Well, I guess I'll go ahead and skip to the chase first.
It turns out that group that made the threat was founded by a guy named Joseph Cohen, a former West Bank settler.
So as far as...
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
So that was your... the revolutionary Islam... revolution Muslim or whatever that made the veiled death threat to the South Park guys, as far as I'm concerned, until somebody proves otherwise as just a Mossad agent pretending to be a Muslim and trying to provoke anti-Muslim sentiment in people.
I don't know why I should believe for a minute that his conversion to Islam is honest, when you can't find an actual Muslim who says the same thing, you know?
Yeah, I didn't see that new development in the story.
That certainly makes it more interesting.
Yeah.
But I think it doesn't invalidate the point in general, which is what I was simply trying to say is they should consider, you know, security concerns of whatever type that might already be in the U.S. before going up and stoking up hornet's nest outside.
Absolutely.
I agree with that 100%.
And, of course, here's the thing, too.
I mean, you look at all the... you know, the guy, Theo van Gogh, was killed by an Islamic extremist in the Netherlands, I guess, right?
Yeah.
And there were all the death threats over the cartoons and all that kind of thing.
But the thing is, that makes great propaganda on American TV about how, boy, you know, these Muslims, what are you, just, you know, a billion irreconcilable people in the world who just hate freedom so much, whatever are we going to do with them, and all that kind of talk.
And yet all those cartoons and even South Park and all these other things are all happening in context of a time when American combat forces occupy multiple Muslim countries and mount major military operations and other ones on a regular basis.
And so it's, you know, it's just like, you know, a slur out of the mouth of a soldier as he bombs a house or something is overheard.
You know what I mean?
So it's not the slur that they're mad at.
It's that clash of civilizations that, you know, they see so many Americans having fallen for and coming and bringing to their part of the world, you know?
Well, first of all, I should just point out that the difference of reactions, let's say, to Islam in Europe and America are different.
And they have different historical perspectives, different demographics.
People here might feel more threatened in different ways.
In the larger picture, you're right.
I would think that Pakistan is kind of a place that we should be concerned about.
Now, if you're reading some of the latest journalism, I think Robert Fisk, a British journalist, was writing from that frontier and the amount of people who are being killed is really going to result in another generation or two of people hating the U.S., when this could have been avoided, to put it one way.
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.
I mean, if we go and just skip around the Middle East of different consequences leading to different problems all the way through, I mean, you look at what's going on in Yemen.
Yeah.
Or look at what's going on in Somalia.
There are now at least a few cases, maybe half a dozen or more, where Somali-Americans, that is Americans, have left this country to go to Somalia to join the resistance against the fake government being backed by the United States.
And some of them, at least reportedly, have even volunteered to be suicide attackers.
Now, you could say, well, you know, crazy Islam.
It doesn't even leave a man's mind alone when he's safe in Minnesota somewhere or something.
But the truth is, this is the result of our government's foreign policy using, you know, putting firepower on targets, that's what they call it, using their military to kill people in that part of the world.
Yeah.
It's blowback, you know, just like 9-11 was in the first place.
Yeah, well, it was just, as I think Philip Giraldi said before in one of your interviews, was the wrong means of handling a specific situation.
It's something that would have been a police matter, not requiring a huge military offensive.
Yeah, in fact, the very first time I interviewed Phil Giraldi back in 2005, I said, well, what would you do with this whole terrorism thing?
And he said, I would ramp the whole thing down.
Just whatever it is, minimize it.
You know?
Just because it makes obvious sense doesn't mean it has anything to do with, you know, what our policy is going to be any time in the near future.
So let me ask you about Kosovo.
You know what's fun, everybody in the audience?
Go to your favorite brand of search engine, next opportunity you get, and search images for Camp Bond Steel.
And then you'll be able to have a great time pointing at your computer screen and telling others near you, oh, my God, would you look at this?
That thing, it's like as big as Florida.
Yes, it's fairly large.
So tell me, what exactly is the status of, now I know that Bill Clinton promised that all American peacekeepers would be home by Christmas 1995.
How's that working out?
So the peacekeeping force is gradually being reduced, but there's still the fundamental disagreement between Serbia, which does not recognize the independence of Kosovo, which it considers a, you know, historically Serbian province.
And there's also the, you know, the nagging problem that they have large minorities in compact areas, especially in northern Kosovo, separated by the river Ibar.
And so, therefore, there's a whole lot of issues that are connected between the Kosovo Albanian government and the international agencies that are overseeing the, now that they declared independence in 2008, so we can say the international agencies are overseeing.
But, you know, I've been there recently and speaking with international officials.
You sort of get a feeling of deja vu, like you're interviewing, you're asking the same questions and getting the same replies.
It's just the face in front of you that's a little bit different.
And it's, sadly, it's as usual.
The internationals, they're confused and, you know, plotting against each other.
The social ills are increasing, the unemployment is increasing.
They're sending back more refugees from Germany and other countries who really have no future.
It's not a nice place.
You do see some things.
There is a certain optimism, at least among the Albanians.
There's young generations, there's music and so on.
But, overall, there hasn't been any real progress.
And there's still a lot of issues about the legality of property ownership and so on.
A lot of the Albanians are very disappointed with their political options and, you know, the politicians that they have available.
When somebody builds a huge mansion on the outskirts of town, while so many people are very poor, it doesn't leave a very good taste.
And so now they're independent or so whatever we would call it for the last two years.
But there hasn't been a huge amount of recognitions by foreign countries.
There hasn't been this sort of jolt of activity that the U.S. wanted, especially the U.S. and the EU.
So you have the usual stereotypes, the dithering Europeans, you know, basically arguing with each other and obsessed with bureaucracy.
And the U.S. who's impatient and they see things happen and they try to ram home solutions.
And the Serbs who are clever enough to play this thing out for whatever advantage they can get.
And basically, you know, the foreigners being drawn into a situation where they have no real sense of the local realities or what to do with the whole mess.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's just puzzling to me.
And, you know, I don't know if it's the old world is just bent like this, or maybe it's just my fantasy that America is not this way as much as it really is.
Maybe it is just the symptom of the world.
But is everything over there just a matter of division by tribe and ethnicity?
I mean, I understand that all these civilizations grew up next to each other that by what are now, you know, very close geographic terms and that, you know, there are ancient histories going back and all kinds of conflicts and blood feuds and whatever.
But then again, you know, people only live a few decades and then we die and are replaced by our kids or whatever.
And so it's just amazing to me that everything is such an ethnic division, you know?
Yeah.
And, you know, I spent some years thinking that this cannot really be so.
But after a while, you get to the point where in a case it is so in so far as if people want to believe something is reality, then it is reality.
You know what I mean?
If you want to believe the earth is flat, then the earth is going to be flat for you and whatever consequences may come from that.
Yeah.
The problem with the local people is that they all have such wildly different views of reality and of history and of what that all means.
For example, the Christian and Muslim divide.
If you're a Muslim, you're looking back at the Ottoman Empire as a kind of golden age.
And so everywhere where there's a building, now they have protests about whether they should build a new mosque in Skopje.
They say, well, this was where a mosque was that was torn down.
And so we're going to build it.
And then, you know, on the other hand, a Christian will say, well, this mosque is where a church used to be.
And, you know, it should be a church.
And so there's these kind of insipid debates about, you know, people, this was 100 years ago, 200 years ago, whatever.
Let's think about the future.
And there's enough of a... it's not necessarily the majority of the population that agree with this.
I know a lot of people who really could care less.
But you always have this vocal minority group of pressure, you know, coming from people in the media or political parties.
And the way that we're geared up to operating with these countries, and this is very important, I think, whether the U.S. or the EU, we're geared up to talking with political leaders and with what they call community representatives.
So it's not... we're talking about, you know, fostering democracy and so on.
But still, when it comes down to there's a crisis or a problem or we want to see this happen or that happen, you just get in a room with some political leaders who promise they can deliver this or that or have their, you know, different complaints to bring to you that day.
And there isn't really a means of getting the masses of people involved or of consulting anyone on their opinion.
We had this lively case when the government here decided to rename the airport of Skopje Alexander the Great Airport.
And I had Greek friends the next day who were calling and saying, oh, it's all a plot from Skopje that they're all trying to get us and they all believe in ancient ideology and this is proof of it.
And I said, you know, nobody was consulted.
This was probably decided by two or three people.
And this just was news to us like it's news to you.
It just happened the next day.
And, you know, nobody here really asked for this.
So there's a huge breakdown in communication, which I think on the level of the average person, if people here were more able to speak with each other in a civil way and we could get the politicians out of it, then it would be a better chance for peace and, you know, dialogue and so on.
But the way that the international diplomacy is geared up, it's always geared up towards the political leaders.
You know, you never see someone go out and ask the average farmer, worker, whatever, what they would like to see happen.
It's always you get a bunch of politicians around and then you say, you know, do this or do that, work this.
And so there isn't really any improvement if we're looking in terms of society.
There's a lot of increases in consumerism and a lot of new shiny shopping malls and new apartment blocks and so on.
But in terms of education and critical thinking, I haven't seen any improvement, really.
Well, what we need is a no state solution, it sounds like.
Well, and speaking of that, over the long term, do you think Serbia is going to try to reinvade and retake Kosovo?
Or do you think Kosovo might join up with Albania?
That would be more likely.
They just announced the new national road construction between Kosovo and Albania.
The Albanian government has different projects in southern Albania with southern parts of Macedonia, which will gradually increase their influence there.
So it's much more likely that.
I don't see Serbia invading anything, which is a farcical.
And I don't see why they would want to either, because most of Kosovo is really not very nice.
And it wouldn't be worth having, honestly.
Well, I just thought it was like historically where Serbia was founded.
It was the first Serbian state or something like that back in the day.
It's true, but what are you going to do once you get there?
I mean, if you have places that are destroyed and that you can't live from, it's going to be a victory and then what?
And I think they know that.
Their concern is to protect whatever minorities they may have left, which are scattered in the center and the south, are more compact than the north, and to ensure some rights for them.
But, of course, for a Serbian politician of whatever thing, they can't allow to say that there's an independent Kosovo.
It's the same as the Macedonia-Greece issue and with several other regional issues.
It's a loss of faith, which would be political suicide, first of all.
So, the EU wants Serbia, and Serbia is clever enough to know this, and Serbia knows that Russia also wants to do it on its side.
So this was the non-aligned policy that Yugoslavia had under Tito's time.
And Serbia was the major state, and Yugoslavia has, I think, taken this approach to diplomacy in the post-Yugoslav era, where they be friendly with this side and that side as much as they think it is to their advantage, and be smarter than everyone in the middle.
But we will see how it goes.
Turkey is the other regional power, so Turkey and Serbia would be the two most important countries for the long run of this region anyway.
Greece could be important, but we don't know about their economy and to what extent it's going to melt down and perhaps take other countries with it.
Man, I'm starting to think I need a backpack and fill it with Lonely Planet travel guides, and I need to just get my running shoes on and go and hit the bricks and go travel around a part of Europe.
It sounds like a really interesting place.
It's a lovely place.
It's really interesting.
And every day you find something new, and I suppose it's what keeps me here is you have the opportunity every day to use your brain a little bit and to listen to people and understand what motivates them, what's important to them, what they like to see happening for their country and so on.
You certainly have a feeling of being in a place where things are happening.
And some beautiful beaches, too, I have to say.
Yeah, well, I was going to say maybe they cheat a little bit with the Photoshop, but to hear your Lonely Planet travel guides tell it, it's a really nice place to take a view as well.
Oh, yeah, very, very beautiful.
All right, everybody, that is the Great Crystal.
Please, so you can find all this old Antiwar.com stuff.
Hey, by the way, are you still there?
Yes, yes, I'm still here.
Hey, we want you to write stuff for Antiwar.com some more.
We like it when you do.
Yes, sir, I will be happy to.
That's why.
I've been traveling quite a bit and doing a lot of projects.
I haven't had very much time to even do any other writing.
It's been a pretty quiet last couple of years for me.
I understand.
So many books.
Yeah, you need to understand that the next time I see an article by Chris DeLiso on Antiwar.com, I'm going to say, hey, look, a Chris DeLiso article on Antiwar.com.
So I'll be excited, and I'm pretty sure there are a lot of other people who wonder whatever happened to that guy, too.
So maybe we'll… That guy has been traveling for months and months and months at a time and writing on very short notice.
So I haven't disappeared.
I've just been away.
All right, well, we miss you.
Yeah, come back.
Okay, miss you, too.
All right, take care, Chris.
Talk later.
Yeah, bye-bye.
All right, y'all, that is Chris DeLiso.
Website is ChrisDeLiso.com.
Of course, also Antiwar.com slash DeLiso, D-E-L-I-S-O, that is, by the way.
He's the author of The Coming Balkan Caliphate, The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe, which is not nearly such a scary book as it sounds by the title there.
It is a very interesting read and an honest one.
I think the publisher came up with the title there.
And also, of course, check out Balkanalysis.com.