03/13/17 – Chris Deliso on the foreign provocateurs exacerbating Macedonia’s political crisis – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing our long lost buddy, Chris DeLiso.
Our good friend, formerly a writer for antiwar.com.
He keeps his own blog called Balkanalysis, where he writes all about the Balkans.
And he lives in Macedonia and he's got this very important essay and there's a podcast interview of him as well.
And this essay is at the American Interest.
This is your free article this month, it says.
The American Interest.
Macedonia's crisis isn't going away.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you, man?
I'm great.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Well, man, I'm happy to talk to you again.
I should have mentioned that you're the author of The Coming Balkan Caliphate, which you said was the publisher's idea.
You weren't really trying to be that alarmist, but you wrote a hell of a great book about America's intervention in Bosnia there that people need to read.
I have a new book coming out on the European migration crisis in May.
Oh, yeah.
From Traeger.
Yeah.
And what's it called?
Migration, Terrorism and the Future of a Divided Europe, a Continent Transformed.
That's the full thing.
I can't write all that down.
Email me that.
I shall.
I can't write that fast, Chris.
All right.
Hey, OK, great.
Yeah, well, I'll certainly have my eyeballs peeled for that.
Now, here's the deal, man.
I have to tell you, I read this whole article.
Macedonia's crisis isn't going away.
I didn't have a chance to reread the whole thing.
But I just got to confess to you, I didn't understand it at all.
I mean, I know what you're trying to tell me.
I just am telling you, it couldn't stick in my brain.
So I'm going to ask you like this.
I don't know the first thing about Macedonia, man.
Not the first thing about it, other than people fight over the name.
But I'm not even sure who fights over the name.
And I know that this article has a lot of left and right and young and old and foreign and domestic and regional and ethnic differences.
And I guess, you know, I don't know exactly how to start.
But maybe if you could sort of list some of the major sides and factions of who's back and who and who's really against who in a real simpleton Scott Horton kind of way here so I can try to grok you.
Well, Scott, in the immortal words of Jeffrey Lebowski, there's a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot of what have yous.
Yes, many of them.
You're here in Macedonia.
We've been in a almost three year political crisis.
This began after the elections of April 2014, when the winning party, Vemuro Dipone, which is the conservative party that's been in power since 2006, won and the opposition, Social Democrats, which is the remnants of the former communist Yugoslavian Social Democratic Party, lost again as they've lost since 2006.
And they immediately boycotted Parliament and cryptically warned that they had some evidence that would topple the government.
Later on in the fall, the leader of that Social Democratic Party went to the prime minister, Nikola Grebsky, and basically threatened him that he had incriminating information.
And unless the prime minister resigned or included him in the government, it would all be leaked.
And so the prime minister got a court order to record this.
And then it showed up on YouTube in the video.
Anyone can see that he's saying I'm working with foreign intelligence services from outside of the region to depose you.
So in January of 2015, the government arrested a alleged co-conspirator of the Social Democrats.
And he was a former intelligence officer who had allegedly used his people inside of the SIGINT department, of the counterintelligence service, to surreptitiously record four years of conversations involving Macedonian officials, businessmen, opposition diplomats, and so on.
So the narrative was quickly switched when the opposition leader, Zoran Zayev, immediately started releasing what they called bombs of wiretapped materials, which allegedly incriminated the government in corruption and so on.
And this was extremely interesting because the West, to a man, jumped to defend them, basically overturning the government's investigation and saying, you know, the government is all crooked and corrupt, as these wiretaps prove.
The European Union sent a special expert mission, which was composed of former European commissioners and experts, who spent a total of three days in the country before coming to a verdict that was basically co-written with the help of the same Social Democrats.
This led to a European-mediated settlement, which was called the Pershino Agreement of June and July of 2015.
According to this agreement, there would be new elections.
There would be a special prosecutor who would investigate the alleged crimes of these wiretaps that showed, and a bunch of other reforms towards the EU-NATO path and all of that.
So twice the elections were deferred because the Social Democrats did not have the popularity, and a bunch of other little details happened that the conditions were not correct.
Finally, the elections did happen December 11th of the past year, in which the Vumero, the conservatives, won by a margin of two seats in Parliament.
And this was highly unusual because it indicated that a lot of Albanians voted for the Social Democrats instead of for the Albanian parties, which has cast a huge chaos over the country and the region.
Climaxing in January, when the prime minister of Albania, Edi Rama, came up with a platform to unite the Albanian parties of Macedonia for all of these maximalist demands for a binational country, for recognizing genocides that didn't happen, for all kinds of crazy things, and nobody has been honest about what is actually in the platform, the president of the country, Djordje Ivanov, said he will not recognize any kind of platform that was created in a foreign country under a foreign leader that's anti-constitutional, that's against the multi-ethnic character of the country, and so on and so forth, whereas the West, which is NATO, the EU, the US ambassador, are all pushing and pushing and pushing as fast as possible for them to create a government.
And the president will not give a mandate under these circumstances of a foreign-imposed platform.
So he said all you have to do is drop the platform and we will give you a minority government right if that's what you really want.
Although it's incredibly unpopular, and now for two weeks people have been protesting, up to 100,000 people in 26 different cities, which is largely a grassroots initiative, because they're against this in fear of a partition or federalization of the country.
So, I think I actually get this here.
All right, what you're telling me is the US and the EU are demanding that this conservative government that keeps winning, that they immediately form a coalition with the leftist side, but the leftist side includes right-wing Albanian ethnic nationalists who would split off and join Albania or jeopardize… Whoever is the winning parties from the Macedonian side, from the Albanian side, they form a coalition.
And this was mathematically possible for the conservatives and for the top Albanian party, which is Dewey, to again form a coalition.
They had 61 seats, but under tremendous pressure of the US embassy, the Albanians backed off and went this new adventure.
So, there would actually be a minority coalition formed of the socialists and a bunch of Albanian factions, which would give them a smaller advantage.
So, what would have happened is the most powerful and most popular party in the country would be completely out of government, and there would be a total coup d'etat.
And right now they're saying, from the socialists, they're saying, you know, we're going to do it anyway, whether or not the president gives us the mandate, which sets an extremely dangerous course.
But the most important thing, I mean, because this is in some extent all local politics, the most important thing that we have investigated and will continue to investigate is how this crisis, because of these wiretaps, has trapped all of these Western agencies and Western interests into defending the social democrats from the beginning, because everyone is mutually compromised.
And this is where it became really, really interesting.
And the US also has launched programs through USAID, which is the US Agency for International Development, which is supposed to be happy people doing happy things, but has become increasingly militarized under the Bush and Obama regimes.
So, they're all in it and they're all in a rush, because the USAID has, through its Office of Transition Initiatives, which is OTI, is supposed to be their fast response mechanism, which goes into countries like Colombia and Central Asia, and they put through fast and covert means, usually in 18-month cycles, of making changes on the ground.
And this is incredibly exciting for your desk-bound administrative people in Washington who get to feel almost like they're in the CIA or something.
And they use contractors who have been in war zones, special operators, people who know how to do stuff.
But here it has been such a disaster, because everything they have tried to do since January of 2016 has backfired in a spectacular way that has ruined the credibility of our embassy and of our diplomacy, and they only have another three months.
And when their report card comes in, if they don't get the goals that they wanted, they could lose funding.
Trump could say, this is another administrative burden that we don't need.
So, there's a lot at stake that has nothing to do with the actual country or ethnic groups or politicians.
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Yeah, that's always an important point.
Whoever's instituting the sanctions or aiming the cannons or whatever, they'll always lobby for their job to continue no matter what it is, or how contrary to current goals, whatever they're doing might be.
But now, so, in a sense, this really amounts to, from the beginning or only kind of after the fact, an American color-coded revolution type of a thing here, where they're trying to say, is it that the Americans are telling these guys, you know, refuse to be good losers about the election results and try better to win next time?
They're saying, instead, protest and refuse and obstruct and threaten and demand, or these guys are just doing that anyway?
Well, what happened last year, first of all, in 2015, there was seen to be certain events that would topple the government, and they were shocked every time it didn't work.
First of all, it was supposed to be the wiretaps.
Didn't work because the public wasn't buying it.
The concept that the government had wiretapped itself saying incriminating things, it was just bogus.
Second, there was a terrorist, attempted terrorist attack from Kosovo Albanians with some local Albanians, but that was neutralized by the police in May of 2015.
So that didn't work.
Then there was a few other tricks here and there that didn't work.
What actually happened was once the USAID machine got starting, they did something called the Colorful Revolution last summer, which is what you're referring to.
They even called it that?
The Colorful Revolution?
They literally called it the Colorful Revolution.
So these people, they're not hiding it anymore.
And this is all funded by George Soros and shuffled through the U.S. and through all of these ghost NGOs that don't exist.
And now this has spawned a tremendous reaction from the Macedonian people, especially people who are close to the conservative party, and they actually launched an initiative called Stop Operation Soros, which has gained traction.
If you look in Breitbart and other conservative media, you will find commentary about this, because Soros has pumped so much money into this country to create these NGOs, and they're the other people who have a lot to lose if the initiatives don't succeed here, because they've been living high off the hog for at least 5, 10 years without having to work in any regular job, just getting money for nothing by being professional leftists.
Hey, it's good work if you can get it, apparently.
We got an entire middle part of North America saturated with them right now, but I know exactly what you mean.
Look at that in America.
Macedonia was a dry run for what you're experiencing now.
It's basically the same dynamic and same people.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, they tried to even do the whole big protest in the streets thing, but that's the thing about Americans is we're pretty used to accepting election results and moving on with our lives.
We don't need to do a color-coded revolution here.
It didn't work very well.
And, you know, it's funny, because they even really, you know, it's that bubble, you know, they talk about if you ever read a memoir of anybody with power, they're like, yeah, once you're inside that bubble, yeah, the bubble of idiocy that surrounds people with power, where they really were entertaining to themselves the idea that, well, maybe we could influence the Electoral College.
And it sounds like stupid conspiracy stuff, but no, actually there's solid reporting from very mainstream sources about how the remnants of the Hillary campaign were seriously considering this, and were in contact with the people who were, you know, working on getting a CIA briefing for the Electoral College about how Trump is a secret agent of the Russians, and so that the Electoral College will cancel the election results, which is so fanciful, there's no way it was ever going to happen, and of course it didn't at all.
But meanwhile, if it had happened, it would have led to a war.
You know what I mean?
If they had really canceled the election like that, and, you know, maybe you could steal an election from a Democrat on that level, but certainly not from a Republican like Trump, who won with grassroots support over the elite's dead bodies, you know?
No way.
And this is what's happening now, because there is this tremendous pressure from the West.
Every evening there is these grassroots protests, as I mentioned, which have 30,000 here in the capital of Skopje and around the country about a total of 100,000, and I expect this will escalate, because people are feeling frightened, first of all, that they could lose their country, the only country they have, and second of all, they feel insulted every time a foreign diplomat comes and says, you must do this.
So if you put the most powerful and popular governing party into opposition, then, you know, the former Prime Minister, Nikola Grebsky, himself says, I can't guarantee what will happen, which is, you know, a bit ominous.
But there's a lot of people who are ready to take the law into their own hands.
They might not be as well-armed as the Republicans in America, but they've been extremely well-behaved until now, and this is what the West, among many other things they haven't realized, is that by having the conservatives that they hate in power, they're keeping them in check.
Which is how far right are these conservatives anyway?
I mean, it sounds like they must be pretty center-rightist to even be in power, right?
This is Macedonia.
There's never been a fascist party.
There's never been an anarchist party.
People here are pretty centrist.
They're socially conservative, but at the same time they would, you know, overspend on health care and, you know, things you would expect more from a Scandinavian liberal model.
So we're not talking about crazy right-wing people or anything.
This is just a small country of two million people.
People just want a peaceful life.
They don't want to be messed around with.
But you have neighbors on all sides who are always, you know, sort of looking hungrily over the border at what they can get.
And this has created for the last 25 years a siege mentality where, you know, people tend to err on the side of paranoia, but also apathy that, you know, it's like whatever we do, it won't really matter because the great powers will decide our fate anyway.
And now that you have Russia making comments to defend the government and oppose the U.S., this was actually a very clever move.
In the very beginning, I said only Russia could benefit because everyone else would play their usual roles and not think about what they're doing.
And now Russia is citing, you know, the rights of the country to make its own political future without outside interference.
And given the McCarthyite hysteria you have now in Washington, if someone said, you know, Russians say it's good to breathe oxygen, there would be, you know, a complaint against that.
So Trump is trapped in a way because he has, you know, the Russians are saying to do the sensible thing.
But if he agrees with that, then someone's going to blame him from the other side or even in his own party.
So they're in a very difficult situation.
And right now there's no clarity which the Macedonians would, you know, appreciate about what the Trump administration actually plans to do here because you have an ambassador who is incredibly unpopular.
You have holdovers from the Obama administration who are still manning state.
He hasn't got down to that level of draining the swamp yet.
And so you have people saying completely different things and no one really knows what is the U.S. policy or how far they're willing to go to see it through.
If Hillary had won, which they were expecting, then the country might not exist by now.
They're kind of holding out hope for him, huh?
Wow.
So now what exactly is the sticking point with the U.S. here?
You said that they feel like they want to be independent, and I realize that could be enough, but there must be something else, right?
Well, there's something like seven congressmen and Senator Mike Lee from Utah who are now asking for an official investigation of U.S. embassy, U.S. aid, and Soros money for sponsoring all these NGOs.
Well, it's not just his business interests, though, right?
Do they want to bring Macedonia into NATO or what?
Yeah, they have this fantasy that the name issue with Greece, because Greece has a province called Macedonia and this is the historic issue that they don't want to compromise, and unless Macedonia changes its name, Greece will not stop its veto to join NATO and the EU, so they realize that Greece will not compromise because they're already in those clubs and they don't have the domestic political support for any kind of compromise.
So instead, the West in the last 10 years has been putting all the pressure on the government of Macedonia to make all the concessions.
And finally, with these social democrats, they found their man who will do that, who will change whatever it takes to make it happen, even if it means dividing the country with Albania or some other crazy thing.
So their goal is they assume that change the name and we will get into NATO as if this was somehow the… Macedonia is already for the last 13 years sending troops in Afghanistan or Iraq, so they're basically in NATO for everything except a name.
So, yeah, that is a big issue, but they might be miscalculating because it's not just the name for the Greeks, it's also the language, the identity, and Bulgarians don't believe there's a Macedonian ethnicity, that they're really Bulgarians in denial.
The Serbian Orthodox Church says the Macedonian Orthodox Church doesn't exist.
So you open a whole can of worms if you start negotiating about your identity.
That's perfect for someone like George Soros who doesn't want any kind of national identities anywhere as a complete globalist, but for the people who live here, it's quite a big deal.
Yeah, all right.
Well, now, so to get right back to the worst case scenario, which I guess means the most likely one since we're dealing with the American Empire here, at least in part, if I understand what you're saying, Ray, if the Americans get their way and the left-wing party comes in and they have this coalition with these Albanian nationalists, that really does jeopardize the shape of the line of the western border of this country here, and that could really change.
And if it does, that you're saying the Macedonian right, they could go to war over that.
I don't know if the party would go to war, but there would be a lot of angry citizens.
So if those parliamentarians go into the parliament, they might not come out.
I mean, I don't want to sound too slippery slope about it or whatever, but I'm just thinking if we're talking about Bill Clinton, George Bush or Barack Obama, you know, this is what would happen, right?
It would be the worst possible thing that could happen.
So I don't know why to assume any better about our current dear leader.
Well, I mean, I don't know if Trump has good intentions or not, but I think he has a lot more important things to worry about than here.
The only difference being what President Ivanov has made a point out of is, look, if you go and accept that a foreign leader in another country can create the platform, conditions for you to form a government, then it can happen elsewhere.
So let's say the president of Mexico, it would say it was a dead heat between Hillary and Trump.
Let's say the president of Mexico gathered, you know, Latino, La Raza, other groups and said, unless you implement our demands from Mexico for these Latin speaking people, then we're not going to let you form a government or we're going to give it to the winner.
People would go nuts.
So in the context of Europe, if they make this a precedent, then say Russia has minority populations in the Baltic countries which are now teeming with NATO troops.
What if Russia decided that we want more rights for Russian speakers there or Turkey, which is, you know, completely, completely going into uncharted waters?
They have minorities in Bulgaria and Greece.
So what would be to stop them from using that as an example?
So what the Macedonians are saying is like, OK, if you want to mess with us, fine, but you could have a much, much bigger problem elsewhere in Europe down the road, which could eventually lead to a serious conflict that could affect you much more than us.
So this is why the president has asked all the world leaders to repudiate this T-Rana platform, as they call it.
So far, only Russia has done so.
And he said we'll give the mandate to the socialists, even though they lost, if only they will stop accepting a platform from outside.
And even the conservatives said, you know, you can have the mandate, we'll support you, even if we're not in the government, just get rid of a foreign backed platform and they won't do it.
So it looks like there's a zero sum game now.
Everyone is betting that they can upend the other.
And it's going to be, you know, pretty exciting times in the next few weeks.
Yeah.
Well, good luck with that.
Pretty exciting indeed.
All right.
Well, now I can't wait to reread this article now that I have a better thumbnail sketch.
I really should have listened to that other interview of you first is what I should have done.
I just didn't have the time, Chris.
But I sure appreciate it.
It's probably better this way that you really kind of walk me through it step by step so easily like that, because I probably if I thought I understood it, I would have gone on and on asking my ill formed questions much worse than I actually did.
So we're all better off this way.
Excellent.
Yes.
Very good stuff, as always.
And good to talk to you again.
Great to talk to you, Scott.
Oh, yeah.
All right, you guys.
That is Chris DeLiso.
Used to write for Antiwar.com way back when.
We miss him.
You can read this article.
Apparently you get one free article a month at the American interest.
It's the American interest dot com with hyphens for some reason.
Macedonia's crisis isn't going away by Chris DeLiso.
And that's the Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, you guys.
Scott Horton dot org for the archives.
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