18 years later, the spectre of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia still haunts Europe

The 24th of March, 2017, is the 18th anniversary of the worst war crime in Europe since the death of Hitler. NATO, not sufficiently happy that much of Yugoslavia had all ready been broken apart, decided to drill the final nail in the coffin by bombing Serbia.

Hospitals, orphanages, churches, television channels, countless other civilian targets including homes as well as the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade were destroyed. Thousands of Serbian families were made refugees and some still do not have proper homes, even in 2017.

A full-scale world war could have started when American General Wesley Clark ordered NATO troops to fire on Russian peacekeepers at Pristina Airport. It was only because British commander, General Mike Jackson, ordered troops not to fire, that a major incident was averted.

The destruction of a nation which did not threaten any NATO member was not only a violation of the NATO charter and a war crime committed without sanctioning from the UN, it was a crime that has resulted in an on-going geo-political blunder.

The Balkans is yet again on the verge of war on many fronts. After half giving up on trying to neuter Yugoslavia and particularly Serbia politically, NATO and the EU have once again thrown their weight behind Albanian terrorists and radicals in an attempt to ethnically cleanse the Serbian province of Kosovo of her remaining ethnic Serbs. They also have ambitions in other regions of Southern Serbia as well as Montenegro.

Equally worrying is how the western powers are taking advantage of the political crisis in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (or as I propose to name it, the Slavic Republic of Macedonia as distinct from Hellenic Macedonia) to try and use radicalised Albanians to rip the small state into shreds.

NATO accomplished worse than nothing in their 1999 war crime. They didn’t even make a bad situation worse, they made a workable situation disastrous.

Yugoslavia was the most successful  multi-cultural state in modern European history, but by allowing ancient historical and indeed mythologised hatreds to be fed, countries like Germany, Netherlands, Britain and America sowed the seeds of discord. This discord could have been solved with a political rather than military solution, but NATO had designs for the region that would not settle for something sensible.

Albania has gone from being the most isolated state in the world under the rule of Enver Hoxha, to becoming the regional exporter of terrorism, radicalism, instability and even political Islam, in a region where not long ago, each of these things was an unknown quantity.

What’s more is that the impoverished and hopelessly corrupt Albanian state wouldn’t be able to radicalise her ethnic brethren in the former parts of Yugoslavia if NATO and the EU didn’t give them the carte blanche they are currently receiving.

The NATO drafted Tirana Platform, is nothing short of  a preemptive declaration of war against much of the Slavic Balkans, beginning with Macedonia, where it has faced fierce resistance from ordinary citizens. It is disguised as an Albanian document, but its origins are in America and Britain.

It is a kind of Balfour Declaration for the Balkans, wherein Albanians are slowly being granted other people’s land by a distant neo-imperial foreign power, all in a region that between 1945 and the 1990s had been generally peaceful and in the case of Yugoslavia, also prosperous. If the proposals in the Tirana Platform are fully implemented, it would almost inevitably mean war.

Not content with the legacy of the war crime of 1999, the west is keen on making the Balkans a kind of Israel-Palestine conflict in Europe. No one with any sense of decency could want this. Sadly, decency is something lacking when it comes to the enemies of many former Yugoslav states.