At the same time the changing international climate that favors the creation of globally-linked webs of business influence is another motive for Russian companies to emerge as international champions in light of the country’s entrance into the World Trade Organization. Lastly, the upheaval in Syria, North Africa and the delicate situation in Turkey & Iran, as well as, the real danger of an eventual disintegration of the European Union, likely prompts Moscow to back-up Russian companies interest into the Southeastern part of Europe, as a preferential entry point to the EU and in the wider region.

Banks
The Russian VTB bank has assets of over 200 billion Euros and is heavily involved in providing large loans to mostly Russian industrial institutions. In Southeastern Europe it maintains presence only in Cyprus through its subsidiary Russian Commercial Bank.
Presently VTB is in talks to inject 1 billion Euros into the Greek-Cypriot Marfin Popular bank, which maintains presence also to Romania, Serbia and Ukraine. Due to the “haircut” of Greek bonds Marfin is in dire straits for a significant share increase and if the deal goes on VTB will become the managing partner with some 45% of shares.
Marfin caters the needs of locally based companies and has a good reputation in handling private banking demands, as well as, providing considerable credit lines to commercial clients.

Moreover, the already established in Athens Russian bank SISC CB KEDR, has announced in March 2012 it immediate plan of expanding both its branch network and its credit line capabilities for the ailing Greek market. In parallel it is widely rumored that it will ultimately use Greece as a spring board to expand in neighboring Bulgaria, at a period where the regional banking system due to the Greek debt crisis is heavily exposed and amazingly depreciated. It is of interest to note that the largest Balkan bank, the National Bank of Greece, whose real estate assets with today’s commercial values are in excess of 15 billion Euros and its net position in its Turkish subsidiary Finansbank, is more than 5 billion Euros; is worth merely 1.6 billion Euros in the stock market. Similar analogies are to be found for the other banks and financial institutions.

 
Russian tycoons banking plans

Rybolovlev is a Russian tycoon, 93rd in global Forbes list with 8 billion USD wealth, who in September 2010, acquired through an offshore fund registered in the British Virgin Island (Odella Resources), almost 10% of Bank of Cyprus making him the largest individual shareholder of the largest bank on the island, which also has strong presence in Greece, UK, Guernsey, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. Since January 2012 he has paid several low-profile visits to Athens and met with several important shareholders of local banks in order to discuss opportunities for him to buy strategic share percentages in all major Greek private banks that suffered great losses due to the “haircut” of the Greek bonds and are desperately seeking for funds. Some of those such as Alpha Bank, Eurobank and Piraeus Bank, maintain very important presence in all Balkan countries and it is rumored that Rybolovlev is also negotiating the investment in these subsidiaries through a consortium with him along with other Russian banks. Furthermore another Russian business tycoon, Alexander Nesis has secured the buy of 5% of Piraeus bank in 2011 through his ICT fund and he is also frequently negotiating the increase of his share in the bank aiming to create a banking network in the Balkans.

Energy investments and privatization

 
The Russian Gazprom recently established a rapprochement with Bulgaria that calls for the beginning of the construction of the South Stream project within the next year. Moreover both sides are entrapped for years in talks regarding the 5 billion USD investments for Belene thermonuclear power station that the Russian Company Atomstroyexport is vying for contract. In Serbia, where the largest energy company NIS was bought a few years ago, and in Croatia, along with Slovenia the North axis of the South Stream has been agreed to pass through along with natural gas depots along the route. In Greece, Gazprom expressed its formal interest of participating in the privatization of the DEPA & DESFA natural gas companies that are to be sold by the end of 2012, with a price tag estimated at 2 billion Euros. In another privatization development, that of ELPE Greek oil group with operations in most of the Balkans, Gazprom Neft expressed its interest of buying 35% of the disposable shares. In parallel Rosneft increased its deliveries of Ural type oil to the Greek market, after the effective Iranian hydrocarbon embargo and it is estimated that 30-40% of the consumption of oil in Greece will be covered from that source in the coming months. In Bulgaria, and Serbia Lukoil and Gazprom Neft respectively control the vast majority of oil imports already. In Romania as well, Russian interest is also significant. According to a late 2011 report by the Fox Business News “Russian oil giant Lukoil Holdings will invest around 400 million USD in hydrocarbon prospecting at Romania’s Black Sea platform, with another 1.5 billion USD available for further works if discoveries are made”. Lastly in Greece 65% of its natural gas imports are being met by Gazprom, in Bulgaria almost 95%, in Romania 30%, in Slovenia 55%, in Croatia 40%, in Serbia 95%, in FYROM 100% and in Turkey 65%. The projections by the European Commission’s energy directory, the IEA and most energy analysts is that the use of gas globally and in Southeastern Europe will further increase in the coming decades, and in that respect Gazprom is betting on a multibillion Dollars investment such as South Stream in order to achieve a hefty return on capital for the next two generations or so.

Real estate & Tourism

Over the past 15 years there has been a steady increase in the interest of Russian holiday makers to buy a second property in coastal areas of Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro. Nowadays interest of organized and systematic nature is being revealed that calls for investment en mass in that sector. In early 2011 the Greek -Russian chamber of commerce and the Russian real estate federation signed a protocol of cooperation, whereby the former will assist the later in pursuing business opportunities in Greece.

Several companies, such as “Leventi S.A”, “Ependytiki Kritis S.A”, “Chantzis & SIA O.E”, Nea Ktimatiki S.A”, “Domus Ars S.A” that are developing luxurious summer resorts and housing complexes in Central Greece, Crete, Khalkidhiki, Island of Tzia, Pilio and Loutraki, respectively are actively engaged with major Russian companies to make joint investments.

Since late 2011, around 20 representatives of Russian real estate corporations have visited Greece to explore opportunities, and some have secured deals, such as the buy of a Corfu based hotel, several units in Khalkidhiki and dozens of highly prized villas in the island of Crete. Since late 90′s the Russian tourist market has increased considerably and Greece, along with Turkey, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Montenegro are becoming hot spots for incoming Russian tourism. Moreover the Municipality of Belgrade is actively encouraging the marketing of the city as destinations targeting the high-disposable income Russian tourists.

Tourism from Russia, as regarding to Greece has as a positive secondary effect the large number of fur coat exports from the city of Kastoria to the CIS market, worth more than 300 million Euros a year and most probably the only industrial sector in Greece that hasn’t felt the crisis due to that factor.

In 2011 600,000 Russian tourists ventured to Greece and for 2012 850,000 are estimated to arrive. In Bulgaria 470,000 came from Russia with 550,000 expected for this year. In Montenegro entire villages and more than 40% of property in Montenegro are owned by Russians, according to an investigation by Novaya Gazeta, with Russians constituting the largest number of incoming tourists except neighboring Serbians. For 2012 it is estimated that 300,000 Russians will spent their vacations in that country of the Adriatic coast. In Turkey there is a massive inflow of Russian tourists, with the local tourist board estimating that more than 4 million will visit the country in 2012. The Southeastern European tourism authorities seem to be eagerly awaiting the increasing arrivals of Russian citizens, since they spent on their average trip more than1,500 USD per head , which is almost double than that of an average UK, Dutch or German tourist.

Lastly, Greek, Cypriot, Serbian and Croatian business owners are in talks with Russian counterparts in order to proceed in large-scale investments in housing, leisure and entertainment complexes in various locations. The negotiations take place mostly in Cyprus, where Russian tycoons, banks and funds have deposited from 20 up to 100 billion USD according to different economic reports at times.

 
In general the global economic crisis in 2008 that spiraled into an EU crisis via the Greek debt issue in 2010 seems to be motivating Russian interest into tapping depreciated resources in the Southeastern part of Europe. Considerable interest is said to be shown also by Chinese companies for Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria and Indian corporations also examining gaining a further foothold in the region, with interest in food processing industries and transportation. Future will tell if the Balkans becomes the entry point for the massive introduction of BRIC funds into the EU, a move which is contemplated by the robust growth of industrial exports by the leader of the EU, Germany, to the BRIC markets and especially those of Russia and China.

“The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is dependent upon the problem of a lawful external relation among states and cannot be solved without a solution of the latter problem.” -  Immanuel Kant(1)
 
To paraphrase I. Kant from the above quote, it is problematic for Kosovo to establish “a perfect civic constitution” (understood here in its more expansive meaning as an internal order of the state, not just as the fundamental legal document of a state) because it is dependent on a lawful external relationship of that “state” with other sovereign states.(3)
 
Kosovo, as constituted today, experiences sovereign ambiguity regardless of the way sovereignty is understood, but especially if it is understood as a concept that is the sine qua non(4) of states.(5)
 
From any good legal dictionary we learn about the essential attributes sovereignty must possess in today’s world. For example, Black’s Law Dictionary, one of the highest authorities in this field, defines sovereignty as “Supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power; supreme political authority; the supreme will; the self-sufficient source of political power from which all specific political powers are derived; the power of regulating […] internal affairs without foreign dictation.”(6)
 
As it has already been mentioned, Kosovo’s international legal sovereignty is questionable not only because of the lack of mutual recognition by an overwhelming majority of sovereign states in the modern world but as well from the point of view based on the traditional Westphalian understanding of sovereignty, which underlines Kosovo’s inability to exclude external actors from authority structures within its own territory. Kosovo’s own Constitution nominates external factors, both civilian and military, as “Final Authority” within Kosovo.(7)
 
When Kosovo’s domestic sovereignty is taken into consideration, referring to the formal organization of political authority within the state and the ability of those who claim officially to rule Kosovo as a sovereign state to exercise control within it, even the UN (UNMIK), which protectorate Kosovo still officially is, has expressed concerns about its own and Kosovo’s “government’s” inability to exercise authority in all of Kosovo’s claimed territory, especially in the north of the land, controlled by the Serbian population, which considers it part of the Republic of Serbia.(8)
 
Even the fourth kind of sovereignty(9), the interdependence sovereignty, described as “the way in which public authorities regulate the flow of people, information, capital and ideas across the borders of the state,”(10) is questionable and exposed as, at least, limited, if not even non-existent, by the regulations of the UN Security Council Resolution 1244(11), which refers to the Rambouillet Accords(12) to provide immunity for NATO and grant it “free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access.”(13)
 
Sovereignty as a theoretical concept
 
In political theory there are many meanings of sovereignty – political, legal, internal, external, de iure, de facto, influential, limited, relative…(14)
 
Yet, regardless of its theoretical meaning, to possess true sovereignty a state must have a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into diplomatic relations with other sovereign states.(15)
 
Yet, since 1576, when the term was introduced for the first time,(16) two theories of sovereignty have been dominant – the Classical theory and the Constitutional theory, differing on their approach as to how the concept of sovereignty relates to the authority of the state, although both theories understand unlimited power to be sovereignty’s main attribute.(17) The classical theorists believe that state authority is sovereign and thus unlimited, while the constitutionalists believe that state authority is sovereign and final but limited, being vested in the state’s constitution created by its people.(18)
 
The Classical theory describes three main elements of sovereignty: unlimited power, sovereign power as the source of all the rights in the state, and state authority as the bearer of sovereignty (not the people or the constitution).(19)
 
The Constitutional theory states that sovereignty’s source is a legal document, a Constitution, from which state authority draws its power, and that sovereignty is not vested in any will.(20) & (21)
 
A Historical Overview
 
Since the earliest times it has been recognized that there must exist order and sovereign control of a community of people if a civilized human society is to come into being and its functions were to be performed properly. The earliest authors in the Western world have demonstrated the differences between a world organized and ordered according to principles of civilization and the world not developed further from its most primitive and chaotic form. In order to demonstrate this, Homer presents the hearers/readers of his epics The Iliad and The Odyssey with the description of the land of Cyclops.(22) It is juxtaposed in the epics to the ideal of the orderly and civilized world expressed by the “Great Laerte’s son, Ulysses, sage in council”, who after receiving wisdom from the goddess Minerva, instructs the Greeks on the form of government and the benefits of depositing all sovereignty into the hands of one sovereign.(23)
 
Yet, even that early in human history, a voice arises that expresses the opinion that sovereignty doesn’t spring solely from a divine source but from the people too, and that without their consent and cooperation all claims to sovereignty would be empty and meaningless.(24) The greatest ancient philosophers and political thinkers discussed that what today we call sovereignty, although they didn’t assign to it all the attributes that the term has in its modern meaning.
 
Plato proposes the perfect political system in which sovereignty (political power) ought to be exercised only by the individuals who “know the good,”(25) the so-called “philosophers-kings.”(26)
 
Aristotle uses the Greek term “to kurion” in place of the modern term “sovereignty” and he doesn’t give it the meaning of the supreme constituted authority but the meaning of supremacy in fact only.(27)
 
Similarly to Aristotle, Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War, records the prevailing understanding of sovereignty of that age – the eternal law through which might and power give the right to rule and command to their holder(s).(28) This, so-called “Melian Episode”, as described by Thucydides, is the first recorded statement of the principle that “Might Is Right”(29), especially when the statement by the Athenians that the “divine is always on the side of the big battalions”(30) is taken into consideration as the justification of that principle.
 
In the same spirit is one of the shortest definitions of sovereignty, expressed by Carl Schmitt, which very clearly describes its true meaning, leaving no ambiguity about who the true sovereign is–”Sovereign is he who decides on the exceptional case.”(31)
 
With the advance of Christianity, and with its final supremacy, its proponents and ideologist tried, at least theoretically, to amplify the description and definition of sovereignty by adding the element of legitimacy to it, making a distinction between a truly legitimate sovereign and the one that is sovereign because of his hold on power in the realm. The legitimate sovereign is the one who is the “divinae maiestatis imago”(32), while the other is a tyrant, since the legitimate one “strives to achieve obedience to the laws and to preserve the liberty of the people”(33), and the other one “promotes servitude” and is the image of “devilish deprivation.”(34)
 
The Roman Church authorities and its philosophical and political theorists worked very hard over the centuries to establish the belief in the Church’s absolute authority and sovereignty(35) over the whole of the world but such notions clashed with both the understanding of sovereignty within the medieval system of vassalage(36) and with the realpolitik necessity of monarchs to establish their own absolute sovereignty within their realms.(37)
 
In the old Roman Empire and in its legal system, the power of the Emperor was understood as bestowed upon him by the citizens of Rome. When the empire converted to Christianity, the power of the head of state was regarded as coming from God.
 
As the clash between Empire and Church intensified, the Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire recognized the advantages of the old Roman law, with Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa especially using these advantages to increase and strengthen royal absolutism. Its enormous growth and spread into all aspects of life led to the emergence of opposition to this notion and to the appearance of new views and understandings of the concept of sovereignty.(38)
 
By the close of the so-called middle ages and the beginning of modernity, a variety of philosophers and political theorists produced new ideas about sovereignty, distancing it from the sphere of the Church (regardless of denomination) and placing it, at first in the person of a monarch, and later in the people inhabiting the state, with the element of state always present and essential for the existence and exercise of sovereignty.(39)
 
Machiavelli was among the first modern thinkers who, in order to somehow curb the power of a multitude of strongmen, experiencing the chaos of Italy of his age, proposed bestowing the supreme and absolute authority in the hands of a monarch.(40)
 
A French philosopher, Jean Bodin, was very strong in his support and propagation of royal absolutism and sovereign prerogatives of the monarch, allowing him even the right to be “exempt from obedience to the laws of his predecessors… [and even those] issued by himself… Sovereignty rests in being above, beyond or excepted from the law.”(41)
 
Many of the philosophers, abandoning completely the idea of a Church’s dominance and sovereignty in the realm of politics, followed in his steps and supported the idea of royal absolutism and total sovereignty of the monarch, including B. de Spinoza(42) and Thomas Hobbes,(43) but Johannes Althusius was the first to present a theory of federal republicanism, placing sovereignty in the hands of the people.(44)
 
One of the most important religious leaders of the age, Martin Luther, a German Protestant reformer, developed a clear theological argument(45) in support of appropriating the temporal power of the pope and the Roman Church by the princes, prescribing for them the substance of sovereignty without directly discussing it in political terms.(46)
 
This clash of religious and political ideas and wills was slowly coming to a diplomatic conclusion, first by the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, where sovereign independence was accented by the recognition of the principle “The religion of the realm will be that of its prince” (Cuius regio, eius religio), and finally by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia(47), where the earlier claims and ideals of universal authority of the Church and of the Empire were overthrown and sovereign states were fully recognized in European diplomatic relations, although both the Church(48) and the Empire(49) attempted to restore the old system, cherishing the ideals of the previous age.
 
As Daniel Philpott stated: ” The sovereign states system arrived most commandingly through revolutions.   Through two prominent ones in particular. The first is what political scientist John Gerard Ruggie describes as “the most important contextual change in international politics in this millennium”–the shift in Europe from the medieval world to the modern international system, which took full shape at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.’ The system then spread, rapidly expanding across the globe when the colonial empires collapsed after World War II. Colonial independence is the second revolution.”(50)
 
Although it took a few more international treaties (of course, after quite a few destructive and bloody wars) for the system of sovereign statehood to be stabilized, it did, in the end, become the worldwide basis for international diplomatic relations(51) until it was violently disrupted in 1999 by the Kosovo war in the Balkans and the 2008 recognition by many of the great powers of the unilateral declaration of independence by a Muslim Albanian minority within the sovereign state of Serbia.
 
In spite of many modern voices declaring sovereignty “not a fixed concept”(52), an “anachronistic concept”(53), or, mockingly, “precious”(54), the very recognition of Kosovo’s independence and sovereignty by the leading Western states has proven, yet again, the statement by Elihu Burritt that “sovereignty is the immediate jewel of a nation… [It is not only] the great vital right of a state, it is its glory and independence, the most precious thing it has.”(55)
 
Kosovo’s lack of legitimacy and sovereignty
 
Max Weber had explained a long while ago that, in order to be legitimate, in a political system, “a criterion of every true relation of imperative control, however, is a certain minimum of voluntary submission.”(56) If the three pure types of legitimate domination are taken into consideration in the case of Kosovo, it is possible to claim that the so-called “international community” expects the “rational” type to be its basis for legitimate domination in Kosovo, since “it” has given to “itself” the right to occupy the sovereign territory of an internationally recognized state of Serbia, and to set up a new order within its sovereign territory, according to “its” vision of a, at least better, if not perfect and ideal state. The Moslem Albanian community in Kosovo bases its legitimacy of domination on the “traditional” character of its status in the Balkans during the half a millennium of Moslem Turkish rule there, which guaranteed the followers of Islam legal, political, economic and social domination over the Christian “infidel” population sharing the land with them. The current political leaders of the Albanians in Kosovo, demand the third type of dominance to be recognized as theirs – the “charismatic” legitimacy of their rule, emanating from their “heroic” fight for “independence and freedom” of the Albanian people in the region.
 
Another very important detail is the sense of the “bureaucratic administrative framework”(57) that the “international community’s” representatives possess in Kosovo, performing their duties and balancing their roles as they implement the policies set by the UN, the US, and the EU, and which are very often contradictory and adversary to each other. That framework not only gives them the strongest sense of power, of belonging to something special and exclusive, and of being above and beyond the rest of the actors in Kosovo(58) (especially when backed up by the NATO troops!), but it also gives them that special sense of being “the one who decides on the exceptional case.”(59)
 
Looking at Kosovo from the prospective of the question of sovereignty, in today’s world, Kosovo could be seen as a case sui generis only when it comes to the multitude of sovereignties that overlap in its territory. The United Nations Resolution 1244 (which is still in effect and is recognized even by the powers(60) that officially recognized Albanian minority’s self-declaration of independence) recognizes the sovereignty of the Republic of Serbia over the territory of Kosovo(61). So does, of course, the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia(62). At the same time, the Serbia’s Albanian Moslem minority in the Province of Kosovo and Metohija declared the province’s independence from Serbia and claims sovereignty over its territory, calling it the “Republic of Kosovo*”(63). It has been officially recognized by the US and many of the individual great powers that are members of the European Union, although the European Union itself has not recognized the self-declared independent “Republic of Kosovo*” and works closely with the UN on administering the Serbian province as its protectorate(64). Simultaneously to all this, the Constitution of the self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo, by its articles 147 and 153, clearly renounces its sovereignty and states that the final authority in Kosovo are the UN civilian administrator and NATO military force commander, making those who command NATO the ultimate sovereigns over Kosovo(65).
 
Conclusions

Sovereignty is a “testimony, not of what happened, but of what the people who debated and wrote about it wanted their contemporaries to believe, or wanted to believe themselves.”(66)

It is truly a nightmarish task to attempt to come to any rational and logical, legally and scientifically sound conclusion regarding current Kosovo sovereignty status. It is equally daunting to make any political claim, or a claim using arguments of justice, democracy or right of self-determination.
 
What is clear in the case of Kosovo is that claims to sovereignty there are aplenty – they overlap and contend with each other, negating and denying one another, creating a web of deception and a fertile ground for conflict and disputation.
 
Yet, the most obvious candidate to receive the crudest and basest title of Kosovo’s true sovereign is none of the civilian claimants, domestic or international, but the military alliance known as NATO, that is, the individuals who command it, using the military force on the ground as a clear symbol of its power to decide all the questions relevant to their interests, leaving all other matters unresolved and as its possible maneuvering ground.

Viseslav Simic is a Professor of Strategy and Political Analysis at El Tec de Monterrey Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico

Footnotes:

1 Immanuel Kant, “On History” – Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784) – Seventh Thesis; Translation by Lewis White Beck; The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963.
2 The agreement for the regional cooperation and representation of Kosovo, of 24 February 2012, signed in the technical dialogue between the “Republic of Kosovo” and Serbia conducted in Brussels with the facilitation of European Union, states that the country will be represented at the regional forums as “Kosovo*” – UNMIK–Division of Public Information; Media Monitoring Headlines; March 16, 2012 – www.unmikonline.org
3 By April 8, 2012, recognized by 88 out of 193 United Nations members [plus The Republic of China (Taiwan), who is not a UN member; Kosovo hasn't reciprocated the recognition since it is hoping for recognition by the People's Republic of China]; Source: Official Kosovo Government website: http://www.president-ksgov.net/?page=2,54
4 “something absolutely indispensable or essential” – http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sine%20qua%20non
5 Sovereignty – God, State, and Self; The Gifford Lectures; Jean Bethke Elshtain; Basic Books; 2008; page 2.
6 Black’s Law Dictionary; 8th edition; 2004; page 1430.
7 Articles 147 and 153 of Kosovo’s Constitution.
8 http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/europe/balkans/kosovo/211-north-kosovo-dual-sovereignty-in-practice.aspx & http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2010/04/mil-100407-voa02.htm
9 The four kinds of sovereignty as described by by Stephen D. Krasner in his book Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy; Princeton University Press – 1999 – p. 4-5.
10 Ibidem
11 UN Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999); Article 11, sections a and i.
12 http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/ramb.htm
13 Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government In Kosovo; Rambouillet, France; February 23, 1999; Appendix B, Sections 6 (a, b, c), 7, 8, 16 and 17.
14 Stankiewicz, W. J., (1976), “Sovereignty as Political Theory,” in: Political Studies, Volume XXIV, No. 2, Oxford: Claredon Press, p. 141, and Heywood, Andrew, (1994), Political Ideas and Concepts: An Introduction; London: Macmillian Press, p. 49-56.
15 The Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (signed 26 December 1933); M. O. Hudson (ed.); International Legislation; Carnegie Endowment; Washington; 1931-50; Vol 6, p. 620.
16 Jean Bodin; Six Books on Commonweale.
17 Heywood, Andrew, (1994), Political Ideas and Concepts: An Introduction; London: Macmillian Press, p. 49-53.
18 ibidem.
19 ibidem.
20 ibidem.
21 Also pointed out by Hannah Ardent in her book On Revolution (London, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 141-178). Also, in her work, Between Past and Future (Page 97. New York, 1961) she points out the problem that modern Liberalism derives from this anti-dogmatic standpoint Since it opposes the superiority of any divinely founded authority over any earthly legitimate power, it has to admit that if there is no authority prior to the power of the earthly authority of the existing political and legal order, there is no possibility that liberal monism can prevent the risk of arbitrary and unrestrained might.
22 “The land of Cyclops first, a savage kind, Nor tamed by manners, nor by laws confined: Untaught to plant, to turn the glebe, and sow, They all their products to free nature owe: The soil, untill’d, a ready harvest yields, With wheat and barley wave the golden fields; Spontaneous wines from weighty clusters pour, And Jove descends in each prolific shower, By these no statues and no rights are known, No council held, no monarch fills the throne; But high on hills, or airy cliffs, they dwell, Or deep in caves whose entrance leads to hell. Each rules his race, his neighbour not his care, Heedless of others, to his own severe.” – The Odyssey; Homer; Translation by Alexander Pope; Digital book location – 347-50.
23 “Good friend, keep still, and hear what others say, Thy betters far: for thou art good for nought, Of small account in council or in fight. All are not sovereigns here: ill fares the state Where many masters rule; let one be Lord, One King supreme; to whom wise Saturn’s son In token of his sov’reign power hath giv’n The sceptre’s sway and ministry of law.’ Such were his words, as through the ranks he pass’d…” – The Iliad; Homer; Translation by Alexander Pope; Digital book location 352-53.
24 “Thersites, with unmeasur’d words, Of which he had good store, to rate the chiefs, Not over-seemly, but wherewith he thought To move the crowd to laughter, brawl’d aloud. The ugliest man was he who came to Troy” […] With scurril words, he thus address’d the King: “What more, thou son of Atreus, would’st thou have? Thy tents are full of brass; and in those tents Many fair women, whom, from all the spoil, We Greeks, whene’er some wealthy town we take, Choose first of all, and set apart for thee. Or dost thou thirst for gold, which here perchance Some Trojan brings, the ransom of his son Captur’d by me, or by some other Greek? Or some new girl, to gratify thy lust, Kept for thyself apart? a leader, thou Shouldst not to evil lead the sons of Greece. Ye slaves! ye coward souls! Women of Greece! I will not call you men! why go we not Home with our ships, and leave this mighty chief To gloat upon his treasures, and find out Whether in truth he need our aid, or no;” – The Iliad; Homer; Translation by Alexander Pope; Digital book location 355-60.
25 Ryan K. Balot and Zena Hitz ; A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought – Chapter 24 – Plato on the Sovereignty of Law – Published Online April 24, 2009.
26 Plato; Republic; p. 506.
27 Hermann Rehm, History of the State Law (Geschichte der Staat Rechtswissenschaft);  pp. 95-96.
28 “… of the gods we hold the belief, and of men we know, that by a necessity of their nature wherever they have power they always rule […] we neither enacted this law nor when it was enacted were the first to use it, but found it in existence and expect to leave it in existence for all time, so we make use of it, well aware that both you and others, if clothed with the same power as we are, would do the same thing.” – Thucydides; History of the Peloponnesian War; Book V, page 105.
29 Werner Jaeger; Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Book I, trans. by Gilbert Highet, pp. 292-303.
30 Thucydides; History of the Peloponnesian War; Book V, page 105.
31 Carl Schmitt – Political Theology – four chapters on the concept of sovereignty; Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985; page 5.
32 John of Salisbury; Polycraticus (Ioannes Saresberiensis; Policraticus); Libri I, IV and VIII.
33 Ibidem.
34 Ibid.
35 “Romana ecclesia… cuius auctoritate maius non est… Sola enim Romana ecclesia sua auctoritate valet de omnibus iudicare; de ea vero nulli iudicare permittitur” – Gratian; Decretum magistri Gratiani; Liber 9, C. 9-10 and Q. 3.
36 “In France of the thirteenth century the king had the sovereignty over his kingdom, but so had every individual baron over his barony.” (“Car chascuns barons est souverains en sa baronie”) – Beaumanoir; Customs of Beauvaisis; Book II; A.D. 1043; p. 23.
37 “The French monarch doesn’t acknowledge any superior in temporal affairs” – Pope Innnocent III (1198-1216); Decretal: Venerabilem.
38 K. Pennington; The Prince and the Law, 1200-1600; University of California Press; Berkeley, 1993; p. 12.
39 Only in the relatively recent times has the lack of statehood been accepted as a non-essential element for the recognition of sovereignty, and only in international relations. An example is the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, since 1834 headquartered in Rome. Although it is a Roman Catholic religious order, it is recognized as possessing sovereignty by 104 states that have official diplomatic relations with it, accepting the Order’s Head as a sovereign head of state with the title of Prince and Grand Master. The Order has not recognized Kosovo as a sovereign state as of November 15, 2010 – http://www.orderofmalta.org/the-order-and-its-institutions/335/government/?lang=en
40 “The only way to establish any kind of order… is to establish some superior power which, with a royal hand, and with full and absolute powers, may put a curb upon the excessive ambition and corruption of the powerful.” – N. Machiavelli (1469-1527); 1532; The Prince and the Discourses, New York, NY; The Modern Library, 1950; p.28.
41 Jean Bodin; On Sovereignty; Cambridge University Press; 2004; pp. 2, 12, 39.
42 “Only the bearer of all powers, not of the highest power [summa potestas], is in fact true sovereign.” – B. Spinoza; Tractatus Theologico-politicus; XVI, 2; XVI, 20.
43 For Hobbes, life, in the absence of order and absolutist rule, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” – Hobbes, Thomas; Leviathan; Cambridge University Press; 1999.
44 Johannes Althusius; Politica; Frederick Smith Carney (Editor); Liberty Fund; 1997.
45 Martin Luther; (1523); Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed; Westminster Press; 1967.
46 “By the destruction of the independence of the Church and its hold on an extra-territorial public opinion, the last obstacle to unity within the State was removed,” – J. N. Figgis; (1907); From Gerson to Grotius 1414–1625; 2nd edition; reprinted; Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press, 1916; pp. 72, 91.
47 “Westphalia [the beginning of a codification of the greatest secular right on earth] remains the most significant revolution in sovereignty to date.” – Daniel Philpott; Revolutions in Sovereignty; 2002; p. 32.
48 Pope Innocent X (r. 1644–1655) declared it “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, and devoid of meaning for all time”
49 Until the end of the Austrian Empire, the Habsburgs, who provided most of the Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, continued to work on the fulfillment of the imperial goal set by one of their ancestors: ” [The Emperor Frederic (father of Emperor Maximilian), in the middle of 15th century,] seems to have anticipated the future greatness of Austria; for he had imprinted upon all his books, engraved upon his plate and carved into the walls of his palace a mysterious species of anagram composed of the five vowels, A, E, I, O, U. The significance of this great secret no one could obtain from him. It of course excited great curiosity, as it everywhere met the eye of the public. After his death the riddle was solved by finding among his papers the following interpretation– Austri Est Imperare Orbi Universo = Austria Is To Govern The World Universal.” – John Stevens Cabot Abbott; The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power; Loc. 976-80. 
50 Daniel Philpott; Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations; Loc. 67-71.
51 “In early modern Europe, it was the Protestant Reformation that brought a century of war, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which in turn brought about a system of sovereign states. In the twentieth century, it was nationalism and racial equality that brought the revolts, protests, and colonial wars that extended the system globally. For both revolutions, international agreement upon sovereign statehood was the terms on which a crisis of pluralism was settled.” – Daniel Philpott; Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations; Loc. 77-80.
52 “Opponents of integration often attack such proposals as threats to national sovereignty. Sovereignty, however, is not a fixed concept.” – Robert Pastor, North America’s Second Decade; Foreign Affairs (January/February 2004)-  http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/59538/robert-a-pastor/north-americas-second-decade
53 “Sovereignty is an anachronistic concept originating in bygone times when society consisted of rulers and subjects, not citizens. It became the cornerstone of international relations with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. During the French Revolution, the king was overthrown and the people assumed sovereignty. But a nationalist concept of sovereignty soon superseded the dynastic version. Today, though not all nation states are democratically accountable to their citizens, the principle of sovereignty stands in the way of outside intervention in the internal affairs of nation states. But true sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments. If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified. By specifying that sovereignty is based on the people, the international community can penetrate nation states’ borders to protect the rights of citizens.” – George Soros; The People’s Sovereignty, How a new twist on an old idea can protect the world’s most vulnerable populations; Foreign Policy magazine; Jan. 1, 2004. & Marino Busdachin; General Secretary of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO); To the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium; December, 2006 – http://www.americansov.org
54 “A system of world order–preferably a system of world government –is mandatory… The proud nations someday will see the light and, for the common good and their own survival, yield up their precious sovereignty…” – Walter Cronkite; A Reporter’s Life – http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/deweese011107.htmhttp://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/deweese011107.htm
55 Elihu Burritt, Thoughts and Notes at Home and Abroad, 1868, p. 266.
56 Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization; III. The Types of Authority and Imperative Co-ordination; I. The Basis of Legitimacy; I. The Definition, Conditions, and Types of Imperative Control; Trans. A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. New York: Free Press, 1997. Pages 324-329.
57 ibid. – page 175.
58 As Max Weber points out, they feel personally free, feeling obligations only to their official charges; as part of a very strict administrative hierarchy; that they have very clearly defined domains; that it is their main job and obligation; that they will be judged by their superiors according to the performance and execution of that charge; and that they must follow the strict internal administrative discipline. – Max Weber; Economía y sociedad – Esbozo de sociología comprensiva; Edición preparada por Johannes Winckelmann; Fondo de Cultura Económica; México; p. 176.
59 “Sovereign is he who decides on the exceptional case.” – Carl Schmitt; Political Theology – four chapters on the concept of sovereignty; Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985; page 5.
60 Even if they “creatively interpret the UN SC Resolution 1244″, knowing fully, as Carl Bildt, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, stated, that “there are no legal grounds fro doing what we are doing, but we must preserve at least a semblance of international law.” – http://www.kosovocompromise.com/cms/item/charts/en.html?id=478
61 Resolution 1244 (1999), adopted by the Security Council at its 4011th meeting,
on 10 June 1999: “… Reaffirming the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region, as set out in the Helsinki Final Act and annex 2…”
62 The Constitution of the Republic of Serbia, The Preamble: “… the Province of Kosovo and Metohija is an integral part of the territory of Serbia…”
63 see footnote # 2
64 Resolution 1244 (1999), adopted by the Security Council at its 4011th meeting,
on 10 June 1999, authorizes the Secretary-General, with the assistance of relevant international organizations, “to establish an international civil presence in Kosovo” and “decides on the deployment in Kosovo, under United Nations auspices, of international civil and security presences, with appropriate equipment and personnel as required…”, “requests the Secretary-General to appoint, in consultation with the Security Council, a Special Representative to control the implementation of the international civil presence, and further requests the Secretary-General to instruct his Special Representative to coordinate closely with the international security presence to ensure that both presences operate towards the same goals and in a mutually supportive manner…”
65 The Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo; Article 147 [Final Authority of the International Civilian Representative]: “Notwithstanding any provision of this Constitution, the International Civilian Representative shall, in accordance with the Comprehensive Proposal for the Kosovo Status Settlement dated 26 March 2007, be the final authority in Kosovo…”, and Article 153 [International Military Presence]: “Notwithstanding any provision of this Constitution […] The Head of the International Military Presence shall, in accordance with the Comprehensive Proposal for the Kosovo Status Settlement dated 26 March 2007, be the final authority in theatre…”
66 Robin G. Collingwood (1889-1943); The Map of Knowledge; Oxford;1924; page 237.
 
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Abbott, John Stevens Cabot; The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power.
Althusius, Johannes; Politica; Frederick Smith Carney (Editor); Liberty Fund; 1997
Ardent, Hannah; On Revolution; London, Harmondsworth, 1973
Balo, Ryan K.t and Hitz, Zena; A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought – Chapter 24 – Plato on the Sovereignty of Law – Published Online April 24, 2009.
Beaumanoir; Customs of Beauvaisis; Book II
Black’s Law Dictionary; 8th edition; 2004
Bodin, Jean; On Sovereignty; Cambridge University Press; 2004
Bodin, Jean; Six Books on Commonweale
Burritt, Elihu; Thoughts and Notes at Home and Abroad; 1868
Carl Schmitt, Carl; Political Theology – four chapters on the concept of sovereignty; Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985
Collingwood, Robin G.; The Map of Knowledge; Oxford;1924
Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo
Elshtain, Jean Bethke; Sovereignty – God, State, and Self; The Gifford Lectures; Basic Books; 2008
Figgis, J. N.; (1907); From Gerson to Grotius 1414–1625; 2nd edition; reprinted; Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press, 1916
Gratian; Decretum magistri Gratiani; Liber 9
Heywood, Andrew, (1994), Political Ideas and Concepts: An Introduction; London: Macmillian Press
Hobbes, Thomas; Leviathan; Cambridge University Press; 1999 Homer; The Iliad; Translation by Alexander Pope; Digital book
Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government In Kosovo; Rambouillet, France; February 23, 1999
Jaeger, Werner; Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Book I, trans. by Gilbert Highet
John of Salisbury; Polycraticus (Ioannes Saresberiensis; Policraticus); Libri I, IV and VIII.
Kant, Immanuel; On History – Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784); Translation by Lewis White Beck; The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963.
Kant, Immanuel; Perpetual Peace; Translated by Lewis White Beck
Krasner, D.; Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy; Princeton University Press – 1999
Luther, Martin; (1523); Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed; Westminster Press; 1967
Machiavelli, N.; (1469-1527); 1532; The Prince and the Discourses, New York, NY; The Modern Library, 1950
Pennington, K.; The Prince and the Law, 1200-1600; University of California Press; Berkeley, 1993
Philpott, Daniel; Revolutions in Sovereignty; 2002
Plato; Republic
Pope Innnocent III (1198-1216); Decretal: Venerabilem.
Rehm, Hermann; History of the State Law (Geschichte der Staat Rechtswissenschaft)
Spinoza, B.; Tractatus Theologico-politicus; XVI
Stankiewicz, W. J., (1976), “Sovereignty as Political Theory,” in: Political Studies, Volume XXIV, No. 2, Oxford: Claredon Press
The Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (signed 26 December 1933); M. O. Hudson (ed.); International Legislation; Carnegie Endowment; Washington; 1931-50; Vol 6
Thucydides; History of the Peloponnesian War; Book V
UN Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999)
Weber, Max; Economía y sociedad – Esbozo de sociología comprensiva; Edición preparada por Johannes Winckelmann; Fondo de Cultura Económica; México

Quintus Horatius Flaccus

 
By Ioannis Michaletos/The latest incidents in France which resulted in the murder of seven people by a radical Jihadi person, raises once more the threat level posed by radical Salafi elements.

First of all it is notable to point out that since early February 2011 the French newspaper “Le Figaro” has published a classified document of the French counter-intelligence stating that at least 100 EU nationals had been trained in 2010 alone, in Islamic terrorist camps in The AfPak region. The data from what it seemed didn’t include Balkan nationals or those from Caucasus or Turkey, thus the overall number from this part of Eurasia must be significantly higher, without counting the “Arab Spring” process and the ongoing civil strife in Syria that proves to be like a magnet for all sorts of terrorist-driven Salafi elements.

 
The French paper back then stated that around 14 nationals were French and the press agency AFP confirmed also that Italian and Belgium citizens were training after being recruited by terrorists. Similar data have been confirmed over the past two years by British and German authorities, whilst a late 2011 report by the Austrian Ministry of Interior confirmed that radical Wahhabi cells of Balkan origin are residing in Vienna, where the attacker against the USA Embassy in Sarajevo the same year, had lived for some time.

 
The dynamics of the present day culminations in the Arab-Muslim world caused by the series of revolutions and conflicts of the Arab Spring, coupled with the European economic recession, will inevitably raise the alert level for all European security authorities, since the likehood of further attacks can be estimated. Moreover, the increase in posture in the Sunni world of the “stealth” radicals such as the Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers, as well as the various Takfiri groups or the Libyan Mujahedeen forces; further adds to the hypothesis that a looming crisis regarding urban terrorism of Islamic origin is to be expected. In addition the influx of illegal immigrants from Central Asia and North Africa into the EU -And mostly from the Balkans- tends to sustain the issue of monitoring the increasing Islamic community in Europe that has developed extremist points of view. Simply put it, the chances for radical action are increasing on par with the population increase of desperate masses of people that are venturing into Europe in a time where the Continent is experiencing a far-reaching debt and economic crisis.

Continuing, the Presidential elections in France and USA in 2012 and the probability that German early elections are going to be held along with the major world events of the Olympic Games in London this summer and the European football championship in Ukraine and Poland, are some other significant factors that raise the alert for the defense against terrorist activities within Europe.

In contrast to the even recent past, the proliferation of easy and cheap travel by all means and the mass introduction of secure, cheap and speedy communication and technology to all citizens in Europe, adds another immense challenge to the authorities. Simple tools such as twitter, Google earth, Facebook, Skype and other didn’t even exist or were in nascent form back in the Madrid bombings in 2004 or the London ones in 2005. Nowadays all these tools and a host of other applications can be used by agile and tech savvy terrorists as auxiliary elements for strike preparation and in addition to be manipulated as to pass around in the millions copies of proclamations and through the social media to create a wave of sensation. The case of the lone wolf Brevik (Although not a Jihadist) is a clear  and recent case. After all the essence of any terrorist act, is not the “act” itself, but the effect that will have in the public of the targeted society or institution.

Another issue that further supplements the hypothesis of the current article is the mass entrance of undocumented aliens from radicalized societies in Europe since 2005. It is roughly estimated by examining the data issued by various local authorities and those of FRONTEX and Europol, that over the past 6 years around 500,000 – 700,000 people have arrived in Europe from Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Maghreb, Iraq, Syria, West Bank-Gaza, Sudan, Nigeria, Egypt, Yemen, Mauritania, Somalia. Very few of those have returned back and those that remained few again have been documented, registered or identified in any state-related capacity. That along is another factor to be assessed for, bearing in mind that the overwhelming majority of these people are marginalized due to mostly objective conditions, meaning the lack of employment and social mobility opportunities in present day Europe.

 
Lastly, the gradual or “step-by-step” victory of the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan vis-a-vis the international community-NATO provides clearly a boosting factor in psychological terms for the Jihadist worldwide. Quite a few may protest to that notion, but the fact is, that 150,000 troops with the full backing of dozens of states cannot attain a safe passage -without the fear of an imminent attack against them- in no more than 2-3% of the Afghan territory. Consequently that means that the war in that country has been gradually lost in terms of political outcome and not necessarily on military terms. It is of wider knowledge that when NATO troops exit Afghanistan the Kabul government would not be able to withstand the Taliban more than a few weeks. As the deadline for an eventual exit is approaching (2014), Jihadists may from now plan their move in order to speed up the process and claim their victory, before the international community drafts a meaningful plan to protect the Kabul government and the moderate stratums of the Afghani society.

It is hard not to be disgusted by the way the corporate media has taken up a chorus of hateful anti-Serbian clichés on the occasion of General Ratko Mladić’s arrest. They have, with complete contempt for the presumption of innocence, which ought to benefit every person accused of a crime, condemned him in advance in public opinion, all the while calling him the “Butcher of the Balkans” (after having done so with Milošević and Karadžić). This sordid title had been reserved for Slobodan Milošević, who refuted all the accusations leveled against him by the ICTY in The Hague before that parody of justice left him to die in order to avoid being forced to acquit him. As far as Radovan Karadžić is concerned, his “butchery” has been passed over temporarily in silence while awaiting a verdict in his trial. But the title flourishes obscenely once again today in reference to a man who has been unhesitatingly vilified by the deplorable parrots of news services.

It’s nauseating to have to listen to or read these unfavorable comments prompted by his arrest. There is not one single doubt, not one single moment of hesitation. All the blind, demonizing anti-Serbian catchphrases that have persisted for more than a decade are being replayed without the slightest reference to the many outstanding questions and outright lies that have been re-examined and rectified; catchphrases that are being replayed despite the plethora of witnesses and documents that have refuted these lies; and are being replayed despite the growing number of authoritative books that have cast an impartial view on the war in the Balkans. Television, radio, and newspapers are blindly drumming the same old calumnies and idiocies into our ears. As an encore, you get the sinister image of the nullity of the media, which is incapable of conducting independent investigations, incapable of overcoming prejudice, and which is pickled in the privilege of propaganda as well as in the mimicry of mental retardation.

Such psittacism is particularly offensive as far as Mladić is concerned. Everything that he is accused of goes against the real facts. A partisan of Greater Serbia? He was always an implacable defender of the ex-Yugoslavia, federal and pluralistic.  Indulgent toward ethnic cleansing? He always took pains to make sure that his army was composed of soldiers from all ethnic and religious groups. Author of atrocities? He detested paramilitary militias and denounced their contempt for the laws of warfare. A perpetrator of massacres against prisoners? He was known for his severity in punishing those who mistreated detainees. All this has been investigated and proven to be true, not only by his own statements, orders, and conduct but also by the people who were with him, from the highest to the lowest ranking. He was admired by his peers, by Western generals who considered him to be an outstanding professional soldier, not simply for his adeptness in strategy and his legendary bravery, but also for his transparency and integrity. His troops, who understood that they had an extraordinary leader, worshipped him. Wesley Clark, the American general, Commander in Chief of NATO forces during the conflict, paid him an unforgettable compliment: “You are the only military leader I know who does not say Forward! to his troops but instead says Follow me!” Such praise, coming from an adversary, carries weight.

I did not know Mladić personally. But two of my close friends knew him well and often spoke to me of his valor. One was General Pierre-Marie Gallois, who recently passed away, and who never failed to pay him his respect. The other is the news photographer Shone, who accompanied him on all his campaigns, and who many a time evoked the memory his rectitude, courage, and generosity. Furthermore, I published a book about him, a translation of an American edition, a 750-page tome in which Milo Yelesiyevich gathered an impressive collection of documents relevant to him — speeches, standing orders, anecdotes, political analyses — that sketch the portrait of this extraordinary man.

As far as the so-called “genocide” in Srebrenica is concerned, it is depressing to see that the media has not taken into consideration the serious studies that have re-established the truth. It has been a long time since this “genocide” had been turned into a contemptible myth of 8,000 Muslims who were executed. Not only did I publish a book in which highly regarded international figures ridiculed this imaginary number, but a practically definitive work has just been published in Holland — “Deconstruction of a Virtual Genocide: An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Srebrenica” — which gives an account of exhaustive research conducted by an international group of scientists and academicians. The conclusions they reached about the myth of Srebrenica are corroborated in annexes by all manner of irrefutable proof, such as the names of victims, the number of those who were killed, the results of the exhumations of the bodies, the texts of military and civilian reports, autopsy reports, an accounting of the deaths on both sides; lists of Serbian villages that were put the torch and pillaged by Naser Orić’s (the military leader of the Muslim troops in Srebrenica) troops, etc.

And let’s add a few words about politics in general. Today, we know the disastrous details of the Western intervention. The war led against the former Yugoslavia resulted in the dismemberment of a country that was a co-founder of the United Nations and a loyal ally of France in two world wars; the war resulted in the expulsion of 200,000 Serbs from Krajina (where they had lived for centuries); the war resulted in the “ethnic cleansing” of tens of thousands of others; the war resulted in the creation of six new statelets, two of which are Muslim puppet confections (one part of Bosnia and Kosovo) that are dependent on international aid (while Europeanists are agitating for continental unification); the war resulted in the destruction of Serbia and the weakening of many other Balkan countries; the war resulted in the pollution of vast areas by depleted uranium weapons, and from now on, in the apprehension of one of the most valiant defenders of Christianity.

Ratko Mladić is not “the Butcher of the Balkans.” He is a patriot who fought against an Islamic invasion led by mudjahedin. Instead of imprisoning him, we ought to erect a statue of him.
Karadžić and Mladić are not the real war criminals. Those who are jubilant to see them in prison today are the real war criminals.

On 17th of January, 2012, during the testimony of  Witness Pyers Tucker, the Chamber admitted associated exhibit at P4230, a summary of three intercepted conversation from March 1993, between, number one, General Mladić and the accused; number two, Vinko Pandurevic and General Milovanovic; and number three General Mladić and Vinko Pandurevic.  In the relevant portion of his amalgamated statements discussing Exhibit P4230, Mr. Tucker says “I have been told this is the record of three conversations produced by Croatian intelligence services” and then proceeds to discuss how the intercepted conversation relate to a meeting he had on the 11th of March, 1993, with General Morillon, Branko Grujic and Vinko Pandurevic.

The Chamber recalls its previous rulings that intercepts are a special category of evidence which, before being admitted, requires further evidence about their authenticity and reliability from sources such as the relevant intercept operator or a participant in the intercepted conversation. The Chamber considers that summaries of intercepts such as those in P4230 fall into the same category and therefore that Exhibit P4230 was not sufficiently authenticated for it to be admitted through Pyers Tucker. The Chamber thus reconsiders its decision of 17th of January, 2012, to admit P4230 and orders that the documents be marked for identification as MFI P4230. [Prosecutor v. Karadžić, Transcript, p. 23968-9]
         
A similar impression of scrupulous correctness is cultivated by the Karadžić Chamber a bit further on. The Prosecutor, Mrs. Edgerton, tries to introduce some intercept evidence allegedly involving General Mladić, but is sternly rebuked by Judge Kwon for failing to produce a satisfactory foundation:

MS. EDGERTON:  The second conversation that’s no longer on the      screen in front of us, Your Honour, involves General Mladić speaking with  an intermediary from the VRS Main Staff.  General Mladić is not heard, but the interlocutor has been identified as General Mladić. [Prosecutor v. Karadžić, Transcript, s. 25316]

And further on:

JUDGE KWON:  Ms. Edgerton, last year on 4th of February in the decision of judicial notice decision, we ruled as follows: “Therefore, declaration from persons who are neither participants in the conversation themselves nor intercept operators are not sufficient for the purpose of establishing an intercept’s authenticity.  The Chamber is thus not satisfied that the authenticity of the following intercept was sufficiently established.”

I think this case should be no different.  In order for you to tender that intercept, it should have been discussed through [Prosecution investigator] Mr. Blaszczyk, who at  least could have provided at least some foundation as to how this intercept came into the possession of the Prosecution. [Prosecutor v. Karadžić, Transcript, s. 25324]

Fair enough. But have ICTY chambers been universally reluctant to accept dubious intercept evidence? What real guarantee do we have that even the Karadžić Chamber is not merely posturing in its apparent adherence to high standards? The verdict will tell.

In the meantime, we do have some indications of how this type of evidence has been received and treated by ICTY chambers in past cases. A short review is in order.

In the Krstić trial judgment, already in the fourth paragraph the Chamber  sets the stage for the benevolent consideration of every conceivable variety of evidentiary materials:

“The Trial Chamber draws upon a mosaic of evidence that combines to paint a picture of what happened during those few days in July 1995.” [Prosecutor v. Krstić, Par. 4]

A concrete, and in the specific context of the Krstić case vitally important application of that “mosaic” principle, appears in due course as the Chamber discusses how it reached its conclusion that the Bosnian Serb Army had in its custody the number of prisoners that would have been required to make the mass slaughter that was attributed to it possible:

There are also fragments of information from VRS communications about the possible magnitude of the executions. An intercepted conversation, at 1730 hours on 13 July 1995, indicates that about 6,000 men had been captured from the Bosnian Muslim column by that time… Other intercepted VRS conversations reveal that, on 15 July 1995, midway through the executions, at least 3,000-4,000 Bosnian Muslim prisoners were being detained by the VRS.171 Further, on 18 July 1995, two unidentified Bosnian Serbs were heard in an intercepted conversation reflecting on the recent events in Eastern Bosnia, including matters relating to the Bosnian Muslim column.172 One participant said that of the 10,000 military aged men who were in Srebrenica, “4,000-5,000 have certainly kicked the bucket”. [Ibid., Par. 83]

This evidence, based, as the Chamber says, in great part on intercepted  communications leads in the next paragraph to a very dramatic conclusion:

“The Trial Chamber is satisfied that, in July 1995, following the take-over of Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb forces executed several thousand Bosnian Muslim men. The total number is likely to be within the range of 7,000 -8,000 men.” [Ibid., Par. 84]

The serious cumulative impact of that “mosaic”, including its intercept component, is clearly reflected in a further paragraph of the Krstić Judgment:

“The Trial Chamber finds that, following the takeover of Srebrenica in July 1995, the Bosnian Serbs devised and implemented a plan to execute as many as possible of the military aged Bosnian Muslim men present in the enclave.”[Ibid., Par. 87]
 
Of course the Krstić Chamber was obliged to consider, pro forma at least, the reliability of the evidence on which it relied so heavily to form its “picture mosaic”. That is done in Pars. 105 et passim where the issue of reliability of intercept evidence is addressed.

To paraphrase the Chamber’s narrative, intercept records were handed over to the OTP by the Bosnian government. VRS did have secure means of communication, but their use was too cumbersome, so they often used unsecured lines for expediency. Intercept evidence was relied on by OTP for key elements of its case.

After attributing such great weight to intercept evidence in the presentation of the prosecution case, the Chamber concludes reassuringly:

“The Trial Chamber was told that all possible measures were taken to ensure the accuracy of the transcribed conversations.” [Ibid., Par. 109]

Noting that Defence expert, General Radinović, had expressed some doubts about the reliability of this type of evidence, the Chamber takes the position that it “accepts that the OTP did in fact diligently check and cross-reference the intercept material as part of the ‘intercept project’,” which should be sufficient to allay the general’s concerns.  The Krstić Chamber goes on to say that “The Trial Chamber accepts that the OTP did in fact diligently check and cross-reference the intercept material as part of the ‘intercept project’. In order to determine whether the material was reliable and genuine, the OTP looked at the internal consistency between the notebooks and the printouts of each conversation. Transcripts of a single conversation, which was recorded by two or more interceptors, were also compared. The OTP also embarked on a process of corroborating the intercepts with information obtained from other sources, such as documents acquired from the VRS, the RS Ministry of Defence and UNPROFOR, as well as aerial images.” [Ibid., Par. 114]

It is difficult to avoid the impression that when it comes to presenting such important evidence the Chamber leaves it to the Prosecution to monitor itself and that it is quite happy with the results of that arrangement.

Should there be any residual doubts advanced by sceptics such as General Radinović, the Chamber draws its trump card:

“A former OTP employee assigned to the ‘intercept project’ testified that, as a result of this corroboration process, she became convinced that the intercepts were ‘absolutely reliable’… the former OTP employee [helpfully identified as Mrs. Frease] who appeared before the Trial Chamber testified with ‘absolute certainty’ that the dates ascribed to the individual conversations were accurate.” [Ibid., Par. 114]

That surely should suffice to put all doubts to rest. Unsurprisingly, Prosecution military expert Richard Butler endorses the Chamber’s view. [Ibid., Par. 115]

To make things even more iron clad, it was not just Prosecution personnel at The Hague who took great care to guarantee the integrity of the intercept evidence gathering process.  It turns out that Bosnian Muslim technicians at the source were equally professional and conscientious:

“All possible measures were taken by the Bosnian Muslim interceptors to ensure the accuracy of the recorded conversations, as would be expected in any prudent army. This fact was reinforced by the measures taken by the OTP to verify the reliability of the intercepted evidence as part of the ‘intercept project’.” [Ibid., Par. 116]

To what degree that is really true we shall soon see when we review the statement one of those intercept operators gave to the Office of the Prosecutor.

In the Blagojević and Jokić case, we find similar dicta. Most notably, the Chamber announced up front that “the Trial Chamber is convinced that the intercept-related evidence admitted is a reliable source of information.” [Prosecutor v. Blagojević and Jokić, Par. 30] Defence objections to that conclusion are summarized, but they are promptly overridden: “The Defence of Dragan Jokić argued that the intercept transcripts were taken down by unknown personnel or personnel with a history of unreliable transcriptions lacking sufficient training, that substandard equipment was used, that by not providing original tape recordings the Prosecution was effectively submitting hearsay evidence, which ought not to be admissible.”  [Ibid., Footnote 72]

It is nevertheless important to remember, when the Chamber says that “bearing in mind the testimonial evidence and the very large amount of documentary evidence, the Trial Chamber cannot find that it is necessary to have access to the original audio recordings of the intercepts”, that of more than 100 intercepts used in the Krstić case only one was audio.

In the Popović et al. judgment rendered in June of 2010, the chamber considered various factors in regard to 213 intercepts admitted prior to concluding that “Trial Chamber has found the intercepts to be overall probative and reliable” [Prosecutor v. Popović et al., Par. 66] 

The Trial Chamber’s procedure was to examine whether, “based on the totality of the evidence, a reasonable trier of fact could find the intercepts to be what the Prosecution purports them to be—a contemporaneous record of intercepted VRS communications.” The Trial Chamber says that in the process it “considered the testimony of several witnesses relating to the intercepts, such as intercept operators, an expert in radio relay communications, and a Prosecution analyst. It considered all challenges made by the Defence, including the theory that the intercepts had been fabricated, evidence relating to the chain of custody, and the general lack of audio recordings. In sum, the Trial Chamber concluded that the Prosecution had established that the intercepts as a whole were prima facie relevant and probative.” [Ibid., Par. 64]

It seems that all those challenges turned out to be without foundation and that the record keeping practices of the Bosnian Muslim intercept operators in besieged Srebrenica were meticulous and satisfactory in every way. In fact, the Chamber made its determination to view that evidence favourably “particularly in light of the evidence given by the intercept operators” [Ibid., Par. 65]

Two examples will put into bold relief some of the issues raised by the high level of receptivity shown by various ICTY chambers to intercept evidence. They suggest that in regular criminal cases in most national jurisdictions the way this evidence was gathered would almost certainly be found questionable by non-political judges.

The reference in Par. 383 to a key purported intercept resulting in information that was vital to the construction of the factual underpinnings of the Popović judgment and therefore to the credibility of the judgment as a whole is an apt illustration. It concerns a 13 July 1995 intercept indicating the capture by Serbian forces of about 6,000 Srebrenica Muslim POWs. It is the only clear reference to the number of POWs captured at that point. Without establishing such a fact, the case against the defendants would be seriously undermined because without the prior capture of thousands of Muslim prisoners, executions on such a huge scale could not have occurred. This is the Trial Chamber’s summary of the intercept’s content:

“A conversation intercepted at 5:30 p.m. on 13 July indicates that approximately 6,000 Bosnian Muslim prisoners were detained in the Bratunac area at three locations, with about 1,500 to 2,000 men in each location. One of the locations appears to be the football field at Nova Kasaba, another was ‘up there where the checkpoint at the intersection is,’ and a third was ‘halfway between the checkpoint and the loading place.’ In this context, the Trial Chamber is of the view that one of the places is Sandici Meadow and the other Nova Kasaba.” [Ibid., Par. 383]

But a review of the actual intercept, as presented by the Prosecution and available as a trial exhibit and a document from the Tribunal data base, raises some serious concerns. The interlocutors are designated as X and Y, meaning that they are completely anonymous and that even their existence cannot be verified, not to mention the possibility of cross examining them. Other than the sheet of paper with some writing on it, purporting to be an intercept of their conversation, we do not have any objective evidence from first hand sources that such an interchange even took place or, if it did, that the participants were in a position to know what they were talking about. The latter point is of critical importance. A key conclusion about the number of prisoners is drawn exclusively from the conversation attributed to them and is based on the assumption that they were competent reporters of the relevant facts. (See Exhibit 1)

But even if we were to credit this piece of evidence, it is still susceptible to variable interpretations. According to the Prosecution, and the Chamber accepts that, anonymous individuals X and Y had a conversation at 5:30 pm on 13 July 1995 where Y informs X that at each of three different locations there were “about 1,500 to 2,000” prisoners, or a total of “6,000”. Even if we accept the conversation’s authenticity, the conversation does not support “beyond a reasonable doubt” the interpretation that the Prosecution and the Chamber attribute to it about the total number of captured prisoners. For each of the cited locations, a range of 1,500 to 2,000 captured prisoners is given. Assuming that the Chamber chose, for whatever reasons, to give credence to the information contained in the intercept of nameless participants, it still had the option of choosing the lower total of about 4,500 POWs. Since in the purported intercept there is no claim of an accurate headcount, the Chamber would have acted reasonably by erring on the side of caution. But no, four and a half thousand captured prisoners, though a considerable number, will not do because it is still too far from the required total of 8,000 “victims of genocide”. The court therefore simply adds up maximum numbers from an unsubstantiated document and uses that as the basis for its conclusion.  Mass murder now is possible because approximately the projected number of victims were already under the control of the executioners. 

Another curious use of “intercept evidence” can be cited. We are turning our attention again to the Krstić trial, and the evidence of prosecution military expert Richard Butler about a July 18 1995 intercept from which he draws equally significant conclusions. The relevant section of his testimony is in the Krstić trial transcript, p. 5205. Essentially, using an English translation, Butler offers his interpretation of the July 18 intercept where he claims that the execution of several thousand Muslim prisoners is described in coded terms as their having “kicked the bucket”. “I can only assume,” Butler testified, “that this was a reference to Muslim men who were transferred to the Zvornik brigade zone of responsibility, where they were executed.” [Ibid., Transcript, p. 5205] The issue is important because the interlocutors refer to 4,000 to 5,000 persons.

Two important observations are in order. First, Butler admitted that he does not speak Serbo-Croatian and therefore would have been unable to follow the conversation in the original language of the speakers if it were shown to him. Second, there is no record of the existence of a Serbo-Croatian original in the ICTY data base.

In his expert opinion, based on the version of this intercept that was shown to him by the Prosecution (and, as it turns out, accepted by the Chamber in its judgment), Butler advanced the view that the phrase “kicked the bucket,” which is used in the English version, signifies a mortal outcome. But both Serbo-Croatian and English speakers may question that. First, there is no expression equivalent to “kick the bucket” that native Serbo-Croatian speakers in the intercept might have used that comes to mind. Since there is not even a purported Serbo-Croatian original of this key conversation, what they actually said to each other is something that we will never know. Second, from the standpoint of the English language, in which Butler presumably is fluent, “to kick the bucket” is not customarily used to describe violent death.  So at a minimum some serious questions can be raised not just about the authenticity of this intercept, but about the interpretation attached to it as well.

Which brings us to the central issue: how reliable are the intercepts that are used at ICTY? A corollary question is how trustworthy are the judicial conclusions that are drawn based on such evidence.
Dramatic, but completely ignored, answers to these questions were provided by Emir Osmić, one of the Bosnian Muslim Army’s intercept operators who were keeping tabs on Srebrenica radio traffic within the Army of the Republika Srpska [VRS]. In a statement given to Office of the Prosecutor investigators on 6 May 1999, Osmić describes in detail his duties as a BH Army intercept operator and the way he and his colleagues performed their job. This is the way he depicts that process:

When my shift on duty was over, I would hand my notebooks over to the commander who would then type them up, and return them to the next shift to continue to use. When the notebooks were filled with notes the commander would take them and, I believe, carry them over to the division headquarters, after which they would send them to the archive or something like that. I had nothing to do with what went on with them after I turned them over to the commander. The tapes that we used we kept reusing because we did not have enough tapes. We used tape-recorder tapes and we would tape over the previously recorded material if during the shift the tape ran out. I am not sure if a single one of the tapes on which we recorded important conversations was preserved. The one thing I do recall is that we had to use the same tapes over and over again because we did not have enough of them. I have no idea what happened to those tapes. [Statement of Emir Osmić, EDS file number 0084 8061]
  
The situation we have here, according to operator Osmić, is that no physical evidence for the incriminating conversations between VRS officers and personnel is available. The same tapes were used repeatedly, and with each use what was previously recorded would be erased. Written notes of what was heard and before erasure supposedly recorded were made, but they ended up in some black hole at the headquarters and “the archive”. Between then and their popping up in court at The Hague, there seems to be no verifiable chain of custody, no assurance that they were not tampered with by the Bosnian Muslim authorities, who had them under their control and were not a neutral party in the ICTY proceedings.
         
These facts should be assessed against the backdrop of pious protestations by some ICTY chambers about “authentication” that were cited at the beginning. How consistent is the judicial branch of ICTY in adhering to the enunciated principles? If they were consistent, would that not be reflected at key junctures where intercepts were being used to buttress major elements of the prosecution case? We saw some examples which indicate that it may not have been.
         
We may, for the moment, set aside the issue of purported audio intercepts made by foreign intelligence agencies during the Bosnian war. They were used also in the Hague proceedings but to a relatively minor extent (just as in the case of “aerial photographs” considerations of national security were adduced to thwart the subjection of this form of signals intelligence to thorough independent evaluation). But from both the quantitative and qualitative standpoint, their courtroom role was not nearly as prominent as that of locally produced intercepts, originating from the monitoring sources of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. To the extent that they have been used (e.g. at the Popović et al. trial) it was under limitations which constituted a severe handicap for the defence. It is important to bear that in mind because just as with the DNA evidence, modern technology makes it extremely easy to falsify audio material. When effective expert analysis of the proffered data is precluded, the purported evidence is as good as useless.
         
We believe that we have offered sufficient reasons for the inherent untrustworthiness of intercept data used at ICTY (and, by extension, before its Sarajevo clone, the State Court for War Crimes of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which uses identical material) to warrant the sounding of alarm bells. We need more than the disingenuous assurances of intercept operators of one of the warring parties and the “absolute certainty” of Mrs. Frease. The trial records of these courts, in particular with respect to Srebrenica where the greatest concentration of intercept evidence abuse may be noted, should be carefully combed and the authenticity of all intercepts the court relied on should be subjected to thorough professional scrutiny. ICTY (and Sarajevo court) intercepts which fail to meet fundamental standards of admission in ordinary criminal cases in national jurisdictions should be excluded from consideration. The verdicts of both courts should be modified as necessary to reflect the exclusion of such evidence.

Stephen Karganovic is the President of Srebrenica Historical Project.

February 17 marks the fourth anniversary of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia. The UDI has been recognized since by the United States and its key NATO partners, as well as 80-odd other countries. The majority of the world’s sovereign states have refused to do so, however, including two permanent Security Council powers (Russia and China), two budding giants (Brasil and India), five European Union members (including Spain) – and Israel.

Successive Israeli governments have come under pressure from Washington to change their mind, but on this issue the raison d’etat has wisely prevailed across the political spectrum. The similarities between Kosovo and Judea-Samaria are not obvious to the uninitiated, and Israeli diplomats prefer not to spell them out and risk needless tiffs with the Americans. On closer scrutiny those similarities turn out to be significant.

In both cases there’s a small piece of disputed real estate – rich in history, poor in everything else, and badly mismanaged by the local Muslim majority chronically hostile to its non-Muslim neighbors. In both cases that majority craves internationally-recognized statehood, and in both cases the demand is based on a bogus claim of distinct nationhood (“Kosovar” or “Palestinian”) that conceals the broader expansionist agenda – greater- Albanian and Palestinian Arab-Islamic, respectively.

The act of recognition by the major Western powers has opened, in Kosovo’s case, a Pandora’s Box of legal, geopolitical, moral and security issues. It has cemented an already flourishing black hole of lawlessness and endemic corruption and enhanced a potential base for jihad-terrorism deep inside Europe. A repeat scenario between the Jordan and the Green Line would be the last thing Israel needs as it contemplates strategies for containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, responding to the tectonic change in Egypt and to the crisis in Syria.

The US support for the Kosovo Albanians has adversely affected Israel’s interests in a number of significant ways. It sets the precedent that a solution to an intractable political and territorial quarrel can and should be imposed by force by outside countries, even if one of the parties – in this case Serbia – rejects the proposed solution as contrary to its vital national interests.

The question of how Israel should come to an accommodation with Arab aspirations remains open, but no sane Israeli would suggest that a solution imposed by outsiders, either under the UN or EUNATO aegis, would likely be in Israel’s interest. Washington’s claim that outside powers can award some part of a state’s sovereign territory to a violent ethnic or religious minority with a local plurality – as NATO powers did in Kosovo in 1999 – would put in question not only the future of Judea and Samaria but even southern Galilee and parts of the Negev, where non-Jews have, or may eventually acquire, significant local majorities.

Israel’s Muslim population is now above 20 percent, roughly the same as Serbia’s if Kosovo is included. If Albanian Muslims can demand separation of their majority-inhabited areas from Serbia today, citing alleged past mistreatment, it is an even bet that Israel’s Arabs will invoke that same precedent tomorrow. (Needless to say, Washington’s claims that Kosovo is a one-off issue, a special case, completely sui generis, etc. are not taken seriously by any would-be irredentist or separatist movement.) The readiness of the US administration to circumvent the Security Council, knowing it would block Kosovo’s UDI on international legal grounds, seeks to devalue Russia’s and China’s veto power as such. In light of how many times anti-Israel UNSC Resolutions have been thwarted by a US veto, diminishing the power of the veto per se may prove detrimental to Israel in the future.

More significantly, as has been pointed out by many American policymakers, an overt motivation of US policy on Kosovo is to curry favor in the Islamic world. Such a notion betrays a remarkable naivete that is a form of appeasement. One only need look at American efforts to help create a Palestinian state, to bring “democracy” to Iraq or Afghanistan, or to provide aid to the mujihadin against the Soviet Union in the 1980s to see the value of jihadist gratitude. A complete victory in Kosovo would merely stimulate the demand for further concessions elsewhere, with Israel always the ultimate prize.

Last but not least, proponents of Kosovo independence scoff at the Serbs’ claim that Kosovo, with its many ancient monasteries and the site of the famous battle, represents not just any part of their country but its very heart and soul – “Serbia’s Jerusalem.” Such attitude betrays a cynical contempt for the essence of any true nation’s identity, which necessarily rests on its historical, moral and spiritual roots.

Without such foundation a people ceases to be a people and becomes but a random mob.

If Serbia can be haughtily deprived of her Jerusalem today, and her historical and spiritual claims are dismissed out of hand, who is to say “al- Quds” will not be demanded of Israel tomorrow as the capital of an independent “Palestine”? Let it be added that proponents of Kosovo’s independence overlook or flatly deny the fact that Kosovo’s top Albanian leaders were members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, an organization once regarded as a terrorist group.

Today’s Pristina is more reminiscent of Gaza or Ramallah – with Saudi-financed mosques, chaotically built concrete houses, and roadside rubbish heaps included – than of any European city of comparable size.

The Netanyahu government should continue to stand up to its closest friend and ally, the United States, on an issue many Israelis may consider peripheral.

Israel’s position on Kosovo is a matter of vital national interest on which no government should ever compromise. Ideas matter. So do principles.

The writer is the Co-Founder and Executive Director, The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies and the Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The church of St. Nicholas, in the majority Albanian-Muslim village of Labuniste, was two centuries old and housed valuable icons. The arson at Labuniste followed the burning of a Macedonian flag and the raising of Albanian and Islamic banners in the neighboring town of Struga, allegedly in reaction to an incident of “mocking Islam” at a local carnival last month. The town, on the shores of Lake Ohrid, lies at the southern edge of the line of ethnic separation between the two communities. The exact figures are disputed, but Macedonian Slavs account for about two-thirds (1.3 million) and Albanians for 30 percent (600,000) of the republic’s two million people. The latter, 98 percent Muslim, have had a remarkable rate of growth since 1961, when they accounted for only 13 percent of the total. Albanian birthrate has been more than twice that of Slavs for decades.

Following the signing of the NATO-brokered Ohrid Agreement that ended the 2001 Albanian rebellion by the “NLA” (a KLA subsidiary), FYROM has become bi-national and bilingual and the Albanians its second constituent nation. They are guaranteed proportional share of government power and an ethnically-based police force. This has turned FYROM into the weakest state in the Balkans and its de facto ethnic partition has become formalized and internationally guaranteed.
Having secured their dominance along the borders of Albania and Kosovo, the current main thrust of the Albanian ethno-religious encroachment has the country’s capital city as its primary objective. It is a little-known fact that today’s Skopje is effectively as divided as Nicosia or Jerusalem. Once a city quarter becomes majority-Albanian, it is quickly emptied of its Slavic, non-Muslim population. The time-tested technique is to construct a mosque in a mixed area, to broadcast prayer calls at full blast five times a day, and to create the visible and audible impression of dominance that intimidates non-Muslims (the locals call it “sonic cleansing”).

During the 2001 Albanian rebellion the NLA was largely financed by the smuggling of narcotics from Turkey and Afghanistan. In addition to drug money, as The Washington Times reported on June 22, 2001, “the NLA also has another prominent venture capitalist: Osama bin Laden.” French terrorism expert Claude Moniquet told The Christian Science Monitor in 2006 that up to a hundred fundamentalists, “dangerous and linked to terrorist organizations,” were ready in sleeper-cells in Macedonia. New recruits are offered stipends to study Islam in Saudi Arabia, and they are given salaries and free housing to spread the Wahhabi word on their return to FYROM.

In March 1999, on the eve of the war in Kosovo, I wrote in The Times of London that NATO support of ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo would unleash a chain reaction whose first victim would be Macedonia, because “once KLA veterans acting as policemen start to patrol Kosovo, the rising expectations of Macedonia’s Albanians will be impossible to contain.” “Nonsense,” a U.S. State Department official snapped at a conference in Washington a few days later.  “The problem in Kosovo is Milosevic. In Macedonia the Albanians don’t need to make trouble because their rights are respected.” The issue was that of “human rights,” he said, not nationalism: the notion of Greater Albania was a Serb paranoid invention.

Thirteen years later we know the score. The KLA has morphed into the “Kosovo Protection Corps” (KPC) and a human organ-trading terrorist, Hashim Thaci, is the province’s “Prime Minister.” A “Greater Albania” is taking shape, with the U.S. government still in denial about this reality. In western FYROM, in the Greek Epirus, and in the Malesija region of Montenegro, no institutional arrangements short of ethnic partition will assuage Albanian separatism.

The Albanians enjoy the backing of a powerful regional player, Turkey. They are a key link in the steadily developing Islamist “Green Corridor” in the Balkans, and are heartily supported by the Islamist government in Ankara in all their endeavors. The project’s goal of creating a contiguous chain of Muslim-dominated polities from Istanbul in the southeast to northwestern Bosnia needs to bridge a 90-mile gap in Macedonia between the Muslim Pomaks of southern Bulgaria and their Albanian coreligionists in FYROM. On current demographic and political form it will be bridged by the middle of this century.

There is nothing particularly unusual about Albanian ambitions and methods: Pre-modern nations and tribes have been at it since time immemorial. The Albanians differ only in that they have perfected the art of using foreigners – sultans, kaisers, duces, fuehrers, comrades, and over the past two decades the U.S. government and NATO bombs and troops – to get the job done for them. The only reason that ethnic Albanians still tolerate NATO’s presence in Kosovo – now that it is no longer needed to defeat the Serbs – is that it has not seriously attempted to protect them either.

Both demographically and politically, the Republic of Macedonia has a precarious present and an uncertain future. With the gradual decline of the American empire, however, sooner or later the Albanians will have to face their long-abused neighbors without foreign cover. That will present them with an unexpected problem, and its eventual resolution – however just – may be messy and unpleasant in the distinctly Balkan way.

Davutoglu’s Strategic Depth – What has become known as Turkey’s neo-Ottoman strategy became prominent with the appointment of Ahmet Davutoglu as foreign minister in 2009. As Erdogan’s long-term foreign policy advisor, he advocated diversifying Turkey’s geopolitical options by creating Turkish zones of influence in the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Middle East. On the day of his appointment Davutoglu asserted that Turkey’s influence in “its region” will continue to grow: Turkey had an “order-instituting role” in the Middle East, the Balkans and the Caucasus, he declared, quite apart from its links with the West.
 
In Davutoglu’s own words, Turkish foreign policy has evolved from being “crisis-oriented” to being based on “vision”: “Turkey is no longer a country which only reacts to crises, but notices the crises before their emergence and intervenes in the crises effectively, and gives shape to the order of its surrounding region.” He asserted that Turkey had a “responsibility to help stability towards the countries and peoples of the regions which once had links with Turkey” — thus referring to the Ottoman era, in a manner unimaginable only a decade ago: “Beyond representing the 70 million people of Turkey, we have a historic debt to those lands where there are Turks or which was related to our land in the past. We have to repay this debt in the best way.”

This strategy was based on the assumption that growing Turkish clout in the old Ottoman lands — a region in which the EU has vital energy and political interests — could prompt President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel to drop their objections to Turkey’s EU membership. If on the other hand the EU closes its door to enlargement – as now seems imminent – then Turkey’s huge autonomous sphere of influence in the old Ottoman domain would be developed into a major and potentially hostile counter-bloc to the West.

Prime Minister Erdogan is no longer as eager as before to minimize or deny his Islamic roots, but his old assurances to the contrary — long belied by his actions — are still being recycled in Washington and treated as reality. This reflects the propensity of the Obama administration, just like its predecessors, to cherish illusions about the nature and ambitions of America’s regional “allies,” such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The implicit assumption in the U.S. foreign policy community — that Turkey would remain “pro-Western,” come what may — should have been reassessed years ago. Since the AKP came to power the Army has been neutered, confirming the old warning of the Turkish top bras that “democratization” would mean Islamization. To the dismay of its Westernized secular elite, Turkey has reasserted its Ottoman and Muslim legacy with a vengeance.

We are witnessing the end of a process that could be predicted with precision. Nine years ago I wrote in Chronicles (April 2003) that the Bush Administration was mistaken to pretend that Turkey was “a truly indispensable nation” – as a senior U.S. Administration official, Paul Wolfowitz, called it at the time:

In his pitch to the West Mr. Erdoğan is unsurprisingly eager to minimize his party’s Islamic connections by stressing his “secular” and “conservative” credentials. His assurances were keenly accepted in Washington… The escalating crisis of Turkey’s political system over the past decade reflected a deeper malaise, the loss of confidence of the old Kemalist elite. The implicit assumption in Washington—that Turkey would remain “secular” and “pro-Western,” come what may—should have been reassessed after the Army intervened to remove the previous pro-Islamic government in 1997. Since then many voices have warned that “democratization” would mean Islamization, and that America needed alternative scenarios and regional strategies.

Nine years later this assessment has been proven right. Erdoğan and his team claim that the marginalization of the Army heralds the country’s democratization. Practicing the Islamic art of taqiyya in its purest form, foreign minister Davutoğlu claims that the AKP reversal of Kemalism was all about advancing civil rights and Western-style liberties, that it reflects “the Turkish nation’s will to live in a freer and more democratic environment in compliance with European Union standards.” It is “an important turning point for democracy in Turkey,” he says, and “a result of the Turkish nation’s interest in the reform process carried out in light of universal and European norms.” President Abdullah Gül claims that Turkey can now have a “great and unbelievably positive effect” on the Middle East. Ahmet Davutoglu adds, “If the world is on fire, Turkey is the firefighter… assuming the leading role for stability in the Middle East.”

Securalists’ Demise – The terminal loss of confidence of the old Kemalist elite was swift and now seems irrversible. The fruits of AKP rule invoke the memory of the late Necmettin Erbakan, who announced many years ago that ”Turkey is going to change its regime towards fundamentalism—the debate is whether it is going to be with blood or without.” The change of the Turkish state and society, of its ethos and institutional culture, is profound. The secularist elites see it happening, “but they are gripped by panic, paralyzed, unable to act, living just for today,” Claire Berlinski, an American-born writer and journalist who has lived in Istanbul for years, told me on my last visit to Turkey in January 2011. She compared the atmosphere in the city to the last days of the Weimar Repuiblic in Berlin: the writing is on the wall.

The lack of support from Washington has been a factor in demoralizing the Kemalist establishment, but more important perhaps was the manner in which Erdoğan and the AKP had succeeded in obtaining the compliance of the secularist elite in the crucial early years of their mandate. Turkey’s activist foreign policy had seduced them with the vision of an autonomous sphere of Turkish influence in the old Ottoman domains in the Middle East, the Caucasus, and the Balkans. It has enabled the Islamists to co-opt into the project many senior civil servants, diplomats and generals who are not sympathetic to the ideological assumptions of the neo-Ottoman paradigm, but who were ready and willing to support its “quantitative” aspects. They subscribed to the ostensibly traditional, nationalist components of Davutoğlu’s neo-Ottoman concept of “strategic depth,” without realizing that it was a Faustian pact.

For the sake of Turkey’s status as a first-rate regional power—pleasing to their Kemalist-nationalist sensibilities—the secularist elite were prepared to close their eyes to the fact that Islam is the all-encompassing denominator of the project. Back in the fragile early days of 2002-2003 the AKP leadership wisely grasped the need for the secularist nationalists to be given a slot in the national consensus on Turkey’s multi-layered identity. Those days are now over.

Many inherited Weimar officials, Wilhelmstrasse diplomats and top officers of the Reichswehr were likewise not supportive of the Nazis when Hitler came to power. During the crucial early years of the Third Reich (January 1933-January 1938), they were likewise willing to offer their services to his de facto revolutionary project in the name of promoting traditional German national interests and objectives. In early 1938 they were inevitably swept away in a fresh wave of Gleichschaltung, heralded by the removal of General von Blomberg and foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath.

In 2010-2011 Turkey’s Islamists were finally able to do the same to the Kemalist civil service and army cadres. Their replacements, steeped in Islamism and neo-Ottomanism, are being groomed at the lower levels of the hierarchy. Their dilemma, for many decades before Erdogan, had been to resist the lure of irredentism abroad, and at home to turn Islam into a matter of personal choice separate from the state and distinct from the society. It could not be done.

The Army Humiliated – The arrest in early 2011 of over a hundred active-duty military officers as part of an investigation into an alleged plot to topple the government was the final chapter in the demise of the Turkish army as a relevant political factor. The arrests brought to 196 the number of active and retired officers who were accused of involvement in the so-called Sledgehammer Plot dating back to 2003. In February 2011, prosecutors requested that 163 of the accused remain under arrest – most of them active duty senior ranks – on a dubious legal pretext. The suspects include the former commanders of the Turkish navy and air force.

This was a massive purge in preparation for the largest show trial ever in the non-Communist world. The charges, too, were worthy of Moscow 1937. The Sledgehammer plot, the government alleged, was to have included bombings of historic mosques in Istanbul, an attack on a museum, and the provocation of military tensions with neighboring Greece including aerial attacks on Greek islands. Such acts of terrorism and outright military aggression were supposedly designed to plunge Turkey into utter chaos and provide an opportunity for the military to step in and remove the AKP-controlled government from power.

The Sledgehammer was connected to the reported Ergenekon conspiracy, supposedly the Mother of All Plots, the mega-conspiracy in which the “Deep State” – a shadowy coalition of senior military officers, the intelligence services, the judiciary, and organized crime – planned terrorist attacks to foment unrest leading to a military takeover. The claims about these supposed conspirators defy logic. Arch-secular nationalists, the prosecutors said, had been in bed with the Maoist PKK, the extreme-left Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party, the Islamist Hizbullah and Milli Görüþ, the ultranationalist Turkish Revenge Brigades, the Turkish Workers’ and Peasants’ Liberation Army, and the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party.

Details of the “Sledgehammer” emerged after an anonymous source delivered a suitcase full of supposedly secret military documents to a newspaper reporter in January 2010. Prime Minister Erdogan and other AKP leaders have openly lent credibility to the charges. There were countless inconsistencies in the accusations, however. To take one example, dozens of entities – hospitals, NGOs, companies, and even military units – were referred to by names or acronyms which they acquired many years after 2003, in some cases as late as August 2009. The military has strenuously denied the allegations, claiming that the documents were forged, and insisting that the scenarios were part of a hypothetical war game that took place at a military training seminar. “The Turkish Armed Forces, which have especially avoided any actions that could be seen as interfering with the ongoing judicial process, have explained through repeated statements, in no uncertain terms, what the seminars were, how they were carried out, what they involved and who participated under what orders,” the April 6, 2011, General Staff statement said.

The Sledgehammer case was not a “case” at all; it was a successful attempt by the AKP regime to neutralize Turkey’s once-powerful military once and for all. The government’s specific objective was to discredit the officer corps and thus facilitate the abolition of the Army’s traditional role as the guardian of the country’s secular political system. According to Dani Rodrik of Harvard University – whose father-in-law, retired four-star general Cetin Dogan, is one of the defendants – we were witnessing machinations in the guise of the judicial process aimed at achieving political advantage instead of justice. The result is that “Turkey’s relevance as a democratic beacon for the Middle East” has been undermined.

Turkey’s legal system has always been viewed as something opaque, arbitrary, and capricious—another weapon to be used by the powerful against their enemies, not a source of justice for ordinary people. Its continued misuse is an issue which is a matter of legitimate concern, if we are to take seriously President Obama’s rhetoric about Turkey as the essential bridge between the East and the West..

Turkish Services to the Ummah – The fact that Turkey is no longer a Western “ally” is still strenuously denied in Washington; but we were reminded of the real state of affairs on March 9, 2010, when Saudi King Abdullah presented Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with the Wahhabist kingdom’s most prestigious prize for his “services to Islam.” Erdogan earned the King Faisal Prize for having “rendered outstanding service to Islam by defending the causes of the Islamic nation.”

Turkey under Erdogan’s neo-Islamist AKP has rendered a host of other services to “the Islamic nation.” In August 2008 Ankara welcomed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a formal state visit, and last year it announced that it would not join any sanctions aimed at preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. In the same spirit the AKP government repeatedly hosted Sudan’s President Omer Hassan al-Bashir, who is accused by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of genocide against non-Muslims. Turkey is currently favoring the replacement of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, ostensibly in the name of democracy, but fully cognizant that the beneficiary of the regime change would be the Muslim Brotherhood.

Simultaneous pressure to conform to Islam at home has gathered pace over the past seven years, and is now relentless. Turkish businessmen will tell you privately that sipping a glass of raki in public may hurt their chances of landing government contracts; but it helps if their wives and daughters wear the hijab.

Changing Gears on Europe – Ankara’s continuing bid to join the European Union is running parallel with its openly neo-Ottoman policy of re-establishing an autonomous sphere of influence in the Balkans and in the former Soviet Central Asian republics. Turkey’s EU candidacy is still on the agenda, but the character of the issue has evolved since Erdogan came to power in 2002.

When the government in Ankara started the process by signing an Association agreement with the EEC (as it was then) in 1963, its goal was to make Turkey more “European.” This had been the objective of subsequent attempts at Euro-integration by other neo-Kemalist governments prior to Erdogan’s victory, notably those of Turgut Ozal and Tansu Ciller in the 1990s. The secularists hoped to present Turkey’s “European vocation” as an attractive domestic alternative to the growing influence of political Islam, and at the same time to use the threat of Islamism as a means of obtaining political and economic concessions and specific timetables from Brussels. Erdogan and his personal friend and political ally Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s president, still want the membership, but their motives are vastly different. Far from seeking to make Turkey more European, they want to make Europe more Turkish — many German cities are well on the way — and more Islamic, thus reversing the setback of 1683 without firing a shot.

Nevertheless, the Western media and politicians remain infatuated with the twin myth of Turkey’s “Islamic democracy.” Sensing a mix of Western weakness and wishful thinking, Prime Minister Erdogan asserted a year ago that the tables have been turned: in the decades ahead, Europe will need Turkey more than Turkey needs Europe. “European labor markets and social-security systems are comatose,” he declared, and “European societies are near geriatric,” in contrast to Turkey which is “bursting with the vigor that the EU so badly needs”:

Our European friends should realize that Turkey-EU relations are fast approaching a turning point… Turkey is a regional player, an international actor with an expanding range of soft power and a resilient, sizable economy. And yet, the fact that it can withstand being rebuffed should not become reason for Turkey’s exclusion. Sometimes I wonder if Turkey’s power is an impediment to its accession to the Union. If so, one has to question Europe’s strategic calculations … We are no more a country that would wait at the EU’s door like a docile supplicant. Some claim that Turkey has no real alternative to Europe … However, the opposite is just as valid. Europe has no real alternative to Turkey. Especially in a global order where the balance of power is shifting, the EU needs Turkey to become an ever stronger, richer, more inclusive, and more secure Union. I hope it will not be too late before our European friends discover this fact.

Too late for what exactly? – one may ask. Erdogan’s implied threat is that Turkey would turn against “Europe” if it is not admitted into the EU, which is in itself an eloquent argument against admission. No responsible family would unlock the door to an uninvited guest with a long criminal record who threatens unpleasantness if he is not admitted. Fortunately, leading EU countries seem to realize that “Europe” with Turkey in its ranks would be weaker, poorer, and infinitely less safe.

Hostility to Israel – The cooling of traditionally strong relations between Turkey and Israel started with Erdogan’s sudden and harsh burst of anti-Israeli rhetoric at Davos three years ago, followed by barring Israel from annual military exercises on Turkey’s soil. At the same time, to Israel’s dismay, Turkey’s strident apologia of Hamas became more vehement than anything coming out of Cairo or Amman. (Talking of terrorists, Erdogan has stated, repeatedly, “I do not want to see the word ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamist’ in connection with the word ‘terrorism’!”) The tension reached its peak with the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” incident in May 2010. Turkey’s “special relationship” with Israel is over, even at the level of symbolic gestures. Relations between Israel and Turkey continue to deteriorate: Israel’s ambassador to Ankara, Gabi Levi, is the only one not to be invited to the traditional meal that precedes the Ramadan fast, in the presence of Erdogan and senior officials of his Justice and Development Party. All of the other ambassadors are invited.

Israel’s defense and security community is in agreement that Turkey was moving toward becoming a radical and nuclear Islamic state. Officials and leading analysts assert that Erdogan was rapidly dismantling the secular Turkish state and turning Turkey into another Iran – a radical Muslim state soon to be armed with nuclear weapons. “There could be a deep strategic change,” Amos Gilad, a senior Defense Ministry official, says. The Israelis are particularly concerned by Erdogan’s success in intimidating the once-powerful Turkish military. They point out that Turkey has launched plans to build at least two nuclear reactors and produce enriched uranium. Israeli analysts add that under Erdogan Turkey could acquire weapons technology under the cover of a civilian nuclear program. “If there is not a change in personality, then Turkey will become Iran No. 2,” former National Security Council director Uzi Dayan says.

The Neo-Ottoman Strategy in the Balkans – Modern Turkey’s Balkan strategy conforms to the old paradigm of the Green Corridor. This is a geopolitical concept with two meanings. It denotes the Islamists’ goal of creating a contiguous chain of Muslim-dominated polities from Istanbul in the southeast to northwestern Bosnia, a mere 120 miles from Austria. It also denotes the process of increasing ethno-religious assertiveness among the Muslim communities along that route. That process entails four key elements: (1) Expanding the area of those communities’ demographic dominance; (2) Establishing and/or expanding various entities under Muslim political control with actual or potential claim to sovereign statehood; (3) Enhancing the dominant community’s Islamic character and identity within those entities, with the parallel decrease of presence and power of non-Muslim groups; and (4) Prompting Muslim communities’ ambitions for ever bolder designs in the future, even at the risk of conflict with their non-Muslim neighbors. Understanding this neo-Otoman strategic concept par excellence is essential to a comprehensive understanding of the motives, actions, and emerging expectations of different actors in the Yugoslav wars of 1991-1999 and their aftermath.

Political, cultural, religious and demographic trends among Muslim communities in the Balkans strongly suggest that the Green Corridor is taking shape, either deliberately or spontaneously. Nevertheless, many Western academic experts and media commentators (especially in the English-speaking world) have shown the tendency to be a priori dismissive of any suggestion that a long-term Islamic geopolitical design exists in the Balkans, let alone that it is being deliberately and systematically pursued. The notion of the Green Corridor was thus criticized as a product of Serbian propaganda with “Islamophobic” overtones, although its most authoritative proponents in recent years have been institutions and experts (British, Italian, American, Israeli etc.) with no ethnic or personal axe to grind in the Balkan imbroglio.

The Bosnian war was still raging when Sir Alfred Sherman, former advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and co-founder of the Centre for Policy Studies, warned that the Muslims’ objective was “to create a ‘Green Corridor’ from Bosnia through the Sanjak to Kosovo” that would separate Serbia from Montenegro. Western powers are “in effect fostering this Islamistan,” Sherman warned, and developing “close working relations with Iran, whose rulers are keen to establish a European base for their politico-religious activities.” In addition, “Washington is keen on involving its NATO ally Turkey, which has been moving away from Ataturk’s secularist and Western stance back to a more Ottomanist, pan-Muslim orientation, and is actively helping the Muslim forces.”

Sherman’s 1994 diagnosis proved to be prescient. A decade later it was echoed by Col. Shaul Shay of BESA Center at Bar-Ilan University. He noted that “the Balkans serve as a forefront on European soil for Islamic terror organizations, which exploit this area to promote their activities in Western Europe, and other focal points worldwide.” His conclusions regarding the Green Corridor are disquieting: “[T]he establishment of an independent Islamic territory including Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania… is one of the most prominent achievements of Islam since the siege of Vienna in 1683. Islamic penetration into Europe through the Balkans is one of the main achievements of Islam in the twentieth century.” Shay’s account shows how the Bosnian war provided the historical opportunity for radical Islam to penetrate the Balkans at a time when the Muslim world came to the aid of the Muslims. The Jihadist operational and organizational infrastructures were thus established.

John R. Schindler, professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer, concurs: in his view the Balkans provide the missing piece in the puzzle of al-Qa’ida’s transformation from an isolated fighting force into a lethal global threat. Radical Islam played a key role in the Yugoslav conflict, Schindler says: like Afghanistan in the 1980s, Bosnia in the 1990s became a training ground for the mujahidin, leading to blowback of epic proportions.

The Green Corridor paradigm reflects Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which used the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a paradigmatic case of the so called “fault-line wars” between Islam and the rest. During the Bosnian war (1992-1995) Alija Izetbegovic presented a “pluralist” image to the West, but his followers acted in accordance with his primary message. The fruits of their labor – and that of their coreligionists in another half-dozen countries in the region – are visible along a thousand miles’ trail through the middle of today’s Balkans.

The spread of Islam in the Balkans was “by the sword”: it was contingent upon the extent of Ottoman rule and the establishment of political and social institutions based on the teaching of Kuran and the previous seven centuries of Islamic legal and political practice. The line of the attack went from Thrace via Macedonia to Kosovo; through the Sanjak into Bosnia all the way to the Una river, was finally stopped at the Habsburgs’ Military Frontier created in the 16th century. It is noteworthy that the geographic thrust of the Ottoman attack and later colonization of Muslims from other parts of the Empire in the Balkans coincided exactly with the “Green Corridor.” The historical record further indicates that Ottoman efforts at Islamization of the local population were more determined, and far more successful, along the “Transverse” axis (Thrace-Macedonia-Kosovo-Sanjak-Bosnia) than in other conquered Christian lands (e.g. in mainland Greece, central Serbia, northern Bulgaria, or Wallachia).

The Ottoman conquest destroyed the materially and culturally rich Christian civilization of Byzantium and its dynamic and creative Slavic offspring in Serbia and Bulgaria. The conquered populations became second-class citizens (“dhimmis”), whose physical security was predicated upon their abject obedience to the Muslim masters. They were heavily taxed (jizya, or poll tax, and kharaj) and subjected to the practice of devshirme: the annual “blood levy” (introduced in the 1350s) of a fifth of all Christian boys in the conquered lands to be converted to Islam and trained as janissaries. In the collective memory of Balkan Christian nations, five centuries of Turkish conquest and overlordship – with all their consequences, social and political – are carved as an unmitigated disaster. Conversions to Islam, a phenomenon more strongly pronounced along the Green Route than in the central regions of the Empire, contributed to a new stratification of the society under Ottoman rule and a new power balance. People of the same ethno-linguistic community, sharing the same ancestors, thus often evolved into members of two fundamentally opposed social and political groups.

The Christian communities all over the Balkans are in a steep, long-term demographic decline. Fertility rate is below replacement level in every majority-Christian country in the region. The Muslims, by contrast, have the highest birth rates in Europe, with the Albanians topping the chart. On current form it is likely that Muslims will reach a simple majority in the Balkans within a generation. Turkey’s European foothold on the Straits and in Eastern Thrace is populous (over 11 million), overwhelmingly mono-ethnic (Turkish) and mono-religious (Muslim); the Christian remnant is negligible. There is a rekindled sense of kinship among the growing ranks of Turkish islamists with their Balkan co-religionists and with the old Ottoman domains further west. The re-Islamization and assertiveness of Turkey under Erdogan is essential to the revival of Islam and ethnic self-assertiveness all along the Green Corridor.

Without a strong, solidly supportive anchor at its southeastern end, no Muslim revival in former Ottoman lands along the Green Corridor would be possible. Under the AKP Turkey has become revisionist, potentially irridentist, and detrimental to stability in the Balkans. Far from providing a model of pro-Western “moderate Islam,” Kosovo, Muslim Bosnia, Sanjak, western Macedonia, and southern Bulgaria are already the breeding ground for thousands of young hard-line Islamists. Their dedication is honed in thousands of newly-built, mostly foreign-financed mosques and Islamic centers. The intent was stated by the head of the Islamic establishment in Sarajevo. “The small jihad is now finished … The Bosnian state is intact. But now we have to fight a bigger, second jihad,” Mustafa Ceric, the Reis-ul-Ulema in Bosnia-Herzegovina, declared over a decade ago. This statement reflects the inherent dynamism of political Islam.

Far from enhancing peace and regional stability, neo-Ottoman policies pursued by Ankara continue to encourage seven distinct but interconnected trends centered on the Green Corridor:

(a) Pan-Islamic agitation for the completion of an uninterrupted Transverse by linking its as yet unconnected segments.

(b) Destabilization of Bosnia resulting from constant demands for the erosion of constitutional prerogatives rooted in Dayton, leading to the abolition of the Republika Srpska.

(c) Growing separatism among Muslims in the Raska region of Serbia, manifest in the demand for the establishment of an “autonomous” Sanjak region.

(d) Continuing intensification of greater-Albanian aspirations against Macedonia, Montenegro, Greece, and rump-Serbia.

(e) Further religious radicalization and ethnic redefinition of Muslims in Bulgaria, leading to demands for territorial autonomy in the Rhodope region.

(f) Ongoing spread of Islamic agitation, mainly foreign-financed, through a growing network of mosques, Islamic centers, NGOs and “charities” all along the Route.

(g) Escalation of Turkey’s regional ambitions and Ankara’s quiet encouragement of all of the above trends and phenomena.

In all cases the immediate bill will be paid by the people of the Balkans, but long-term costs of the Green Corridor will haunt many Western policy-makers for decades to come.

The Ottoman Legacy – Washington’s stubborn denial of Turkey’s political, cultural and social reality goes hand in hand with an ongoing attempt in some quarters of the Western academia and mainstream media to rehabilitate the Ottoman Empire, and to present it as a precursor of Europe’s contemporary multiethnic, multicultural tolerance and diversity. In reality, four salient features of the Ottoman state were institutionalized discrimination against non-Muslims, total personal insecurity of all its subjects, an unfriendly coexistence of its many races and creeds, and the absence of unifying state ideology. It was a sordid Hobbesian borderland with mosques.

An “Ottoman culture,” defined by Constantinople and largely limited to its walls, did eventually emerge through the reluctant mixing of Turkish, Greek, Slavic, Jewish and other Levantine lifestyles and practices, each at its worst. The mix was impermanent, unattractive, and unable to forge identities or to command loyalties.

The Roman Empire could survive a string of cruel, inept or insane emperors because its bureaucratic and military machines were well developed and capable of functioning even when there was confusion at the core. The Ottoman state lacked such mechanisms. Devoid of administrative flair, the Turks used the services of educated Greeks and Jews and awarded them certain privileges. Their safety and long-term status were nevertheless not guaranteed, as witnessed by the hanging of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch on Easter Day 1822.

The Ottoman Empire gave up the ghost right after World War I, but long before that it had little interesting to say, or do, at least measured against the enormous cultural melting pot it had inherited and the splendid opportunities of sitting between the East and West. Not even a prime location at the crossroads of the world could prompt creativity. The degeneracy of the ruling class, blended with Islam’s inherent tendency to the closing of the mind, proved insurmountable.

A century later the Turkish Republic is a populous, self-assertive nation-state of over 70 million. Ataturk hoped to impose a strictly secular concept of nationhood, but political Islam has reasserted itself. In any event the Kemalist dream of secularism had never penetrated beyond the military and a narrow stratum of the urban elite.

Conclusion – The near-impossible task facing Turkey’s Westernized intelligentsia before Erdogan had been to break away from the lure of neoimperial irredentism abroad, and at home to reform Islam into a matter of personal choice – in other words, to make Islam separate from the State and distinct from the society. The Kemalist edifice, uneasily perched atop the simmering Islamic volcano, had always been unstable. Today it is an empty shell. Today’s Turkey is a regional power of considerable importance which bases its strategy on the concept of neo-Ottomanism, while denying its existence. Neo-Ottoman Turkey’s interests and aspirations no longer coincide with those of the United States or Europe, and they are diametrically opposed to the interests of the traditionally Orthodox Christian nations in the Balkans.

By Ioannis Michaletos | The Interpol is quite specific in identifying the real importance of Southeastern Europe in the present day European narcotics market. According to the research of that organization, two primary routes are used to smuggle heroin: the Balkan Route, which runs through South Eastern Europe, and the Silk Route, which runs through Central Asia.

Balkan Route is divided into three sub-routes: the southern route runs through Turkey, Greece, Albania and Italy. Further, there is the central route that runs through Turkey, Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and into either Italy or Austria. Lastly there is the northern route that runs from Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania to Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland or Germany. Large quantities of heroin are destined for either the Netherlands or the United Kingdom and from there on they are being distributed in neighboring markets such as Ireland or the Scandinavian countries. The anchor point for the Balkan Route is Turkey, which remains a major staging area and transportation route for heroin destined for European markets, mainly due to geographical reasons, as described previously.

Historically, the Balkan route is the main overland connection between Asia and Europe. According to previous research by Dutch research center and the monitoring of present day traffic, every year, this route is taken by around 2 million lorries, 300,000 coaches, and 6 million cars, without counting the domestic motorway traffic. The most common way to transport heroin is a relatively small quantity of 10 to 150 kilos hidden in a lorry. Considering the scale of legitimate commercial trade on the Balkan route, combined with the fact that it takes some hours to a whole day to search a lorry, explains why it is virtually impossible to counteract these activities, by ordinary Police & Customs methods. For example, it is estimated that roughly only one out of 50 lorries, is actually checked in the borders of most Southeastern European countries, therefore the probabilities of confiscating heroin under that method is quite ineffective.

The “Hot spots” of action

The customs post of Gurbulak in the province of Agri, the first Turkish village after crossing the border with Iran, is the main passage used by traffickers as it lies on the AH1 highway, the huge thoroughfare linking the Far East to Turkey, and then, through the E80 highway, from Turkey to Bulgaria and to Europe. According to the Italian-based security researchers of the FLARE Network against transnational crime, the Gurbulak pass is crossed daily by thousands of vehicles, including about 20 thousand trucks, the vehicles used most in heroin transportation. Moreover, the semi-autonomous Kurdish tribes residing in the tri-border region between Turkey-Iran-Iraq, tend to collect dues for all illicit shipments being made there, either narcotics, fuel or people’s smuggling, by facilitating such transport. In addition local corrupted public officials are working their way through the system to ensure a steady flow of heroin and collect commissions as an exchange.

Once the large shipments enter the Turkish territory coming mostly from Afghanistan, via Iran, they head towards the metropolitan region of Istanbul, an immense urban sprawl of more than 15 million people and the historical junction between Europe and Asia and between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean one.

The illegal product is unloaded in secret in warehouses, and then it is routed towards Europe. It is estimated that 37 per cent of all Afghan heroin, or 140 metric tons (mt), departs Afghanistan along the so-called Balkan route, to meet demand of around 85 mt per year. Most of the heroin interdicted in the world is seized along this route: between them, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey were responsible for more than half of all heroin seized globally in 2008.

Once the shipments are stored in Istanbul region, they are then re-exported either towards Ukraine and the port of Odessa with the crucial assistance of mostly Ukrainian and Georgian criminal gangs or towards Greece and/or Bulgaria via land routes using as a transport hub the city of Edirne and the help of local criminals. Smaller quantities travel via tourist boats to the Greek Aegean islands and lastly by air by air, from Atatürk International Airport, connected with the main European airports.

The persons responsible for the journey from Iranian borders up to the Balkans, are the Turkish organized kingpins, known locally as “Babas”, which means father, similar to “El Padron” figures in Latin America. The Babas, are mostly based in the Anatolian high-plains of Turkey and have access to a vast number of subordinates that work full time with them, either as drivers, logistics suppliers, warehouse owners, money laundering facilitators and other professions. News reports from time to time, estimated that around 25,000 people are full -time occupied in this illicit trade in the country and have a network reaching hundreds of cities and villages along the “heroin route”.

Iran and Turkey do not have a visa regime between them and border controls are in many cases lax or not strict, thus enabling a rather steady flow of heroin without probabilities of strategic interruptions. Other factors that play a crucial role are the Kurdish populations in the tri-border area between Turkey-Iraq-Iran that facilitate narcotics contraband in order to raise capital, and the widespread public sector corruption in the Balkan countries which permits heroin smugglers to penetrate to an extent local security institutions. Furthermore, the presence of strong and transnationally well-connected criminal networks such as the Italian Ndrangheta, Albanian crime syndicates, the Montenegro clans, Turkish drug kingpins, Russian, Ukrainian, Caucasian criminal cells and Serbian narcotics groups, should not be overlooked. In essence the Balkans have way too much strong and organized criminal groups concentrated and operating in the same region.

 Wider implications

Narcotics contraband is also indirectly related to illegal immigration and weapons smuggling, therefore it is an illegal industry which is multilevel and high in revenue and also linked to corrupted officials and a large number of individuals who make their living by being employed in these illicit sectors. It is not an issue which can be singled out by the rest of organized crime activities. Also it is important to note that illegal organized prostitution rings in the Balkans are directly related to narcotics, since police investigation in several countries have revealed over the years that the drug dealers first raise capital by illegal prostitution before venturing into narcotics trade which is even more profitable. It is a very rare case that a group of people become drug dealers (in a systematic, significant and organized manner), without being involved in either prostitution or goods smuggling previously.

On a wider level, it should be noted that narcotics contraband has international implications. For instance, in December 2009, the United Nations’ Drugs and Crime Tsar Antonio Maria Costa claimed that illegal drug money saved the banking industry from collapse. He claimed he had seen evidence that the proceeds of organized crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse. Thus, the Balkan heroin route, apart from a multi-billion Dollar illicit trade path, is also one generating profits indirectly to corporations thriving into the legal market, such as banks, making the whole issue of combating drug trade as a really complicated problem, that cannot be dealt with conventional measures.

The prospects don’t look especially optimistic. The current financial crisis and the widespread corruption in the Balkans will ensure that there is going to be plenty of “human capital” readily available to “invest” into narcotics smuggling; whilst the Afghani producers don’t have any serious incentives to curb their production and Iran (state employees within border and police control) being embargoed by the West, will just seek to increase their revenues by tacitly allowing the trespass through its territory of vast amounts of heroin.

Narcotics trade is extremely difficult to be contained without long-term efforts and cooperation between all countries involved. Narcotics are a lure for criminals because they are fast moving objects with extremely high yield and return on “investment”.

The illegal Immigration Organized Crime Industry

Basic human trafficking principle in S.E Europe: “You enter from Iran; you exit from Greece”

Trafficking of people to Europe via Turkey is based on a Ford-type assembly line, according to the Turkish security specialist and academic Professor Icduygu, and it involves small groups of traffickers (the so-called kacakcılar), each of which ensures the passage of migrants from one border to the other, from one city to another city. In addition the Greek Police and its organized crime analysis directory, have in the recent past analyzed the multitude of human trafficking networks operating in the country and regionally and concluded that all of them are interrelated through several persons or small groups of people that operate as information hubs and facilitate trafficking. In turn, those people are related to prominent figures in several countries and thus they are able to extent heavy influence in political or economic spheres and be able to evade the Law in many cases. In 2011 the Greek press, leaked a secret report by the Greek intelligence service, that concluded around a numerous network of people connected to the illegal immigration industry that even financed pro-immigration NGO’s in order to manipulate the public opinion into accepting the mass introduction of illegal immigrants in the country. Moreover the report mentioned around a web of illicit monetary transactions that had as a purpose to control specific sectors of the local economy and thus the smugglers aimed at penetrating stratums of the society so as to gain clear political influence. In sort, the illegal immigration industry in Southeastern Europe is primarily based on an extensive web of interpersonal relations between individuals that are involved in the sectors of transport, logistics, real estate, along with prominent smugglers of narcotics and weapons that are also involved in an ad hoc basis in the mass immigration of undocumented aliens.

Since 2008, Greece is the main entrance point for illegal immigrants from Asia into the EU, through Turkey and the overwhelming majority of the persons arrested as traffickers by the Greek authorities, are local citizens, along with Turks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Georgians and Pakistanis.

The human traffickers have also a division of labor and pay special attention into two sectors, which are document forging and housing. The first sector is a booming illicit market in Southeastern Europe whereby fake passports and ID’s change hands on an hourly basis and for significant amounts of money. Routinely tourists are being spotted and then stolen not for the value of their possessions, but mostly for the passports they carry, who are then forged and sold to bidders. The housing market, is also a hugely profitable one, since hundreds of thousands of immigrants are literally stashed in decaying building in several Balkans countries and pay their accommodation per head on a per diem case to the persons renting the apartments, who mostly belong to the traffickers groups or are related to them as acquaintances. A 40 sq meter apartment on a 50 year old decaying building in the center of Athens, whose rent would not be more than 100-150 Euros per month -if rented to one person-, generates 100 Euros per day when rented by traffickers to a group of 20 immigrants each paying 5 Euros per day. One billion Dollars is the estimated income for illegal immigrant trafficking just in the Greek-Turkish borders for 2010 alone by calculating the capital they paid for their “journey”. More income is generated by the exploitation of immigrants after their entry in the target country. That includes their housing needs and most importantly their use as a conduit of illegal actions, such as narcotics dealers, undocumented street vendors and similar activities.

Greece as a regional epicenter

It is estimated that around 400-500,000 illegal immigrants from Asian and African states are in Greece in 2012 and most of them want to move to Northern Europe. It is of importance to note that once and if Bulgaria and Romania enter the Schengen free movement in the EU agreement, a huge traffic of these people is expected in the Greek-Bulgarian borders. Already attempts by traffickers to test the border control system in these two countries, has been made. In Serbia it is unofficially mentioned by local Police authorities that approximately 20,000 people of Afghani and Pakistani origin mostly have been “trapped” in the territory, not being able to move towards Western Europe and unwilling to repatriate back. The issue is steadily becoming a societal one for the whole of the Balkans.

Over the past three years, Greece is becoming, and especially Athens; the coordinating center for the transporting of Asian illegal immigrants from the Balkans to Europe. Sophisticated methods of operations are being used by the criminal networks. An Example of The Many: Central European nationals, such as Slovakians or Hungarians act as “intermediates” for criminal groups, rent houses in Athens or shops and then proceed into recruiting Asians that want to be transferred with the collaboration mostly of Greek and Albanian criminals.

The Central Europeans belong to Schengen countries, which is a crucial point. Also, since they are not at the moment well-known to the authorities of the S.E European countries, they have more room to move and cross borders, without fearing surveillance. In many cases young women from those countries marry (White marriages) in order to create legal papers for Nigerians, Iranians and Pakistanis especially, who pay 4-8,000 Euros each individual. Since 2010, diplomatic missions by Central European countries have alerted the Greek authorities of the aforementioned and pointed out towards well-coordinated criminal networks that have even taken control of local “missionary churches” that although they seem to have no followers, they are able to issue hundreds of marital documents per year to persons of specific nationalities and for the reasons explained previously. It can be safely assumed that the vast majority of marriages being made in Greece, and also to other Balkan countries over the past few years between Asian and African immigrants and European citizens; is a product of well-coordinated facilitation for the purposes of illegal immigration to Europe.

Countermeasures

The issues concerning the Southeastern Europe and especially those of heroin trade and illegal immigration have alarmed both local and international authorities, such as Interpol, Europol but also U.S DEA, UK’s SOCA and various other security agencies. Because of the complicated nature of the issues and the difficulty of cooperation between so many countries, no authority has been able to contain effectively the problems at hand. Several initiatives that are under way, or being discussed for, include the creation of joint police teams for analysis work and the establishment of periodic international security forums. Moreover, cooperation between security and police forces of the Balkan countries regarding money laundering, and modernization of the anti-narcotics units of the Balkan countries with the assistance of more experienced organizations by partner countries (EU, USA, etc). Little though, has been done on a political level and little attention has been shown into looking the issue from a holistic perspective, meaning the understanding that Narcotics, weapons, prostitution, and illegal immigration markets, are all related between them, thus the bureaucratic security structures have to perform joint operations in order to really enforce the Law rather than staging individual operations on a compartmentalized manner.

Organized crime, especially in narcotics and illegal immigration sectors is multifaceted, and it penetrates all spectrums of society- so the countermeasures should take this into account. That essentially means that Judicial, security, intelligence, police, military and social agencies have to combine efforts, share thoughts, propose joint initiatives and conduct dialogue between them and in a synopsis view illicit activities under a holistic plan, by encompassing all spectrums of the current reality.

Estimations

Heroin trade is the locomotive for the generation of illicit earnings in Southeastern Europe and illegal immigration is becoming a central organized criminal activity with direct political & social implications for Europe, because it is directly related to demographic trends and has political implications.

As a consequence, the region of Southeastern Europe, sooner or later will face heavy political pressure, mostly from the EU, in order to counteract to these issues and that will certainly create all sorts of developments due to the already strong influence of local criminal networks that will obviously strive to maintain their illegal sphere of influence and earnings.

On a second level, the present day financial crisis that has affected greatly countries such as Greece, Romania and tends to spread in the rest of the neighboring countries, may well have as a side effect the further empowerment of both heroin trade and increase of illegal immigration trafficking due to the involvement of further human resources in these illicit markets for reasons correlated to the lack of employment opportunities and scarce capital base.