Serbia’s President elect Aleksandar Vucic has recently exposed damning statements from William Walker, the American former head of the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) mission to the war torn Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija.
Vucic’ statements speak of Walker’s desire to create a so-called Greater Albania that will annex parts of neighbouring states including Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Greece into a large Albanian state in the Balkans.
Mr. Walker’s statements were not leaked but were made publicly. The scandal is that few people in the media have reported these statements. This is why the Serbian President-elect highlighted them in an interview with Sputnik.
Mr. Walker has stated the following on Monday while in Pristina
“This project that I’m working on is meant for all Albanians in Kosovo in the diaspora, in Albania. I’m working on a joint project for their unification. Albanians worldwide were united in the 1990s with the sole purpose of the liberation of Kosovo. I was with them when they declared independence. Albanians have won and they came here to celebrate together. Now is the time for the final step, for all of us to be together, to accomplish this achievement”.
President-elect Vucic responded to these inflammatory remarks, saying,
“Serbia will in every place and at every level present this as the ultimate proof that Walker’s goal was never to protect human rights in Kosovo but to fight against Serbia and for the creation of the ‘Greater Albania’.”
William Walker was in the then Yugoslav Republic of Serbia as early as 1998. He was one of the key figures whose statements NATO used as a justification for a war on Yugoslavia.
Walker fabricated evidence that Serbs were engaged in acts of aggression against ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija, often just called Kosovo.
The reality couldn’t have been further from the truth. Walker was essentially the Yugoslav equivalent of Colin Powell speaking before the UN about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.
Likewise in Yugoslavia, most people in Kosovo and Metohija lived in peace. To that end, throughout the latter half of the 20th century, living standards in Yugoslavia were far higher for all citizens than those in the neighbouring Albanian state.
In spite of this, a minority of Albanians began a slow insurgency and campaign of extreme violence against Serbs living in Kosovo and Metohija. This combined with the fact that the 1974 Constitution of Yugoslavia gave non-Serbs living in provinces of Serbia autonomy while not allowing Serbs living in Yugoslav republics like Bosnia and Croatia the same privilege, lead Serbs to petition the Yugoslav government in the form of the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art (SANU Memorandum).
The SANU memorandum’s major points included
–A desire to redress the imbalance of the Yugoslav Constitution so that reforms could be made to afford Serbs outside of the Serbian Yugoslav Republic the same autonomous rights as non-Serbs in autonomous provinces of Serbia.
–Highlighting of the atrocities committed by ethnic Albanians against Serbs and others in places like Kosovo.
–Highlighting the sacrifices that Serbs had made for Yugoslav freedom and unity in the world wars.
The entire memorandum, translated into English can be read here.
At the time, the memorandum was denounced by future Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević as well as future Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić.
By the late 1980s, constitutional amendments were made to redress the problems of an imbalance against the rights of Serbs in both Kosovo as well as in the autonomous Serbian province of Vojvodina.
However, this did little to quell the Albanian insurrection. Throughout the 1990s, as Yugoslavia became a war zone, a group that even the United States recognised as a terrorist organisation for much of the decade, the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) began a guerrilla war against both Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija, as well as Albanians who wanted to maintain the political status quo and live in peace.
Thanks in large part to the efforts of William Walker, the KLA was declassified as a terrorist group by the US, shortly before Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair led NATO into a war on Yugoslavia, a war which saw the US fighting with the KLA terrorists. The war had no UN authorisation and consiquently was both a war crime according to international law as well as a violation of NATO’s own charter which defined the group as a defensive alliance. No Balkan state was in NATO in 1999.
READ MORE: 18 years later, the spectre of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia still haunts Europe
The war displaced thousands of Serbian families in their own country. Many are still without proper homes almost 20 years later.
Now, the likes of Walker as well as the current Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, are speaking openly about annexing parts of Serbia as well as other Balkan states like Macedonia, in an attempt to great a ‘Greater Albania’.
The so-called Tirana Platform is more or less a blueprint for how Albanians can ironically ‘Balkanise’ the Balken Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, while the Albanian Prime Minister recently spoke openly about annexing parts of Serbia.
READ MORE: Albanian PM threatens to annex part of Serbia if the EU doesn’t admit Albania
The conflict has in recent decades also taken on a religious aspect as majority Sunni Muslim Albanians have burnt down sacred Orthodox Christian Serbian churches in Kosovo and Metohija.
Since the early 2000s, the religious angel of a dirty protracted ethnic war has become even more magnified.
The Tirana Platform designed to weaken Macedonia, threats to annex parts of Serbia and Montenegro’s controversial ascension into NATO, something which most Montenegrin citizens oppose, is designed to accomplish two things.
First of all, it is an attempt to weaken Serbia in the Balkans by surrounding what remains of Serbia by hostile states and secondly, the west is attempting to draw Russia into a new war in the Balkans, playing on Russia’s historic fraternal ties to Serbia.
READ MORE: NATO is trying to draw Russia into a new Balkan war
William Walker is supposed to represent the neutral ‘so-called’ international community, but as the Serbian President-elect rightly says, Walker is merely a lobbyist for the Greater Albania project, a project that threatens the legal territorial integrity of up to four Balkan states.
Anywhere else in the world, Mr. Walker would be considered a menace, but because it’s the Balkans, he’s ignored in public and praised behind the scenes.
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