On February 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron reportedly agreed to try to secure a ceasefire in the Donbass where shelling along the entire front line dramatically increased over the past few days. The self-proclaimed republics have started mass evacuation of the civilian population, allegedly fearing of an “imminent” Ukrainian military offensive.

Ever since Russia issued an “ultimatum” to the United States in December 2021, demanding an end to NATO expansion eastward, many American analysts and politicians have been speculating about on which day o a Russian invasion of the Eastern European country may begin. After Russia did not attack Ukraine on February 16, as the US President Joe Biden had predicted, the Kremlin officials as well as the Donbass leaders started playing the same game – accusing Ukraine of planning to launch an imminent military offensive against the Russian proxies.

“The Armed Forces of Ukraine can intensify their offensive on the night of February 21 near Donetsk and Lugansk”, said Viktor Vodolatsky, a high-ranking Russian lawmaker, stressing that the Ukrainian Army is “moving towards the self-proclaimed republics”.

Many other Russian politicians insist that a large-scale war could come at any time. Alexander Borodai who served as the first prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and is now a member of the Russian Parliament, claims that a war between Russia and Ukraine is inevitable. It is worth remembering that in 2015 Borodai said that Russian actions in the southeast of Ukraine were a “false start”. Does that mean that in 2022 the Kremlin could capture not just the Donbass, but also other Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine?

According to the Russian political and military analyst Yuriy Podolyaka, tensions in the region will reach its climax on February 21 and 22, while in December 2021 Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Russian systemic opposition Liberal Democratic Party, said that the war will break out on February 22 at 4 AM.

What Russian and Western analysts and politicians have in common is that they both seem to enjoy speculating about the exact date Russia and Ukraine could start a war. But what if they prove to be wrong again?

There are fears in the West that the Russian President Vladimir Putin could seize the entire Ukraine, as well as the Baltic states – Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia – and even try to destabilize the Balkans. Such actions, however, do not seem to be realistic, especially in the Balkans – a region in southeastern Europe that is heavily in the United States’ and the European Union’s geopolitical orbit.

It is entirely possible, however, that Putin could try to fabricate a humanitarian crisis in the Donbass. Indeed, Putin has already started accusing Ukraine of committing “genocide” in the Donbass, and Russian media now focus on a “refugee crisis”, given that thousands of people from the region have been evacuated to Russia. Such a narrative – well-known in the Balkans where the West used the same tactics in the 1990s to demonize the Serbs – could eventually serve as a pretext for a military campaign against Ukraine.

To this day, however, Putin continues to call Ukrainians “brotherly people”, although he refuses to return the coal-rich Donbass region and gas-rich Crimea to “brotherly” Ukraine. Instead, Moscow has deployed tens of thousands of troops near the Ukrainian border, most likely in an attempt to send a message to Kiev and Washington that Russia will intervene in case Ukraine launches a military offensive in the Donbass.

If a large-scale war really breaks out, the Donbass republics can count on Serbian volunteers, who already fought on the pro-Russian side in 2014, while fighters from Croatia could yet again join the neo-Nazi Ukrainian Azov battalion. There are also rumors that mercenaries from other Balkan nations could go to the front line in Eastern Ukraine, although not many people in the region are particularly eager to fight in what looks to be a proxy war between Russia and the United States on the Ukrainian territory.

Officially, Serbia calls on both Russia and Ukraine to resolve the crisis by diplomatic means, while the President of Croatia Zoran Milanovic threatens to recall all troops from NATO forces in Eastern Europe in case a conflict between Moscow and Kiev escalates. In other words, Serbia and Croatia are seeking to preserve good ties with both Russia and Ukraine. However, if the West puts enough pressure on the two countries, Belgrade and Zagreb will have to openly side with Kiev.

Meanwhile, the Balkan nations, as well as the rest of the world, will wait to see if apocalyptic predictions of a major war in Europe will come true.

According to video footage that became viral on social media, Serbia’s President appeared to react with some puzzlement when Trump announced, in the Oval Office, that the Balkan country agreed to move its embassy to Jerusalem in less than a year. Vucic was scratching his head bemusedly as US President spoke, which is why many speculate that Serbian leader apparently did not know what he signed.

Just a few days after the “historic summit” in Washington, the European Union warned Serbia and Kosovo that they could be hurting their chances for EU membership by moving their embassies to Jerusalem. The threat would hold more weight if Serbia had not already been left languishing on the “European path” for two decades and ife all European Union members so much as recognized Kosovo. Still, it is unusual for Brussels so directly to take on both the US and Israel.

The Serbia – Kosovo deal was primarily important to Trump in order to demonstrate at least some foreign policy success. That is why the agreement on economic normalization was signed in Washington, as one of its main goals was to emphasize Trump’s dominant role. In addition, a photograph of Vucic sitting in the Oval Office looking like a naughty schoolboy summoned by the headmaster Trump also became viral, and it said a lot about Serbia’s place in the modern world.

The deal signed in Washington also clearly demonstrated who “the real boss” in the Balkans is. Besides Norway and the Donbass, the so called Western Balkans is the only energy-rich territory in Europe, especially in terms of coal reserves and hydroelectric potential. As natural gas and crude oil become scarce, natural resources in Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Albania could play a very important role. That is why the region will likely stay in the US sphere of influence, and may never join the EU. Also, the Serbia – Kosovo deal includes the US request for energy diversification, which means that Serbia may have to reduce its purchase of Russian natural gas. That could be one reason that Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova posted a picture on Facebook of Vucic in the White House, alongside a picture of Stone from the 1992 film Basic Instinct, at a police interrogation where her character briefly exposes herself.

“If you are invited to the White House but your chair stands like you are in an interrogation, you should sit like in the picture number 2. Whoever you are. Just trust me,” Zakharova wrote.

Vucic, on the other hand, said while he was in Washington he “defended Serbia’s close ties with Russia, including an arms purchase, and his refusal to impose Western sanctions against Moscow over its policies in Ukraine”. However, given that Serbia’s President agreed to unconditionally remove the Serbian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, it is not very likely that he would have opposed any Trump request that he join in anti-Russia sanctions. In other words, the US likely did not make such requests at all. If it did, Vucic would have broken ties with Russia, just like he agreed to ban Huawei’s 5G technology in Serbia, even though the Chinese company is reportedly heavily involved in a new system of video-surveillance in Belgrade.

Finally, Serbia’s decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem will undoubtedly spoil the country’s relations with Palestine, as well as with the rest of the Arab world. On the other hand, Belgrade will not get any concessions from Israel. In fact, before the “historic deal” in Washington, the Jewish state was among the countries that did not recognize Kosovo. In an exchange of Serbia’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recognized the independence of Kosovo, which Serbia still considers as part of its territory. Pristina is also unlikely to benefit from normalization of relations with Israel, and the step may worsen its relations with other Muslim countries after it opens embassy in Jerusalem. Thus, at least in the short-term, the only winners of the Serbia – Kosovo deal seem to be “the most pro-Israel president in American history” and Bibi Netanyahu.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Euronews: “Serbian president Vucic asked about moving embassy in Israel to Jerusalem”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban not only continued to defend his anti-immigrant bigotry but went on to say that Islam has never been part of Europe.

Mr. Orban not only is increasing the misery of largely Muslim refugees, but now he has erased 1300 years of European culture and politics, committing a sort of cliocide or mass killing of history.

The European “continent” is a little bit of an invented construct, but in any case it has been powerfully shaped by peoples who “came to us,” as Orban said of the Muslims. The Indo-European speaking peoples appear to have begun coming in from Syria and Turkey around 9,000 years ago. Hungarian as a language is probably Siberian from beyond the Urals, and its older forms show heavy Persian and Turkic influences. People in what is now Hungary did not speak Hungarian until well after people in southern Spain were speaking Arabic. Orban is clinging to a European nativism that has less historical grounding than that of European Arabs.

There isn’t a good way to exclude Spain or the Balkans from Europe. No history of either region could omit a heavy Muslim heritage. While it is true that Islam “came into” these areas from elsewhere, how is that different from everything else in Europe?

So too did the (Indo-European) Spanish language and the Slavic languages come into Europe from elsewhere. So too did Christianity, which invaded from the Middle East and was rejected until Constantine (and by many long after that). The indigenous European language in Spain was Basque. The indigenous religion was the worship of earth deities like Mari and Sugaar. The Celts perhaps brought a form of Druidism. Later on, many Spanish coastal cities such as Barcelona were founded by Phoenicians from Lebanon and they worshiped Baal. Christianity was a minor affair until after 313 AD / CE, and it is by no means clear that a majority of Spaniards were Christian in 711 when the Muslims began taking over the Iberian Peninsula. Only from 1492 was Islam largely liquidated in Spain, though large numbers of secret Muslims continued to live in Andalusia for perhaps centuries thereafter.

So Christianity had maybe a 400-year lead on Islam in western Europe, and Europeans belonged to neither of them in the heyday of the Roman Empire, the supposed crucible of classical Europe.

Sicily was an Arab Muslim Emirate 831–1072, with profound impacts on southern Italy. They remained a majority on the island until the mid-1200s.

The Ottoman Empire and Islam were central to the history of the Balkans and eastern Europe from the 1200s forward. While it is often thought that the Ottomans only had the Balkans, at some points their sway was much wider than that.

What is now Hungary was Ottoman Hungary 1541 to 1699.

The Ottomans did not simply preside over much of eastern Europe. People converted to Islam, largely voluntarily, or immigrated from Anatolia. European communities such as the Bosnians and Albanians have been Muslim for centuries. Maybe their Islam is a few centuries younger than the Christianity of Hungarians, but both religions came to that region from the Middle East long after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Muslim technology and culture had an impact. In the medieval period, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) had an enormous influence on the Catholic scholastic thinkers. Avicenna’s medical work, the Qanun or Canon, was still taught at Leipzig in the early 1700s. The Muslim observatory at Maragheh in Iran produced astronomical observations that influenced Copernicus.

h/t Allaboutturkey.com

Ottoman policy deeply influenced the history and culture of eastern Europe, including that of Orban himself. The Ottomans favored Protestantism and especially Calvinism, playing an important role in protecting them in Hungary and Transylvania. That’s right. The 11.6% of Hungarians who today say they are Calvinists, including Orban himself, are there in some important part because Sultans like Suleyman the Magnificent and Selim II gave their ancestors a refuge in their dominions. Had Hungary been ruled by Catholics then, Protestantism would have likely been virtually wiped out, as it was in Catholic Spain, or, indeed, in the thin strip of Catholic Austrian-ruled western Hungary itself.

That’s right, Viktor Orban’s religious heritage was shaped and made possible by the relatively tolerant Muslim policy in Ottoman Hungary.

French jurist and thinker Jean Bodin (1530–1596) wrote of rulers like Suleyman the Magnificent:

“The great emperor of the Turks does with as great devotion as any prince in the world honour and observe the religion by him received from his ancestors, and yet detests he not the strange religions of others; but on the contrary permits every man to live according to his conscience: yes, and that more is, near unto his palace at Pera, suffers four diverse religions viz. that of the Jews, that of the Christians, that of the Grecians, and that of the Mahometans [Muslims].”

In other words, Bodin’s characterization of the Muslim Ottoman rulers who then were Hungary’s monarchs shows them to have been far superior to today’s Orban, who does not even seem to know that his ancestors benefited from living under their scepter.

—-

Related video:

Ukraine Today: “EU Migrant Summit: Hungary’s Orban says he is not closing border with Croatia”

Support among Russians for military intervention in Syria has more than doubled, to 31 percent in early October from 14 percent in September, according to independent pollster Levada Center.

The increase comes with coverage of air strikes filling Russian state airwaves, press, and the Internet, and social-media salvoes fired from both sides of the debate.

Via social media: Pro-Kremlin Twitter satirist Lev Sharansky published this cartoon lampooning the idea of a moderate Syrian opposition.

On social networks like Twitter, expressions of support for Moscow's air raids appear to fit into three distinct categories: perceived cultural and historical affinities between Syria and Russia; purported Western helplessness in the face of the continuing Syrian crisis; and the conflation of any armed forces opposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime under the "terrorist" banner.

1. #SyriaIsOurs

The hashtag #СирияНаша (#SyriaIsOurs) has become a polemical football, kicked back and forth by Kremlin fans and the opposition alike.

For supporters of Russia's actions in Syria, it's an appeal for concern about the fate of that country based on perceived common religious and cultural foundations. Lawmaker Semyon Bagdasarov articulated this line of reasoning best when he declared on late-night television that Syria was much closer to Russia than many people believe. "Without Syria, without [the ancient city of] Antioch, there would be no Orthodoxy and there would be no Rus. This is our land!" Bagdasarov said. 

” Syria is our Land!”

For Russia's political opposition, the phrase is an ironic allusion to the "Crimea is ours" slogan that emerged following Russia's unrecognized annexation of that Ukrainian peninsula in March 2014 and thus an indictment of Putin's adventurism in foreign policy.

Maria Katasonova, an aide to Russian presidential advisory-board member Yevgeny Fyodorov, used the hashtag with a photo of herself at a rally next to the Syrian Embassy in Moscow. In the photo, Katasonova is holding a portrait of embattled Russian ally Assad. 

У Посольства Сирии проводим акцию. #Syria #Путин #Асад #СирияНаша pic.twitter.com/x6xxdDJEtv

— Мария Катасонова (@KatasonovaMaria) October 1, 2015

"#SyriaIsOurs" has also appeared alongside photos of purported Syrian activists thanking Russia (and whoever else was cropped out of this photo, by the way) for its support for Assad. 

#СирияНаша pic.twitter.com/ZQB5QCd6tW

— Лиса (@EKasatka) September 30, 2015

2. "Let's outdo the West"

Syria's civil war erupted in 2011 after Assad's forces brutally dispersed peaceful antigovernment protests, setting off a spiral of violence and armed opposition. The militant Islamic State (IS) group subsequently declared a caliphate — a state ruled by strict Islamic law — and began claiming territory in mid-2014. Kremlin supporters accuse the West of fecklessness in its attempts to resolve either crisis. It has therefore fallen to Russia, President Vladimir Putin and his supporters argue, to stop the radicals and bring peace to Syria.

This narrative depicts U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in distress, at a loss over what to do about IS. Putin, smiling at the helm of a fighter jet, suggests trying a MiG, which this meme claims is a great cure for headaches. 

Other Russians echo Putin's accusation of U.S. "meddling" in the world as the cause of the conflict.

"American democracy, Syria before and after," reads this tweet: 

Russian conspiracy theories are particularly rampant. Some accuse the West of secretly supporting terrorists, presumably reflecting speculation in some corners that Washington was involved in creating IS or alluding to overt U.S. support for some of the armed forces fighting to dislodge Assad's government.

"We do not negotiate with terrorists," says Obama in this meme. "We just sponsor them." 

3. "They are all terrorists"

The broad and fractured opposition to Assad's regime controls some Syrian territory, including stretches in the hands of extremist groups like IS and Al-Qaeda's Al-Nusra Front and others in the hands of relative moderates like the Free Syrian Army and Syrian National Council. A major fear in Washington and Ankara amid Russia's buildup ahead of the current bombardment campaign centered on Moscow's unqualified support for Assad and its related policy of labeling all anti-Assad forces as extremists. The United States and others have contended that Russia's air strikes have targeted not IS, as Moscow claims, but other forces opposed to Assad's government.

Putin's Internet defenders have argued there is no "moderate opposition" to Assad in Syria — only Assad's legitimate regime and terrorists.

The Russian Embassy in the United Arab Emirates tweeted a cartoon aimed at proving that point. 

Find the right #Syrian rebel to arm – non-trivial task to start your day with | #Syria #سوريا #ISIL #Nusra #داعش pic.twitter.com/Gc60dVAn7D

— Russian Embassy, UAE (@RusEmbassyUAE) October 5, 2015

Pro-Kremlin Twitter satirist Lev Sharansky published a cartoon similarly lampooning the idea of a moderate Syrian opposition:  [above]

That argument isn't limited to pro-Kremlin hacks, by the way. Anton Nosik, a prominent Kremlin critic whom some describe as the "founder of the Russian Internet," shocked many liberals when he wrote on LiveJournal that "whoever bombs Syria today, I very much welcome it. And if [Syria] is erased from the face of the earth, I wouldn't be disappointed at all, I would only say thanks."

Little wonder, then, that Russian pilots flying sorties over Syria are being hailed by some as Hollywood superstars from the movie Top Gun (which, incidentally, prompted a surge in young men joining the U.S. Navy). 

Via RFE/ RL

Copyright (c) 2015. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

These days, the park flanking Belgrade’s bus terminal and the nearby railway station teems with migrants.

They are from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Somalia, and they are on the last leg of a grueling journey they hope will take them to the European Union.

Inside the bus terminal, dozens of haggard-looking migrants, many with young children, are waiting for the bus to Subotica. From this town in northern Serbia, which lies just a few kilometers from EU member Hungary, they will try to cross into the European Union.

When the bus rolls in, a group of about 15 men, most of them very young, group outside the door holding their tickets.

The driver waits before letting them in. “Tickets!” he then barks.

Back Of The Bus

Without a word, he directs them towards the back of the bus — without even glancing at their seat numbers.

When I board the bus, the driver lights up. “Hello!” he chirps, politely inviting me to take a seat in the front. My seat number, however, is 25 — right in the back of the bus.

Asked why he is seating me in the front, the driver tells me to just do as I’m told.

By the time everyone is seated, the arrangement is clear: the Serbian passengers all sit in the front, while all the migrants sit in the back.

But the migrants know better than to complain; they seem grateful to even be on that bus. They sit in silence, looking fixedly at the road.

I get up and sit next to a young migrant. His name is Mohammad, he is 16.

“I’m from Afghanistan and I’m going to Germany for work,” he tells me in broken English. “First I will go to Hungary, I have a friend there.”

Behind us, the others start smiling and peering at us. Mohammad is travelling with a 13-year-old girl and another teenage boy. Unlike him, they don’t speak any English.

“The situation in Afghanistan is very bad because of the Taliban fighting, and it’s getting worse every day,” Mohammad continues. “My mother, my father, and my sister stayed behind. They are very poor.”

Asked whether he has enough food and clothes, Mohammad grows stern.

He shows me his satchel and insists that he has everything he needs. When I offer him and his friends a bag of crisps, they all politely decline.

Later, I phone several experts for reactions.

“We will be seeing more and more of this,” Dragan Popovic, from the Center for Practical Policy, says with a sigh. “We are robbing these people, making money out of them, or sending them on their way so they don’t bother us here.”

Zeljko Stanetic, an analyst at the Civic Center in Vojvodina, says he recently saw graffiti in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, calling on the country to “throw immigrants in the trash.”

The number of migrants and refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, and Tunisia, travelling overland through the Balkans on their way to the EU has dramatically increased in recent years.

The number of people apprehended crossing the Serbia-Hungary border alone has risen by more than 2,500 percent since 2010 — from 2,370 to 60,602, according to an Amnesty International report.

We arrive in Subotica.

Ignored And Cheated

At the bus station, three Afghan men are trying to buy bottled water from a kiosk. The vendor slams the door shut, locks up the store, and walks off.

Across from the kiosk, taxi drivers are waiting for the latest batch of refugees.

Subotica taxis have been known to cheat migrants by charging them $50 before dropping them off near a forest a few kilometers away, telling them they have arrived at the border.

A group of Afghans I meet at the station decides to walk the 10 kilometers separating them from Hungary. If they are lucky, they will be able to pass unnoticed by border guards and will be one step closer to realizing their most cherished dream: a safe life in the European Union.

“It’s nothing,” says one of them. “It took us 35 hours to reach Iran, we walked through the desert without water, food, or anything else. Then we traveled six days from Turkey to Bulgaria. After Bulgaria, we came to Serbia. I set off two months ago.”

Via RFE/ RL

Copyright (c) 2015. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.
——

Related video added by Juan Cole:

Euronews: “Riot breaks out at Hungarian migrant camp”

On 12 June, 5,000 skirts and dresses were hung on 45 clotheslines in the football stadium in Prishtina, capital of Kosova. “The laundry is washed clean, like the women who are clean and pure—they carry no stain,” asserted artist Alketa Xhafa-Mripa, the Kosovar originator of the art installation. The football stadium was chosen as the place of installation for the contrast with its masculine association, its centrality in Prishtina, and for the clear visibility of the skirts and dresses on the field.

In the 1998-1999 war in Kosova, an estimated 20,000 Albanian women and girls were raped by Serbian soldiers and especially Serbian paramilitary. Until now, there was no effective way of remembering this. Albanian culture is traditional and such matters could not be mentioned for fear of the social stigma. Almost all Albanians in Kosova are Muslim and this adds to the social conservatism.

The International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague was particularly ineffective in dealing with rape in Kosova. Kosovar women who had been raped by Serbian forces and who had been convinced to testify as anonymous witnesses found that while their identities were protected while at the Tribunal in the Hague, they were revealed back in Kosova by Milošević’ team. They felt betrayed by the Tribunal, and some reportedly threatened to commit suicide rather than return to Kosova.

Sevdije Ahmeti, who had convinced the women to testify, said she would never again counsel women to testify under such circumstances. “If the Tribunal had understood the importance of family honor in Kosova, it would never have requested them to testify, or at the very least, it would have worked harder to maintain anonymity.” Sevidje Ahmeti later explained that only women with no close living male relative would even consider reporting a rape (Trix, F. “Underwhelmed”— Kosovar Albanians’ Reactions to the Milošević Trial,” in Timothy Waters (ed.) The Milošević Trial: An Autopsy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 229-248).

Earlier, in the 1990s during the Bosnian War, Turkish women had sent white crocheted head scarves to Bosnian women who had been raped as symbols of purity and that they were martyrs. Again the attempt was to counter the social stigma that accrues to women who have been violated through no fault of their own.

What is more memorable and impressive about the Kosovar installation is its public nature. Even before it was put up, Alketa Xhafa-Mripa spent a month going around to different towns in Kosova hearing stories of survivors and encouraging people to donate skirts. Xhafa-Mripa who is Kosova-born but now lives in London got Tony Blair’s wife to make a donation. President Atifete Jahjaga, the first woman president of Kosova, also made a donation and supported the installation throughout.

More important are the local donations. A red satin dress with a rosebud pattern was donated with the message on it: “This dress has a bitter story.” And most important, fathers, husbands, and brothers brought dresses and skirts and helped in the installation.

As President Atifete Jahjaga said, “This is a call the break the silence, to fight the stigma, a call to act, a call to raising awareness, and a call for acceptance.” The fact that the clean skirts and dresses were hung out clothes-lines on 12 June, the 16th anniversary of the entry of NATO into Prishtina, a day of commemoration in Kosova is meant to bring the sacrifices of the women into a positive sense of community.

Frances Trix is professor of linguistics and anthropology at Indiana University.

—-

Related video added by Juan Cole:

AJ+: “Kosovo Artist Hangs Dresses For 20,000 Wartime Rape Victims”

Now it appears, thanks to EU mediation, there will be new national elections in Macedonia next April 2016. In one sense it is quite early—there were national elections in April 2014 in which Nikola Gruevski, president since 2006, was once again elected. But in another sense, these elections are not all early. Macedonia has been simmering politically for several years.

The current political tension is between opposition leader Zoran Zaev of the Social Democrats and President Nikola Gruevski of the VMRO-DPME party. Gruevski, a rightist technocrat, has had control of most media in this landlocked Balkan nation of two million. And yet Zaev’s allegations surfaced.

Zaev accused Gruevski of wiretapping 20,000 people, including judges, police, politicians, religious leaders, and foreign diplomats. Slowly, over the past six months, Zaev released documents to prove it along with embarrassing content. As public opposition to Gruevski grew, Gruevski’s responses morphed from accusing Zaev of dealing with a foreign power, to forbidding him from leaving the country, to accusing him of wiretapping.

In spring of this year, Zaev made public emails allegedly from Gruevski that appeared to show how four years ago Gruevski had tried to cover up the killing of 21-year old Martin Neskovski by special security police the night of Gruevski’s victory in the 2011 election. News of the attempted cover-up was not well received. The first week in May this year there were large demonstrations in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, against Gruevski.

Gruevski’s initial response after the emails of the Neskovski killing were made public was to let the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Transport resign. This did not work. Another large opposition demonstration was planned for the following Saturday in Skopje.

Then on that Saturday, May 9, an alleged “terrorist incident” took place in the city of Kumanovo in which eight police and fourteen Albanians were killed. Gruevski called for flags at half-mast.

Albanians in Kumanovo immediately spoke up to say that they had no part in this, that it was not what it seemed. The government then came out and acknowledged that the Albanians who were killed were not from Macedonia, but from Kosovo. There is a smuggling route that goes through there; it is anyone’s guess who these convenient Kosovars were.

To understand why this was so convenient a distraction for the government, it is important to know that officially Macedonia is 65% Macedonian Slav, 25% Albanian Muslim, and the rest Turk, Roma, Serb, Vlach, and Bosniak minorities. The main tension that the government was trying to exploit was between Macedonian Slavs and Albanian Muslims. Indeed, in 2001 there had been incidents between Slavs and Albanians which led to the internationally negotiated Ohrid Framework Agreement which guarantees certain rights for minorities with 20% or more of the population within a district.

Only this time, for the first time, the distraction of Macedonian-Albanian animosity did not hold. In public demonstrations against Gruevski, people had begun putting Macedonian and Albanian flags side by side to emphasize that they did not want to be divided. This was unheard of in a country where there had been fighting between the two groups in 2001, and economic hardships had made ethnic tensions worse.

On 10 May, a 40-year old Albanian man from Kumanovo spoke out in Macedonian. It was carried on YouTube and has been seen by over half a million people—a quarter the population of Macedonia. In the video he decried the machinations of the police action. He spoke from the heart.

Where is the food for the table? Where is the economic zone that the government keeps talking about? . . .

Real leaders, Albanian or Macedonian, would be with their people. None of them are here. Gotse Delchev, Skenderbeg—leaders of Macedonians and Albanians—were with their people, not in offices or hiding in tunnels or sending their children to Lugano. I do not want to fight anyone. No one wants war. No one wants shooting . . .

Near the end he put his arm around an older Macedonian man. He added, “Nationalism and terrorism are constructed things to divide us.”

The YouTube video, seen by half a million, is unprecedented. Will Macedonian Slavs be able to hear the Albanian man as a person, and not be fearful or resentful of Albanians as a group? That would be the beginning of real change for Macedonia.

Since then there have been two large rallies of 10,000 people in Skopje: one for the opposition, and one for Gruevski. So there are still many supporters for both. Most employment is tied to party affiliation in Macedonia. Clearly, the problems are not simple.

They have yet to work out who will rule in the interim. It should be an interesting period in Macedonia.

Frances Trix is professor of linguistics and anthropology at Indiana University.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Wochit News: “Early Poll Plan for Macedonia Strife”