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By Sasha Uzunov
Melbourne Australia
October 18, 2005
Don't you just hate it when you make a prediction in an article and it comes true and newspaper editors don't take you seriously? Well, it's happened to me a number of times, which is very frustrating.
In January 1991 I warned five months in advance that war would break out in Yugoslavia; that the Yugoslav Army would invade the republics of Slovenia and Croatia. In the same article, I was one of the first to reveal Yugoslavia supplying weapons to the Saddam regime of Iraq. No one wanted to run the story. It finally was picked up by the Croatian Herald, Melbourne, Australia and published on 25 January 1991.
Eleven years later British journalists, Nicholas Wood and Ian Traynor, wrote in the Guardian newspaper, "Yugoslavia the hub of arms sales to Saddam," November 26, 2002, picked by the Mlebourne Age
During an interview in 1993 for Melbourne radio station 3ZZZ I said that war would breakout in Macedonia unless a strong and large United Nations peacekeeping force was deployed to safeguard Macedonia's borders with Kosovo, Serbia, Bulgaria, Albania and Greece.
Eight years later, I was a soldier in the Australian Army patrolling the East Timor - Indonesia border when I heard that an ethnic Albanian insurgency had erupted in the west of Macedonia.
Every journalist dreams of finding a high-ranking source like Deep throat of Watergate fame. In 1992 I came across a high-ranking NATO source in Brussels, Belgium.
He revealed to me the secret plan to partition Macedonia along ethnic lines after a short war: the west would be incorporated into a Greater Albania and the left over parts would be incorporated either by Serbia or Bulgaria.
I found the plan to be far-fetched when I first heard it. I thought this person was pulling my leg. But later events showed that it wasn't far-fetched.
We met at the European Parliament's (EP) Brussels office. I was an Australian journalist hired by the MILS news agency to train young Macedonian reporters and to fine tune its daily news wire service, which was being supplied to subscribers: foreign embassies and international media agencies.
MILS's main office was in Brussels and had a branch in Skopje, the Macedonian capital. Skopje was manned by respected local journalist Saso Ordanoski, and his assistant was Mircela Casuleva, a Reuters correspondent and wife of Slobodan Casule, who later became Foreign Minister.
I found Mircela to be an excellent journalist with a great personality.
I was sitting at the bar in the EP with MILS Managing Director, Dr Ljupco Naumovski, a former Macedonian diplomat. A man introduced himself as working for NATO and showed me his ID card. We made some small talk and he left.
few weeks later, MILS got an interesting phone call from the Belgian police saying it had been screened and given a clean bill of health to operate as a news agency; that it had no links to any foreign governments or intelligence services. The call was unusual to say the least and why it was made has never been made clear to me.
The NATO source invited me out for drinks a number of times. He was a big vodka drinker. He must have had 5 or six when he let rip with the revelation that Macedonia's days as an independent nation were numbered. I laughed and said, "I agree with you unless the problem of corruption and the economy are fixed."
"No it's not just a matter of money," he said. "There are greater outside forces at work that you don't know about." He would not elaborate. He had another 5 vodkas and left. This cat and mouse game kept going for a month or two, until he let it all hang out.
He revealed in great detail how war would start in Macedonia; he named names; told me how weapons were being smuggled by ethnic Albanian insurgents into Macedonia through Kosovo and from Albania. He said a favourite supply route was through the western town of Debar, which sits on the Macedonian-Albanian border. He mentioned there were a number of mountain caves near Debar being used to hide weapons. Donkeys were being used to ferry ammunition.
But he would not tell my who was pushing for war in Macedonia.
By 1993 UN peacekeepers from the UNPROFOR mission were deployed to protect Macedonia's borders. This mission later became UNPREDEP. Years later, for some crazy reason the Macedonian government recognised Taiwan and China in retaliation used its seat in the UN Security Council to stop the mission. With UN peacekeepers out of the way, the 2001 war in Macedonia began as a spill over from the Kosovo conflict of 1999.
The whole thing was mind-boggling. I remember talking to Mira, an elderly Serbian woman who was teaching the Macedonian language to Belgian children. She asked me what I was interested in writing about Macedonia. I said to her I would like to investigate the claims made by the NATO source and look into past Yugoslav communist crimes in Macedonia such as the infamous Chento show trial of 1946.
Her response was "You don't need to dig up the past nor worry about the future." I found her lack of curiosity surprising considering her ex-husband was famous Macedonian writer Meto Jovanovski, and both her children are journalists. Son Borjan Jovanovski was a former Presidential media spokesman whilst daughter Svetlana Jovanovska is the Brussels correspondent for major newspaper Dnevnik.
One day walked into our Brussels office a fit looking man in his late 30s or early 40s. He had very short blonde hair and had a military bearing. He introduced himself as Andreas Renatus Hartmann, a Member of the European Parliament for the German political party, The Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Mr Hartmann invited Dr Naumovski and myself to dinner at a swanky Moroccan restaurant. The dinner went well. We talked about a wide variety of subjects but the attention inevitably turned to the Balkans. I was enjoying eating the couscous and almost choked when Mr Hartmann said matter of fact that German Intelligence was about to open its first "station" in Tirana, Albania since World War II, and the British were pissed off at being beaten to the punch.
I though to myself why is this guy telling me this? He dropped more bombshells when he said that Europe, in particular German and France did not want an Islamic state in the Balkans namely Bosnia-Hercegovina or a Greater Albania. The German and French right wing parties wanted to strengthen Macedonia to act as a buffer state against possible Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
I found this at odds with the NATO source's revelations. Was Macedonia caught in the cross-fire of a power play between competing European nations? What could it possibly all mean?
And why was I told this? I could only speculate and say maybe they saw me as a young and enthusiastic journalist wanting to make a name for myself who would float the information in my articles. But what they didn't count on was unbelieving newspaper editors!
-----------------
Published in the Australian Macedonian Weekly newspaper, 18 October 2005
Sasha Uzunov is a freelance Australian journalist who has covered the Balkans and Iraq.
Melbourne Australia
October 18, 2005
Don't you just hate it when you make a prediction in an article and it comes true and newspaper editors don't take you seriously? Well, it's happened to me a number of times, which is very frustrating.
In January 1991 I warned five months in advance that war would break out in Yugoslavia; that the Yugoslav Army would invade the republics of Slovenia and Croatia. In the same article, I was one of the first to reveal Yugoslavia supplying weapons to the Saddam regime of Iraq. No one wanted to run the story. It finally was picked up by the Croatian Herald, Melbourne, Australia and published on 25 January 1991.
Eleven years later British journalists, Nicholas Wood and Ian Traynor, wrote in the Guardian newspaper, "Yugoslavia the hub of arms sales to Saddam," November 26, 2002, picked by the Mlebourne Age
During an interview in 1993 for Melbourne radio station 3ZZZ I said that war would breakout in Macedonia unless a strong and large United Nations peacekeeping force was deployed to safeguard Macedonia's borders with Kosovo, Serbia, Bulgaria, Albania and Greece.
Eight years later, I was a soldier in the Australian Army patrolling the East Timor - Indonesia border when I heard that an ethnic Albanian insurgency had erupted in the west of Macedonia.
Every journalist dreams of finding a high-ranking source like Deep throat of Watergate fame. In 1992 I came across a high-ranking NATO source in Brussels, Belgium.
He revealed to me the secret plan to partition Macedonia along ethnic lines after a short war: the west would be incorporated into a Greater Albania and the left over parts would be incorporated either by Serbia or Bulgaria.
I found the plan to be far-fetched when I first heard it. I thought this person was pulling my leg. But later events showed that it wasn't far-fetched.
We met at the European Parliament's (EP) Brussels office. I was an Australian journalist hired by the MILS news agency to train young Macedonian reporters and to fine tune its daily news wire service, which was being supplied to subscribers: foreign embassies and international media agencies.
MILS's main office was in Brussels and had a branch in Skopje, the Macedonian capital. Skopje was manned by respected local journalist Saso Ordanoski, and his assistant was Mircela Casuleva, a Reuters correspondent and wife of Slobodan Casule, who later became Foreign Minister.
I found Mircela to be an excellent journalist with a great personality.
I was sitting at the bar in the EP with MILS Managing Director, Dr Ljupco Naumovski, a former Macedonian diplomat. A man introduced himself as working for NATO and showed me his ID card. We made some small talk and he left.
few weeks later, MILS got an interesting phone call from the Belgian police saying it had been screened and given a clean bill of health to operate as a news agency; that it had no links to any foreign governments or intelligence services. The call was unusual to say the least and why it was made has never been made clear to me.
The NATO source invited me out for drinks a number of times. He was a big vodka drinker. He must have had 5 or six when he let rip with the revelation that Macedonia's days as an independent nation were numbered. I laughed and said, "I agree with you unless the problem of corruption and the economy are fixed."
"No it's not just a matter of money," he said. "There are greater outside forces at work that you don't know about." He would not elaborate. He had another 5 vodkas and left. This cat and mouse game kept going for a month or two, until he let it all hang out.
He revealed in great detail how war would start in Macedonia; he named names; told me how weapons were being smuggled by ethnic Albanian insurgents into Macedonia through Kosovo and from Albania. He said a favourite supply route was through the western town of Debar, which sits on the Macedonian-Albanian border. He mentioned there were a number of mountain caves near Debar being used to hide weapons. Donkeys were being used to ferry ammunition.
But he would not tell my who was pushing for war in Macedonia.
By 1993 UN peacekeepers from the UNPROFOR mission were deployed to protect Macedonia's borders. This mission later became UNPREDEP. Years later, for some crazy reason the Macedonian government recognised Taiwan and China in retaliation used its seat in the UN Security Council to stop the mission. With UN peacekeepers out of the way, the 2001 war in Macedonia began as a spill over from the Kosovo conflict of 1999.
The whole thing was mind-boggling. I remember talking to Mira, an elderly Serbian woman who was teaching the Macedonian language to Belgian children. She asked me what I was interested in writing about Macedonia. I said to her I would like to investigate the claims made by the NATO source and look into past Yugoslav communist crimes in Macedonia such as the infamous Chento show trial of 1946.
Her response was "You don't need to dig up the past nor worry about the future." I found her lack of curiosity surprising considering her ex-husband was famous Macedonian writer Meto Jovanovski, and both her children are journalists. Son Borjan Jovanovski was a former Presidential media spokesman whilst daughter Svetlana Jovanovska is the Brussels correspondent for major newspaper Dnevnik.
One day walked into our Brussels office a fit looking man in his late 30s or early 40s. He had very short blonde hair and had a military bearing. He introduced himself as Andreas Renatus Hartmann, a Member of the European Parliament for the German political party, The Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Mr Hartmann invited Dr Naumovski and myself to dinner at a swanky Moroccan restaurant. The dinner went well. We talked about a wide variety of subjects but the attention inevitably turned to the Balkans. I was enjoying eating the couscous and almost choked when Mr Hartmann said matter of fact that German Intelligence was about to open its first "station" in Tirana, Albania since World War II, and the British were pissed off at being beaten to the punch.
I though to myself why is this guy telling me this? He dropped more bombshells when he said that Europe, in particular German and France did not want an Islamic state in the Balkans namely Bosnia-Hercegovina or a Greater Albania. The German and French right wing parties wanted to strengthen Macedonia to act as a buffer state against possible Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
I found this at odds with the NATO source's revelations. Was Macedonia caught in the cross-fire of a power play between competing European nations? What could it possibly all mean?
And why was I told this? I could only speculate and say maybe they saw me as a young and enthusiastic journalist wanting to make a name for myself who would float the information in my articles. But what they didn't count on was unbelieving newspaper editors!
-----------------
Published in the Australian Macedonian Weekly newspaper, 18 October 2005
Sasha Uzunov is a freelance Australian journalist who has covered the Balkans and Iraq.
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