The Oxford English dictionary defines balkanisation as:
[to] “Divide (a region or body) into smaller mutually hostile states or groups.”
There are numerous examples of this process being foisted upon targeted regions and nations by global powers. In this article we will look at how the Western NATO aligned powers, most notably the U.S, UK and France have ‘balkanised’ the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya. We will also consider why they do so and who benefits from the process. By doing so we may come to understand who is driving the policies that lead to the break up and subsequent economic exploitation of the victim nations.
Yugoslavia:
The former nation state of Yugoslavia made a series of catastrophic mistakes. Firstly it maintained good international relations without aligning itself to either the Western or Eastern power blocks; it had reasonable economic growth and had industrialised successfully; it offered its citizens a decent living standard and gave them shares in the industries they worked in and owned; healthcare and education were free and standards were good; it had a thriving tourist industry and its trade relations were solid; it was an ethnically diverse nation with a number of different communities living in relative harmony; it wasn’t free from problems but was managing them.
On the other hand, just like nearly every other nation on Earth it had significant debts. Though nowhere near as substantial as those of its European neighbours, it was in hock to the international banking cartels nonetheless. This is the case for nearly every nation state on Earth. With global national debt standing at just over $230 trillion, which is more than 3 times larger than the planet’s GDP, national debt is almost a universal reality. This obviously begs the question who the world can possibly owe the money to?
Therefore, it goes without saying, Yugoslavia just had to be smashed to pieces and turned into a number of ethnically distinct, impoverished, mini states. It is not a conspiracy theory to suggest the balkanisation of the former Yugoslavia was something actively pursued by the U.S. and its western allies. It is a matter of historical fact.
In 1990 former head of the CIA, U.S. President George H.W Bush, convinced congress to pass the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Law. Following the end of the Cold War, Yugoslavia was no longer required as a buffer zone between the NATO states and their former Warsaw Pact adversaries, so its independent socialism would no longer be tolerated.
The Appropriations Law ended aid, trade and all credit agreements between Yugoslavia and the U.S. It cut of funding from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank effectively calling in the loans. This made Yugoslavia bankrupt practically overnight. Furthermore, the legislation stipulated the U.S. would only resume credit agreements following elections in each of Yugoslavia’s constituent republics; the U.S. would oversee all of them.
The Appropriation law also stated that only groups the U.S. State Department deemed to be ‘democratic forces’ would receive funding. Consequently, a number of right wing, ultra nationalists organisations emerged in the various republics as they were suddenly plunged into economic and social chaos. This led directly to the complete destabilisation of the whole region.
Between 1992 and 2001 a series of viscous conflicts and insurgencies unfolded. The horrors committed included the widespread use of ‘ethnic cleansing’, sectarian violence and warfare, genocide, deliberate starvation, the shelling and bombing of captive civilian populations, summary executions and war rape. Hundreds of thousands of people died, the majority during the Bosnian War between 1992 and 1995. An estimated 2.5 million refugees fled and another 2 million were internally displaced.
By creating the problems within the former Yugoslavia in the first place; by reacting to it by arming ‘democratic forces’ and flooding the conflict with Islamist extremists, the NATO powers were ultimately able to offer their desired ‘solution’ in the form of the Dayton Accords. The region was de-industrialised, the populations impoverished and set against one another. This created a lawless vacuum which today provides a European entry point for the illegal weapons, drugs and sex slave industries.
It also provides a largely unregulated environment from where arms, fighters and military equipment can be illegally shipped into war zones, such as Syria, in cases where ‘certain powers’ would rather keep such activity under the radar. Even better, the previously independent regional economy was made entirely reliant upon Western ‘aid’ and dependent nations were powerless to resist the building of the sought after Trans-Balkan oil pipeline. Corporate exploitation of the region could proceed unchecked.
This is the essential ‘purpose’ of balkanisation. By reducing the victim nation to rubble, western corporations benefit, not only from the procurement of arms by combatants during the conflict, but also from the loans and credit agreements established once hostilities have subsided. These loans then fund rebuilding contracts which are divvied up by compliant puppet governments, again for the profit of the corporations who usually spend billions lobbying governments to launch the conflicts that cause the destruction in the first place.
In the case of the former Yugoslavia global corporations quickly swooped in to make their money. The corporate gravy train started with ‘the Train and Equip Program.’ This used $500million of tax payer money, to openly funnel arms to what remained of the Bosnian army. This is just one example of the many ways societies are ‘fleeced’ via the direct transfer of wealth from the population to the ‘elite.’ U.S. ‘voters’ paid for the ‘aid’ program and the profits went directly into the pockets of the privately owned weapons manufacturers. War has always been a profitable business for the New World Order.
By 1999 the EU estimated the rebuilding costs for Kosovo alone were $4billion. This is another well practiced money spinner. Nations already destroyed by war are forced to borrow the ‘investment capital,’ at interests, so they can afford to pay international corporations to repair the infrastructure they’ve just blown up. Of course the terms of the loans and the contracts are entirely at the banking cartel’s discretion and usually involve seizing all of the target country’s natural resources. This ensures they can never afford to pay back the loans, and so become vassal states of the banks. The losers are always the people and the winners are always the venture capitalists.
Libya:
Despite being the darling of the Western media for a few years in the mid 2000’s the Libyan dictator Colonel Gadaffi’s brutal end came following U.N Security Council Resolution 1973 which enabled NATO (mainly British and French forces) to obliterate Libya with a carpet bombing campaign in 2011. While the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair had schmoozed with Gadaffi to grease the cogs of a £550 million Royal British / Dutch Shell gas deal with the dictatorship, what Gadaffi did next sealed his, and his country’s fate.
Much like the government of the former Yugoslavia, Gadaffi tried to operate outside of the diktat of the global financial oligarchy and its international banking cartel. He argued that the African Union should be free of European Union and U.S based financial control and attempted to establish an independent African Development Bank. Part of his plans included the creation of an African gold backed currency (the African Dinar) which would replace the petrodollar as the reserve currency for trading Libyan (and other African nations) oil. He proposed disentangling African trade from the Euro and the Dollar and, with significant inward investment from China already flowing into the country, Libya threatened to shift regional and potentially global financial structures.
In addition Gadaffi’s control of the Libyan oil and gas reserves, which are some of the best quality reserves in the world and present more than 2% of the global market, meant that global energy giants such as Exxon, ConocoPhillips and others had been forced to accept far less favourable deals than their shareholders were accustomed to, in order to simply remain in the Libyan market. With only an estimated 30% of Libyan reserves tapped, the golden egg of regaining control over Libyan energy resources was a mouth watering prospect for global corporations. When Gadaffi then made moves to create an independent reserve currency his days were undoubtedly numbered.
Of course that isn’t what the politicians said, nor is it how the situation was reported by the MSM. In 2008 the voting world gave a collective sigh of relief when the great hope, Barrack Obama, was selected, sorry I meant ‘elected.’ He was a ‘good man’ who came to power promising peace. He achieved the historic feat of being the first U.S. President in history to have officially killed people on every single day of his eight years in office. His words even won him a Nobel peace prize.
Some of his words included accusing Muammar Gaddafi of marching his army towards Benghazi, the centre of the entirely peaceful ‘colour revolution.’ Obama claimed that when Gaddafi stated “we will kill them like rats” he was referring to the innocent street protestors of Benghazi. This enabled NATO to get U.N Security Council Resolution 1973 passed, authorising the ‘humanitarian’ bombing of Libya. Obama was lying through his teethe. Libyan forces were already engaged in fierce fighting with Western backed terrorist groups, like the Libyan Islamic Frighting Group (LIFG,) in the city of Misratah. Gaddafi’s rhetoric was aimed at the terrorists.
It isn’t really clear how the 2011 carpet bombing of Libya ‘saved people.’ Senior British army officer, General Sir David Richards, urged the U.N to allow NATO “to be freed from restraints that precluded attacking infrastructure targets.” Screw the Geneva Convention basically. This may explain why, according to NATO’s own data, more than a third of their 9,700 ‘precision’ air strikes were aimed at civilian targets, killing tens of thousands of rescued Libyans. The country was obliterated by the NATO bombing, led by Britain and France. Just like Yugoslavia and Iraq, it was rendered a failed and dysfunctional state.
All the talk of humanitarian bombing and saving Libyans was complete crap. Clearly the main focus of NATO’s destruction of Libya were robbery, corporate exploitation of resources and the creation of an ISIS bridgehead from which to wage war in Iraq and Syria. You need look no further than the email exchanges of Obama’s Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, to recognise the fact. Her advisor Sydney Blumenthal sent her an email clearly outlining France’s reasons for leading (with Britain) the bombing of Libya. This had come to his attention from French intelligence sources and it shows the bombing had nothing to do with saving anyone and everything to do with gold and the assertion of global dominance.
“[the] …..quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According to these individuals Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:
a. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production,
b.Increase French influence in North Africa,
c. Improve his intemai political situation in France,
d. Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world,
e. Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in [North Africa]”
And, in specific reference to the gold reserves:
“According to sensitive information available to this these individuals, Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. During late March, 2011 these stocks were moved to SABHA (south west in the direction of the Libyan border with Niger and Chad); taken from the vaults of the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli. This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French.franc(CFA).”
In other words when the NATO powers discovered Gadaffi’s plans to ditch the Franc (linked to the Euro) and create an African oil trading reserve currency, they immediately smashed the country to smithereens. Lowe and behold, in what must be a first for an Islamist extremist insurgency, who fortuitously took advantage of NATO’s bombing, one of the first things this loosely affiliated band of Islamist paramilitary organisations did, following the fall of the Gadaffi regime, was form a central bank. They also established a national oil company which surprisingly was far more amenable to foreign investment and the involvement of global energy corporations than its predecessor under Gadaffi. Of course the new central bank also took control of the gold reserves.
Another extremely coincidentally result of NATO’s carpet bombing was that the Islamist terrorists were free to organise themselves under the protection of a NATO enforced ‘no fly zone.’ This wasn’t the only time Western air strikes appeared to support Islamist terrorists. Not only was the effective creation of an ISIS safe-haven predictable, Canadian intelligence reports reveal that NATO member states were fully aware of the likely ramifications. They knew that groups linked to al Qaeda would benefit from the air strikes. Which suggests the possibility it was an intended outcome, rather than simply another ‘mistake.’
Similarly the British Government’s 2016 Foreign Affairs Select Committee report was scathing. It stated:
“In March 2011, the United Kingdom and France, with the support of the United States, led the international community to support an intervention in Libya to protect civilians from attacks by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi. This policy was not informed by accurate intelligence. In particular, the Government failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element. By the summer of 2011, the limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change. That policy was not underpinned by a strategy to support and shape post-Gaddafi Libya. The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.”
Despite the harsh criticisms of the Canadian intelligence report, British Select Committee and others, the implication is always that support for the Islamists is an unfortunate byproduct military intervention. However support for Islamist terrorist organisations has been a long standing, consistent effect of Western foreign policy for many years. In addition the rise and operational effectiveness of ISIS again appeared to be a direct result of concerted policy. It stretches credulity beyond any reasonable limit to maintain the idea that this was all simply the result of a combination of unfortunate errors.
Iraq:
Again, in Iraq, we saw the balkanisation of a country into a war torn, dysfunctional collection of battling fiefdoms. Each engaged in struggles for supremacy against one another. This left the nation itself ripe for economic exploitation and allowed global corporations to capitalise on the mayhem. However, in the case of Iraq, there is an apparent link between the profitable failed state model of balkanisation and individuals intimately involved in the decision to launch the so called ‘war on terror,’ which has fine tuned balkanisation into a slick, globalist operation.
The U.S led coalition’s puppet Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was set up as an interim Iraqi government following the U.S. ‘victory’ in the early summer of 2003. One of its first moves was to overturn Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist party’s reliance upon economic central planning and allow foreign investment to flood into the country. With ‘CPA Order 17’ it decreed that all foreign investors and contractors were immune from prosecution in Iraq. It also took over the running of Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) which brought $20billion into the country in the first year of the occupation alone. The Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund (IRRF) brought in an additional $18billion in the same year. This meant huge reconstruction contracts for Western corporations. The accounting for this money was virtually non-existent and widespread allegations of corruption were the norm. Though, being immune from prosecution, that was of no concern to the Western corporations feasting at the trough.
For example, in 2003, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) were offered a ‘sole source contract’ to fix and operate all Iraqi oil wells. This meant they didn’t need to bid for it, they were just handed the job. The value of the contract was worth an estimated $7 billion. KBR were the construction subsidiary of the global corporation Halliburton. Vice president Dick Cheney (neocon ‘hawk’) had been its chief executive from 1995 to 2000. He stood down to become Vice President of the U.S.A. Cheney stated that he had no financial ties with Halliburton or KBR. None at all, apart from the $2 million per year ‘bonus’ he received from them as ‘deferred compensation.’ He also held purchase options on Halliburton stock, whose military contract portfolio had grown as rapidly as their share price while he and his neocon chums were running the U.S. Cheney absolutely denied any impropriety or personal war profiteering. He declined to disclose his communications with Halliburton when asked to do so by Congress.
This failed state, profit model is undoubtedly what the western globalist powers (and the corporations who own them) had in mind for Syria. Something which they haven’t quite given up on yet. Russia and Iran’s backing of the Syrian Government threw a major spanner in the works but it seems unlikely the U.S led coalition and its regional allies will give up on their balkanisation efforts without further destabalisation attempts. As evidenced by the destruction of the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya this is a major revenue stream for the global corporations who own the planet.
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interesting that you’ve left DISQUS behind. SMART move; wisdom is still in pockets on the net… Someone needs to do a full due diligence on this uber surveillance tool, that even the most radical, anti-establishment sites embrace to facilitate their comments. DISQUS has never been examined or investigated. Yet it is the most widely proliferated opinion-aggregator on the www. Backed by google-CIA, everyones most visceral feelings and thoughts are funneled via one pipeline into their secret, personal dossier that supplements FB but completely by stealth. And catches those who try to elude the big social platforms by not joining. Glad to see at least one site is too smart to aid & abet this intell gathering octopus by opting our of DISQUS tool
Thanks for the fascinating comment. To be honest I knew nothing about the possible nefarious nature of DISQUS. I can’t remember now why I chose not to use it but I didn’t know about the issues you have just highlighted. More luck than judgment on my part.
Thanks Iain for an excellent review of the globalist agenda. But being selfish for moment, at least they are protecting our own Anglo/American empire exorbitant privilege all of whom in the West benefit.
With my Libertarian and humanitarian hat on, I must of course condemn all the US actions of corporate exploitation of our brothers and sisters. It was many years ago that I discovered this book which rather blows the whistle on all this stuff but I can’t see it changing in the foreseeable, but if it did we might find ourselves under the yoke of the Chinese hegemony?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Confessions-Economic-Hit-Man-shocking/dp/0091909104
Thanks so much. Really appreciate the translation. Great work.