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Ethnic War, Human Rights, or Oil Profits? by Alan Spector 21 February 2001 02:45 UTC |
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When NATO began its intensification of the war against Yugoslavia, some
people thought it was because NATO wanted to defend human rights, and others
thought it was just "mistaken" US-NATO policy. And some of us said it was
because of Caspian Sea oil. Some of us were ridiculed for that by some
rather simple minded arguments about how there was no oil in Kosovo, etc.
etc. Please now read the following article from the (not particularly
Marxist) Guardian of London.
Here is the link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4136440,00.html
==============================================
The Guardian of London
February 15, 2001
NATO mocked those who claimed there was a plan for
Caspian oil
George
Monbiot
Gordon Brown knows precisely what he should do about
BP.
The company's Å“10bn profits are crying out
for a windfall tax.
Royalties and petroleum revenue tax, both lifted
when the oil price
was low, are in urgent need of reinstatement. These
measures
would be popular and fair. But, as all political
leaders are aware,
you don't mess with Big Oil.
During the 1999 Balkans war, some of the critics
of NATO's
intervention alleged that the western powers were
seeking to
secure a passage for oil from the Caspian sea. This
claim was
widely mocked. The foreign secretary Robin Cook
observed that
"there is no oil in Kosovo". This was, of course,
true but irrelevant.
An eminent commentator for this paper clinched his
argument by
recording that the Caspian sea is "half a continent
away, lodged
between Iran and Turkmenistan".
For the
past few weeks, a freelance researcher called Keith
Fisher has been doggedly documenting a project which
has, as far
as I can discover, has been little-reported in any
British, European
or American newspaper. It is called the Trans-Balkan
pipeline, and
it's due for approval at the end of next month.
Its purpose is to
secure a passage for oil from the Caspian sea.
The line
will run from the Black sea port of Burgas to the Adriatic
at Vlore, passing through Bulgaria, Macedonia and
Albania. It is
likely to become the main route to the west for
the oil and gas now
being extracted in central Asia. It will carry 750,000
barrels a day: a
throughput, at current prices, of some $600m a month.
The project
is necessary, according to a paper published by the
US Trade and Development Agency last May, because
the oil
coming from the Caspian sea "will quickly surpass
the safe capacity
of the Bosphorus as a shipping lane". The scheme,
the agency
notes, will "provide a consistent source of crude
oil to American
refineries", "provide American companies with a
key role in
developing the vital east-west corridor", "advance
the privatisation
aspirations of the US government in the region"
and "facilitate rapid
integration" of the Balkans "with western Europe".
In November
1998, Bill Richardson, then US energy secretary,
spelt out his policy on the extraction and transport
of Caspian oil.
"This is about America's energy security," he explained.
"It's also
about preventing strategic inroads by those who
don't share our
values. We're trying to move these newly independent
countries
toward the west.
"We would
like to see them reliant on western commercial and
political interests rather than going another way.
We've made a
substantial political investment in the Caspian,
and it's very
important to us that both the pipeline map and the
politics come out
right."
The project
has been discussed for years. The US trade agency
notes that the Trans-Balkan pipeline "will become
a part of the
region's critical east-west Corridor 8 infrastructure
... This
transportation corridor was approved by the transport
ministers of
the European Union in April 1994". The pipeline
itself, the agency
says, has also been formally supported "since 1994".
The first
feasibility study, backed by the US, was conducted
in 1996.
The pipeline
does not pass through the former Yugoslavia,
but there's no question that it featured prominently
in Balkan
war politics. On December 9 1998, the Albanian president
attended a meeting about the scheme in Sofia, and
linked it
inextricably to Kosovo. "It is my personal opinion,"
he noted,
"that no solution confined within Serbian borders
will bring
lasting peace." The message could scarcely have
been
blunter: if you want Albanian consent for the Trans-Balkan
pipeline, you had better wrest Kosovo out of the
hands of the
Serbs.
In July
1993, a few months before the corridor project was first
formally approved, the US sent peacekeeping troops
to the
Balkans. They were stationed not in the conflict
zones in which
civilians were being rounded up and killed, but
on the northern
borders of Macedonia. There were several good reasons
for
seeking to contain Serb expansionism, but we would
be foolish to
imagine that a putative $600m-a-month commercial
operation did
not number among them. The pipeline would have been
impossible
to finance while the Balkans were in turmoil.
I can't
tell you that the war in the former Yugoslavia was fought
solely in order to secure access to oil from new
and biddable states
in central Asia. But in the light of these findings,
can anyone now
claim that it was not?
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