Oil, NATO and Yugoslavia

>From Sean Gervasi's "Why is NATO in Yugoslavia?", delivered to the
Conference on the Enlargement of NATO in Eastern Europe and the
Mediterrenean, in Prague, Czech Republic, January 13-14, 1996. The complete
paper is at http://www.mclink.it/assoc/fondpasti/nato/gerv-e.htm. Gervasi
was a frequent contributor to Covert Action Quarterly and taught in
Belgrade at the Institute of International Politics and Economics in the
1980s. He died in July, 1996. The kind of life he led and the example he
set is described in a London Telegraph obit that follows this excerpt from
his paper. Gervasi was probably the most forceful defender of peace and
social justice in former Yugoslavia that we had.

================

Yugoslavia is significant not just for its own position on the map, but
also for the areas to which it allows access. And influential American
analysts believe that it lies close to a zone of vital US interests, the
Black Sea-Caspian Sea region. 

This may be the real significance of the NATO task force in Yugoslavia. 

The United States is now seeking to consolidate a new European-Middle
Eastern bloc of nations. It is presenting itself as the leader of an
informal grouping of Muslim countries stretching from the Persian Gulf into
the Balkans. This grouping includes Turkey, which is of pivotal importance
in the emerging new bloc. Turkey is not just a part of the southern Balkans
and an Aegean power. It also borders on Iraq, Iran and Syria. It thus
connects southern Europe to the Middle East, where the US considers that it
has vital interests. 

The US hopes to expand this informal alliance with Muslim states in the
Middle East and southern Europe to include some of the new nations on the
southern rim of the former Soviet Union. 

The reasons are not far to seek. The US now conceives of itself as being
engaged in a new race for world resources. Oil is especially important in
this race. With the war against Iraq, the US established itself in the
Middle East more securely than ever. The almost simultaneous disintegration
of the Soviet Union opened the possibility of Western exploitation of the
oil resources of the Caspian Sea region. 

This region is extremely rich in oil and gas resources. Some Western
analysts believe that it could become as important to the West as the
Persian Gulf 

Countries like Kazakhstan have enormous oil reserves, probably in excess of
9 billion barrels. Kazakhstan could probably pump 700,000 barrels a day.
The problem, as in other countries of the region, at least from the
perspective of Western countries, has been to get the oil and gas resources
out of the region and to the West by safe routes. The movement of this oil
and gas is not simply a technical problem. It is also political. 

It is of crucial importance to the US and to other Western countries today
to maintain friendly relations with countries like Kazakhstan. More
importantly, it is important to know that that any rights acquired, to pump
petroleum or to build pipelines to transport it, will be absolutely
respected. For the amounts which are projected for investment in the region
are very large. 

What this means is that Western producers, banks, pipeline companies, etc.
want to be assured of "political stability" in the region. They want to be
assured that there will be no political changes which would threaten their
new interests or potential ones. 

An important article in THE NEW YORK TIMES recently described what has been
called a new "great power game" in the region, drawing an analogy to the
competition between Russia and Great Britain in the northwest frontier of
the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth century. The authors of the
article wrote that, "Now, in the years after the cold war, the United
States is again establishing suzerainty over the empire of a former foe.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union has prompted the United States to
expand its zone of military hegemony into Eastern Europe (through NATO) and
into formerly neutral Yugoslavia. And -- most important of all -- the end
of the cold war has permitted America to deepen its involvement in the
Middle East." [12] 

Obviously, there have been several reasons which prompted Western leaders
to seek the expansion of NATO. One of these, and an important one, has
clearly been a commercial one. This becomes more evident as one looks more
closely at the parallel development of commercial exploitation in the
Caspian Sea region and the movement of NATO into the Balkans. 

On May 22, 1992, the North Atlantic Treay Organization issued a remarkable
statement regarding the fighting then going on in Transcaucasia. This read
in part as follows: "[The] Allies are profoundly disturbed by the
continuing conflict and loss of life. There can be no solution to the
problem of Nagomo-Karabakh or to the differences it has caused between
Armenia and Azerbaijan by force. "Any action against Azerbaijan's or any
other state's territorial integrity or to achieve political goals by force
would represent a flagrant and unacceptable violation of the principles of
international law. In particular we [NATO] could not accept that the
recognized status of Nagorno-Karabakh or Nakhichevan can be changed
unilaterally by force." [13] 

This was a remarkable statement by any standards. For NATO was in fact
issuing a veiled warning that it might have to take "steps" to prevent
actions by governments in the Caspian Sea region which it construed as
threatening vital Westem interests. 

Two days before NATO made this unusual declaration of interest in
Transcaucasion affairs, an American oil Company, Chevron, had signed an
agreement with the government of Kazakhstan for the development of the
Tengiz and Korolev oil fields in the Westem part of the country. The
negotiations for this agreement had been under way for two years prior to
its being signed. And reliable sources have reported that they were in
danger of breaking down at the time because of Chevron's fears of political
instability in the region. [14] 

At the time that NATO made its declaration, of course, there would have
been little possibility of backing up its warning. There was, first of all,
no precedent at all for any large, out-of-area operation by NATO. NATO
forces, furthermore, were far removed from Transcaucasia. It does not take
a long look at a map of the Balkans, the Black Sea the Caspian Sea to
realize that the situation is changing.

===========

SEAN GERVASI, who has died in Belgrade aged 63, held a number of important
posts in the United Nations, but first came to prominence in Britain during
the 1960s, when he was the catalyst for student unrest at the London School
of Economics. Gervasi began to lecture at the LSE in 1962. His unusual
ideas about the economics of growth, and his reluctance to accept standard
economic models, soon brought him to public notice. Engaging and
charismatic, Gervasi rigorously eschewed the conventional and was as likely
to quote Bob Dylan as Keynes. His lectures proved extremely popular, and
attracted an audience from Oxford and Cambridge as well as from the LSE.
When Gervasi's contract ended in 1965, ten academics, including two readers
and five lecturers, wrote to the director to ask him to extend the
appointment for a further two years. Gervasi's work, they urged, held out
"the possibility of changing the way in which future economists think about
policy problems". The authorities at the LSE were unmoved. Their attitude
led to one of the first student "sit-ins", a form of protest which would
plague British universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Gervasi, as
secretary of the British Ad Hoc Committee on Vietnam, was among the first
to condemn British support of America's war effort. He gave wholehearted
support to the anti-war movement, which staged mass demonstrations outside
the American embassy in Grosvenor Square. 

For the rest of his life Gervasi remained true to the ideas which he had
espoused in the 1960s. Although his immaculate three-piece suits, rich
voice and smooth manner suggested a member of the Establishment, he always
saw himself as on the side of the oppressed. Gervasi spent 15 years with
various UN institutions, including the Committee on Decolonisation, the
Centre against Apartheid, the Office of the Commissioner for Namibia and
the Sanctions Committee of the Security Council. He also acted as a
consultant to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
and to the governments of Libya, Kuwait and Lebanon. He campaigned against
apartheid in South Africa; investigated member states which had broken the
embargo of arms to Rhodesia; and was in constant demand to advise African
countries on the economic effects of independence. He became a special
adviser to Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia. From careful analysis of the methods
used to overthrow the Allende government in Chile, Gervasi was able to
offer Third World governments advice on how to deal with efforts by hostile
foreign forces to destabilise them. His help was sought by Jamaica,
Yugoslavia and Mozambique. 

Gervasi also worked as a journalist, contributing to a wide range of
publications, including Der Spiegel and Le Monde Diplomatique. In addition
he was a regular commentator on Pacifica radio and the New York station,
WBAI. In 1976 he achieved a notable journalistic coup when he revealed how
American arms manufacturers were secretly selling weapons to the South
African government despite a UN prohibition. Sean David Gervasi was born at
Philadelphia on Aug 10 1932. His father, the journalist Frank Gervasi, was
head of the Rome bureau for Hearst's International News Service in the late
1930s. When he went to report on the Spanish Civil War he took his son with
him, and the boy's first memories were of gunfighting in the streets. The
family moved back to America and Gervasi was educated at St Albans School,
Washington DC. He went on to the University of Geneva; Keble College,
Oxford; and Cornell University. In 1957 he was appointed to a post in
Washington at the Executive Office of the President, Bureau of the Budget.
This job extended into the Kennedy administration, but Gervasi resigned
after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and left for Britain. On his arrival in 1961
Gervasi became a visiting fellow at King's, Cambridge. After the eventful
spell at the LSE he taught at the Treasury Centre for Administrative
Studies, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Oxford, the University of
Paris and Ruskin College, Oxford. From 1985 he was a professor at the
University of Paris, and from 1988 a visiting fellow at the Institute for
Policy Studies in Washington. At the time of his death Gervasi was research
professor at the Institute for International Politics and Economics in
Belgrade, and was completing Balkan Roulette, a book on the break-up of
Yugoslavia. Among his publications were Deindustrialisation, Foreign
Capital and Forced Labour in South Africa (1970), and Portugal, Nato and
Southern Africa (1974). Sean Gervasi married first, in 1964 (dissolved
1973), Milli Kosoy; they had a son. He married secondly, in 1983, Heather
Cottin; they have a daughter. 


Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)