CHOMSKY Members:

For your information . . .

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alan Spector <[log in to unmask]>

Note from Alan Spector:

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 œ10bn 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?