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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 April 1999 Issue No. 426 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 April 1999 Issue No. 426
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Special Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Oiling the wheels of Pax Americana
By Gamal NkrumahAs NATO's punishing air raids against Serbia enter their fourth week, Washington continues to insist that there is no imminent plan to deploy ground forces. Such assertions, however, should by now be taken with more than a pinch of salt. The Americans are clearly planning to tighten the screws even further on an already badly battered Yugoslav economy, and plans are afoot to strengthen the economic blockade. International oil prices may be lower than at any time in living memory, but the strategic nature of the present conflict should never be forgotten. At the heart of the war against Serbia lies the struggle to control black gold, and the principal routes along which the region's oil pipelines run hold the key to understanding the present Balkan crisis.
Washington wants to block deliveries of oil by sea to Yugoslavia. The New York Times reported this week that NATO supreme commander US Gen. Wesley Clark wants all oil shipments halted. "We are talking with our NATO allies about taking stricter action in order to limit the amount of oil that goes in," US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was quoted as saying in the Los Angeles Times.
Deliveries by sea to Serbia have continued to trickle in, even as unrelenting and systematic NATO bombardment of Yugoslav refineries and oil storage installations continues unabated. NATO estimates that its Yugoslav blitz has so far cost the country 70 per cent of its oil supplies, and that their enemy is no longer able to refine crude oil. What little oil Serbia does receive now takes the form of refined products hastily unloaded at the besieged ports of its reluctant ally Montenegro.
NATO this week announced that on Sunday it had destroyed the oil refinery at Pancevo. A petrochemical facility and nitrogen plant at the same site were also hit, and another refinery at Novi Sad was reportedly destroyed. But there are also signs of cracks in the Alliance over the strategy of hitting economic targets. American officials requested a plan to block sea shipments of oil at a closed meeting of allied delegates last week, but their French counterparts questioned the legal basis of the move, submitting that it would not be possible to stop and search ships in the Adriatic Sea without a specific resolution from the United Nations Security Council.
Yugoslavia was already having serious trouble securing fuel even before the loss of the two refineries this week. Its main pipeline artery for crude oil, the Adria line which transits via Slovenia and Croatia -- two former Yugoslav states that are intensely anti-Serb -- and Hungary -- a new NATO member-state with an axe to grind against Serbia -- has also been cut off.
This month marked the 50th anniversary of the signing of the NATO charter in Washington. Originally conceived as a defensive body designed to halt the westward advance of Communism, NATO now has 19 member states including several former Warsaw Pact nations. To celebrate its golden jubilee, the Alliance has launched its first ever military offensive.
Calls for the Western allies to commit ground troops have been mounting ever since the air raids began. In the media, the war has been consistently presented as the direct consequence of Yugoslavia's stubborn refusal to agree to a reasonable peace plan -- in particular, its rejection of the presence of an international security force in Kosovo. As an article in the New York Times for 14 April reminded its readers, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic "has absolutely refused to entertain an outside force in Kosovo, arguing that the province is sovereign territory of Serbia and Yugoslavia." Yet at the Rambouillet talks in late February, Serb President Milan Milutinovic had expressed his willingness to discuss "an international presence in Kosovo" to monitor the implementation of the accords.
For the US, that was not good enough. "We accept nothing less than a complete agreement, including a NATO-led force," said an adamant and intransigent Albright on 21 February, hours after Belgrade had assented to the political part of the proposed agreement. The clause that caused the trouble required that some 28,000 NATO troops be stationed in Kosovo.
On 23 March, the day before the air raids began, the Serbian parliament adopted a resolution again rejecting the military portion of the accords, but expressing willingness to review the "range and character of an international presence" in Kosovo. Belgrade was actively considering accepting a UN peacekeeping force, and the US knew this. "Washington was aware that Yugoslav parliamentarians had expressed openness to an international presence," Vladimir Nesic, Yugoslav chargé d'affaires in Cairo, told Al-Ahram Weekly.
But then, war has many motives, some of which are rarely discussed in public. America, for instance, is always glad of a reason not to have to make cuts in its defence budget. Indeed, plans are underway to increase the Pentagon's annual budget to $276 billion next year -- an amount equal to 40 per cent of total world military expenditure. The implications for global security of a single nation's commanding such a mighty arsenal are legion. While Washington wastes no time in condemning India and Pakistan's nuclear tests, it continues to condone Israel's not-so-secret nuclear programme and has consistently refused to reduce the $30 billion spent annually on strategic nuclear forces in the post-Cold War period. Meanwhile, there are still 100,000 American troops stationed in Europe. If NATO does decide to station ground troops permanently in Kosovo, that figure is bound to increase.
Amidst the din of war, it is all too easy to forget that it was Washington, not Belgrade, that created the Balkan crisis. Economist Michel Chossudovsky, of the University of Ottawa, Canada, described in some detail how the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international financial institutions prescribed and forcibly administered the lethal double dose of structural adjustment and large-scale privatisation to Yugoslavia in his 1997 book The Globalisation of Poverty. The IMF's prescription spelt disaster for the Yugoslav economy. Millions were thrown out of work, and economic assistance from the Yugoslav central government to its six constituent republics was abruptly ended. A vicious circle of tragedies and disasters followed, beginning with the break up of Yugoslavia and ending with the catastrophes of Bosnia and Kosovo. Washington, aided and abetted by Germany, masterminded this entire ruinous process.
Not content with their handiwork, Washington and Bonn also turned a blind eye to the systematic ethnic cleansing espoused by Serb and Croat nationalists. The West watched in silence for two years while the twin fascist governments killed an estimated 250,000 people between them. Moreover, it was the US Central Intelligence Agency, in conjunction with German business interests in the Balkans, working through a private organisation of retired American military officers, that financed, trained and armed the Croatian fascists who launched the counterattack that created the basis for the partition of the bloody remains of Bosnia. Subsequent ethnic cleansing by Croatian forces counted 250,000 Bosnian Serb victims. It was these deeds of war that were then enshrined in the shameful Dayton Accords, which were presented by the Western media as a victory for reason and common humanity.
Like the second Gulf War against Iraq, the latest NATO intervention is yet another military action undertaken to secure oil pipeline routes and oil profits, along with other miscellaneous strategic imperialist advantages connected with the Caspian Sea region. Between them, the Caspian region and the Middle East contain some three-quarters of the world's known reserves of petroleum. Washington, not unnaturally, favours the construction of oil pipelines from the Caspian westward across Turkey to the Balkans and southeastern Europe, at the expense of Russian interests. This week, the US denounced the dispatching of Russian surveillance ships to the Mediterranean as "not helpful." The war for Kosovo is thus being played out with all the awesome logic of a spaghetti western.
Small wonder, then, that we are obliged once more to witness an horrendous humanitarian disaster. Milosevic failed to learn the lesson taught by the fate of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leader was once an American ally. Indeed, was it not the late April Glaspie, America's ambassador to Baghdad, who gave Saddam the green light to invade Kuwait?
Having embraced the Serbian president as a partner in the Dayton Accords that ended the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, Washington at first turned a blind eye when Milosevic unleashed his campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. But, just as the West went on to stab Saddam in the back, so in time they turned against Milosevic. In doing so, the NATO states quite deliberately by-passed the UN consultative procedures, dismissing the Security Council's role. Of course, this is not the first time the US has obstructed international law, as witness its various refusals to arrest and remand to the War Crimes Court in The Hague persons indicted for genocide and other violations of human rights who fall under the de facto, and perhaps also de jure jurisdiction of NATO forces in Bosnia, even though such due process was provided for as part of the Dayton settlement.
Moreover, the American constitution explicitly states that war can be declared only by Congress, not by the president. During the Vietnam War, a somewhat vague "War Powers Act" had to be passed, in order to cover up the ugly Tonkin Gulf incident. It was this act that was invoked during Operation Desert Storm against Iraq. Meanwhile, as far as Kosovo is concerned, Congress has still not been consulted. Germany and other NATO member-states are also violating their own constitutions by participating in the blitz without proper democratic process.
Thus history once more repeats itself. But the current version is again a tragedy, not a farce. By the end of World War II, Josef Broz Tito's communist resistance movement had forged a way out of the genocidal nationalist wars instigated in the region by the German Nazis and the Italian fascists. Now, under the guidance of Milosevic and other arch-nationalists, those fratricidal hatreds have returned with a vengeance.
Milosevic abrogated Kosovo's autonomy ten years ago. Then, Western support for the break-up of the former Yugoslavia provided him with the perfect pretext for such an anti-democratic move. Today, by striking at Yugoslavia, Washington is exacerbating the same trend, undercutting and hampering the activities of Serbia's nascent democratic movement -- just as it did in Iraq.
Not only that, but the Pentagon and the CIA knew all too well that the recent air raids would only multiply the sufferings of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians. It would be a galling irony if the Croatian Serbs, displaced through NATO's military assistance to Croatia during the previous war, now settle in Serbian Kosovo in the aftermath of another NATO intervention, which has led to yet another vicious round of ethnic cleansing.
The mufti of Yugoslavia recently denounced the Western allies' aggression and rightly pointed out the hurt it has done to Muslims within the Yugoslav Federation. This clumsy, violent and half-hearted attempt to bring peace has been nothing but a macabre mockery for the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees. For those who have lost only their homes, and not their lives, in the last few weeks, the NATO intervention is a cloud which has no silver lining.
