[George Monbiot was not noted for support for Serbia during the Balkan Conflicts – he was a great enthusiast for the official anti-Serb narrative and slips into the article below a barb about ‘Serb expansionism’ as they sought to regain control of the oldest part of Serbia. But writing within his own area of specialism, he saw what was going on].
The Guardian Thursday February 15, 2001
A discreet deal in the pipeline
Nato mocked those who claimed there was a plan for Caspian oil
Special report: the petrol war
George Monbiot
Gordon Brown knows precisely what he should do about BP. The
company’s £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?