Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: In Kossovo non c'e petrolio, non come in Kuwait

Vale la pena leggere questo articolo, se si capisce l'inglese.
Alla faccia dei motivi umanitari...
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A Discreet Deal in the Pipeline
Nato Mocked Those Who Claimed There was a Plan for Caspian Oil
by 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?
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Posted from [128.196.188.92] by way of 
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Vale la pena leggere questo articolo, se si capisce l'inglese.
Alla faccia dei motivi umanitari...
PS:  Grazie alla chiusura di 
deja.com
, per ora non posso leggere
risposte  :-(
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by George Monbiot
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-- 
Posted from [128.196.188.92] by way of 
f259.law4.hotmail.com
 [216.33.148.137] 
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Non è chiuso deja, è stato comprato da google, che ora gestisce anche
il vecchio archivio deja. Almeno per quello che cercavo, mi sembrava
funzionare.
--
manetones

 risposte  :-(
news.ccit.Arizona.EDU
  :-)
Ciao,
Z