Bozen – These days war is still often reduced to a fight between good and evil, or to political intentions or geostrategic thoughts. Although Pope Francis in June 2014 criticized that the world economic system “in order to survive must make war”, economic reasons behind conflicts are seldom mentioned. But of course they exist, and there is a paragon in contemporary history which demonstrates how important economic reasons behind wars can be. It’s the “Kosovo-War” of 1999.
First, let’s get a small overview of the Kosovo War. From March 24 to June 10 1999 NATO led a war against Yugoslavia. Operation Allied Force was officially called a humanitarian intervention in favor of the suppressed Albanians, and was depicted not as an attack, but as a defense of human rights. But as James Kurth, an American professor of political science, puts it, the War over Kosovo was just “ostensibly the first truly humanitarian war.”
Ostensibly, because behind the official justification one can find geostrategic, geopolitical, military and, not least, economic reasons why the air raids were executed. While geostrategic and geopolitical interests can be summarized briefly with the stationing of NATO-forces in a post-communist country, the military intentions can be identified in the transformation of NATO from a defensive into an intervention alliance. Even though this transformation was the most important goal of the Kosovo-war, it went along with economic reasons, mashing up with both political and military intentions. The transformation of NATO is mainly due to economic reasons – the struggle for resources and the policy of open markets all over the world.
From the point of view of military logic, NATO led a war against a state whose military power was to be smashed to pieces. At the same time, the enemy’s economic base was seriously affected, which was another goal. Deploying troops smoothed the way for the so-called reconstruction, a restructuring of the national economy on the neoliberal model. At the same time the crisis connected personnel between the arms industry, the military, and politics, especially in the USA, where defense contractors create an artificial need out of their own business self-interest. This is how the four factors of neoliberalism, geopolicy, geostrategic considerations, and the military complement and promote each other.
The privatizing strategy of the UN-Administration (UNMIK) was, contrary to the official justification of the bombing campaign, not about helping the Albanians in Kosovo but about taking advantage of the desolate economic situation. Thus, a devaluation strategy was applied. In the case of the construction conglomerate Ramiz Sadiku, of Prishtina, the UNMIK sought to lower the price of the companies to be auctioned off to sell them cheaply. The industrial giant Ferronikel, which employed around 2,000 workers in the purely Albanian region of Drenica, was dispossessed in 2005 despite demonstrations by workers supported by the mayors of the Drenas and Skenderaj municipalities. Repeatedly in the previous years, the responsible UNMIK authorities had been given concrete plans showing how the workers could have started production themselves again with seed funding.
UNMIK and their AKM Trust Agency insisted on selling. While the metal workers’ union estimated the factories to be worth more than 300 million Euro, the AKM with Joachim Rücker serving as its chair accepted a bid from the British company Alferon, selling them for 33 million Euro. Alferon manages the mining and metals group International Mineral Resources, which is headquartered in Kazakhstan. Thyssen-Krupp holds a share of the company. And while the Supreme Court in Prishtina ascertained that the steel tube factory in Ferizaj was worth a minimum of 25 million Euro, AKM sold the company for 3.6 million. Michael Schäfer, director in the Foreign Office of Germany, explained the business practices of his friend Joachim Rücker by stating that it was time for investments to finally yield political and economic returns. On September 1, 2006, Rücker was promoted to UNMIK chief.
US diplomats and military played a special role in the privatization process. Numerous officials returned after the end of their mandates to Kosovo, especially in the coal and telecommunication industries, like Wesley Clark, Madeleine Albright, James Pardew, and Mark Tavlarides. Secretary of State Albright was one of the most vehement proponents of the air raids. Wesley Clark, as NATO Supreme Commander, was responsible for carrying them out. US diplomat Pardew enjoys the Kosovo elite’s esteem for his role “on the ground” during the war, according to the “New York Times”. And Tavlarides was legislative director in the National Security Council of the White House during the Clinton administration. He orchestrated the commission for building a section of the motorway from Prishtina to the Albanian border, valued at a billion dollars by Prime Minister Hashim Thaçi. The contract was awarded to a joint venture of the San Francisco-based Bechtel group and the Turkish company Enka.
The policy on which privatizations were based, the opening of Yugoslavia according to the rules of the neoliberal market, was written already in the Rambouillet Treaty before the beginning of the war. Article I calls for a “free market economy,” Article II for the privatization of all state assets. In this context, the high number of economic targets damaged by bombs in the air war (around 380 industrial facilities) appears in a new light – particularly so, because foreign and private companies were hardly affected by the bombing. Privatization is about continuing the war with political means through NATO, the EU, and the IMF. The powerhouse behind this is, as German professor of sociology Maria Mies says, neoliberal globalization, which leads to, and is promoted by war. Globalized capital causes situations of crisis everywhere in the world, and these ‘crises’ must then be solved militarily by ‘crisis reaction forces’. Those forces defend the interests of the big corporations of the NATO countries everywhere in the world.
Thus, the most economically influential nations have created a worldwide military system under US leadership, intended to ensure unrestricted access to resources, thus providing “security of supply.” At the same time, on a physical level, war destroys whatever has survived despite deregulation and forced market liberalization. The Serbian automobile factory Zastava was heavily affected by the bombings (37,000 employees, among them 2,000 Albanians, unemployed, 2,000 apprentice positions lost, 229 ancillary companies affected). In 2008, Fiat – an enterprise from a NATO state – assumed control of the insolvent factory.
Let’s summarize it this way: So that Western banks and multinational groups can act globally as well as nationally, as required by the WTO regulations, war is, as the Canadian professor of economy Michel Chossudovsky puts it, “a multilateral investment agreement of last resort.” In Kosovo, for instance, Commerzbank (of Germany) and Raiffeisenbank (of Austria) took over almost all of the banking system, thus controlling the financial activities in the province. This is how neoliberal capitalism and war form new realities.
