”Wars, conflict — it is all business,” sighs the eponymous hero of Charlie Chaplin’s 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux.
Many will not need to be convinced of the link between United States corporations now helping themselves to Iraqi state assets and the military machine that prised Iraq open for global business. But what is less widely known is that a similar process is well under way in a part of the world where B52s were not so long ago dropping bombs in another ”liberation” mission.
The trigger for the US-led bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was, according to the Western version of history, the failure of the Serbian delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace agreement. But that holds little more water than the tale that has Iraq responsible for last year’s invasion because it did not cooperate with weapons inspectors.
The secret annexe B of the Rambouillet Accord — which provided for the military occupation of Yugoslavia — was, as British foreign office minister Lord Gilbert later conceded to the defence select committee, inserted to provoke rejection by Belgrade.
Equally revealing about the West’s motives is chapter four, dealing with the Kosovan economy. Article I (1) called for a ”free-market economy”, and article II (1) for privatisation of government-owned assets. At the time Yugoslavia was the last economy in central-southern Europe to be uncolonised by Western capital. ”Socially owned enterprises”, a form of worker self-management, predominated.
Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car and tobacco industries, and 75% of indus-try was state or socially owned. In 1997 a privatisation law had stipulated that, in sell-offs, at least 60% of shares had to be allocated to a company’s workers. The high priests of neo-liberalism were not happy.
At the Davos summit in 1999 British Prime Minister Tony Blair berated Belgrade for its failure to embark on a programme of ”economic reform” — new-world-order speak for selling state assets and running the economy in the interests of multinationals.
In the 1999 Nato bombing campaign state-owned companies, rather than military sites, were targeted by the world’s richest nations. Nato only destroyed 14 tanks, but 372 industrial facilities were hit, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed.
After the removal of Slobodan Milosevic, the West got the ”fast-track” reforming government in Belgrade it had long desired. One of the first steps of the new administration was to repeal the 1997 privatisation law and allow 70% of a company to be sold to foreign investors — with just 15% reserved for workers. The government then signed up to the World Bank’s programmes, effectively ending the country’s financial independence.
Meanwhile, as The New York Times had crowed, ”a war’s glittering prize” awaited the conquerors. Kosovo has the second-largest coal reserves in Europe, and enormous deposits of lignite, lead, zinc, gold, silver and petroleum.
The jewel is the Trepca mine complex, whose 1997 value was $5-billion. In an extraordinary smash-and-grab raid soon after the war, the complex was seized from its workers and managers by more than 2 900 Nato troops.
Five years on, the Kosovo Trust Agency (KTA), which operates under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (Unmik), is ”pleased to announce” the programme to privatise the first 500 socially owned enterprises (SOEs) under its control.
The closing date for bids passed last week: 10 businesses went under the hammer. The Ferronikeli mining and metal-processing complex, with an annual capacity of 12 000 tonnes of nickel production, is being sold separately, with bids due by November 17.
To make the SOEs more attractive to foreign investors, Unmik has altered the way land is owned in Kosovo, allowing the KTA to sell 99-year leases with the businesses, which can be transferred or used as loans or security.
Even Belgrade’s pro-Western government has called this ”robbery of state-owned land”. — Â