The Role of Caspian Sea Oil in the Balkan Conflict

by Diana Johnstone, WAMM

NATO has solved the NATO problem, not the Kosovo problem. This was clear in today's headline in the International Herald Tribune: "Last-minute Kosovo Deal Averts Raids - A Bold Role Puts New Life in Alliance." The Washington Post story from Brussels read as follows:

"The apparent resolution of the Kosovo crisis has dramatically expanded NATO's post-Cold-War responsibilities, escalating the alliance's future peacekeeping duties in the Balkans and reaffirming its new destiny as a pan-European security organization. For the first time in its 50-year history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization threatened to encroach on the territory of a sovereign nation. It also established a key precedent by vowing to conduct military operations that would ignore a potential veto by Russian and Chinese members of the United Nations Security Council."

That's what matters, after all, and not the Albanians, much less the Serbs.

And later on in the same Washington Post article: "Whether we like it or not, NATO has become the sheriff in Europe's 'Wild Southeast,' said a senior European diplomat. "We need to expand our perception from the microcosm of Bosnia to an overall strategy for the Balkans because NATO has become the central organizing force for the entire region."

And the region is interesting especially for the following reason: only two days earlier, on October 12, the International Herald Tribune carried a New York Times story reporting that the U.S. is about to lose its two-year campaign to persuade major oil companies to quickly build a multibillion dollar oil pipeline from the Caucasus to the Mediterranean, "a campaign that has become a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy . . . "

The U.S. has not totally lost, because apparently the oil companies will refrain from making Caspian-oil-dependent pipelines through Iran. But even though U.S. officials "have been exerting just about every form of persuasion at their disposal to persuade the oil companies to choose a route that would run from Azerbaijan, down through Turkey to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan," it appears that the companies will rely on a much shorter pipeline already being built from Azerbaijan to the port of Supsa on Georgia's Black Sea coast.

So here's the problem: "From Georgia, the oil would be loaded into tankers and shipped across the Black Sea toward Europe. This would not only deny billions of dollars in potential revenue to Turkey, a U.S. ally, but would mean a sharp increase in oil tanker traffic through the narrow Bosporus, which Turkey strenuously opposes."

The solution to this problem is obvious: an oil pipeline through the Balkans, specifically, through Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Albania. Thus the need for the region to come under a NATO protectorate. The same article makes clear that the stakes are high: "The Caspian Region has emerged as the world's newest stage for big-power politics. It not only offers oil companies the prospect of great wealth, but also provides a stage for high-stakes competition among world powers.

"This grand rivalry has begun with an intense competition for control over pipeline routes that will carry the Caspian oil to foreign markets. Much depends on the outcome, because these pipelines will not simply carry oil, they will also define new corridors of trade and power.

"The nation or alliance of nations, controlling the pipeline routes could hold sway over the Caspian region for decades to come."

Diana lives in Paris, where she is writing a book on Kosovo. She speaks Serb and has spent time in Kosovo. She is the former press attache for the Green Party in the European Parliament and the former European Editor of In These Times.