'Wars, conflict - it's all business," sighs Monsieur
Verdoux in Charlie Chaplin's 1947 film of the same name. Many
will not need to be convinced of the link between US
corporations now busily 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 already 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 standard 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 by not cooperating with weapons inspectors.
The secret annexe B of the Rambouillet accord - which
provided for the military occupation of the whole of
Yugoslavia - was, as the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert
later conceded to the defence select committee, deliberately
inserted to provoke rejection by Belgrade.
But equally revealing about the west's wider motives is
chapter four, which dealt exclusively with the Kosovan
economy. Article I (1) called for a "free-market economy", and
article II (1) for privatisation of all government-owned
assets. At the time, the rump Yugoslavia - then not a member
of the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO or European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development - was the last economy in
central-southern Europe to be uncolonised by western capital.
"Socially owned enterprises", the form of worker
self-management pioneered under Tito, still predominated.
Yugoslavia had publicly owned petroleum, mining, car and
tobacco industries, and 75% of industry 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 early in 1999, Tony Blair berated Belgrade, not
for its handling of Kosovo, but 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, it was state-owned
companies - rather than military sites - that were
specifically targeted by the world's richest nations. Nato
only destroyed 14 tanks, but 372 industrial facilities were
hit - including the Zastava car plant at Kragujevac, 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 enormous Trepca mine complex, whose 1997
value was estimated at $5bn. 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, who used
teargas and rubber bullets.
Five years on from the Nato attack, the Kosovo Trust Agency
(KTA), the body that operates under the jurisdiction of the UN
Mission in Kosovo (Unmik) - is "pleased to announce" the
programme to privatise the first 500 or so socially owned
enterprises (SOEs) under its control. The closing date for
bids passed last week: 10 businesses went under the hammer,
including printing houses, a shopping mall, an agrobusiness
and a soft-drinks factory. 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 gov ernment has called this a "robbery of
state-owned land". For western companies waiting to swoop,
there will be rich pickings indeed in what the KTA assures us
is a "very investor-friendly" environment. But there is little
talk of the rights of the moral owners of the enterprises -
the workers, managers and citizens of the former Yugoslavia,
whose property was effectively seized in the name of the
"international community" and "economic reform".
As the corporate takeover of the ruins of Baghdad and
Pristina proceeds apace, neither the "liberation" of Iraq nor
the "humanitarian" bombing of Yugoslavia has proved Chaplin's
cynical anti-hero to be wrong.
· Neil Clark is a writer and broadcaster specialising in
Balkan affairs
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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