Pepe Escobar: It’s about oil and US military bases (1 of 3)
Story Transcript
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BBC REPORT: The world has a new country. Russia doesn’t like it, Serbia wants to block it, but Kosovo’s declaration of independence is very real.
NBC REPORT: Here America is king, thanks to a US-led NATO war of liberation started by Bill Clinton nine years ago, after years of Serb atrocities against the Muslim population.
ABC REPORT: As Kosovo’s people celebrated their independence, it has become something of an international flashpoint. The US says independence is the only viable option to promote stability in the region.
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PEPE ESCOBAR, TRNN ANALYST: There’s a myth being spun all over the US and around the wealthy parts of the European Union—France, Britain, and Germany—that the independence of Kosovo is a great accomplishment, is a victory for democracy, and a successful accomplishment of US foreign policy, these in the words of Senator Hillary Clinton. Well, that’s not exactly the case, but it may be the case depending if you come from a completely different perspective. Lots of people all over the world, in different parts of the world, are asking themselves, “Okay, if Kosovo can do it, why not us?” I’ll give you a very, very short list that includes Flanders in Belgium, Northern Cyprus, the Serbian Republic of Bosnia, the Basque country in Spain, Gibraltar, Indian Kashmir, Tibet, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are both in Georgia and they’re both Russian-friendly, and Kurdistan. Why they can’t do it? It’s very simple: because the whole soap opera involving the unilateral and illegal independence of Kosovo, immediately applauded by the US and by the three European Union giants, is directly related to two key things: oil and the expansion or the worldwide empire of US military bases. This means in detail the AMBO oil pipeline and Camp Bondsteel. They are totally interrelated. The AMBO pipeline (Albania, Macedonia, Bulgarian Oil), which is an entity registered in the US, a pipeline that is worth $1.1 billion since 1995, actually, this whole thing started, like, 13 years ago with a feasibility study for a very important pipeline in the Balkans. This was four years before the 78-day, illegal, unilateral bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO but basically orchestrated by the Clinton administration. This feasibility study–And then there was another feasibility study conducted in ’99– itself was by a British subsidiary of Halliburton. This is when Dick Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton. Camp Bondsteel is also directly related to AMBO pipeline, because Camp Bondsteel was built by KBR, which is an Halliburton company as well. It’s the biggest US military base built since the Vietnam War. In fact, military types always are joking that there are only two man-made structures that can be visible from the moon: Great Wall of China and Camp Bondsteel. The AMBO oil pipeline essentially having to go through Kosovo and Macedonia, this implied that the US or at least NATO had to control that area. So this was one of the main objectives for the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.
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