The so-called independence seems to cost Kosovo very dearly. Numerous Western diplomats have already charged a lot for their engagement in the realization of the project of a so-called independent Kosovo and now they have been joined by the retired US general Wesley Clark, who was the NATO commander at the time when NATO bombed Serbia in 1999. Now he is especially interested in coal reserves in the Province. On the other hand, corruption and organized crime in Kosovo are more and more rampant, while people there are becoming increasingly poorer. There is a high rate of unemployment and a constant drop of living standard in Kosovo. More from Ivana Subašić.
It is no secret that, in the past 12 years, many Western diplomats have been conducting very successful business in Kosovo, which has brought them profit of hundreds of millions of dollars. Those diplomats include Madeleine Albright, who was the US secretary of state during the NATO bombing of Serbia, and a former UNMIK head, Bernard Kouchner. Both of them had the final say when it came to telecommunication affairs. On the basis of the writings of some media, Kouchner played a key role in the creation of the first and largest mobile telephony operator in Kosovo,“Valja” – which is a consortium of PTT Kosovo and French “Alkatel”, with an annual income of 200 million dollars. In 2004, the Albright Group took over the job of a special consultant to the chairperson of the Managing Board of "Ipko net", which, in the midst of the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, was formed by none other than the heads of the International Rescue Committee. After NATO came to Kosmet, "Ipko net" signed an exclusive contract on the use of infrastructure with the Kosovo Energy Corporation, which enabled them to become the first Internet provider that covered 70% of the Province’s territory.
Wesley Clark, who was the NATO commander during the bombing of Serbia, is today the head of the Canadian energy corporation Envidity. He is exclusively interested in coal reserves in Kosovo. It is estimated that some 100,000 barrels of synthetic oil can be derived from those reserves daily. The news, published by the Life in Kosovo portal, is especially interesting because the legal owner of those reserves is the Republic of Serbia, which is also the legal owner of all the other energy potentials and telecommunication infrastructure in Kosovo and Metohija. According to the Geological Institute for Research in Mineral Ores, the reserves number between 7 and 12 billion tons of coal in the Kosovo basin and some 2 billion tons in Metohija. Therefore it is clear how much Serbia has lost in the past twelve years due to the unresolved Kosovo issue, i.e. the fact that Serbia has no competences over its own raw material and energy potentials in the southern Province.
All this proves once again that the Kosovo independence project was not based on the human rights issue, as Pristina’s Western mentors claim, but on the strategic and personal interests of the main players in international political and economic relations. This is something that professor Michael Chossudovsky, the founder, editor and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), based in Montreal, Canada, pointed to in an article of his a few years ago. He described the recognition of independence of Kosovo as part of a US-NATO military plan, adding that, by bombing Serbia and especially by building the Bondsteel base in Kosovo, the USA created conditions for permanent military presence in southern Europe. He writes that the plans for building Bondsteel, aimed, among other things, at securing the building of a strategic pipeline, were known as early as in 1997, two years before the NATO bombing of FR Yugoslavia, and were built into a contract between the Pentagon and the petroleum company Halliburton, through its engineering subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root. It was Dick Cheney, later a US vice-president, that was at Halliburton’s helm at the time. One of the objectives underlying Camp Bondsteel was to protect the Albanian-Macedonian-Bulgarian Oil pipeline project (AMBO), which was to channel Caspian sea oil from the Bulgarian Black Sea port of Burgas to the Adriatic, writes Chossudovsky.
Although the so-called independence seems to cost Pristina dearly, it is Serbia that suffers most. Not only is Serbia’s territorial integrity being threatened, but its significant raw material and energy potentials in Kosovo and Metohija are being illegally expropriated.