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OIL AND POWER STRUGGLES BEHIND CHECHNYA WAR
Commentary by Kimball Cariou, PV Editor
(This article is from the Jan. 1-15/2000 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, Canada, V5L 3J1.)
AS BORIS YELTSIN'S second war against Chechnya grinds on, world public opinion is growing increasingly alarmed by the terrible consequences for Chechen civilians, but also at the rising tensions between Russia and the USA, fuelled by Yeltsin's latest nuclear threats. Clearly there is far more at stake in this war than first meets the eye.
As with other conflicts in the region during this century, the key to understanding this struggle is oil. Chechnya and Dagestan are among the former Soviet territories near the Caspian Sea, with its vast sources of oil and natural gas. More than a century ago, the nearby city of Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, became the centre of a booming oil industry which was greatly expanded during the Soviet era. This industry was a rich prize desired by Hitler during the Second World War, but the Red Army blocked the Nazis before they could occupy the Caucasus in 1942.
Since the capitalist counter-revolution which broke up the USSR in 1991, a consortium of 11 oil monopolies from the USA and Europe have gained control of more than 50 percent of the oil reserves in the area, estimated at a potential worth of $4 trillion. US imperialism has steadily worked to advance its interests around the Caspian Sea, now bordered by five countries: the former Soviet republics of Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, as well as Iran.
The Russian government fears that the CIA and the Pentagon are engineering the de facto colonisation of these and other resource-rich former Soviet territories, such as by encouraging the Islamic separatist movement in Chechnya.
"The national interests of the U.S. correspond to a scenario in which an armed conflict is constantly smouldering in the North Caucasus," Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev said in a recent news conference. Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Avdeyev said a few days later that the country may be heading for a direct conflict with the United States.
"The prospects of potentially enormous hydrocarbon reserves is part of the allure of the Caspian region... New transportation routes will be necessary to carry Caspian oil and gas to world markets," according to a December 1998 report from the United States Energy Information Administration.
The USA wants a new Caspian oil pipeline to bypass the existing lines routed through Russia, which were designed to link the Soviet Union internally. On Nov. 18, President Clinton and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson met with the presidents of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Tajikstan and Turkey to announce plans to construct a new $2.4 billion oil pipeline from Baku to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, bypassing Russia. This would effectively turn the Caspian into an "American lake."
Such a scenario would drastically weaken the geo-political influence of the new capitalist rulers of Yeltsin's Russia, undercutting their drive to exploit and dominate the former Soviet republics and autonomous regions in Central Asia. In turn, the emerging bourgeois cliques of those areas want to strike their own separate deals with the imperialist powers, cutting Russia out of the picture.
The Russian ruling class is using the war to whip up ultra-nationalist, chauvinist feelings among working people, to divert attention from the deepening economic crisis heading into parliamentary elections, and then presidential elections next June. Their aim is to weaken public support for the communist and left forces, and to strengthen the bourgeois parties and Putin's election prospects.
One critical response has come from the Russian Communist Workers Party, which said in a recent statement that "The real reason for the [war in Chechnya] is the annihilation of the socialist society. Before, power and law were directed toward the equality of people on a social and national level. However, at present a society is being built on the basis of overt inequality and property. This has evoked the meanest tendencies amongst people, a cruel power struggle, the separatism of national elites, and, centrally, the principle of divide and conquer. The origins for this bloody tragedy are the ruling regime and its policy of restoring capitalism in Russia."
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