As
the conflict in Ukraine persists and as peace talks between Putin and
western European leaders (Merkel and Hollande) continue, it is important
to look at the economic actors/interests that benefit from conflict and
regime change in the Ukraine and how this compares to situations like
Syria, Libya and Iraq. There are under-reported angles and interests to
these conflicts that we hear little about in western mainstream media
and that many do not look for because they are too caught up in
political or human dramas. For instance, mainstream media spend so much
time demonizing a single enemy, be it Putin in the Ukraine situation,
Assad in Syria, Gaddafi in Libya or Saddam Hussein in Iraq, etc., that
they do not also critically explore how external actors may exploit or
bolster such conflicts and situations in order to secure
politic-economic motives such as access to oil, making way for
destructively conditional IMF loans, or quashing domestic policies that
undermine foreign imperial and economic interests.
In western media, a dangerously false binary
exists; wherein opposition to western imperial and corporate agendas for
a particular region equals support for “evil men” like Putin or
Gaddafi, for instance. This is part of what I call distraction politics
or conflation politics, where opposition to neoliberal and imperial
policies—such as IMF loans with austerity conditions that devastate and
impoverish a nation, its people and its agriculture—is conflated with
support for certain tyrants (as defined by the west).
In the case of regime change and concomitant
conflict in Ukraine, western media is so fixated on the demonization of
Russian President Vladimir Putin over annexation of Crimea that little
attention is being given to what JP Sottile calls “the corporate
annexation of Ukraine.” Commenting on the economic plan for the country
Sottile notes that, “for American companies like Monsanto, Cargill and
Chevron, there’s a gold mine of profits to be made from agri-business and energy exploitation.”
Some European lawmakers view the Ukraine conflict as a smokescreen to allow the IMF/World Bank/European Bank
for Reconstruction financed agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology
business to steal Ukraine’s highly valued and coveted farmland. The
distraction politics around the conflict in Ukraine—e.g., the west
versus the evil Vladimir Putin—hides the reality of massive farmland
seizures that will greatly enrich western agribusiness corporations
while ushering in poisonous policies and practices such as GMO crops.
With Yanukovych ousted, the new government in Ukraine has agreed to
austerity reforms in exchange for IMF and World Bank “aid.” In addition
to the devastating impact these reforms will have on poverty levels and
Ukrainians’ standard of living, the austerity measures will also allow
western agribusiness corporations to side-step Europe’s hitherto tight
restrictions on GMO production. As Lendman explains Ukraine has long
been considered Europe’s “bread basket.” “It’s rich dark soil is highly
valued” and “ideal for growing grain.” With one third of Europe’s
agricultural farmland, Ukraine’s agricultural potential is vast, making
it an ideal target for western agribusiness giants that seek to amass
massive economic wealth through altering and poisoning the food supply
of the region. For many analysts these economic prospects underlie the
Ukraine conflict.
This is somewhat reminiscent of the economic
motives for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the “war on terror.” It is
now widely known that the Bush administration lied about Saddam
Hussein—the US’s former ally and partner in (war) crime turned public
enemy number one—having weapons of mass destruction in order to have a
pretext to invade the country. As I explain in an upcoming book, the
motives for war on Iraq were overwhelmingly economic, with US
mega-corporations winning massive contracts—largely paid for by US tax
payers—to “rebuild” a country (i.e., infrastructure, privatizations of
public services, etc) the US military had just destroyed. In addition to
development contracts, massive profits were made by US oil and oilfield
services firms such as Halliburton and Chevron. Halliburton alone,
which was once CEO-ed by none other than former vice president Dick
Cheney, reportedly made $39.5 billion on the Iraq War.
Similarly, NATO’s involvement in Libya was
largely for economic reasons. Like Saddam, Gaddafi was an ally—and
former foe—of the west that fell back out of favour before the 2011
rebellion against him. While the US hypocritically claimed that NATO’s
involvement in Libya was humanitarian, many analysts feel it had more to
do with oil and protecting the global monetary system. Indeed,
as Newman explains, Gaddafi’s regime went from a “a model” and an
“important ally” of the west to an enemy and target of regime change in a
period of just a few years. This sudden shift in popularity may have
something to do with Gaddafi’s plan “to quit selling Libyan oil in U.S.
dollars — a plan that would be “especially devastating for the U.S.
economy and the American dollar.”
Similarly, is has been noted that the plan for
intervention in Syria was/is fueled by oil interests, not humanitarian
concerns. In his comprehensive analysis of the situation, Nafeez Ahmed
explains that violence and the killing of civilians—by either side of
the conflict—is “being exploited for narrow geopolitical competition to
control Mideast oil” and gas pipelines. His report draws on numerous
official sources, including leaked government documents, retired NATO
officials and former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, to
demonstrate how the situation in Syria is tied to long-standing western
desires to secure control over Middle East oil and pipelines, with the
US-UK training Syrian opposition forces since 2011 in order to elicit
collapse of the Syrian regime “from within.”
While a western oil grab is a major factor in
Iraq, Libya and Syria (in addition to protecting the dollar and European
banks, in the case of Libya), in Ukraine it is largely about land grabs
and western agribusiness’ GMO plans—ushered in through a $17 billion
conditional IMF loan—for the rich and fertile soil of the country. It is
interesting to note, as Joyce Nelson of the Ecologist does, that in
late 2013, then president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a
European Union association agreement tied to a $17 billion IMF loan,
opting instead for a Russian aid package worth $15 billion plus a
discount on Russian natural gas. As Nelson explains, “his decision was a
major factor in the ensuing deadly protests that led to his ouster from
office in February 2014 and the ongoing crisis.” This means that the
present-day IMF loan—and its voracious economic conditions—was on the
table before the ouster of former president Yanukovych, and that regime
change in the country conveniently made it possible for the loan to take
hold.
In addition to opening up Ukraine’s rich
farmland to western agribusiness giants and GMO production, IMF loans
typically come with strict economic restructuring conditions in the form
of structural adjustment programs (SAPs). These programs essentially
force the borrowing nation to restructure its economy by cutting public
spending and subsidies in areas such as employment, income support,
health and education as well as privatizing (previously accessible)
services such as health. If these IMF conditions are applied in Ukraine,
it will devastate and impoverish the country.
Such important politico-economic issues and
agendas in Ukraine are rarely covered at length, if at all, in western
mainstream media. As the conflict in Ukraine continues and as western
mainstream media focus mainly on the human and political dramas of the
conflict and the Minsk 2 ceasefire agreement, one can only hope the
people of Ukraine will not suffer the same long-term political and
economic fate as the people of Iraq, Syria or Libya.
http://russia-insider.com/en/2015/02/21/3724
