Camp Bond-steel in Kosovo
Is this another Guantanamo in the pristine mountains of Kosovo? What's the 21st
Century term for "gunboat diplomacy?"
Camp Bondsteel and America?s plans to control Caspian oil
By Paul Stuart
29 April 2002
Camp Bondsteel, the biggest ?from scratch? foreign US military base since the
Vietnam War is near completion in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. It is
located close to vital oil pipelines and energy corridors presently under
construction, such as the US sponsored Trans-Balkan oil pipeline. As a result
defence contractors?in particular Halliburton Oil subsidiary Brown & Root
Services?are making a fortune.
In June 1999, in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Yugoslavia, US
forces seized 1,000 acres of farmland in southeast Kosovo at Uresevic, near the
Macedonian border, and began the construction of a camp.
Camp Bondsteel is known as the ?grand dame? in a network of US bases running
both sides of the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. In less than three years
it has been transformed from an encampment of tents to a self sufficient, high
tech base-camp housing nearly 7,000 troops?three quarters of all the US troops
stationed in Kosovo.
There are 25 kilometres of roads and over 300 buildings at Camp Bondsteel,
surrounded by 14 kilometres of earth and concrete barriers, 84 kilometres of
concertina wire and 11 watch towers. It is so big that it has downtown, midtown
and uptown districts, retail outlets, 24-hour sports halls, a chapel, library
and the best-equipped hospital anywhere in Europe. At present there are 55
Black Hawk and Apache helicopters based at Bondsteel and although it has no
aircraft landing strip the location was chosen for its capacity to expand.
There are suggestions that it could replace the US airforce base at Aviano in
Italy.
According to Colonel Robert L. McClure, writing in the engineers professional
Bulletin, ?Engineer planning for operations in Kosovo began months before the
first bomb was dropped. At the outset, planners wanted to use the lessons
learned in Bosnia and convinced decision makers to reach base-camp ?end state?
as quickly as possible.?
Initially US military engineers took control of 320 kilometres of roads and 75
bridges in the surrounding area for military use and laid out a base camp
template involving soldiers living quarters, helicopter flight paths,
ammunition holding areas and so on.
McClure explains how the Engineer Brigade were instructed ?to merge
construction assets and integrate them with the contractor, Brown & Root
Services Corporation, to build not one but two base camps [the other is Camp
Monteith] for a total of 7,000 troops.?
According to McClure, ?At the height of the effort, about 1,000 former US
military personnel, hired by Brown & Root, along with more than 7,000 Albanian
local nationals, joined the 1,700 military engineers. From early July and into
October [1999], construction at both camps continued 24 hours a day, seven days
a week.?
Brown & Root Services provides all the support services to Camp Bondsteel. This
includes 600,000 gallons of water per-day, enough electricity to supply a city
of 25,000 and a supply centre with 14,000 product lines. It washes 1,200 bags
of laundry, supplies 18,000 meals per day and operates 95 percent of the rail
and airfield facilities. It also provides the camps firefighting service. Brown
& Root are now the largest employers in Kosovo, with more than 5,000 local
Kosovan Albanians and another 15,000 on its books.
Staff at Camp Bondsteel rarely venture outside the compound and their
activities are secretive. Whilst other KFOR patrols are small and mobile with
soldiers wearing soft caps and instructed to integrate with the local
population, US military personnel leave Bondsteel in either helicopters or as
part of infrequent but large heavily armed convoys.
In unnamed interviews US troops complain that hostility to their presence is
growing as local inhabitants compare the investment in Camp Bondsteel with the
continuing decline in their own living standards.
Those visiting Camp Bondsteel describe it as a journey through 100 years in
time. The area surrounding the camp is extremely poor with an unemployment rate
of 80 percent. Then Bondsteel appears on the horizon with its mass of
communication satellites, antennae and menacing attack helicopters circling
above. Brown & Root pay Kosova workers between $1 and $3 per hour. The local
manager said wages were so low because, ?We can?t inflate the wages because we
don?t want to over inflate the local economy.?
The escalating US presence at Bondsteel was accompanied by increased activity
by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Since its appearance most Serbs, Roma and
Albanians opposed to the KLA have been murdered or driven out. Those remaining
dare not leave their houses to buy food at the local stores and the need for
military escorts stretch from children?s swimming pools to tractors taken away
for repair. According to observers the KLA continue to act with virtual
impunity in the US sector despite the high tech military intelligence
facilities at Bondsteel.
When US troops arrive at Camp Bondsteel, they are more likely to be met by a
Brown & Root employee directing them to their accommodation and equipment
areas. According to G. Cahlink in Government Executive Magazine (February
2002), ?Army peace keepers joke that they?re missing a patch on their
camouflage fatigues. ?We need one that says Sponsored by Brown & Root,? says a
staff sergeant, who, like more than nearly 10,000 soldiers in the region, has
come to rely on Brown and Root Services, a Houston based contractor, for
everything from breakfast to spare parts for armoured Humvees.?
The contract to service Camp Bondsteel is the latest in a string of military
contracts awarded to Brown & Root Services. Its fortunes have grown as US
militarism has escalated. The company is part of the Halliburton Corporation,
the largest supplier of products and services to the oil industry.
In 1992 Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defence in the senior Bush administration,
awarded the company a contract providing support for the US army?s global
operations. Cheney left politics and joined Halliburton as CEO between 1995 and
2000. He is now US vice president in the junior Bush administration. In 1992
Brown & Root built and maintained US army bases in Somalia earning $62 million.
In 1994 Brown & Root built bases and support systems for 18,000 troops in Haiti
doubling its earnings to $133 million. The company received a five-year support
contract in 1999 worth $180 million per-year to build military facilities in
Hungary, Croatia and Bosnia. It was Camp Bondsteel, however, that was dubbed
?the mother of all contracts? by the Washington based Contract Services
Association of America. There, ?We do everything that does not require us to
carry a gun,? said Brown & Roots director David Capouya.
The aim of outsourcing military support and services to private contractors has
been to free up more soldiers for combat duties. A US Department of Defence
(DoD) review in 2001 insisted that the use of contractors would escalate: ?Only
those functions that must be done at DoD should be kept at DoD.?
In sectors controlled by other Western powers, KFOR soldiers who are living in
bombed out apartment blocks and old factories joke, ?What are the two things
that can be seen from space? One is the Great Wall of China, the other is Camp
Bondsteel.?
More seriously a senior British military officer told the Washington Post, ?It
is an obvious sign that the Americans are making a major commitment to the
Balkan region and plan to stay.? One analyst described the US as having taken
advantage of favourable circumstances to create a base that would be large
enough to accommodate future military plans.
Camp Bondsteel has become a key venue for important policy speeches by leading
officials of the Bush administration.
On June 5, 2001 US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld explained to troops at
Camp Bondsteel what role they played in the new administration?s economic
strategy. He declared, ?How much should we spend on the armed services? ...My
view is we don?t spend on you, we invest in you. The men and women in the armed
services are not a drain on our economic strength. Indeed you safeguard it.
You?re not a burden on our economy, you are the critical foundation for growth.?
One month later, President George W. Bush made his first trip abroad to see US
troops at the camp. He traveled directly from the Rome G8 summit, where
tensions with European governments had come to the fore. In a speech described
as a ?retrenching? of the US in Europe, he insisted that US troops were in
Kosovo to stay, had gone in together and would ?leave together?. In a break
from normal procedure, in front of cheering troops, Bush signed into law a
Congress-approved increase in military spending of $1.9 billion.
Since then Camp Bondsteel has continued to grow, as it spearheads the first
phase in a realignment of US military bases in Europe and eastward. The
Bondsteel template is now being applied in Afghanistan and the new bases in the
former Soviet Republics.
According to leaked comments to the press, European politicians now believe
that the US used the bombing of Yugoslavia specifically in order to establish
Camp Bondsteel. Before the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the
Washington Post insisted, ?With the Middle-East increasingly fragile, we will
need bases and fly over rights in the Balkans to protect Caspian Sea oil.?
The scale of US oil corporations investment in the exploitation of Caspian oil
fields and the US government demand for the economy to be less dependent on
imported oil, particularly from the Middle-East, demands a long term solution
to the transportation of oil to European and US markets. The US Trade &
Development Agency (TDA) has financed initial feasibility studies, with large
grants, and more recently advanced technical studies for the New York based
AMBO (Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria Oil) Trans-Balkan pipeline.
Announcing a grant for an advanced technical study in 1999 for the AMBO oil
pipeline through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania, TDA director J. Joseph
Grandmaison declared, ?The competition is fierce to tap energy resources in the
Caspian region....Over the last year [1999], TDA has been actively promoting
the development of multiple pipelines to connect these vast resources with
Western markets. This grant represents a significant step forward for this
policy and for US business interests in the Caspian region.?
The $1.3 billion trans-Balkan AMBO pipeline is one of the most important of
these multiple pipelines. It will pump oil from the tankers that bring it
across the Black Sea to the Bulgarian oil terminus at Burgas, through Macedonia
to the Albanian Adriatic port of Vlore. From there it will be pumped on to huge
300,000 ton tankers and sent on to Europe and the US, bypassing the Bosphorus
Straits?the congested and only route out of the Black Sea where tankers are
restricted to 150,000 tons.
The initial feasibility study for AMBO was conducted in 1995 by none other than
Brown & Root, as was an updated feasibility study in 1999. In another twist,
the former director of Oil & Gas Development for Europe and Africa for Brown &
Root Energy Services, Ted Ferguson, was appointed as the new president of AMBO
[1997] after the death of former president and founder of AMBO, Macedonian born
Mr Vuko Tashkovikj.
According to a recent Reuters article, Ferguson declared that Exxon-Mobil and
Chevron, two of the worlds largest oil corporations, are preparing to finance
the AMBO project.
The building of AMBO risks antagonising Turkey, the US?s main ally in the
region. According to the Reagan Information Interchange, ?While the United
States is making an advantageous economic decision, it is overlooking its
crucial strategic relationship with Turkey.?
The US is also antagonising its European allies and Russia with Camp Bondsteel
and other smaller military bases run alongside the proposed AMBO pipeline
route. It has been built near the mouth of the Presevo valley and energy
Corridor 8, which the European Union has sponsored since 1994 and regards as a
strategic route east-west for global trade.
In April 1999, British General Michael Jackson, the commander in Macedonia
during the NATO bombing of Serbia, explained to the Italian paper Sole 24 Ore
?Today, the circumstances which we have created here have changed. Today, it is
absolutely necessary to guarantee the stability of Macedonia and its entry into
NATO. But we will certainly remain here a long time so that we can also
guarantee the security of the energy corridors which traverse this country.?
The newspaper added, ?It is clear that Jackson is referring to the 8th
corridor, the East-West axis which ought to be combined to the pipeline
bringing energy resources from Central Asia to terminals in the Black Sea and
in the Adriatic, connecting Europe with Central Asia. That explains why the
great and medium sized powers, and first of all Russia, don?t want to be
excluded from the settling of scores that will take place over the next few
months in the Balkans.?
******
Diego Garcia: Paradise Isle or Britain's shame?
Gordon Thomas, investigative journalist and author of Gideon's Spies: the
Secret History of the Mossad asserts that "high level leaders and operatives of
Al Qaida and the Taliban are held there (on Diego Garcia)" and "none are being
protected by the Geneva Conventions".
Thomas claims: "the interrogation techniques used on Diego Garcia are contained
in a secret CIA manual on coercive questioning. It contains sections headed
'Threats and Fear', 'Pain', 'Narcosis' and 'Heightened Suggestibility and
Hypnosis'."
He further suggests "the presence of the prisoners on Diego Garcia is so secret
that a counter-terrorism official in Washington said President Bush 'had
informed the CIA he did not want to know where they were'."
A recent report by Human Rights First entitled "Ending Secret Detentions" cites
Diego Garcia as a suspected site for the detention of individuals, including
the leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah, Hambali, otherwise known as Riduan
Isamuddin.
Thomas suggests that private Lear jets regularly fly into the island with a new
batch of prisoners, which, he says, have included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi
Bin Al Shibh and Abu Zubaydah, kidnapped from Pakistan. He says this is done
with the knowledge of US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld and often with the approval
of the White House.
It seems that the US administration realizes the Guantanamo experiment has
failed. Rumsfeld has already admitted to "ghost" detainees who don't show up in
any official documents and who have no name. How many of these are being
tortured on Paradise Isle, I wonder. According to various reports, others are
being held on two US prison ships - the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu.
Ibrahim Habaci and Arif Ulusam, both Turkish; Saudi citizen Faha al Bahli;
Mahmud Sardar Issa from Sudan; and Kenyan national Khalifa Abdi
Posted by Hannah at November 25, 2005 06:12 AM
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