NATO BOMBS AID GERMAN INDUSTRY

German State follows a traditional pattern of exploiting NATO wars

Dateline 20th April 2008

German Foreign Policy reports yet another example of German State and German industry profiting from wars fought by British, Canadian and American soldiers but to which German troops are not permitted to contribute.

As we reported elsewhere ( ) Iraqi industry were invited to meet German industry as thousands of British and US soldiers were dying in an attempt to establish political and industrial calm in Iraq. As coalition troops went to Afghanistan (German troops among them but refusing to go out at night or actually go to where there was real fighting to be done) the German Government hosted Afghanistan reconstruction conferences on the Rhine. (The most blatant example of the failure of German Armed Services in Afghanistan was when a Taliban commander with links to the killers of several British soldiers escaped from German special forces because the German soldiers were not allowed to shoot. The German special forces team came within a few hundred metres of his hideout before they were discovered by Taliban forces. But the Berlin government will not let its soldiers fire shots in Afghanistan in any situation other than self-defence. . . and the Taliban chief escaped. A German defence ministry official said the incident would not change Berlin's policy of the 'principle of proportionality'. He added: 'A fugitive like the Baghlan bomber is not an aggressor and should not be shot unless in self-defence.') German troops showed similar "compassion" (or incompetence) when confronted by KLA terrorists in Kosovo.

Now we see a similar pattern in Serbia where NATO bombs, aided by German intelligence and non military personnel, killed thousands of Serbs and destroyed Serbian industrial assets but where after fighting had stopped German industry moves in to capitalise on the low priced assets.

Volkswagen wants to take over the former Serb car corporation in Zastava, once one of the most important pillars of Yugoslavian industry and manufacturer of the Yugo car. NATO bombs descended on Zastava in 1999 in that illegal war (based on myths, lies and the fabrication of "evidence of genocide") to protect Kosovo (where it turns out Serbs were proportionately 12 times more likely to be killed by the Kosovo Liberation Army than vice versa!). At that time about one fifth of the population of the town of Kragujevac was employed by the company. The bombing caused some $850m of damage and today the company produces only 10% of the cars it used to.

The Serbian State is of course desperate for foreign capital and for modern expertise to re-establish a Serb car manufacturing capacity and is therefore asking for bids, offering the usual incentives of subsidies, preferential terms and export aids to rich foreign bidders.Volkswagen, reports GFP, is particularly interested in the company's strong links to Russia where the future potential market for Volkswagen is of course very attractive. As with other East European privatisations the local currency price (also driven down by the effect of the NATO attack on the Yugoslav currency and economic sanctions against Yugoslavia) of a former State enterprise for predatory western capital is tantamount to peanuts!

There is a distinctly rotten smell in the air if those who used sanctions, lies, a full scale bombing campaign and many infringements of international law to bring a company and a country to its knees then move in to make a different kind of very profitable killing! Seldom have we seen a clearer example of the intimate link between corporatism, fascism and imperial power!

It was in Kragujevac during the Second World War that the German army committed one of its most serious massacres of the war when 2,300 people including 300 children were murdered. GFP reports that in 1999 NATO bombs even destroyed a memorial to the Nazi war time massacre. Compensation has never been forthcoming from the Germans, nor from NATO for the 1999 destruction and mass unemployment which resulted.

Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose!