Stealing
Syria’s Oil: The EU/Al-Qaeda oil consortium
The decision of the European Union to lift the
embargo on Syrian government’s energy exports by importing oil from the ‘armed
opposition’ is another flagrant violation of international law. It violates the
UN General Assembly declaration of 1962 on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural
Resources and is yet another violation of the 1981 UN declaration on the
Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Internal Affairs of
States. But it is much more than a technical violation of the law. It marks the
decent of civilization into barbarism.
London and Paris, have more than Washington, been at
the forefront of aggression against Syria. In spite of the fact that it has now
been confirmed by most media sources that the Syrian ‘opposition’ is Al-Qaeda,
London and Paris persist in their insane
drive to arm the terrorists, using the spurious argument that if they don’t arm
the ‘moderates’ the ‘extremists’ will take over the country. However, in the
words of the New York Times, ‘nowhere
in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of’. [1]
The fact that the Syrian ‘rebels’ are in fact Al- Qaeda has even been admitted by the war-mongering French
daily Le Monde.[2]So, Paris and London are pushing for further arming of
Al-Qaeda and the legalization of oil trading with the jihadi terrorists. In
plain language this means that the loose, terrorist network known to the world
as Al-Qaeda will soon become one of the EU’s partners in the oil business. A
new absurd chapter in the Era of Terror is about to be enacted.
International
law and its violators.
The 1962 UN Resolution 1803 on the Permanent
Sovereignty Over Natural Resources states:
‘Violation of the rights
of peoples and nations to sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources
is contrary to the spirit and principles of the Charter of the United Nations
and hinders the development of international co-operation and the maintenance
of peace’[3]
Japhat Al-Nostra and other
Al-Qaeda affiliated groups do not in any way represent the Syrian people, nor
do they constitute a sovereign state according to the categories of
international law. The ‘armed
opposition’ IS Al-Qaeda. Therefore, the European Union’s decision to officially
buy oil from terrorist gangs currently occupying territories in the Syrian Arab
Republic constitutes a heinous crime and makes a further mockery of the basic
principles governing the relations between states.
The 1981 UN resolution on the Inadmissibility of
Intervention and Interference in the Internal Affairs of States explicitly condemns:
‘the
increasing threat to international peace and security owing to frequent
recourse to the threat or use of force, aggression ,intimidation, military
intervention and occupation, escalation of military presence and all other
forms of intervention or interference, direct or indirect, overt or covert,
threatening the sovereignty and political independence of other States, with
the aim of overthrowing their Governments’,
The declaration goes on to categorically condemn
the deployment of ‘armed bands’ and ‘mercenaries’ by states for the use of
overthrowing the governments of other sovereign states:
‘Conscious
of the fact that such policies endanger the political independence of States,
freedom of peoples and permanent sovereignty over their natural resources,
adversely affecting thereby the maintenance of international peace and
security,
Conscious
also of the imperative need for any threat of aggression, any recruitment, any
use of armed bands, in particular mercenaries, against sovereign States to be
completely ended, so as to enable the peoples of all States to determine their
own political, economic and social systems without external interference or
control’ [4]
Western governments, who for many years have
been openly and shamelessly violating all known and agreed principles of
international law, arming terrorist gangs who murder and maim civilians, funding
common criminals who traffic drugs and recruit child-soldiers, have now
descended to a new low by purchasing oil and gas from these same terrorist
gangs, natural resources which are legally the property of the Syrian Arab
Republic and its citizens.
EU
governments colluding with terrorists
Europe’s descent into absolute moral turpitude
and lawlessness is further reflected in the fact that EU authorities are doing
nothing to prevent brainwashed Muslim youths from traveling to Syria in order
to fight NATO’s war. Yet, the officials of EU states readily admit that hundreds
if not thousands of jihadis from Britain, Ireland, Spain, Germany, Belgium, the
Netherlands and other states are now joining the ranks of the so-called ‘Syrian
rebels’. But they also admit that their only
concern is that these terrorists might be a threat to European security if they
ever return. The fact that these terrorists are putting bombs in busy market
squares; cars; universities; schools; hospitals and mosques throughout Syria,
and that US State Department’s own reports confirm this, doesn’t seem to bother
the EU’s governments. [5]Their only concern is that they might eventually bite
the hand that feeds. The EU ‘anti-terror’
chief Gilles de Kerchove tells the BBC:
"Not
all of them are radical when they leave, but most likely many of them will be radicalized
there, will be trained
"And
as we've seen this might lead to a serious threat when they get back."[6]
We know from Israeli intelligence
sources that most of the terrorists are being trained in US/NATO military bases
in Turkey and Jordon.[7]
So, why doesn’t the EU’s ‘anti-terror’
chief seem to know about this? This is the man responsible for protecting
Europe from terrorism? As I reported
before, France’s ‘anti-terror’ magistrate actually admitted on French state
radio in January 11th that the French government was on the same
side as Al-Qaeda in Syria:
“There are many young jihadists who have gone to the Turkish
border in order to enter Syria to fight Bachar’s regime, but the only
difference is that there France is not the enemy. Therefore we don’t look on
that in the same way. To see young men who are at the moment fighting Bachar
Al-Assad, they will be perhaps dangerous in the future but for the moment they
are fighting Bachar Al-Assad and France is on their side; they will not attack
us’’.[8]
The
cynical double standard which states that all territories outside the EU are
barbaric and therefore outside the realm of international law has now become a
policy that goes unnoticed by Europe’s brainwashed masses. Euro-Atlantic powers are not only behaving
like criminals but are now openly displaying their criminality. One should also note that the French
government has now decided to call the Syrian president by his first name.
Calling a state official by his first name is a sign of deep disrespect in
French etiquette. Since the Sarkozy regime, French diplomacy has been dragged
through the mud, with France’s diplomatic corps now behaving like a cross
between spoilt brats and fascist thugs.
Syria’s Oil Geopolitics
The quest
for sources of cheap energy is one of the geopolitical contexts driving the war
in Syria. Christof Lehmann has written that the discovery of the Iranian Pars
gas field in 2007 and Teheran’s plan to pipe the gas to the Eastern
Mediterranean by constructing a pipeline through Iraq and Syria holds the
potential of turning Iran into a global economic power, giving Teheran enormous
leverage over the EU’s Middle East policy. This development would pose a threat
to the Zionist entity. It would pose an existential threat to the despotic
emirates of the Gulf, who depend on the power of the petro-dollar for their
survival.[9]
That is one
of the reasons why NATO and the Gulf Cooperation Council are using Al-Qaeda
terrorists to break the Shite-led alliance of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon’s
Hezbollah. As Italian geographer Manlio Dinucci has reported, contrary to received
opinion, Syria actually has massive energy reserves.
Dinucci
writes:
‘The U.S. / NATO strategy focuses on
helping rebels to seize the oil fields with a twofold purpose: to deprive the
Syrian state of revenue from exports, already strongly decreased as a result of
the EU embargo, and to ensure that the largest deposits pass in the future,
through the “rebels” under the control of the big Western oil companies.
[10]
The first implementation of the
‘humanitarian intervention’ ideology was during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Since then, the truncated entity
called Kosovo has become Europe’s number one criminal state, run by a convicted
organ and drug trafficking mass murderer called Hacim Al Thaci, a protégé of Brussels and Washington. This is the kind
of narco-mafia anti-state NATO has installed in Libya since the Blitzkrieg
against that country in 2011 and it is the type of criminal regime that will
rule over Syrians if NATO succeeds in bombing that country.
One can read hundreds of articles in the
mainstream press about the criminality of the Kosovar regime and articles
describing the chaos in post-Gaddafi Libya have not been rare. But the same
media outlets will systematically ignore the fact that they were the ones
cheering on the CIA’s Kossovo Liberation Army during the destruction of
Yugoslavia. The same prestitutes are now pushing for more arming of the
terrorists in Syria and for military intervention by NATO.
The closing of the European mind
The
pontificators of European integration and Europe’s role in the world like to pepper
their speeches with pompous references to the ‘rule of law’ and the
universality of ‘European values’.
This specious
rhetoric is unceasingly drummed into European students throughout our
universities and institutions of higher learning and it is repeated ad nauseum
by the mass media. The people now using Al-Qaeda terrorism to further their
interests in the Middle East teach courses in prestigious European universities
on ‘international relations’.
It is no
wonder ordinary people are incapable of seeing and understanding what is
happening before their very eyes. The sheer scale and complexity of the global
institutional networks built upon an empire of lies, self-righteousness and
deceit is simply too overwhelming for the unschooled intellect to comprehend.
Something in our order-seeking minds rejects reality when its horror surpasses
our horizons of tolerance and intelligibility. As a result, the mind recoils,
filters out the real, preferring instead to see in our masters the expression
of complex, contradictory and arcane policies, whose moral content is consigned
to the studies of ‘experts’ and ‘specialists’, who are themselves the products
and propagandists of the same corrupt institutions.
There are now
so many academic institutions, conferences; foundations; think tanks; policy
institutes and university courses proclaiming the virtues of ‘humanitarian
intervention’ that it has acquired the status of a dogma. The repetition and
reproduction of this dogma by the scholastics of neo-liberal academia has
turned that which critical reason would normally scoff at into an apriori principle
of ‘global governance’.
In chapter 22
of his seminal work on international law De Juri Belli ac Pacis, (On the Law of
War and Peace), the great 17th century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius
wrote:
‘Some wars were founded upon real motives and others only
upon colorful pretexts. This distinction was first noticed by Polybius, who
calls the pretexts, profaseis and the real causes, aitias. Thus Alexander made war upon
Darius, under the pretense of avenging the former wrongs done by the Persians
to the Greeks. But the real motive of that bold and enterprising hero was the
easy acquisition of wealth and dominion, which the expeditions of Xenophon and
Agesilaus had opened to his view.’ [11]
Little has
changed since the days of Alexander the Great. Wars are still fought for
pillage and plunder and the furtherance of empire. Polybius’s vocabulary of ‘profaseis’ and ‘aitias’ will be useful here. Since the start of the Syrian
nightmare in 2011, the ‘profaseis’ propagated
by corporate media agencies calling for military intervention in Syria has been
the desire to ‘protect civilians’ from a ‘brutal regime’. Only the naïve and ignorant could now defend
such nonsense as the same media agencies have finally admitted that the
‘opposition’ is in fact Al-Qaeda, a fact the alternative media have been
pointing out since the beginning of the violence in Deraa in March 2011.
NATO’s ‘aitias’ in this conflict is clear: break
up and destroy an independent sovereign state; rob and pillage all of its
resources; rape and terrorize its citizens into submission by unleashing
drugged and brain-washed death squads on the population; constantly blame all
of this on the ‘regime’, then finish the country off with an intensive aerial
bombing campaign before installing a crime syndicate to run the country.
Finally, call that holocaust freedom. Call that holocaust democracy. It’s a
tried and trusted formula which is now being deployed all over the world in
NATO’s megalomaniacal drive for global supremacy.
Grotius
again:
‘Others make -use of pretexts, which though
plausible at first sight, will not bear the examination and test of moral
rectitude, and, when stripped of their disguise, such pretexts will be found
fraught with injustice. In such hostilities, says Livy, it is not a trial of
right, but some object of secret and unruly ambition, which acts as the chief
spring. Most powers, it is said by Plutarch, employ the relative situations of
peace and war, as a current specie, for the purchase of whatever they deem
expedient.’
In the war-ravaged
17th century Europe of Hugo Grotius, to establish the distinction
between profaseis and aitias or the pretexts and real reasons
for war was not considered heretical in the domain of rigorous juridical
discourse. Today, those who make such distinctions are dismissed as ‘paranoid
conspiracy theorists’. In an interview
entitled LA PENSÉE
CRITIQUE COMME DISSOLVANT DE LA DOXA, (Critical Thought as a solvent of Doxa) French sociologist Loic Wacquant argues that ‘never
before have false thought and false science been so prolix and ubiquitous.’[12]
In this age of technological lawlessness, the
basic precepts of international and domestic law have been dismantled. With the
promulgation of the Patriot Act and now the National Defense Authorization Act,
the United States has regressed to the kind of juridical tyranny that preceded
the drafting of the Petition of Right in the England of 1628, a document denouncing
imprisonment without trial, torture and martial law and providing the legal and
moral groundwork for the English Revolution of 1641.
Conclusion
It behooves
us all to reflect upon the current war in the Levant. What we are witnessing is the destruction of
the Westphalian state system and a return to the kind of chaos of the 17th
century’s Thirty Years War, except this time it is festering on the borders of
Europe where the principle of bellum se ipsum alet, war will feed itself, is
being acted out by private military corporations, drug gangs, terrorist
networks and international crime syndicates linked directly and indirectly to
the ideological state apparatuses of the Atlantic powers.
And so, the
KLA have been training the ‘Syrian Free Army’, while Libya’s Islamic Fighting
Group has also joined the ‘holy war’ in Syria. Like the Thirty Years War, the
armed gangs and mercenaries are funding themselves by pillaging the local
economies and selling their booty as contraband. Whole factories in Syria have
been dismantled and stolen by mercenaries in the service of Turkey and Qatar,
while the drug trade is now booming like never before. When one country is
destroyed and reduced to despotic fiefdoms and emirates, Western corporations
move in with their private military companies and proceed to pillage the
country’s resources, unhindered by the rules and regulations of the Sovereign
State. The terrorist hordes then move on to the next country on NATO’s hit
list. This is NATO’s strategy of chaos and it is spreading all over the
Southern Hemisphere.
Given the
criminality of Western oil companies in the past, it is perhaps not entirely
surprising that they would now, in the form of the EU, be openly buying oil
from terrorist organizations. What is surprising, however, is the morbid
insouciance of Europe’s populations. How
could there be so many ‘respectable’ people in our media and academic
institutions prepared to collaborate with these mobsters? Why have there been
few if any significant demonstrations against NATO? How is it possible that the
powers that be should be allowed to get away with such unmitigated criminality?
The Roman
poet Horace wrote- neglecta solent incendia sumere vires -a neglected fire
always gathers in strength. Since the destruction of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan by the
Western-backed Mujahedeen terrorists in the 1979, sovereign states have fallen
prey to mercenaries and terrorist gangs backed by Western imperialism, while
civil liberties have been curtailed in America and Europe in the name of the
‘War on Terrorism’.
The fire has
since spread to the former Yugoslavia; Rwanda; Côte d'Ivoire;
Sudan; Somalia; Iraq; DRC; Chechnya, Libya
and now Syria. If people don’t wake up and mobilize against the criminals
planning these wars, the flames of destruction will eventually come home in the
form of martial law, and a fascist, panopticon police state which will be deemed
necessary during the prosecution of a Third World War against Iran, Russia and
China. If this fire of terrorism is not put out in Syria, it will continue into
the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Russian Federation and Eastern China until all
possible resistance to NATO’s drive for ‘full spectrum dominance’ is eliminated
and a tyrannical, corporate hyper-state rules over the planet.
World wars
have happened in the past and given the scelerate Will-to-Power of our current
rulers, there is no reason to believe that a world war will not happen again. Many
in the West, inured to televised violence and indifferent to distant wars, have
a tendency to believe that politics is a domain that does not affect them. But
in the words of the French politician Charles de Montalambert ‘Vous avez beau ne pas vous occuper de politique, la politique
s'occupe de vous tout de même.’[It is easy for you not to be concerned about
politics, but politics, however, is concerned about you] In the light of
current events the statement merits reflection.
Article first published on Global Research and Dissident Voice.
