Oil Wealth, Colonial and Neo-Colonial Intervention, and Cheap South Asian Labor
In a recent article titled "MISSING THE OIL STORY" Nina Burleigh who has written for The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and New York magazine tried to explore the connection between the latest US military intervention in Afghanistan with unexploited energy reserves in the region. For instance, she pointed to studies that suggest that by 2050, Central Asia will account for more than 80 percent of our oil. She cited a September 10 report in the Oil and Gas Journal, which reported that Central Asia represents one of the world's last great frontiers for geological survey and analysis, "offering opportunities for investment in the discovery, production, transportation, and refining of enormous quantities of oil and gas resources."
She also suggested that there was lots of oil beneath the turf of the US's "politically precarious newest best friend, Pakistan". According to an Agence France Presse report released just days before September 11, "Massive untapped gas reserves are believed to be lying beneath Pakistan's remotest deserts, but they are being held hostage by armed tribal groups demanding a better deal from the central government."
In an earlier article, Steve Niva (Evergreen State College, Washington) had pointed to how US foreign policy in the Middle East had been driven by it's "interests" in backing and influencing regimes who controlled the massive oil resources of the region. That oil has been a major factor in the politics of the Middle East has been brought out by numerous analysts and scholars of the region.
In fact, the British had recognized the importance of the region's oil wealth as early as 1916 when the British secretly signed the 1916 Sykes-Pikot Agreement with France which called for the division of the Ottoman Empire into a patchwork of states that would be ruled by the British and French. The secret agreement was exposed when the Soviet government retrieved a copy in 1921, but a year earlier, the oil factor had been officially recognized in the 1920 San Remo Treaty. In 1928, the Red Line Agreement was signed, which described the sharing of the oil wealth of former Ottoman territories by the British and French colonial governments, and how percentages of future oil production were to be allocated to British, French and American oil companies. (See: Said Aburish, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite, Indigo, London, 1998)
The desire to control the region's oil wealth led to the creation of artificial states such as Kuwait, and states with mixed Kurdish and Arab populations such as in Syria and Iraq. The arbitrary creation of borders and the installation of unpopular pro-colonial leaders served the purpose of dividing the local populations and ensuring the establishment of impotent client-regimes whose administrations were subservient to colonial interests.
In 1945, when Britain was still a major colonial power, US and British coordination and cooperation were highlighted in the following memo: “Our petroleum policy towards the United Kingdom is predicated on a mutual recognition of a very extensive joint interest and upon control, at least for the moment, of the great bulk of the free petroleum resources of the world... US-UK agreement upon the broad, forward-looking pattern for the development and utilisation of petroleum resources under the control of nationals of the two countries is of the highest strategic and commercial importance.” (See: Memorandum by the Acting Chief of the Petroleum Division, 1 June 1945, FRUS, 1945, Vol. VIII, p. 54)
Two years later, the British government expressly noted that the Middle East was “a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination”, since control of the world’s oil reserves also meant control of the world economy. (See: Introductory paper on the Middle East by the UK, undated [1947], FRUS, 1947, Vol. V, p. 569.)
After the second world war, it became impossible to prevent the wave of democratization that swept the colonies, and one by one, the old puppet governments in the region collapsed. Britain and France lost their colonies, but the US stepped in as the new and dominant neo-colonial power in the region. US imperial goals were expressed without mincing any words in a 1953 internal U.S. document: “United States policy is to keep the sources of oil in the Middle East in American hands.” (See: NSC 5401, quoted in Mohammed Heikal,, Cutting the lion’s tail; Suez through Egyptian eyes, Andre Deutsch, London, 1986, p. 38)
In 1958, a secret British document described the principal objectives of Western policy in the Middle East: “The major British and other Western interests in the Persian Gulf [are] (a) to ensure free access for Britain and other Western countries to oil produced in States bordering the Gulf; (b) to ensure the continued availability of that oil on favourable terms and for surplus revenues of Kuwait; (c) to bar the spread of Communism and pseudo-Communism in the area and subsequently to defend the area against the brand of Arab nationalism.” (See: File FO 371/132 779. ‘Future Policy in the Persian Gulf’, 15 January 1958, FO 371/132 778.
The Arab peninsula's oil wealth also led to the cementing of ties between successive Saudi and US governments. US "interests" were exemplified by the quote: “...the defence of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defence of the United States”. Since the 1930s, when oil was discovered in the Arab peninsula, this became one of the key pillars of US foreign policy in the region, and the US government did everything in it's power to maintain the feudal regime of the the house of Al Sa’ud. Operateing without any regard for democratic norms or civil rights for it's citizens or millions of migrant workers that produce most of the nation's wealth, this royal clan which has been propped up since 1943, has also been called the largest family business in the world. Lacking any popular mandate, it has survived largely on the basis of US military strength, and according to some analysts, the US government has pumped in over $33 billion in weapons, military supplies and equipment so as to preserve the authority of this decadent and oppressive monarchy.
The US government (through the CIA) has also been implicated in the coup against the democratically elected, left-leaning government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, which had planned to nationalize Iran’s oil industry. In it's place, the Shah was installed as a result of a covert operation masterminded by the American CIA and British MI6. (See quotes from 'The Federation of American Scientists' in C. M. Woodhouse: Something Ventured, Granada, London, 1982; Roosevelt, Kermit, Countercoup: The struggle for the control of Iran, McGraw Hill, London, 1979.)
Critics of US policy such as Middle East observer and scholar, Mamoun Fandy of Georgetown University’s Center of Contemporary Arab Studies have noted how: “Securing the flow of affordable oil is a cornerstone of U.S. Middle East policy.". Noting that uncritical U.S. support for autocratic Gulf monarchies and their human rights abuses exposes the hypocrisy in American rhetoric about democracy and human rights and "creates the perception among Gulf subjects that their countries are being ruled in the interests of an outside power." (See Mamoun Fandy ‘US Policy in the Middle East’, Foreign Policy In Focus, Vol. 2, No. 4, January 1997.)
It is therefore hardly surprising that anti-war activists are quick to notice the role of controlling the world's oil supplies in US military maneuvers in the region. In an Oct 10 statement issued by Darshan Pal and G. N. Saibaba of the All India Peoples Resistance Forum (AIPRF), there was a suggestion that the US was waging a new war for oil and more military bases in the Middle East. That Germany, France and Japan (who have previously benefited from the deposits of super-profits from the oil-fields of the Middle East) have endorsed the latest US war efforts suggests that this is indeed quite likely. Vital to the profitability of oil production in the Middle East is the vast and unhindered supply of cheap labor mainly from the South Asian region. While India is the largest supplier of high-technology intellectual workers in the kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, a variety of skilled and unskilled manual workers are provided not only by India and Pakistan, but also by countries such as Nigeria, Egypt and the Sudan in Africa, and by Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines in Asia. In Saudi Arabia, immigrant workers make up at least 35 percent of the 15 to 64 age population group. In addition to filling many low paid manual jobs, immigrants are estimated to provide 84 percent of doctors, 80 percent of nurses, 55 percent of pharmacists and 25 percent of all teachers. More recently however, the Saudi government has begun to replace expatriate workers with Saudi nationals, and thousands of foreign workers without proper papers have been arrested and deported.
Nevertheless, immigrant workers play a vital role in these economies, not only in Saudi Arabia, but also in the Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain. In some of these Gulf kingdoms, temporary immigrant workers outnumber citizens by a factor of 2 to 1, or even 3-1. Although the ruling elites in these kingdoms are amongst the richest people on the planet, not all the citizens benefit from the super-profits garnered from the oil industry, and women are often given a raw deal, particularly in Saudi Arabia.
By some accounts, as much of 40 percent of the country’s oil revenues goes straight into the pockets of the ruling family. As a result, poor education and unemployment are increasingly becoming the bane of many of these authoritarian monarchies, as is the repression against local dissent. The complete suppression of the rights of immigrant workers, has of course, been a much older problem.
Secrecy and fear permeate every aspect of the state structure in Saudi Arabia, and most Gulf Kingdoms lack political parties, trades unions, workers safety or immigrant rights advocates, women's groups, or other such democratic organizations. There are no bar associations or organizations that might ensure a fair and independent judicial process. As a result, political and religious opponents of these governments are detained indefinitely without trial or are imprisoned after grossly unfair trials. Torture is endemic, and foreign workers, particularly non-Muslims are most at risk.
With few exceptions, there are stringent controls on media outlets. In Saudi Arabia, the government controls all the domestic radio and TV stations, and closely monitors privately owned print media. No criticism of Islam, the ruling family or the government is tolerated. Forms of punishment are often quite barbaric and include public executions and amputations. Also frequent are private acts of vendetta and rape against less than docile immigrant workers, particularly women.
As the citizenry feels a growing sense of alienation vis-a-vis these highly unpopular and repressive regimes, the US government is now being held responsible for this state of affairs. At the same time, immigrant workers remain completely voiceless and are most oppressed. While there have been several attempts at organizing amongst such workers, state repression and the temporary nature of the work-tenure of most immigrants hinders the formation of lasting organizations that could successfully ameliorate working conditions for the most exploited of these expatriate workers. Temporary contract workers thus pay a very heavy price for the super-profits that are generated in the oil-fields of the Middle East.
Although the nations that export labor to the Middle East benefit from the hard-currency savings repatriated to their home countries, many of these countries suffer more from the high price of energy resources that strangulates the growth of the domestic economy in these countries. Oil-deficit nations, such as India and the Philippines are at a grave disadvantage in this regard. But all capital-poor nations suffer to the extent that the profits from the oil-wealth of the Middle East are deposited in banks in the US, Britain, France, Germany or Japan.
Only a small fraction of this important source of capital finds it's way into the economies of poor countries in Africa or South Asia, and even when it does, such capital investments are laden with onerous and debilitating conditions. South Asian nations are amongst the worst victims, having already suffered two centuries of grueling oppression under British colonial rule. Now they remain capital starved, even as their citizens toil hard to make the oil-rich gulf kingdoms, the richest in the world. They also suffer from the export of the most medieval and repressive versions of Islamic orthodoxy, preventing the people of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh from uniting against what are clearly, common enemies.
As the old colonial powers join hands with the US government in waging new wars in the Middle East, it is crucial that the people of the Middle East, along with their often more oppressed brothers and sisters all across Asia and Africa, refrain from religious extremism and ultra-nationalist sectarianism, but instead, join hands. By understanding the roots of their common oppression, and by uniting in a spirit of mutual respect - they can jointly root out all vestiges of colonial and neo-colonial plunder and pillage that have created enormous tensions and dissatisfaction all across the world.
By encouraging their governments to cooperate with each other instead of competing to become the most loyal lackeys and agents of the US war-machine, the people of the region could usher in an era of peace and progress, putting an end to the social, political and economic misery that has besieged the people of the colonized world for far too long.
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