CHECHNYA - THE LAST OIL RUSH OF THE 20th CENTURY by Brian Becker In a book published in 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States national security adviser, wrote: "For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia. Most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. "Brzezinski's comments are useful to keep in mind when analyzing the current conflict raging in Chechnya. Thus autonomous region, located in Southern Russia, is at the pivot of Europe and Asia. Why is the Yeltsin (and now the Putin) regime in Russia carrying out its brutal serial assault against the separatist rebel movement in Chechnya? Because the Russian Government now fears that the Pentagon and CIA are moving aggressively to grab the former territories of the USSR, especially in the oil-rich Caspian Sea area. Its is the same government that has done so much to try to please the United States capitalist establishment since it dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991. Chechnya and Dagestan, where fighting has raged for the last four months, are territories close to the Caspian Sea. The Caspian has vast oil and natural gas deposits. A consortium of 11 oil monopolies from the United States and Europe has gained control of more that 50 per cent of the region's oil since the USSR was dissolved in 1991. The July 6, 1997 Washington Post described this process as the "last great oil rush of the 20th century - targeted at a potential US#4 trillion patch in Central Asia's Caspian Sea". The Yeltsin (now Pubn) government in Russia asserts that the United States is stimulating, if not directly supporting, the Islamic separatist movement in Chechnya. "The national interests of the US correspond to a scenario in which an armed conflict is constantly smoldering in the northern Caucasus." Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev said in a recent news conference. A few days later, Russia's Deputy-Foreign Minister Alexander Avdevev said at an international conference organized by the Russian Diplomatic Academy that at the country may be heading for a direct conflict with the United States. "These were not accidental or isolated comments by Russian officials. The US has a "..growing readiness to use military force in its direct, most crude form at various levels..the (US) operation in Kosovo and Iraq only herald this readiness. We must assume that is may extend to others, including former Soviet territories," said Anatoly Kvashain, the military head of the General Staff, in a speech to the same conference. THE POLITICS OF AN OIL PIPELINE Before the USSR was dissolved in a US-backed capitalist counter-revolution in 1991, the Caspian Sea was bordered on the east, west and north by the Soviet Union. Now that its former republics are formally independent, five countries border the Caspian. These include Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, as well as Russia and Iran. The United States Government is now attempting to take control over the Caspian Sea oil by transforming the non-Russian former Soviet republics into virtual colonies and grabbing control to the vast oil and gas resources that were once used to fuel socialist construction in the Soviet Union. "The prospects of potentially enormous hydrocarbon reserves is part of the allure of the Caspian region, " the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in a December 1998 report... "New transportation routes will be necessary to carry Caspian oil and gas to world markets" according the EIA. Why is a new Caspian oil pipeline necessary? According to the EIA, because "the existing pipelines were designed to link the Soviet Union internally, and were routed thought Russia". On November 18, President Bill Clinton and Energy Secretary Bill Richardson met with he presidents of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Tajikstan and Turkey to announce plans to construct a new, US$2.4 million oil pipeline from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Ceyhan, the Mediterranean port in Turkey. The new pipeline entirely bypasses Russia... It is calculated to turn the Caspian into an "American Lake". Throughout the Cold War, United States policymakers insisted that they opposed Soviet socialism because it deprived people of "personal liberty" and stifled individual initiative in the free market.": But now it's easy to see that their hatred of the USSR was based on it having prevented US corporations from exploiting the land and resources of the Soviet Union. Source: Workers World Newspaper, 9 December 1999, ww.workers.org)