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 Camp
Bondsteel, the biggest “from scratch” foreign US military base since
the Vietnam War built 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 defense 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 kilometers of roads and
over 300 buildings at Camp Bondsteel, surrounded by 14 kilometers of
earth and concrete barriers, 84 kilometers 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 kilometers 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 armored 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 Defense 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 Defense (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 favorable 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 Defense 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 antagonizing 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 antagonizing 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.
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