Informazione
European debt crisis threatens Balkan economies
By Antid Oto
22 November 2011
The deepening European financial crisis and the ever-growing possibility of bankruptcy for countries like Greece and Italy pose huge dangers for the economies of the Balkan countries. The latter are highly dependent on foreign capital investment and are intertwined with the economies of both Greece and Italy.
A number of recently published reports point to the graveness of the situation facing the so-called Western Balkan countries, a region that has never recovered from the decline of living standards in the 1980s, before the forcible reintroduction of capitalism and semi-criminal fire-sale of state owned assets crippled their economies.
While the region has seen comparatively high growth of 5-10 percent per year prior to the 2008 crisis, this growth relied heavily on foreign direct investment (FDI) or various aid projects financed from abroad. When investment dried up following the 2008 crises, most of the region experienced significant “negative growth” in 2009, with Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina suffering sharp recession.
The Balkan states recorded anemic average growth rates of only 1.6 percent in 2010, with similarly low projections for 2011 and 2012. However, even these low predictions may be unrealistically optimistic, according to the World Bank (WB) report on the region released last Tuesday.
Looking at six South-East European countries of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia, dubbed SEE6, the WB warns at the beginning of its report that they “depend critically on factors that are largely beyond the control of their governments. They are influenced by the global slowdown and uncertainties in the Euro zone (EZ).”
The report terms the current growth rate as “sluggish” and states, “even these modest growth projections assume that the current turmoil in the EZ is resolved in a manner that doesn’t involve a disorderly default and avoids contagion effects.” Based on recent developments in the EU, this is wishful thinking.
The report continues by noting that the non-EU Balkan countries are “susceptible to the effects of a further global slowdown and a deepening euro area crisis through several channels: trade, FDI, foreign banks, and remittances. The EU countries … are the largest trade partners of all the SEE6: trade with the EU is equivalent to between 30 percent and almost half of the SEE6 GDPs.”
Serbia, for example, would be most directly affected by the deepening crisis in Italy, because Italian companies, most notably the automobile company Fiat and the clothing manufacturer Benetton, are among the biggest investors in Serbia. Italy is the top export partner for Serbian products, with proceeds amounting to just over $1 billion in 2011, according to Goran Nikolic, economist from the New Policy Centre, reported by Balkan Insight.
The EU is also the largest FDI provider to the region, with net FDI inflows worth over 2 percent of the SEE6 GDP, and a significant source of remittances in the region.
Another major financial danger is the domination of foreign-owned banks in the region. The WB report explains that even though the banking system in the region “appears resilient... [t]his could change abruptly due to a high share of Greek and Italian owned banks in local banking systems. [N]ot only is the share of foreign banks in the total assets of the region’s banking system very large (at around 89 percent of the total), but this foreign presence is largely an EZ one.”
In a clear sign that the governments are aware and apprehensive of the ever more real prospect of state default in the EU, Albania’s parliament introduced a new bill earlier this month aimed at forcing foreign banks controlling 95 percent of the country’s market to transform their local branches into subsidiaries. The government is thus trying to protect depositors from a possible default of the mother institution.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has also noted the danger of a contagion effect of the EZ debt crises on Albania. Its October report candidly explains that the country “has large trade, labour-market, and banking-system links with Greece and Italy, which could result in substantial spillovers with banking-system contagion potentially the most severe near-term risk, while sharply lower remittances could result in a significant GDP shock”.
The situation is similar in Montenegro. The November 2 edition of The Balkan Insight reported that the Finance Minister Milorad Katnic and World Bank Regional Coordinator for Southeast Europe Jane Armitage, presented the WB’s report on public spending in Montenegro. The report declared that the country must reduce its fiscal deficit and public debt and reduce its dependency on foreign finance, “in particular at a time when conditions on the international market are sensitive and unpredictable” (emphasis added.).
Some two weeks later, on November 17, the local daily Vijesti carried a report from the Montenegrin Finance Ministry, which stated that the IMF could “in case of serious disturbances in the market and a major crisis” provide Montenegro with an unspecified financial loan.
It is evident that the IMF, WB and other representatives of financial capital are seriously considering the possibility of state default in the EU and are developing contingency plans aimed to transfer the fallout of a catastrophic crisis onto the working class of each country.
The capital flight from the region is already evident in currency exchanges. Last week’s Financial Times article “Eastern Europe’s currencies take a Eurozone beating” states that “[f]ar from benefiting from being outside the Eurozone, eastern European countries are feeling the strain of exclusion from the club” with “the value of their currencies plummeting.”
Considering this a somewhat belated reaction the article continues: “Many analysts are surprised it has taken the foreign currency market so long to work out that the impact of the Eurozone crisis on the region’s close trading partners in eastern Europe was likely to be severe.” The Serbian dinar, for example, has lost almost 25 percent of its value in the last three years.
A renewed credit crunch in the Balkan region would be much more severe than in 2008-2009. The extent of social cuts and privatisation of state assets already carried out means that this time round there would be no room for softening the blow with further public spending cuts. This is the conclusion reached by the WB’s chief economist for poverty reduction and economic management in Europe and Central Asia, Ron Hood.
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Nell'aprile scorso, le cosiddette istituzioni dello Stato del Kosovo effettuarono il censimento della popolazione su questo stesso territorio - ma allora non si parlava dei "rigorosissimi regolamenti" di cui sopra. A noi risulta che quei regolamenti non furono applicati! Una enorme parte degli abitanti serbi del Kosovo e Metohija boicottarono quel censimento, in base dell'appello rivolto dallo Stato della Serbia. Tra di noi ci chiedevamo se saremmo stati presi in considerazione nel successivo censimento che stava per effettuare il nostro Stato. Ci speravamo. Il risultato finale è stato che solo qualche abitante del Kosovo e Metohija è stato censito. Così, in uno dei censimenti risultano i soli albanesi, mentre noi non siamo presenti in alcuno dei due. Ci domandiamo in base a quali criteri allo Stato della Serbia non è consentito di effettuare il censimento su di una parte del proprio territorio, visto che questo non è stato neanche riconosciuto come "Stato" indipendente da parte delle Nazioni Unite. Se si tratta di un protettorato, allora lo è per entrambe le etnie!
E perciò, non siamo circa 378.000 abitanti in meno - ovvero 7.120.666 - bensì siamo di più, soltanto non ci avete sottoposto al censimento. Seppure la minoranza albanese avesse boicottato il censimento, più di 100mila serbi non avrebbero fatto lo stesso. >>
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The German state and the neo-Nazi killings
18 November 2011
Over the last two weeks, the German press has carried extensive reports on the operations of a group of three neo-Nazis in the city of Jena over the last 13 years. The gang murdered at least 10 Turkish and Greek immigrants, and carried out other violent crimes under the noses of German domestic intelligence agencies that were actively involved in building the broader far-right networks within which the Jena group operated.
The three neo-Nazis emerged in the 1990s from the ultra-right Thuringian Homeland Security (THS) outfit, whose leader, Tino Brandt, was unmasked as an undercover agent in 2001. He told Der Spiegel that he had received more than 200,000 marks over seven years as an informer for the BVS intelligence service. He claimed to have spent every cent of this money to finance ultra-right groups.
The Jena group went underground in 1998, after police found a bomb workshop in a garage of one of its members. Even though they faced an international warrant for their arrest, they somehow managed to evade capture by the German state over the next 13 years, during which time they carried out at least 10 racially-motivated murders. Ultra-right groups penetrated by German secret service agents went so far as to organize three public solidarity concerts, the proceeds of which were handed over to the three terrorists.
The Jena group came to light on November 4, when two of its members were found shot shortly after fleeing the scene of a bank robbery.
It is impossible to believe that the three Jena terrorists evaded detection and capture for so long without the help of elements in the German security services. The role of Hessian secret service agent Andreas T. in particular is highly suspect. Nicknamed “little Adolf” in his home village for his far-right views, he was reportedly at the scene of no less than five of the Jena group’s murders—including the 2006 shooting of an Internet café owner in Kassel, where he refused to report voluntarily to the police as a witness.
According to reports of “parliamentary parties” cited by the Bild.de website, for several years Andreas T.’s assignments included supervising undercover agents at the THS.
The security services’ ties to violent fascists underline the anti-democratic character of the European capitalist states created after World War II by the European bourgeoisies collaborating with Washington and London. The crimes of the Jena group and its ties to the state emerge organically from this history.
In the first years of the Cold War, as they fought the threat of socialist revolution in Europe, the Western powers recruited numerous ex-Nazi officials into the German state. Nowhere was this more the case than in the German intelligence service. Founded in 1950 by the Allies as an instrument of the Cold War, it employed large numbers of former Gestapo members, who saw Communists as their main enemy.
In 2009, under the headline “Brown Cellar Spirits,” the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote: “For many SS officers and Gestapo men, the formative years of the republic were a happy phase in the resumption of their old professions. Many of the men active in the persecution and mass killing machinery of Hitler succeeded in making the leap into the security agencies after 1949... In the federal central police force, the foreign intelligence service and also in the federal intelligence agency (BVS), old comrades of the Wehrmacht and the SS imparted elements of their Nazi ideology to operational style and training during the first 20 years.”
When the Allies returned the BVS to German government control in 1955, the Adenauer government selected Hubert Schrübbers—who had served the Nazi regime as an SA member and as attorney general—to run the agency. Under his supervision, many former SS members took leading posts in the BVS. Schrübbers was ultimately forced to resign in 1982, when details of his Nazi past came to light.
As the record of the Jena neo-Nazi group makes clear, these connections between fascism and European bourgeois states continue to this day. They constitute a sharp warning to the working class in Germany and internationally of the reactionary forces being pushed to the fore in order to impose the savage cuts being demanded by finance capital amid the deepening crisis of capitalism.
The new “technocratic” regime in Greece, imposed by the banks to force further unpopular social cuts on the working class, includes several ministers of Greece’s fascistic LAOS party. As the right-wing New Democracy (ND) party takes control of the defense ministry, amid rumors of a possible coup, Greek workers opposing the austerity measures demanded by the banks now face a government that includes open supporters of the CIA-backed military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974.
The cold-blooded murders of innocent people of immigrant origin in Germany are the preparation for the mobilization of fascistic forces and the state machine against the working class and all social opposition to the capitalist crisis. They underscore the necessity to mobilize the entire working class in revolutionary struggle against the corrupt political structures of European capitalism.
Ulrich Rippert and Alex Lantier
Uwe Bohnhard e Uwe Mundlos sono seduti al tavolo del camper parcheggiato nella periferia di Eisenach,Turingia. Discutono, forse per l'esito (disastroso) della quattordicesima rapina portata a segno. Esplodono due colpi di pistola. Uwe B. e Uwe M. si accasciano sul tavolo. Il camper va a fuoco.
Nello stesso momento, a Zwichan, cento chilometri più a est, una donna di 36 anni incendia l'abitazione che divideva con due amici. La donna si chiama Beate Zschape e i suoi conviventi erano Uwe Bohnhard e Uwe Mundlos. Ad Amburgo viene arrestato un uomo di 37 anni, proprietario dell'appartamento e del camper andati a fuoco, nonchémembro del NationalSozialistischer Untergrund (Nsu), formazione di stampo neonazista. Con questo finale dalle tinte pulp, la polizia è arrivata a capo di una lunga serie di omicidi a sfondo razziale e all'assassinio di una poliziotta bavarese. Zschape, descritta come una ragazza apatica, svogliata ma estremamente intelligente, si è consegnata alla polizia offrendo collaborazione in cambio di una condanna più morbida.
I tre personaggi appena introdotti (l'uomo di Amburgo è, per la polizia, solo un complice) hanno alle spalle una lunga scia di sangue: noti come i bombaroli di Jena, o la cellula Nsu di Zwichan, sono responsabili di diversi attentati, ma soprattuto hanno messo la firma - tra il 2000 e il 2006 - sugli assassini di otto turchi e di un greco: tutti, tranne uno, lavoravano nei chioschi di kebab. In un dvd ritrovato nell'abitazione di Zwichau, dalla durata di 15 minuti e intitolato "Tour in Germania: nove turchi ammazzati", sono contenute le immagini shock dei corpi delle nove vittime.
Molti quotidiani tedeschi riportano in prima pagina le foto in bianco e nero dei tre di Zwichan e la Germania è letteralmente stordita: la paura del rigurgito nazista è sempre molto forte. La cancelliera Angela Merkel ha promesso di andare al fondo di questa storia che rappresenta "una disgrazia, una vergogna per la Germania". Al ministero dell'Interno si indaga per capire quanto sia estesa la rete del Nsu: "dalle prove raccolte - dicono dal ministero - sembra che si stia sviluppando una nuova forma di terrorismo bruno (ndr: dalle camicie brune hitleriane)".
La cronaca degli ultimi giorni ha riaperto il dibattito anche sulla necessità di mettere al bando il Partito nazional democratico (Npd), di estrema destra e dai richiami nazisti. Il Npd che attualmente percepisce i finanziamenti pubblici - e quindi i soldi dei contribuenti -è il punto di riferimento per le organizzazione ancora più estremistiche: mettere fuori legge il Npd significherebbe tagliare la testa al mostro neonazista. A chiedere un intervento deciso alla Corte costituzionale è anche il sindacato di polizia.
Le istituzioni dovranno agire subito, anche per allontanare un antipatico sospetto che vede come protagonista l'agenzia dei sevizi segreti della Turingia: come è possibile che i tre giovani abbiano potuto operare in maniera così indisturbata e per oltre un decennio?
Nicola Sessa
Dopo il ritrovamento di un dvd lasciato da un gruppo di estremisti di destra che rivendica gli omicidi di "Nove turchi colpiti a colpi di pistola'', sigla contenuta nello stesso cd, il presidente della Commissione di controllo dei servizi del parlamento tedesco, Thomas Oppermann, ha dichiarato che dietro alla fazione terroristica, "Clandestinità Nazionalsocialista" (Nus), si devono nascondere altri complici.
Le indagini sugli "omicidi del kebab", che in diverse cittadine tedesche hanno portato allamorte di almeno 9 persone, tra cui otto turchi e un greco, sembrava esser giunta ad un punto di svolta dopo l'arresto di due complici del gruppo, ma il video che mostra i corpi delle vittime e di cui sono stati pubblicati alcuni fotogrammi dallo Spiegel, ha turbato l'intera Germania.
La scorsa settimana sono stati intanto ritrovati i corpi di due uomini che si sospetta siano legati al Nus, Uwe Mundlos e Uwe Boehnhardt, i quali potrebbero essersi suicidati dopo aver fallito un colpo in banca, e una donna Beate Zschape si è costituita. Un altro uomo,Holger G. 37 anni, è stato arrestato questa domenica ed accusato di aver fornito appoggio e documenti falsi ai membri del Nus. Al gruppo è probabilmente legata anche la morte di una poliziotta nel 2007.
Intanto, la notte scorsa, a 350 km di Berlino un uomo ha aperto il fuoco contro un negozio di alimentari di proprietà di un turco, ma quest'ultimo sembra non essere legato alla banda di estrema destra, mentre alle spalle ha una lunga storia di trattamenti psichiatrici.
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