Natalia Meden
The check-up on the private company Ecolog is over in Afghanistan. The company is working for the German military in the Asian country and has been checked up on, on suspicion of involvement with the drug mafia.
The military has decided that it will continue cooperation with the company, while the latter has admitted that the Bundeswehr is its favourite customer. That story of “love and loyalty” has laid bare a number of grave problems, attesting to the lame nature of the western coalition’s strategy for Afghanistan.
The West’s “new” approach to Afghanistan is based on the idea that Afghanistan’s basic problem is poverty, generated by high rates of unemployment, which, among other things, prompts Afghans to grow opium poppies. Proceeds from drug trafficking are channelled into funding Taliban, therefore fighting drug trafficking will ensure a success of the antiterrorist operation in Afghanistan.
The consequences of the fact that Afghanistan accounts for 90% of world opium production are not limited to funding militants through international drug traffic channels. Another problem is a high level of drug addicts among Afghan policemen (1).
It is, of course, absolutely unquestionable that the drug industry is an evil that one should fight against. One way to fight that evil is to physically destroy opium poppy plantations and laboratories used to produce heroin.
The ISAF international force in Afghanistan has repeatedly carried out raids to that end, and British Defence Secretary John Hutton said by way of summing up the results of one such operation that the drugs seized would never surface in the streets of British cities, while the drug money would never be used to fund Taliban (2). The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper wrote in an article in January that [former] NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe General John Craddock had said in a memo that drug dealers and all related drug production were lawful military objectives (3).
US Afghan and Pakistan envoy Richard Holbrooke has a sui generis view of the Afghan drug business. The man known to have been in charge of dismembering Yugoslavia begged to differ with Russia when presenting his stand on the issue in February 2010. He said that the Russian government believed that the key to the problem was the destruction of the opium poppy, while the United States believed that this would enable Taliban to recruit peasants.
NATO's top chiefs have recently had the private German company Ecolog audited. The fact of the auditing was reported by German General Egon Ramms, commander of NATO’s Joint Force Command in Brunssum, the Netherlands.
It follows from the interview with the general that there had been grounds for suspecting the company of drug trafficking and concomitant activities.
This is a grave accusation of a company that has been working in Afghanistan since 2003. The company’s clients are the German, US, British, Spanish, Croatian, Italian, Belgian, Finnish, Swedish, French, Norwegian, Estonian, Bulgarian and Turkish military contingents; the US, German and Canadian embassies in Kabul; the German Federal Bank for Innovation and Development, and the German Association for Technical Cooperation. The company is engaged in a growing business in a successful market segment, - the provision of services for the armed forces. According to the authoritative magazine of German business circles Wirtschaftswoche, in 2005 the company’s trade turnover grew by 55% as against the previous year, to reach 131 million euros (4).
But then, reporters feel that the company had underreported its profits. Also, the company personnel have been steadily growing, and have doubled since 2006. Since the Cold War was over, many western countries have privatized certain services by withdrawing them from the competence of their respective Defence Ministries. Private companies will often furnish armed forces with supplies and take care of public services, just as “Ecolog” does.
They will specifically engage themselves in cleaning, clothes laundering, garbage removal, the provision of mobile toilets, and also fuel and lubricants. NATO’s ground operations in different countries have prompted the order volume to grow significantly. The company’s very name, Ecolog, dates back to 1999 and is related to the war on Yugoslavia. At that time the enterprising Nazif Destani of Pristina offered clothes laundering to the German military in Kosovo. The future head of the company was just 19 years old at the time. Besides the Balkans, the company was also active in Sudan. Currently in Iraq it provides services for the US, British and Italian military, the US Marine Corps and the [American] company Kellogg Brown & Root. Ecolog has branches in Kuwait, Dubai, the USA, Lebanon and Turkey (5).
The company was first brought into limelight by the media in March 2006, when six Ecolog staff members were taken hostage in Afghanistan, with four of them subsequently killed.
According to press reports, at the time 1,200 staff members worked in Afghanistan of the overall personnel strength of 1,500. 90% of the personnel are Macedonians who’ve been employed under contract.
By western standards the labour conditions are quite severe. Ecolog staff members work shifts of 3 to 4 months abroad before getting a two-week holiday at home. In Iraq they are banned from leaving US barrack compounds for security reasons and live in [small] houses, four people in a 14-square metre room.
But despite such labour conditions, 20,000 Macedonians have applied for work with Ecolog” because staff members are paid 1,000 euros to 1,500 euros a month, or 3 to 4 times more than what the highest paid employees make in the Balkan country in question. The company was registered in Germany because this way it is easier to secure orders. The company owner Nazif Destani is a German citizen and grew up in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, (Rheinland-Pfalz).
The Destani family - a Kosovo Albanian clan - hails from the small town of Tetovo, in the northwest of Macedonia, near the Kosovo border.
According to the 2002 census, Kosovar Albanians accounted for almost 70% of the 86,000 strong population of Tetovo. According to press reports, the KFOR special services mentioned in their reports eight years ago a certain clan that was centred on criminal activities in the border area between Kosovo and Macedonia.
But the Destanis are by no means the only Albanian clan in Macedonia. The clans are often based on a blend of political, military and financial interests. Back in 1987 Nazif’s father Lazim Destani set up a tourist company, Sharr Turist, which was actually engaged in illegally taking guest workers to Germany. In 1994 Lazim Destani got a prison term of more than two years for organizing illegal entry into Germany for his compatriots, and for firearms keeping. The German Defence Ministry feels, however, that the family story of the company personnel is irrelevant to placing orders with Ecolog. In 2008 the company fired a staff member on heroin selling charges.
Once the auditing was over in early March, a decision was made not to discontinue contractual relations with the Ecolog company. In other words, the company has managed to purge itself of suspicions of involvement in illegal activities. But the mass media wonder why military orders are placed without holding tenders. Under the law, a tender should be held if the overall cost of an order exceeds 200,000 euros, whereas Ecolog has got orders, worth dozens of millions of euros. 50 million euros are due to be transferred to Ecolog in 2010 alone (6). Why do contracts with the company continue to be signed year in year out despite recent reports that the work it does is clearly substandard (7)?
The question hangs in mid-air. There is obviously a huge gap in Germany between public opinion and the ruling class policy.
According to the latest polls, 76% of Germans doubt that the military operation in Afghanistan will prove a success, while 65% are opposed to boosting the strength of the German force in the Asian country(8).
But the German Parliament has nonetheless voted for an increase in the maximum strength of the German force from 4,485 to 5,350 servicemen in a show of greater unanimity than in voting on many other issues. The Left Party faction, traditionally opposed to Bundeswehr missions abroad, staged a protest in the voting hall and was put out on orders from the chairman. Given the situation, the Bundeswehr is obviously not interested in fouling its own nest by making the criminal aspects of the military operation in Afghanistan catch the public eye again.
___________________________
(1) An official statement of the UK Foreign Office, 2009 // news.bbc.co.uk/hi/russian/international/newsid
(2) news.bbc.co.uk/hi/russian
(3) Nato streitet über Drogenbekämpfung// Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 29.01.2010.
(4) Latrinen putzen // Wirtschaftswoche. 28.03.2006.
(5) According to the “Ecolog” company website
www.ecolog-international.com.
(6) Harald Schumacher/ Bundeswehr bleibt trotz Pannen dem Dienstleister Ecolog treu // Wirtschaftswoche. 08.03.2010
(7) Funk Viktor. Bundeswehr ist unser liebster Kunde // Frankfurter Rundschau. 06.03.2010
(8) The returns of a public opinion poll, conducted on January 29th 2010 // dpa.de.
===========================
Stop NATO
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnatoBlog site:
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/To subscribe, send an e-mail to:
rwrozoff@...or
Ova adresa el. pošte je zaštićena od spambotova. Omogućite JavaScript da biste je videli.Daily digest option available.
==============================
Jugocoord su Telegram
Jugocoord su Facebook