Europe Ends Arms Embargo For Syrian Rebels, Desperate To Break Russian NatGas Export Monopoly
27
May, 2013
Moments
ago, the British foreign secretary William Hague tweeted that the
arms embargo to the Syrian rebels has officially ended:
Right
EU decision tonight. Arms embargo on Syrian opposition ended. No
immediate decision to send arms. Other sanctions remain
373 RETWEETS 37 FAVORITES
Britain and France had pushed for the ban on supplying the opposition forces fighting Bashar al Assad's regime to be lifted and the failure of ministers to agree an extension to the embargo during 12 hours of talks means it will now end on June 1.
Mr Hague said after the meeting Monday that the decision "sends a very strong message from Europe to the Assad regime".
Sky's foreign affairs editor Tim Marshall said the decision would make little difference in the short-term.
"Already there are many sides arming the two sides that are fighting. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are pouring arms into the opposition," he said.
"What it means though, firstly, is that the idea of the united European foreign policy has bitten the dust.
"I suspect at some point, the British and the French will go ahead and try to arm some of the many, many group there are in opposition in Syria."
Diplomats said there had been an agreement that EU governments would refrain from sending an arms to Syria for now.
Financial and economic sanctions against the Assad government were extended for another year at the meeting.
Several of the 27 EU nations were reticent about more weapons being sent into a conflict zone that has already seen the deaths of nearly 100,000 people.
Others
were not at all reticent about aiding and abbetting the murder of
countless more by Qatari mercenaries.
The
irony is that as has been known for a long time, and as the FT
itself reported ten
days ago, the Syrian "rebels" who actually have been Qatari
mercenaries, have been receiving weapons shipments for years from the
wealthy Persian Gulf country, with the implicit knowledge of both
Europe and the US.
So
why the rush by France and Britain to allow weapons armaments to
resume by official channels, even if it means even more weaponization
of the Assad regime by Russia and China, more bloodshed, and more
death?
Simple:
natural gas.
Recall
that as we explained
a week ago the
whole point of the Syrian escalation is to provide a land route for
Qatari natural gas pipelines to enter Turkey, and from there to
proceed into Europe.
So there you have it: Qatar doing everything it can to promote bloodshed, death and destruction by using not Syrian rebels, but mercenaries: professional citizens who are paid handsomely to fight and kill members of the elected regime (unpopular as it may be), for what? So that the unimaginably rich emirs of Qatar can get even richer. Although it is not as if Russia is blameless: all it wants is to preserve its own strategic leverage over Europe by being the biggest external provider of natgas to the continent through its own pipelines. Should Nabucco come into existence, Gazpromia would be very, very angry and make far less money!
For
this to happen, Syria would have to be controlled by pro-Western
forces: most probably some spin off of the "Muslim Brotherhood"
paradigm last seen in the western takeover of the strategically
critical Suez Canal, and the far less important country surrounding
it.
Needless
to say, such optically noble considerations as the people's
"liberation" or "ushering a new age of democracy"
are not only irrelevant but completely meaningless and hypocritical
in the scramble for European energy independence from Russia. But
they sure make for great front page headlines.
The origin of EU-27 energy imports has changed somewhat in recent years, as Russia has maintained its position as the main supplier of crude oil and natural gas and emerged as the leading supplier of hard coal (see Table 3). In 2010, some 34.5 % of the EU-27’s imports of crude oil were from Russia; this was the highest share recorded between 2002 and 2010 having fallen to a temporary low of 31.4 % in 2008.
The security of the EU’s primary energy supplies may be threatened if a high proportion of imports are concentrated among relatively few partners. Close to three quarters (74.4 %) of the EU-27’s imports of natural gas in 2010 came from Russia, Norway or Algeria – as such there was a diversification of imports as in 2009 the same three countries accounted for 79.2 % of natural gas imports. A similar analysis shows that 58.5 % of EU-27 crude oil imports came from Russia, Norway and Libya, while 64.3 % of hard coal imports were from Russia, Colombia and the United States. Although their import volumes remain relatively small, there was some evidence of new partner countries emerging between 2002 and 2010. This was notably the case for crude oil imports from Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, or natural gas imports from Qatar and Libya.
In
short: the great chess game involving the isolation of Russian natgas
export dominance to its key trading "partner", Europe, goes
on.
How Gazpromia Russia
responds next - as the threat that it may no longer be the monopoly
supplier of marginal nat gas to an energy-starved Europe becomes
increasingly more palpable - is all that matters.
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