-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the April 18, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------

Ron Brown and the Balkans: What the Crash Revealed

By Gary Wilson

The death of U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others in a plane crash in the war-ravaged Balkans April 3 was both revealing and disturbing.

The unexpected death of the highest-ranking Black official in the United States will always raise suspicions. After all, racism is practically the bedrock the country was built on.

At the same time, the crash was revealing. It gives a glimpse of the inner workings of U.S. finance capital and the web of connections among the military, the government, Wall Street and big business.

Ron Brown, considered by many to be the most powerful Black politician in the United States, was on a special mission to Croatia and Bosnia. However, he was acting not as a representative of African Americans but as a representative of U.S. finance capital.

As commerce secretary, Brown was leading a delegation of U.S. business and banking executives to the Balkans.

On the plane were 12 chief executives and 14 U.S. government employees, including one identified by the State Department only as a Central Intelligence Agency analyst. The executives included the chair and chief executive of Riggs International Bank in Washington, the U.S. executive director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and a vice president of AT&T's Submarine Systems division.

There was also the president of Bechtel Europe, Africa, Middle East, Southwest Asia. The San Francisco-based Bechtel engineering company is one of the biggest Pentagon contractors in the United States.

In addition, the chair and chief executive of Parsons Corp. of Pasadena, Calif., was on board. Parsons is one of the world's biggest international engineering and construction corporations. Another passenger was the New York Times bureau chief in Frankfurt, Germany.

This was a high-level operation.

Dismembering Socialist Yugoslavia

The flight represented the next stage in the imperialist dismemberment of socialist Yugoslavia. This stage follows the occupation of Bosnia by a U.S.-led NATO occupation force that has engaged up to 200,000 military personnel. The number comes from the Washington-based Defense News and represents the true size of the military occupation.

But military domination is only one part of imperialism.

A key component of imperialism is the export of capital from the imperialist countries to the countries they oppress.

Back at the turn of the century, before the emergence of giant monopolies, trade-that is, the export of goods-was a dominant feature of capitalism. Now trade is secondary to the export of capital.

The export of capital includes government loans or loans through giant financial institutions like the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund or World Bank. Or the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Such loans are usually for companies based in the imperialist country to build factories, offices or military bases. Companies like Bechtel.

The loans might also be to build or redevelop highways, railroads, ports and so on. Parsons specializes in just such projects.

Capital exports create an outflow channel for "surplus" capital in the dominant countries. But most of the world market is already carved up and under the control of one or another cartel. There are only a limited number of "new" projects that finance capital can undertake.

There is fierce competition among similar corporations in each of the imperialist countries-primarily the U.S., Germany, Britain, France and Japan-for these markets.

The capitalist takeover of socialist countries and industries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has generated a new imperialist frenzy.

The Balkans, however, are not just a new market. They are also a strategic location, geographically connected to Russia and Eastern Europe as well as to Turkey and the Middle East.

The death of Ron Brown and the corporate executives is a reflection of the breakneck pace of imperialist competition.

Brown is the fourth U.S. official to die in the Balkans in the last year. Last August, three U.S. officials died when the armored car in which they were riding plunged into a deep ravine near the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

All were engaged in high-risk operations.

The New York Times reported April 6 that a great many unanswered questions surround the crash of Ron Brown's plane in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Why was the flight attempted in the face of obviously bad weather conditions?

The Times report attributed it to heavy pressure on military pilots "to get there." But it also suggested there was more: "Nonetheless, there can be professional motives, profit motives, unspoken pressures or even overt instructions to fly in risky conditions."

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@wwpublish.com. For subscription info send message to: ww-info@wwpublish.com. Web: http://www.workers.org)

Copyright © 1996 workers.org