  |
Venezuela's Chavez declares OPEC 'anti-imperialist' force
AFP
CARACAS
Petroleumworld.com 06 02 06Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Thursday declared OPEC an "anti-imperialist" organization that can help liberate people in the developing world and told its members the US "empire" would collapse.
Addressing the opening of a ministerial meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the leftist leader said the 11 oil-producing countries were a force to fight poverty.
"OPEC is an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist organization, a liberating organization for the development of our peoples of Latin America, Africa and Asia," he told the energy ministers.
With an OPEC expansion, under consideration, that would include countries from those regions, "the tomb of US imperialism is opened", he said. "The empire is going to collapse in this century."
The fiery US critic repeated his demand of a US troop withdrawal from Iraq and defended Iran, which the United States and others accuse of covertly seeking nuclear weapons, as a "brother people".
"Stop the oppression of the Iraqi people, stop the threat against the Iranian people," he said.
He once again attacked arch-foe US President George W. Bush, whom he has accused of trying to assassinate him.
"The last conversation possible was with (former US president) Bill Clinton, when you could still converse with a US president, which is not the case with the current president, whom I believe is a menace to the world, a true menace," he said.
OPEC "does not want war, it wants peace," he asserted, in arguing for an enlarged membership to give the cartel more clout in world affairs.
"We want to assure an adequate and fair provision (of oil) for the world's balanced development. We want to preserve our natural resources," said the president of Venezuela, the only Latin American member of the predominantly Middle Eastern cartel.
In the past century "we have offered our oil to quench the thirst of the developed countries, while our peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America stagnate in under-development, misery and backwardness," he added.
"That is colonialism, that is called imperialism," he said.
Chavez said that OPEC, if it decides to resurrect an oil price band, should set a "50-dollar floor" per barrel and a "ceiling that would be infinite".
Economic growth in China and India would continue and strong demand for oil would persist in Europe, the United States and Latin America, he said.
OPEC had suspended last year its target price band of 22-28 dollars a barrel as oil prices skyrocketed.
Chavez repeated a proposal by Venezuela that oil prices should be quoted in euros instead of dollars.
"We must get rid of the dollar's dictatorship," he said.
"The dollar is getting weaker mostly because of the irresponsible economic policy" of the United States, he added.
OPEC "continues and will continue to act like an organism of regulation," he said.
The creation of OPEC in 1960 was "a true revolution", he said, but the 1980s and '90s were marked by the cartel being "brought to its knees".
OPEC was "at death's door and one of the assassins was Venezuela" which wanted to quit the cartel and was not respecting its output quota, he recalled.
The cartel's resurgence only came at a summit of OPEC leaders in Caracas in 2000, according to the president, who hosted the meeting.
AFP 01 1950 GMT 06 06
Copyright © 1994-2006 Agence France-Presse. All Rights Reserved.
Your
feedback is important to us!
We invite all our readers to share with us
their views and comments about this article.
Write to editor@petroleumworld.com
Any
question or suggestions, please write to:
editor@petroleumworld.com
Best
Viewed with IE
5.01+
Windows
NT 4.0, '95, '98 and ME +/ 800x600 pixels