In forests in Romania, both state and privately owned, the trees are being over-exploited.
Even in protected jungles wood is being chopped illegally. This is enabled by a network of corrupt rangers, cops and politicians. Rangers who resisted were murdered. Bourgeois media often call this “wood-mafia”, which fits right into the German chauvinism against Romanians, seeing them as corrupt and criminal, claiming this to be the reason for the problems of the Romanian economy. This is how they try to justify the miserable work conditions of Romanians in Germany, wanting them to be “happy that they got anything”.
The truth is however, that wood is not sold by the ton in shady alleys to mafiosi, instead it ends up in the saws of foreign companies, especially from Austria. It is imperialism, that furthers corruption and the decline of Romanian economy. This can be seen especially well in the forestry. After 1990 Romania was opened up to export of capital from different imperialist nations. The Austrian “HS Timber Group GmbH” alone has build five sawmills in Romania since 2003. Forestry in Romania is done mainly to export, with FRG being the fifth biggest importer of Romanian wood. Now several smaller Romanian firms, producing for the national market have done bankrupt, making thousands lose their jobs. Firms like “Koronospan” or “HS Timber Group” are the ones getting the profits extracted from the Romanian forests and financing and creating the “mafia” by buying the illegally chopped wood. They now claim they only legally buy it, but the papers for this are acquired easily by bought officials.
Romania is only the beginning. Seeing the potential incorporation of the Ukraine into the EU “HS” are planing their first sawmill there. In a notable German Bourgeois report about this an old, Romanian ranger, who resisted the corruption talks clearly about the results of imperialism in oppressed nations: “What happened in the thirty years after the ‘revolution’? Nothing. Damned capitalism.”
