Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline: another West-East fault line – Part 2
TDN
Friday, June 3, 2005
OPINIONS
K. Gajendra SINGH
Ilham Aliyev’s late father Haydar, popularly called Baba (father)
of the nation and Azerbaijan’s ruler for nearly three decades,
can be considered the major brain behind the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan
(BTC) pipeline. Before dying at the end of 2003 in a U.S. medical
clinic, he ensured succession for his 41-year-old son in presidential
elections that were disputed by opposition leaders at home and others
outside. Both the United states and Russia acquiesced because, with
the Middle East in turmoil, stability in the Caspian Basin was vital
with its vast energy resources.
Born in the Nakhichevan enclave adjoining Turkey, Haydar Aliyev
was brought to Moscow in 1982 after a successful career in the KGB
in Azerbaijan and became the first Muslim member of the Politburo,
almost reaching the very top. But Mikhail Gorbachev, who took over in
1985 and ushered in the unclearly thought out policies of Perestroika
and Glasnost, dismissed Aliyev in 1987 for opposing the reforms.
But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan declared
independence like other Soviet republics. The wily and resilient
Aliyev, now donning the mantle of nationalism, denounced Soviet
intervention in Baku and re-emerged from Nakhichevan. He soon muscled
his way to become president in June 1993. Among his many admirers,
neither Georgia’s Eduard Sheverdnadzde nor Uzbek President Islam
Karimov have been as successful as Aliyev, who established dynastic
rule.
This writer, accredited to Baku, recalls his meetings with Aliyev
during 1993-96 when Aliyev was still trying to find his feet and
acquire legitimacy at home and respectability abroad. Because of
his KGB background, the West treated him like a pariah. Neither Iran
nor Turkey — as his predecessor was very pro-Turkish — were happy
at his return. Aliyev had bad vibes with Boris Yeltsin and opposed
Russian defense installations in Azerbaijan. Aliyev met with Russian
President Yeltsin and soothed Turkey’s fears, having established
friendly relations with President Suleyman Demirel.
Aliyev also knew many in the Indian leadership from his Moscow days
where he received them as a senior party member, a success story from
one of the Turkic-speaking republics with historic linkages and ties
to India. To break out from his isolation, Aliyev was ready to fly
to India on short notice. He tried frantically to establish contacts
with Western leaders, almost anyone.
Like the Baku-born chess player Garry Kasparov, Aliyev moved
stealthily and aggressively if required. He would turn up in
Istanbul and elsewhere for meetings with Western leaders, and finally
succeeded. He also courted Israel (there were still 100,000 Jews in
Azerbaijan; 50,000 had migrated to Israel), which was happy to have
a watch post in Baku over Iran in the south. Iran has twice as many
Turkic-speaking Shiite Azeris as Azerbaijan. Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu even visited Baku.
Aliyev’s contacts with Israel and European leaders paved the way
for direct contacts with the Americans, especially the powerful
Jewish lobby, to counteract the influential Armenian diaspora in
United States. He seduced the U.S.-led West to his side in the new
Great Game of acquiring and controlling scarce energy resources. In
September 1995, a $7.4 billion deal with an oil consortium led by BP
to exploit Azerbaijan’s extensive energy resources laid the foundations
for the BTC.
Aliyev was a stunning success in Washington. During his 1997 visit
to the United States he met with President Bill Clinton and signed
oil deals with U.S. oil giants worth nearly $10 billion. More
than 400 American VIPs, including many senior officials such as
former secretaries of state and defense, lobbyists, consultants,
investors and facilitators, lined up for a $250-per-plate banquet
in his honor. In a few years from being a pariah, Aliyev had become
a U.S. darling. Verily, the qualities to reach the top rung in any
system are perhaps not so different.
Under Aliyev a new constitution was approved in 1995. He brought
stability and peace to Azerbaijan; a cease-fire with Armenia signed
in 1994 still holds. He enacted economic reforms that brought massive
foreign investment. The BTC project to transport Caspian Basin oil
to the Mediterranean began under him.
Apart from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the
Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Azerbaijan joined
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE),
the Council of Europe and other Western organizations. Baku also
expressed a desire to join NATO. In the illegal U.S. war on Iraq,
Azerbaijan sided with Washington.
Baku, located on the Caspian Sea, was an important stop on the old
silk routes. It produced half of the world’s oil at the turn of the
last century. It has a rich past and a cosmopolitan culture with its
opera houses and fine buildings. It became the center of the Soviet
oil industry and many Indians were trained here.
But in November 1993 it looked gray, bleak and depressing when we
— five ambassadors based in Ankara — went there to present our
credentials to Aliyev. Conditions improved as investments flowed in,
but disparities still remain. This writer saw Afghan war-experienced
mujahaddin, flown in on Pakistani planes to fight in the enclave
of Nagorno-Karabakh, swaggering in the hotel lobbies. They proved
expensive and rather ineffective mercenaries against Russian-armed
Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh forces.
For South Asians, especially Parsees, there is Atishgah — a
fire-worship temple near Baku. The present complex opened in the 17th
century and was used up to the mid-19th century, but the original
Atishgah goes back to very ancient times. From time immemorial
natural gas has seeped out of the earth and catches on fire. Aryans
and Parsees, both Indo-Iranians, worshipped fire. Parsees in India
still do so, as Hindus worship Agni (fire). The Azerbaijani foreign
minister told this writer that Azerbaijan was known as Aagban, which
means “forest of fire” or “arrow of fire.” The temple claimed many
miraculous powers, bringing happiness and well being to visitors
and devotees alike. Located on the silk route, many Indian traders
— Parsees, Punjabis, Gujaratis and others — started visiting the
temple and built Dharamshala-like rooms to stay in. An elderly lady
in charge at Atishgh told this writer that Jawaharlal Nehru and his
daughter Indira Gandhi had once visited.
An Indian restaurant, Caravansaray, also operated in the city in
the 19th century. Pepe Escobar, a recent visitor to Baku, wrote:
“The only other flourishing industry in the Caucasus, apart from oil,
is kidnapping. Not to mention Kristina, the top belly-dancer at the
Karavanserai, a favorite restaurant of the oil oligarchy, who is in
a class all by herself.”
Next door to Daghestan and Chechnya, Azerbaijan is a centerpiece in
the strategic multiethnic and potentially explosive mosaic called
the Caucasus. Azerbaijan and Georgia are essential for the transport
of gas and petroleum to the West via Turkey or the Black Sea and the
Balkans from not only the Caspian Basin but also from Central Asian
republics such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
Conclusion:
The 1973 oil price crisis surely did not compel the United States to
use energy as efficiently as the Europeans and the Japanese did.
Neither did the United States invest heavily to find other energy
alternatives. Instead, it has tried to acquire a stronghold over
energy resources around the world by bribing presidents in Central
Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, now president of
the World Bank, boasted soon after the Iraqi invasion and “mission
accomplished” that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and other
accusations were just bureaucratic excuses for controlling Iraqi
oil. Former UK Environment Minister Michael Meacher recently told Al
Jazeera in Lisbon, “The reason they [United States] attacked Iraq has
nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, it has nothing to do
with democracy in Iraq, it has nothing to do with the human rights
abuses of Saddam Hussein.”
“It was principally, totally and comprehensively because of oil,”
Meacher continued. “This was about assuming control over the Middle
East and over Iraq, the second largest producer, and also over Saudi
Arabia next door. It was about securing as much as possible of the
remaining supplies of oil and also over supplies in the Caspian Basin.”
Meacher also added that the United States had poor environmental
standards. “American power plants waste more energy than is needed
to run the whole Japanese economy,” he said. “They have set their
face against the Kyoto protocol.”
UK Labour Party MP George Galloway, while putting to the sword false
accusations against him of money transactions with Saddam Hussein,
instead accused a U.S. Senate Subcommittee of creating the mother
of all “smokescreens” to hide an unaccounted disappearance of
$8.8 billion of Iraqi oil revenues under the rule in Iraq of Paul
Bremer, the first U.S. viceroy to Baghdad and a symbol of a wastage
of hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in a war that has
become a quagmire for the United States.
It should be a lesson for the pawns in the Caspian Basin. The BTC
pipeline will become just another fault line between East and West
for control of energy sources with Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey
playing crucial roles.
This is a region of uneven topography and ethnic and other fault
lines, and the pipeline would only exacerbate them. There are two
breakaway provinces in Georgia having close relations to Russia. If
the Muslim Chechens, who are now fighting Russia with Georgia not
checking them, decide to take on the United States, they could
sabotage the pipeline. The same jihadis who fought against Soviet
Russia to help the United States avenge its humiliation in Vietnam
also bombed U.S. missions in Kenya and Tanzania and were responsible
for the Sept. 11 attacks. Baku, with tense relations with Moscow and
Tehran in the South, can be infiltrated to create instability. The
pipeline passes through turbulent Kurdish regions of Turkey. In spite
of Kurds in Turkey having recently gained many rights, the situation
remains tense in its Kurdish regions. It is not likely to be helped
if Iraq starts unraveling, which cannot be ruled out considering
Iraqi Kurdistan becoming autonomous, if not independent.
K. Gajendra Singh, served as Indian ambassador to Turkey and Azerbaijan
in 1992-96. Prior to that, he served as ambassador to Jordan (during
the 1990-91 Gulf war), Romania and Senegal. He is currently chairman
of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies. The views expressed here
are his own. E-mail: [email protected]