Frustrated that BP was failing to take their concerns seriously, the residents decided to take action. On 7 February 2004, around 400 people living in the Khrushchevki organised a protest strike, demanding that the local council, national government and BP listen to them. During the strike they blockaded construction sites and stopped work on the pipeline. Then the police arrived and attacked the residents. ‘We were beaten cruelly, despite the fact that the majority were women and children’, reported Eleonora and Merabi. The police leaders claimed that ‘they had orders from government to devastate elements that will create any problems to BTC pipeline construction’.13
Later that month, the Rustavi residents called BTC Co.’s community liaison officer, Ana Petriashvili, to ask for a meeting. As part of John Browne’s promise to make BTC a model of corporate social responsibility, BP had hired community liaison officers to emphasise their commitment to transparency and engagement, creating a team dedicated to communicating with those living along the pipeline. This promise did not quite match Eleonora and Merabi’s experience of Ana Petriashvili, who was rude, used abusive language, and told them she was ‘spending too much time with people like us, and she knows that people are trying to solve their social problems at the expense of BTC Co. She tried to assure us that the pipeline is safe.’ When they demanded documentation on safety standards, Petriashvili apparently replied airily that BP had promised the Georgian government that it would comply with the highest Western standards.14
Walking the streets between the Khrushchevki, we come across a yard used for storing oil pipes near the railway line. There are no familiar BP logos, only Maersk-branded shipping containers and carefully stacked piles of black pipes – spare sections of BTC, in case a length of the line needs replacing. But despite the nearby metallurgical plant making oil pipes, this pile and those already laid in the ground across Azerbaijan and Georgia were not manufactured in Rustavi. BP found the most cost-effective deal in Japan. Between sixty and seventy shiploads travelled through the East China Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Suez Canal, the Bosphorus and the Black Sea, carrying the 150,000 pipe segments from the other side of the world.15 Those before us travelled up the railway from Batumi, and were stacked here before being taken, three at a time, to the construction sites by truck.
In the distant metropolis of Moscow, Rustavi – like Gәncә and Sumqayit – was planned out as a ‘centre of production’ to which iron ore and coal were transported. Now the city has been left to rot, and, according to plans made in other distant capitals, it has been redefined as a ‘corridor’. Natural resources of the highest value are pumped through the fringes of the city, to be processed and consumed elsewhere.
9 WITHOUT HAVING TO AMEND LOCAL LAWS, WE WENT ABOVE OR AROUND THEM BY USING A TREATY
თბილისი (TBILISI), GEORGIA
Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, is built along the steep-sided Mtkvari Gorge. Having drained two-thirds of the country and north-eastern Turkey, the Mtkvari river is now a café au lait–coloured swirl passing through a deep concrete channel, rushing east towards the Caspian. Men stand on both banks, fishing in small groups. The city stretches up the steep hillsides above them. On the ridge of Mount Mtatsminda, which looms over the city, a radio mast flickers with a set of coloured fairy lights, looking like Blackpool Tower. Further east stands a huge aluminium statue of ‘Mother Georgia’, holding a sword and a cup of wine. At her feet, the oak trees in the Botanical Garden are coming into bright yellow-green leaf.
The BTC pipeline runs south of the city. As the line passes through neither Baku nor Ceyhan, a more accurate but less useful name for it would be the Sangachal–Rustavi–Gölovesı pipeline. Tbilisi is less of an ‘oil city’ than Baku – a transit point rather than a beginning or an end. Nevertheless, the pipeline has burrowed its way deep into the city’s body politic, economy and environment.
We are standing by the Church of St George of Kashveti on the central Rustavelis Gamziri – Rustaveli Avenue – waiting to meet Manana Kochladze, an old friend who has spent much of her last eight years challenging BP and the Georgian government over the pipeline. She will be our companion on the Georgian stretch of our journey. Rustavelis Gamziri is wide and dusty. It is spring, the wettest time of the year. The rain last night was heavy enough to wake us. Yet despite this, everything is covered with dust. The pavement, the road, the cars, the window-panes: a thin grey gauze that bleaches the colours of signs or stone, tree bark or paintwork.
Named after the twelfth-century national poet Shota Rustaveli, this avenue is the spine of Tbilisi, lined with the city’s landmarks: parliament, opera house, national theatre, major churches and large hotels. At the far end of the street is Tavisuplebis Moedani – Freedom Square. This open space has been renamed several times over the past two centuries, according to who has been in power. When Georgia was under Tsarist rule it was Yerevan Square, but when the country was absorbed into the Soviet Union it became Beria Square, and then Lenin Square. Visiting businessmen meet in the sparkling Courtyard Marriott across from the Museum of Fine Art, once the imperial Russian theological seminary, renowned as a boarding school for revolutionaries in the late nineteenth century. In 1907, its most famous alumnus, Stalin, returned from Baku, and with forty brigands led a dramatic stagecoach robbery in broad daylight in this square. This spectacular direct action caused an international media frenzy, with London’s Daily Mirror announcing: ‘Rain of Bombs: Revolutionaries Hurl Destruction’.1
The European flag, a circle of twelve stars on a blue ground, can be seen hanging from every vaguely official-looking building. Georgia is not a member of the EU – despite the government’s ardent desire to join. Visibly, however, there seems more enthusiasm for the EU in Tbilisi than in most member states. Georgia does belong to the Council of Europe – the international organisation focused on legal standards and human rights, comprising forty-seven European states including Russia – which uses the same flag as the EU.2 No other country invests more significance in its membership of the Council. In Georgia, the flag is clearly used as a symbol of its allegiance to the West, and hostility to its northern neighbour, Russia. This allegiance and hostility is particularly acute in this spring of 2009, for only eight months ago years of tensions between Georgia and Russia resulted in open warfare over the region of South Ossetia.
It is midday on Sunday, and the streets are bustling. There is no restriction on opening hours: food stores are busy, as are internet cafés, restaurants and ‘slot clubs’ – the local name for slot-machine joints. The crowds are thickest around the metro entrance, McDonalds and the Church of St George of Kashveti, where we stand. People streaming through its wrought-iron gates are greeted by priests in brown, pink, blue and red vestments – the bright colours contrasting with everybody else’s black clothing. Black is the colour of Georgia. Young and old, male and female, wear black trousers, black jackets, black skirts, black shirts, setting off pale skin and black hair.
Manana arrives at the church and we head off to find a restaurant in the Old City. We settle down to a meal including cheese khachapuri and wine from Kakheti. Georgia is inseparable from wine: there are more than 400 varieties, and drinking it at the table is part of the nation’s identity. The rituals of the tamada, the toastmaster, may have evolved partly as a way for the Georgians to distinguish themselves from the vodka-drinking Russians. Manana’s life is divided between her organisation, Green Alternative, and her four-year-old son. With wavy red hair below her shoulders, a grey woollen cardigan and no make-up apart from red nail varnish, Manana defies the Georgian stereotype.
As part of the Central and Eastern Europe Bankwatch network, Green Alternative campaigns on public lending to energy infrastructure projects. Focusing on the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the European Investment Bank, Green Alternative plays a crucial role in the coalition of NGOs that raise concerns about the BTC pipeline. Manana and her colleagues deal with the environmental and social inheritance of the Soviet Union a
nd oppose the negative effects of twenty-first-century energy projects. While using the political levers of EU legislation, they remain wary of Brussels’s geopolitical and energy-dominance intentions. Manana raises concerns about the loans from the public banks for infrastructure projects across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but Georgian issues clearly remain at the front of her mind.
As we finish our meal Manana explains: ‘Georgia needs to think of its own future. But the economists and the politicians are obsessed with transit, to the exclusion of everything else.’ She says that being a transit country does not really bring any benefits. ‘The oil enters in a pipe, and leaves in a pipe. A handful of people get work and the government gets some loose change – and that’s it. The banks say it will make us independent. But in reality, it just shifts dependence on to other actors, such as the maintenance of the EU–Azeri relationship.’ She believes that the only body that cannot lose out in this situation is BP, for the profit made on the sale of crude from the offshore oilfields means that it has already recouped its investment on the ACG and Shah Deniz platforms, and on the Baku–Supsa, BTC and SCP pipelines.
Leaving the restaurant, we walk west along Rustavelis Gamziri until it becomes Chavchavadze Avenue, named after the poet and lawyer who led Georgia’s National Revival in the late nineteenth century. Prince Ilia Chavchavadze promoted a liberal nationalism that opposed both the Tsarist Empire and the growing Marxist movements. Chavchavadze exalted the paternalistic relationship between local nobles and peasants as a counterpoint to socialism.3 He was assassinated with his wife in 1907, the same year as the stagecoach robbery in Yerevan Square. Those behind the murder were never identified. Some blamed Tsar Nicholas I’s secret police, but his most obvious rivals in Georgia were the socialist Mensheviks. More recently, it has been claimed the twenty-two-year-old Sergo Orjonikidze was responsible, with Stalin’s knowledge.4 The mantle of Chavchavadze’s original political party has now been claimed by current President Mikheil Saakashvili’s conservative nationalist United National Movement.
The streets become more thickly lined with trees as we enter the neighbourhood of Vake. Small street stalls mix with luxury stores, embassies with old high-rise blocks. One of the latter houses Green Alternative. Manana guides us to the entrance, where dogs sleep in the shade and faded ‘Stop Russia’ stickers adorn the wall. The ancient elevator creaks as it ascends. It is a long way up.
Inside the office, the sun-filled space feels like many campaign headquarters throughout Europe. Computers on desks, leaflets from old and new campaigns, posters on the walls, and coffee. Piles of reports are stacked up for distribution.
Manana and her colleague Keti Gujaraidze have visited all the villages along the route of the pipeline in Georgia many times, spending days with local residents, helping them file complaints and bringing journalists to hear their stories. In 2003 they discovered that an entire village had been omitted from BTC’s supposedly comprehensive Impact Assessment Study. The 600 residents of the village of Dgvari lived less than a kilometre downhill from the pipeline, and were threatened by severe landslides exacerbated by construction. During our own visits to Dgvari in previous years we had witnessed collapsing homes and a community pleading to be resettled.
In their journeys along the pipeline, Green Alternative have often found the security forces very assertive. Manana describes how armed BTC guards prevented Keti from filming the Jandara Pumping Station from a good distance away, and detained her for two hours. ‘She was stuck in the snow and couldn’t leave as they were pointing guns at her.’ She explained to them that she was not inside the designated security area of the pumping station, but they made her wait for a long time in sub-zero temperatures. ‘It was extremely cold, in the middle of winter.’
Manana and Keti believe that the benefits that BTC was supposed to bring to Georgia are looking thinner and thinner. At pre-construction press conferences and town hall meetings across Georgia, BP staff repeatedly promised the project would employ 5,000 people in the pipe-laying work. But there was a pattern that each time, only minutes later, Georgian government representatives would refer to far higher figures, such as 100,000 jobs – a huge number for a country of less than 5 million. BP did not challenge this disinformation. Now that the pipeline construction period is over, it is clear to all that the number of permanent jobs provided to BTC is small. The high figures appear to have originated from then President Eduard Shevardnadze’s attempts to present the project as the panacea for most of Georgia’s social problems.
The primary longer-term economic benefits publicised by the Georgian government were the revenues from transit fees. Effectively a tax on the movement of oil across a state’s territory, such revenues are standard for countries hosting pipelines, although Azerbaijan waived them from Baku–Supsa, BTC and SCP. In Georgia’s case, the state is due to receive around $50 million a year, if the pipeline is pumping at full capacity – a sum that comprises around 1 per cent of Georgia’s $4 billion annual budget. But this income needs to be balanced against the costs Georgia expends in meeting its own obligations towards the pipeline, primarily security. Under the Host Government Agreement, the legal treaty underpinning the pipeline’s status and outlining Georgia’s commitments, protecting the pipeline is the responsibility of the host country. Georgia has never released figures for the cost of permanently deploying several hundred Ministry of Interior soldiers along the pipeline’s route.
In the spring of 2009, most of Green Alternative’s fury is directed at the current president, Mikheil Saakashvili. As Manana explains, ‘Taking Georgia to war, his economic policies, the aggressive privatisation, the environmental impacts – none of his decisions make sense. And he’s so unpredictable. The only thing you can expect is that he will build more fountains next year!’ She had not expected much from him, as he had been the justice minister in Shevardnadze’s government before 2003. Even so, she had not thought Saakashvili would be more authoritarian than his predecessor. She explains that this began in 2004, when, soon after becoming president, he changed the constitution and removed powers from parliament. ‘For a long time, foreign agencies didn’t recognise this or weren’t interested, as they liked Saakashvili. The EU wouldn’t listen when we raised these concerns.’
Unhappiness with the Columbia University–educated Saakashvili seems widespread in Tbilisi. Walls, underpasses and billboards are graffitied with a single word scrawled across them: ‘Ratom?’ – meaning ‘Why?’ Everywhere there are stickers with an image of Saakashvili’s smiling face in the crosshairs of a target, with a question mark superimposed. At first nobody claimed responsibility for these slogans and images, helping to build up the hype around them. But after a while the movement behind the posters – calling itself ‘Ratom?’ – went public, releasing several videos on to the oppositional TV channel Kavkasia, asking the question: ‘Mikheil Saakashvili is still President! Why?’
Ratom? has joined together with a plethora of existing opposition groups – both long-term critics and recent ministerial defectors from Saakashvili’s cabinet – calling on the president to resign. Despite strong divergences and confusion over their politics, most of the opposition is united in calling for mass protests on 9 April 2009, the anniversary of Georgia’s post-Soviet declaration of independence in 1991. A major rally outside parliament has been announced. Leaders insist that they will remain on the streets until Saakashvili resigns.
What everybody agrees on is that Saakashvili made a huge mistake in attacking South Ossetia in August 2008. The decision resulted in war with Russia and a devastating defeat for Georgia. The tiny republic of South Ossetia was trying to break away from the main state of Georgia, and its fighters were backed by the Russians. There is a widely held view on the Georgian streets that the presence of the BTC pipeline passing through the country had made President Saakashvili overconfident of US, EU and NATO support for Georgia against Russian military force. It was a catastrophic miscalculation: Western interests focus primarily on
the pipeline’s security, not on South Ossetia. The inaction of the Western powers led to bitter disappointment and a slow recognition of the real intentions of European and American politicians.5
On the day of the demonstration itself, the main Rustavelis Gamziri between the parliament building and the Kashveti Church has been transformed from a busy thoroughfare into a rally. Barricades stop the traffic and thousands fill the street, chanting or listening to speeches. Many are carrying flags, most with Georgian national symbols or crosses, and several people hold up placards mocking Saakashvili’s penchant for building fountains and sports stadia.
For Georgians, the large parliament building is not only the seat of power, but carries memories of uprisings and conflicts that ended regimes and brought down presidents. Today, its walls are daubed with recent graffiti – ‘Fuck NATO’ and ‘Fuck USA’. ‘People used to be pro-American, but Bush’s support for Saakashvili has turned this around’, comments a photographer next to us in the crowd.‘There were protests at the US embassy after the 2007 and 2008 elections. The frustration with the US is not about the lack of support during the war – everybody knows that was unrealistic. The anger is because the US, and the EU, are happy with Saakashvili’s pro-Western position and looked the other way when elections were falsified and he tried to crush the opposition.’
Studies by US policy analysts concur with this view, observing that strong personalised ties ‘between Washington and Tbilisi prevented the US from using its power and influence to credibly restrain the Saakashvili government’.6
Another protestor chimes in,‘Nobody is interested in Georgia as a nation, they all just want access to our territory – whether for a pipeline, or our ports, or an airbase for transit to Afghanistan. Everybody is trying to pull Georgia onto its side, pulling in different directions, north or west. But Georgia has its own culture, ancient church and script. Why do we need to be under US or Russian control?’
The Oil Road Page 18
