The Oil Road

by James Marriott

  Her criticisms of BP are many, so we are surprised to discover that it was the pipeline that brought her here – her son got work as a horseback security guard for BTC. She hurries off to bring his contract, a sheet of white A4 with an official stamp and signatures, crumpled into a see-through sleeve – a precious document in a house with few books. It transpires that he has to provide his own horse and cover all its costs, which absorbs much of his meagre pay packet. A horse, she explains, eats twice what a cow needs, while producing no milk. When the horse becomes sick, her son has to pay for the vet. One of his fellow guards lost his job when his mount died. Now we understand better the indifference shown to us by the scrawny horse and rider at the bomb craters near Akhali-Samgori.

  The sunlight floods into this airy wooden room. Looking out across the rooftops, a compact stone church on a rocky hillock marks the centre of the extensive village. Georgia is dotted with post-Soviet churches built in the past ten years, but this one is different, with its weathered stone and Greek inscription above the western door. It must date from when the villagers settled here in the nineteenth century – a rare survivor of the Soviet period. Beyond it lies the dark green of the forest and the sharp white of the mountains.

  After saying goodbye, we have one further place to visit. We want to verify the existence of a military checkpoint that is said to hinder the villagers from walking up the hill to the higher pastures and the hot-sulphur springs, as they have done for generations. The passage up this track is now described by BTC Co. as ‘crossing the pipeline corridor’, and therefore apparently requires an ID card and checks by troops from the Ministry of Interior. Bumping along the dirt road, we soon see the concrete wall of another oil spill catchment dam. Further up the hillside, we can see the familiar pipeline markers. Absorbed in trying to read the route of BTC across the bright green of the distant pasture, we fail to notice a sandbagged wooden hut just on our right. Suddenly we are surrounded by several angry soldiers levelling their guns at us and shouting that we must turn back. Ramazi spins the car around, and we are heading fast downhill again. Clearly the pipeline corridor is militarised here, as at other places, but these soldiers are not as relaxed as those near Akhali-Samgori. The government troops working to protect BP’s infrastructure have control over access not just to the route itself, but also to the meadows, forests and mountains above it. This is the outcome of the work of George Goolsby, the lawyer at Baker Botts who oversaw the writing of Host Government Agreements concerning the state’s obligations on security.

  Conducting Arseny Avraamov’s the Symphony of Factory Sirens in Baku in 1922 for the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. The orchestra consisted of foghorns of the Caspian Fleet, factory sirens, bus horns and a huge cast of choirs.

  John Willet, The New Sobriety: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period 1917–33, Thames & Hudson, 1978

  The Baku–Batumi oil train, stationary behind two Georgian men. Photo taken by Alfred Lyttelton Marriott in 1901.

  Marriott Family Archive

  The scar caused by the construction corridor of BP’s Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline in Georgia, August 2005.

  Andrea Scaringella

  A meeting between British civil servant Duncan Lawson (left), Mayis Gulaliyev (right) and villagers affected by the BTC pipeline in Azerbaijan, August 2005.

  Andrea Scaringella

  © Andrea Scaringella

  Ferhat Kaya standing in the snow on the BTC pipeline route near Ardahan in north-eastern Turkey, winter 2005.

  © Helen Sheehan

  A table from a BP-produced briefing revealing ‘divide and conquer’ tactics to undermine NGO opposition to the pipeline in 2003. It shows the logos of organisations such as Kurdish Human Rights Project, the Corner House, CARE International, the Open Society Institute and Amnesty International. (See Chapter 12.)

  The National Security Archive from the US Department of Energy through the Freedom of Information Act

  Part of the Carbon Web that surrounds BP, and has participated in the creation and maintenance of the Oil Road.

  © UHC Design

  The SIOT Oil Terminal in Muggia, after the 1972 attack. The Palestinian Black September claimed responsibility, explaining that they targeted the TAL pipeline terminal because it supplied Germany, which armed both Israel and Jordan.

  © Giornalfoto and Civici Musei di Storia ed Arte del Comune di Trieste/“Il Piccolo” Archive

  13 I WILL STOP YOU, I’LL SMASH YOUR CAMERA!

  BTC KP 690 – 877 KM – TÜRKGÖZÜ, TURKEY

  Crossing the Georgian–Turkish border at Türkgözü is slow, but the weather in these high mountains is blissful: bright sun and barely a breath of wind. Having left Manana, Keti and Ramazi, we are travelling south by bus; in the opposite direction rolls a stream of articulated trucks with Iranian registration plates, heading towards Russia. Georgian border guards in an EU-funded office check our passports, keying in data and taking digital photographs. Once each individual is approved, an electronic gate opens. Fortress Europe is in operation, ensuring that the supposed ‘undesirables’ are prevented from entering. The Georgian officials give a hard time to three Russian women in bright clothing. Two are allowed to cross, but the third is turned back. The border guards in Azerbaijan were keen to block unwanted books; here, people are denied entry.

  Travellers gather on the grassy verge in the middle of the Turkish border compound, between the police office and the customs shed. A man prays. Another shares his lunch with us. A British-Czech family are taking a week’s holiday from Tbilisi in their little green Niva. They have no map, but know the names of nearby cities. He works for the British Council, running an English teacher-training programme for the Georgian military.

  Twenty years ago, the scene here was rather different. Türkgözü was the only direct border between the Soviet Union and NATO – a frontline across which soldiers from opposing blocs faced each other directly. As a crossing, Türkgözü was only opened in 1994, but today the frontier is largely inconsequential in the wider geopolitical context. US power is projected further east and north. Unless Russia can break Georgia’s NATO alliances, this border has little strategic importance to the West, except to enforce migration restrictions.

  In the two hours we wait, 50,000 barrels of crude are pumped under the scrubland nearby. It flows without a pause, for the Host Government Agreements enshrined the priority of ‘freedom of movement’ for the oil. Nevertheless, this border represents an important marker for the pipeline. Up until this point, through Azerbaijan and Georgia, the pipeline was constructed, and is operated by, the BTC Co. consortium, led by BP. But for the remaining 1,076 kilometres to the Mediterranean, the consortium only has supervisory control. Now, the pipeline belongs to BOTAŞ, the Turkish state oil company. BTC Co. paid it $1.4 billion under the Turnkey Agreement to construct this section of the route by 26 May 2005. Since completion, BOTAŞ has overseen this pipeline’s operation. BOTAŞ also took on the construction of the SCP gas pipeline, running largely in parallel with BTC until it comes to its finishing point at the eastern Turkish city of Erzurum, where it delivers its load into the Turkish national gas grid.

  Across the border, the road continues to rise. The rugged landscape becomes hidden beneath a smooth white blanket of snow, even now, in April. The scar left by the buried pipeline is invisible at this time of year on this high plateau. Even the orange marker posts are barely discernible.

  The crude is pumped up and up, into the Yanlizçam mountains. Our bus slows as the road twists and turns in sharp hairpin bends. We climb the Ilgardağı Geçidi Pass – at 2,540 metres one of the highest passes in Europe. A wall of compacted snow, three metres high, lines our route.

  Emerging out of the glaring whiteness is Turkey’s first pump station, at Posof, sister to the one we saw in Jandara, Georgia. A three-metre-high chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire, surrounds a dense industrial plant, which comprises three large storage tanks, a row of five steel chimneys and a jungle o
f pipes. Fifty workers keep the station running, supervising the pumps that push the oil west. They work two weeks on site before catching the company shuttle back to Ardahan for a short leave and being replaced by another shift. Next to the oil installation, also surrounded by deep snowdrifts, stands a brand new three-storey military base, complete with helipad, staffed by members of the Jandarma, the Turkish militarised police force.

  BTC and SCP are now running across a historic political fault-line. They pass through what was once the frontier of the Roman Empire, the eastern limes. For over 2,000 years these mountains of the Lower Caucasus have been disputed borderlands between rival empires, imperial troops fighting back and forth through the thin air of the high plateau.

  The towns and villages of this region have changed hands repeatedly. Today we are travelling deep inside Turkey, but this land was once part of Russia and, before that, Georgia. It was even briefly under British control. A hundred kilometres to the west, where these mountains drop down to the Black Sea, lies the city of Batumi, back across the current border in Georgia. In the eighth century BCE, Greek merchants founded a trading colony here, naming it Bathys, or ‘Deep’ for its harbour. Six hundred years on, the town was overshadowed by a nearby Roman fort. As that empire’s successor, Byzantium, waned, the region was conquered by the kingdom of Georgia. The rise of the Ottomans meant that, by the sixteenth century, the Turks had captured the city and this plateau from the kingdom of Georgia. However, following the Tsarist expansion into the Caucasus and the defeat of Sultan Abdulhamid II in 1878, these borderlands became part of the Russian Empire.

  Batumi was a pivotal Tsarist port and, along with Tbilisi and Baku, a building block in the industrialisation of the Transcaucasian Province and the new Kars Province, established over the region through which we are now travelling. Only six years after the city and borderlands were absorbed into the empire, the railway from Baku arrived, turning Batumi into an oil-export route between the Caspian and the world market. A harbour was built for the transhipment of kerosene. Soon Ludvig Nobel established a refinery and the Rothschilds purchased the Batumi Oil Refining and Trading Company. Of the 16,000 workers who migrated into the growing city, many were Georgians, Turks, Greeks and Armenians from these high borderlands. Almost a thousand were employed in the Rothschilds’ refinery and kerosene-canning works.

  In November 1901, Stalin, newly arrived from Tbilisi as an organiser for the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, gleefully announced: ‘I’m working for the Rothschilds!’ as he obtained employment at their plant. Conditions were appalling for the labourers from the mountains, and agitation began. There was arson at the refinery, an assassination attempt on the Rothschilds’ manager, and, on 9 March 1902, a massive strike. The company called in the army, who fired on the strikers – thirteen workers were shot dead. As he was arrested and deported to Siberia, Stalin proclaimed: ‘We’re going to overthrow the Tsar, the Rothschilds and the Nobels.’1 Fifteen years later, his prediction would come true.

  Much of the oil produced by this troubled plant was carried away on British tankers owned by Shell. When the Rothschilds sold all their Russian assets to Shell in 1911, the centrepiece of Batumi’s economy was now in British hands. However, all oil exports from the harbour came to a halt at the outbreak of World War I, as Batumi focused instead on supplying Russian troops fighting high up on this plateau. The landscape through which our bus takes us was one of the most brutal battlegrounds in World War I. For four years, men from the villages and the cities were slaughtered up here, until the Revolution caused the Russian Front to collapse. At the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, the borderlands were handed to the Ottomans, but by the following November, Batumi was occupied by the British. For eighteen months the oil port and this hinterland were under the control of a military governor, just like Baku.

  In June 1920 the British evacuated the region. Nine months later, Batumi was the last redoubt of the government of independent Menshevik Georgia. It fell to the Red Army and was absorbed into the Soviet Union. During the first forty-three years of the Oil Road, Batumi changed hands six times. But the plateau finally became separated from the city on the coast; the land and villages we are now passing through became part of the territory of the new Turkish Republic.

  BTC KP 759 – 946 KM – ARDAHAN, TURKEY

  At last Ardahan appears on the horizon – unsheltered in the openness, like a settlement on the tundra. We descend from the distant ring of snow-covered peaks, straight into town. Maybe this lack of natural defences explains why the city castle established by the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim fell to one army after another. Rebuilt as a Tsarist barracks, the fortress stands on an outcrop guarding the river.

  This is the invisible corner of modern Turkey. Ardahan barely registers in the national consciousness, let alone beyond the nation’s borders. Tourism is nonexistent, infrastructure minimal. Few Turkish citizens outside the region have any reason to come here – unless they are posted here by the army.

  A cold wind blows across the vast plain, 1,800 metres above sea level. We pass wastelands of rubbish heaps. Plastic bags lie everywhere – white, blue, pink, black – in the spaces between and behind buildings. Jackdaws and the occasional stray dog pick through the garbage.

  Ardahan has the atmosphere of a garrison town. Soldiers guard entrances to religious and government buildings; tanks are parked down side streets, and infantry conduct exercises in surrounding fields. Plainclothes policemen shadow outsiders.

  We make our way to a small hotel and a joyous meeting with Mehmet Ali Uslu, an old friend from Ankara with whom we have travelled in Turkey before. He will accompany us again on this journey along the pipeline. We tease him over his new closely cropped haircut that seems to make his face beam even more than usual. After the long journey we need to go and find something to eat.

  By the time we head back to the hotel it is nightfall, and the streets are empty apart from a small pack of dogs. A roving squad car pulls up beside the three of us, suspicious of our intentions. Looking through our bags, the policeman barks, ‘What’s in that bottle?’ ‘Water’, we answer. He remains unconvinced until we glug it down exaggeratedly.

  Formerly, Ardahan’s importance derived from its proximity to the Soviet border. Now, with limited external danger to Turkey’s territory, the reason for the city’s continued militarisation is an internal enemy: the Kurds. Since Turkey was established as a nation-state in 1923, the existence of the Kurds as a separate people has been perceived as a threat to its sovereignty. Under Atatürk’s leadership, official decrees banned Kurdish schools, organisations and publications as part of the forced assimilation of minorities into Turkish culture. The Kurdish language was forbidden, villages were renamed to sound Turkish, and parents could not give their children Kurdish names. In 2002, the head of the Registry Department in Ardahan faced criminal charges after issuing identity papers for children named ‘Berivan’, ‘Rojhat’ and ‘Rojin’. Use of the letters ‘x’, ‘w’ and ‘q’ was made illegal, as they do not exist in the Turkish alphabet. Kurdish music, clothes, festivals, and the combining of the symbolic colours red, yellow and green – all have been banned at various times.

  During the 1990s, in the face of widespread rebellion, the Turkish Army’s activities in the region led to the destruction of 4,000 villages and the displacement of 3 million people. Since that time, bombing raids on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and attacks on communities in south-eastern Turkey have continued. Policing in Kurdish areas is largely in the hands of the Jandarma, a militarised police force reviled by many across Turkey. Although the recent government of the conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) has introduced some reforms and eased certain language restrictions, Turkey’s 15 million Kurds still face constant abuse, repression and attempts to assimilate and erase their culture.

  Initially, the BTC pipeline was due to run south from the Georgian border, turning west through the Kurdish heartland of south-eastern Turkey. But t
he active presence of Kurdish resistance movements in the region pushed the oil companies to rethink their plans – especially given the PKK’s repeated bombing of the Kirkuk–Ceyhan pipeline over the years. BTC’s route now bypasses the region to the north. It runs along the Euphrates and the main west–east highway through Central Anatolia. Yet it was impossible for the oil companies to bypass Turkey’s Kurdish population entirely. The provinces of Ardahan, Kars and Erzurum are all home to sizable Kurdish minorities that, in places, comprise up to 40 per cent of the population. State discrimination and repression is the norm here, but uprisings are rare.

  In the autumn of 2001, news of BP’s plans to build BTC across eastern Turkey came to the attention of civil society groups in London. The Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP) became concerned that the pipeline’s route would create a ‘militarised corridor’, with a greater presence of Turkish Army forces and Jandarma in Kurdish villages. Kerim Yıldız, the head of KHRP, argued that the pipeline threatened to escalate state violence and further impoverish Kurdish communities. The company was quick to react, with Barry Halton, BTC regional affairs director, making strenuous efforts to befriend KHRP and pull Yıldız into supporting the pipeline. But Yıldız, working closely with Nick Hildyard of the Corner House, was wary of Halton’s professional interests.

  Yıldız’s fears were borne out three years later, as construction of BTC began in Ardahan province. In May 2004, Ferhat Kaya, chairman of the Ardahan branch of the leftist pro-Kurdish political party DEHAP, met with villagers whose livelihoods were being affected by the laying of the route. He was picked up by the police and taken into custody, beaten and tortured. Ferhat is a Turk, but his position in DEHAP helped him build connections with Kurdish communities, though it also exposed him to state pressure.