As we listen to Galib, it is clear that the Aliyev government has reaped recognition as a ‘pioneer’ for making Azerbaijan ‘a champion of EITI’, and indeed the Intiative’s first champion. 31 But it seems to us that, while politicians and NGOs celebrated Azerbaijan’s recognition at Doha in Spring 2009, they unwittingly bolstered this regime by taking its claims to transparency and diversification at face value. Ilham Aliyev presents himself as a reformer; meanwhile corruption and repression continue more or less unchecked.
Time is running on, and we do not have a chance to express our concerns. In presenting EITI as the solution to skewed development – the curse of the Billion Dollar Bridge – the initiative seems to miss the point that transparency is only one part of a far bigger set of issues. OSI and Revenue Watch have recognised that human rights abuses and corruption continue, but argue that nevertheless the Azeri EITI experience was successful because it enabled the local growth of civil society.
From Galib we shuttle over to the next meeting with Zohrab Ismayilov of the Public Association for Assistance to Free Economy. Once we have exchanged business cards and settled down, he explains that corruption in the state oil company SOCAR is a big problem: ‘Expenditure has increased, but the company doesn’t use tenders. Sometimes SOCAR pays thirty manat for a product that should cost one manat.’
Many of those working on the ninth floor do important work in trying to prevent the Aliyev regime from totally capturing the Azeri economy. Yet we are struck that Zohrab and others are outspoken about the Aliyevs’ corruption, but reticent to discuss the oil corporations’ role in enabling it. Zohrab explains, ‘If the companies have any impacts in Azerbaijan, it is positive. While there are problems with some oil companies in Nigeria and Angola, these factors don’t exist here.’
Reflecting later on our whistle-stop tour of the Caspian Plaza, we cannot doubt that support for independent voices facing repression in Azerbaijan, as elsewhere, is extremely important. But so central is OSI’s role in Baku that it has acquired disproportionate power in moulding the ‘local growth of civil society’.32 Much of its funding is provided in parallel with another US-based funder, the Eurasia Foundation, which supports ‘programs that build democratic and free market institutions’ in the former Soviet Union.33 These two foundations play a significant role in fostering a partially critical sphere that stands outside the regime, but also ensure that the voices of supported NGOs are subtly directed. They loudly criticise local corruption and revenue mismanagement, but not the bigger question about the transformation of Azerbaijan into a resource colony. The role the country should play in the world economy is taken as read, and Ilham Aliyev is inadvertently portrayed as an acceptable autocrat. We are reminded of what Arzu said to us: ‘When you ask “Democracy or oil?”, oil comes top. So, we demand, “Don’t sell our democracy for oil”.’
MATBUAT AVENUE, BAKU, AZERBAIJAN
Walking in Baku is challenging. The construction boom means that buildings, roads and overpasses have sprung up everywhere, and street maps have not kept pace. Sometimes road names have changed only on our map, at other times only on the street sign.
Heading to a meeting with Zardusht Alizade, we are confronted with an urban military base straddling the route we had planned to take. The road is where the map says it should be, but lying across it is a metal barrier: the road then runs past a guard post and in between rows of parked tanks. Civilians are nowhere in sight – only officers in pristine uniforms chatting as they stroll by. We are nervous that we have already put ourselves at risk by talking to government critics. Walking through a military base is probably not the smartest plan.
But we are late, having already got lost once, and we do not want to keep Zardusht waiting. So we take a deep breath and plunge on, studiously ignoring the sentry guarding the barrier. Once through it, it dawns on us that this is a military training college. The security, at least for two lost foreigners, is comparatively lax.
On this quiet, dusty Baku street, flanked by large trees blooming with plastic bags snagged on their branches, stands the building we are heading for. Finding the way in is less easy. Two entrances give onto a car workshop and a general store respectively. Finally, we discover a third door down a side alley, with a handwritten sign in English announcing that a committee meeting has been moved. This bodes well.
Inside lies Baku’s only independent journalism school. Zardusht welcomes us into his little corner office. Tight and compact, the room barely accomodates its two paper-strewn desks and a cabinet of books. With a broad smile on his tanned face and bright eyes, Zardusht offers us a choice of Rafaello or Russian chocolates. He is delighted to see us, reminiscing about his stay in London with us seven years ago.
Zardusht seems to take after his namesake Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism who opposed the existing caste and class structures in Persia 3,000 years ago. As a founder of the original Popular Front opposition in the 1980s, Zardusht had promoted democracy and improvement of the social situation in Azerbaijan. But as the nationalist wing of the Front began to dominate and push for conflict with Armenia, Zardusht and his allies quit and founded the Social Democrat Party instead.
‘When we were starting the Azeri democracy movement’, Zardusht remembers, ‘I was afraid that the country would go the same way as Egypt.’ He had spent time there between 1969 and 1971, on secondment from the Soviet Army, and saw the impact that oil had on the powerful. ‘And now we have gone the same way. We have a corrupt anti-national elite which controls information, oil and gas in order to enrich itself. Our ruling class is immoral.’
In recent years he has distanced himself from party politics in favour of this journalism school he has founded. But he also volunteers as chairman of the Open Society Institute, Azerbaijan. The presence of Zardusht in this position further illustrates the complexities and contradictions in OSI’s role in Baku. Warm and effusive, he speaks highly of others and is humble about his own role. He confirms much of what we have heard elsewhere.
‘BP has never supported independent civil society. You should ask Mayis about this. He was in the OSI monitoring group, and criticised the pipeline. So BP said to OSI, “We will support your programme, but only if Mayis is not part of the coalition.” This is one of the conditions they put on participating in our programmes. Of course, they pursue their interests as a corporation – they support only those who support them, who say BP is soft, very good, very clean – GoNGOs. There are many GoNGOs in this city. Many are former real activists, who then became hunters of grants. I never respect such GoNGOs. I recognise their right to live and my right to not respect them.’
Young women and men periodically pop their heads in to ask questions, and Zardusht patiently deals with each of them. We can see how he built up a movement of dedicated and loyal activists against Soviet oppression in the late 1980s. Respect and affection beam from the eyes of his students.
This is not the only journalism school in Baku; BP itself has run joint courses with the British Council. Zardusht admits that this programme is a good thing because it teaches the basics of journalism. But the benefits are limited. If a journalist tries to use this method to investigate BP, he says, ‘they will become an enemy like Mayis. Both the government and BP try to stop Mayis speaking. They try to close his mouth, to keep him silent.’ As he describes BP’s attempts to silence criticism, Zardusht imitates a fist crushing somebody.
Warming to his theme, Zardusht argues that the Aliyev dynasty and BP are winning at Azerbaijan’s expense. He feels that the oil revenues could be used to develop, to build other works, to create a future without oil, without gas. But instead, ‘our very clever English-speaking president has learned how to run a dictatorship and manipulate civil society for his own benefit’. The restrictions on speech and strong control of media are such that allowing limited civil society is profitable for the government. Zardusht points out that Soros’s programmes, including OSI, have been closed by the Russian government but allowed to op
erate in Azerbaijan. ‘The government here even collaborates with our OSI health programmes. Does this mean that we live in a democracy? No! But this all works well for BP.’
After two hours, Zardusht apologises profusely that he needs to leave. ‘I need to go to an OSI board meeting – it’s time to disburse George’s money again.’ He gives us a lift back into the centre of Baku, and as we drive through the city he says,
‘When colleagues from America visit, they ask me: “Why don’t you recognise the beautiful buildings, the nice cars, the expensive shops? People must enjoy this. Surely this is a good transformation of society?” I answer, “No – this is not my society. That is part of the corrupt state apparatus. The oil will end, BP will leave, the elite will move to their fancy houses in London and Paris. And what will be left behind?” Lots of empty skyscrapers that we can’t keep clean.’
Part II THE ROAD
MAP III AZERBAIJAN–GEORGIA–TURKEY
5 THE WIDE STREAM OF OIL GUSHED OVER THE GREASY EARTH
BIBI HEYBAT, BAKU, AZERBAIJAN
The highway is a hectic turmoil of trucks and cars, dust and potholes, as it takes us away from the city. We are leaving Baku behind, to follow the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline westwards and investigate the situation in the villages on the Azeri plains, in the Georgian mountains and on the Turkish plateau. To track the oil, we had planned to travel with a hired driver, but none would accompany us in Azerbaijan. All those whom Mayis approached turned down the job as soon as they learned that we would be following the pipeline. Eventually Mehdi, Mayis’s brother from far out of town, agreed to come to Baku and take us.
Cramming into Mehdi’s dirty white Lada, we followed the coast road south. Through the rear window we see the distant Absheron Peninsula and the tower blocks of Baku begin to drop away from view. We reach the suburb of Bibi Heybat, where Taghiyev and the Soviet generations that followed him turned a village into a maelstrom of drilling rigs, pipelines and crude-soaked soil.
Like Balakhani further north, this industrial devastation attracts its photojournalists and voyeurs of decay. The stretch of rusted derricks and nodding donkeys was immortalised in The World is Not Enough, the James Bond film that John Browne referred to in his autobiography. In travel guides today the area is known as the ‘James Bond Oilfield’.
Almost a hundred years previously Ali, a character in Kurban Said’s novel, described the scene: ‘Soon we saw the oil derricks of Bibi-Eibat. The black scaffolding looked like an evil dark wood. The smell of oil filled the air. Workers, oil dripping from their hands, stood near drill holes, where the wide stream of oil gushed over the greasy earth.’1
We are following one of the ancient trading routes from Baku. After its conquest by the Persians in 530 BCE, this region was a province of the empire to the south. The states of Atropatena and Albania, whose independence was eventually carved out of the Persian Empire, continued to trade with the cities to the south. After the Arabs conquered the region in the seventh century CE, long camel trains travelled along this coast heading for Tabriz, Baghdad, Esfahan and Basra carrying ‘bales’ of crude oil. This was oil for heating and light, warfare and medicine.
Arab writers such as Abu Ishaq Istahri described the process of digging up and trading the strange substance in this distant city of the Abbasid Caliphate. Marco Polo told his Venetian readers of ‘a fountain of oil, which discharges so great a quantity as to furnish loading for many camels . . . It is also good for burning. In the neighbouring country no other is used in their lamps and the people come from distant parts to procure it.’2
Eventually, in the nineteenth century, control from the Muslim south was replaced by the expanding imperial Russian power from across the Caucasus Mountains to the north. Baku became a border town of the Tsarist Empire, and the trade routes switched to tankers on the Volga and wagons on the rail line to the west.
BTC KP 0 – 187 KM – ŞIXOV BEACH, AZERBAIJAN
As we round the headland at Bibi Heybat, the wide Caspian spreads out before us, blue-grey and littered with the structures of the oil industry. We pass a strip of resort hotels. Outside each stand lines of palm trees, imported, Mayis tells us, from Dubai or Brazil at great expense – like the shrubs and water brought to the park at Villa Petrolea by Ludvig Nobel.
The Caspian, not so much a sea as the world’s largest salt lake, is filled from the north by the rivers Volga and Ural, draining the steppe and the taiga, washing down from the heartland of Russia. Marco Polo said that the Caspian in the 1280s ‘partakes of the nature of a lake not communicating with any other sea . . . The sea produces an abundance of fish, particularly sturgeon and salmon at the mouth of the rivers.’
The immense body of water before us is heavily affected by the flow rate of the two rivers. In the summer of 2009 there was a prolonged drought in western Russia. There were fears that the level of the Caspian would drop as much as three metres, and the nutrient load become so heavy that the algae would bloom and the fish population collapse – fish like the Caspian sturgeon, which is the source of caviar. The historic emblem of this sea, and the livelihoods of those who fish in it, is in serious danger. The sturgeon is threatened by the pollutants down the Volga, and a film of crude, in some places half a centimetre thick, has formed on parts of the Caspian as a result of oil-drilling.3
The road runs close to the shore, and we can see the hulks of jack-up drilling rigs, while far off in the haze are spindly silhouettes of jetties and shallow water platforms, steel centipedes crawling along the surface of the sea. The jack-ups, great pylons at each corner, look like upturned tables, their legs rising in the air. Belonging to oil service companies such as Transocean and Schlumberger, these workhorses of the offshore industry form another segment of the Carbon Web. Rented out to the oil corporations, they are pulled by tugs on to prospective fields to drill wells through the seabed below.
For the Azeri territory we see before us, the sea, is quartered out in fourteen irregularly shaped concession blocks. On the oil maps that indicate them, each block is marked with a name, such as ACG or Lerik, and the titles of the new owners: AIOC, ExxonMobil, BP, Total, Agip, and so on. It is to and from these blocks that the drilling rigs are dragged.
We leave the headland and begin to traverse the flat lands along the shoreline of Şixov Beach. This is a desert not of sand but of mud, made from the ancient bed of the Caspian when the lake was swollen by meltwaters after the last Ice Age. On our left is the grey-green sea, on our right the grey-brown mud desert. To an eye used to the verdant greens of Western Europe or nurtured on images of Arabian sand dunes, this landscape, glimpsed through the windows among the passing trucks, is hard to love. We think of lines in Ali and Nino: ‘I loved the flat sea, the flat desert and the old town between them. The noisy crowd who come looking for oil, find it, get rich and leave again . . . don’t love the desert.’4
On either side of the road lie indeterminate industrial buildings, a cement works, and beyond it a SOCAR terminal with quotations from Heydar Aliyev painted on its walls:
Azerbaijan will remain independent!
A State with a strong economy is capable of everything!
Just across the road a large signpost reads: ‘Deepwater Jacket Factory named after Heydar Aliyev’. It was in this former Soviet rig yard that six of ACG’s mammoth platforms were assembled. The great majority of the 15,000 Azeri workers employed during the construction of the platforms were engaged here. These temporary workers were employed not by Azeri companies, but by a battalion of foreign corporations, including McDermott of the US, Bouygues Offshore of France, Emtunga International of Sweden, and Saipem of Italy. Despite Heyder Aliyev’s slogan about the building of a strong economy, the ‘Contract of the Century’ was biased against Azeri firms doing this work, and in favour of the international companies that BP contracts around the world. This is the engineering part of BP’s Carbon Web, which, like the foreign policy, finance and the military elements, was also crucial in the conquest of the Caspian.<
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BP’s biggest contractor in Azerbaijan, McDermott, was subject in 2005 to the only successful labour strike in recent Azeri history. Arzu had told us how, despite significant corporate pressure, the walkouts by local workers continued for some time and succeeded in raising their salary. But later on Zardusht had suggested that the strike’s success was partly a ploy by the state, who chose not to block it but instead used it to pressure the foreign companies in their own interests.
To our left, a strip of empty beach is neatly fenced off. A line of orange-and-yellow markers protrude from the water and continue up the beach. This is the finishing point of the 187-kilometre pipeline that runs across the bed of the Caspian from the ACG field. These banal posts on this scrap of beach mark the spot where 80 per cent of Azerbaijan’s oil, and most of its gas, comes ashore. This is the physical reality of all those conversations and negotiations, struggles and deals, which took place in meeting rooms and hotels, government buildings and corporate offices beyond the rocky headland to the north. Here, out of view, the oil is pumped under the busy highway and the Aztrans railway line, into the Sangachal Terminal.
We turn off the main road and head towards the sentry cabin at the gates of the terminal. Saplings, neatly planted, fringe the roadside, thin bare whips rising from desert mud. Above us a triple billboard points in three directions, displaying a map of the BTC pipeline, Heydar Aliyev’s face with a thin smile, and the legend:
Heydar Aliyev Adina Baki–Tbilisi–Ceyhan Boru Kemeri 20055
The Oil Road Page 11