BP’s interconnectedness with the Aliyev regime goes beyond underwriting it with revenues. The company’s cooperation with the repressive system operates on multiple levels: local Executive Powers in villages, the Azeri secret service, and the troops of the Special State Protection Service of Azerbaijan. Nazim Babayev threatened Mayis by citing a document apparently signed by the president of BP Azerbaijan and the state security police.2 The close collaboration is evident from the speedy phone calls and responses between the orange-jumpsuited BTC man and the MTN headquarters in Gәncә after we asked for directions. In the case of Hacalli, these institutions have enabled BP to avoid settling the issue of whether the correct families have been compensated.
In the face of this pressure, it is not surprising to hear the despair in Mayis’s voice when he asks, ‘How many years can a man fight, without achievements? I am very tired – psychologically, not physically. Of course, we have some small victories – some people were compensated because of our demands. But we are pushing for something bigger. Our essential aims are to provide justice – but they give this money to avoid providing justice.’
8 DO YOU HAVE ANY BOOKS?
GәNCә, AZERBAIJAN
Pulling into the city of Gәncә after dark, following an hour’s slow drive from Hacalli, we find what was once the Soviet Intourist building still open, newly renovated and renamed the Gәncә Hotel. Azerbaijan’s second city, pronounced ‘Ganja’, has been a place of trade for millennia. Following the Seljuk conquest in the eleventh century, the importance of the town on the main route west from Baku grew. Camel trains, some loaded with bales of crude oil, passed through here headed for Tbilisi, Erzerum and İstanbul. Centuries later the Baku–Batumi Railway was built through the town. More recently, the city witnessed repeated battles and insurrection. After a battle at Gәncә the armies of Tsar Nicholas I marched into Persia and won the decisive victory that led to the Treaty of Turkmenchay and the annexation of Transcaucasia into the Russian Empire. It was in Gәncә that the troops of the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic fought their last battle against the Red Army in 1920, and here that Heydar Aliyev faced down a rebellion in June 1993, beginning his return to power.
Despite Gәncә’s continued role as a regional transport hub, late-night food offerings are meagre. The kebab stalls are closed, and all we can find is a piti tavern about to shut. Piti is a soup of mutton, chickpeas, tomatoes and potatoes baked in individual crocks, but we are too late for something like this. There is only one potato left, the meat is finished, and the heat has been turned off. We settle for mugs of cold broth with large globs of mutton fat.
As we make slow progress through our dinner, Mayis tells us the story of the official BTC pipeline-monitoring process back in 2004 and 2005. ‘The Open Society Institute, OSI, had agreed to run a monitoring programme of the pipeline together with BP.’ At this time, Sabit Bagirov was still chair of OSI, and an advisor to the process. He arranged a roundtable, where he announced a competition to choose NGOs for four monitoring teams. ‘Our organisation, Centre for Civic Intiatives, was selected to be in the human rights team.’
Each team was given explanations of the BTC construction process, as well as certain problems to look for and procedures to document. Mayis continues: ‘Then a “monitoring maestro” was brought in, to teach us – Clive Morgan, an auditor from Wales who has done much work for oil companies.’ Meanwhile, Galib Efendiev, of Revenue Watch, who we had met in the Caspian Plaza in Baku, repeatedly encouraged Mayis to be critical of BP, but not too critical: ‘We want to organise another monitoring next year. So please do good reports so we can continue this project.’
By the beginning of 2005, Mayis had conducted his research in a number of villages along the pipeline, including Hacalli, and circulated his findings to the rest of the human rights team, asking to see what the other members had discovered. It turned out that nobody else had travelled to the affected areas. The others emailed back that Mayis’s report was great, and apologised for being lazy. But after fifteen days all the monitors received a letter from Sabit as OSI coordinator. It contained a loaded question: Which of them, asked Sabit, was prepared to put their signature under Mayis’s report?
Mayis was away in Prague for training. In his absence, his fellow monitors discussed his report with Sabit. They then wrote him a joint letter that told him he had no right to include their names, and that he should not include the villagers’ complaints. ‘I was furious’, says Mayis. Two days before they had been in favour of the report; now they had all, unaccountably, reversed their opinions.
When Mayis returned from Prague, the group of monitors met again. Sabit was irate from the start, demanding that all quotes and names needed to be excluded. The others concurred, and tried to cajole and intimidate Mayis into agreement. Their main argument was about safety for the landowners, which Mayis considered ‘ridiculous’ as the landowners had wanted their names listed in the hope that their specific complaints would be addressed.
Mayis explains that the general political climate in Azerbaijan is clearly repressive, but points out that, if the monitoring teams considered complaining about BP to be too dangerous, ‘this means that there was collusion between the company and the new KGB. And this was a major denial of freedom of speech by BTC – an issue which I felt we had to raise loudly.’ The meeting had continued until 10 p.m., with Mayis’s head ringing from everybody’s comments and Sabit’s anger. In the end, he agreed to exclude individuals’ names on the condition that specific villages were identified and that he could speak at the final press conference.
After they had printed an Azeri edition of the report, the ‘monitoring expert’ Clive Morgan edited the English version. Mayis felt that Morgan’s changes toned down the villagers’ concerns over human rights violations and made the conclusions less assertive. For Morgan, the ‘professionalisation’ of the report apparently meant making it less critical.
Before the press conference, Morgan announced that they needed to rehearse. He set up a video-camera and acted as a journalist asking questions. Mayis remembers how each time he said something critical, he was instructed how to change it. In the end, he explained that the whole process made a mockery of genuine monitoring. He said to camera: ‘The Open Society Institute is trying to have close relations with BP, to work together with them. It is covering up the real impacts.’ Morgan turned off the video in alarm: ‘No, no, no, no! You can’t say this.’
The day before the conference, a press release was prepared. Mayis fought to include the line: ‘We found many human rights violations.’ But when he arrived at the OSI office the next morning, the sentence was gone. ‘I was angry. I took the paper and ripped it up. Then I went directly to the International Press Centre for the press conference.’ But Sabit, Galib, Morgan and the other team coordinators arrived before him. The room was full of journalists, but the others had taken all the places on the podium. Mayis did not want to add a chair and sit at the edge, thinking that they would cut him out from the camera view. So he told the coordinator of the social group, ‘Get up, this is my place.’ He asked ‘Why?’ and Mayis responded, ‘Because you are a slave of BP.’ ‘So they let me sit there, to prevent a scandal in front of the journalists.’
‘I demanded to speak at the end. I explained that there were many human rights violations, and that BP wanted to hide them.’ The press conference was supposed to be strictly one hour, but it was extended so the others could speak again, to attack and criticise Mayis personally, saying: ‘He is alone, he is wrong, he doesn’t know what he is saying.’
The next day, not one newspaper raised the issue of human rights violations; even the photo captions did not mention Mayis’s name, only the names of those sitting on either side of him. ‘They called it a monitoring process. But what is the result of their watching? Has it changed anything?’
We had had Mayis in mind when, at our meeting at Villa Petrolea, we asked Aydin Gasimov of BP what had changed as a result of the monitoring pro
gramme. He had replied that it had ‘taught Azeri NGOs to monitor and audit big projects like pipelines’. In this view, the purpose of ‘monitoring’ is not neccessarily to improve the infrastructure being monitored, but appears instead to mean teaching monitors that a human rights violation is not really a human rights violation.
As we toy with our piti and listen to Mayis, we are struck by how the attempts of villagers to have their voices heard is smothered at all levels, and by how courageous and determined Mayis is. For over four years he has kept faith with the likes of Mehman and his family as they struggle to gain some kind of justice, while others in the Baku NGO world have long since moved on.
Walking back to the old Intourist hotel, we pass through Gәncә’s great main square, at its centre a cluster of plane trees full of rooks cawing in the darkness. Dominating one side of the square is the grand, colonnaded city hall, a Stalinist relic. But Gәncә’s most colossal architecture is to be found in the suburbs. Sergo Orjonikidze, fellow Bolshevik activist and Stalin’s Bailov prison-mate, played a key role in the transformation of Gәncә as head of the Soviet Higher Economic Council from 1928, and was heavily involved in developing the Soviet Union’s first two Five-Year Plans of 1928 and 1933. Under his direction, the city underwent rapid industrialisation, with many new factories and metalworks built. From some distance away we can see a towering red-brick chimney with the date ‘1932’ painted high up in four white numerals.
Despite the pre-World War I growth of Baku, Tbilisi and Batumi, and the building of the railway connecting them, the Caucasus, like the rest of the USSR, had remained a largely agrarian society. All this was to change in a single decade: the 1930s. In ten years, the Soviet Union’s economy was industrialised – a process that had taken England over a century. ‘Soviet urbanisation, in tempo and scale, is without parallel in history’, wrote Isaac Deutscher.1 The collectivisation of land, the mechanisation of agriculture and the development of cities such as Gәncә and Sumqayit transformed the region.
In 1932 Hubert Knickerbocker, a journalist with the New York Evening Post, wrote of a visit to Azerbaijan in terms that, viewed from Depression-era America, must have seemed utopian: ‘I drove over twenty miles of perfect asphalt pavement through mile after mile of new settlements, snowy white, the architecture neo-oriental . . . The street system that replaced horse-cars four years ago is the best in Russia. The new electric inter-urban line connecting the “Black City” where the wells are thickest has the most artistic station.’ Walking around, Knickerbocker heard a shot ring out, and traced it to a shooting range with a political theme: ‘Hit a Capitalist and up rises a Social Democrat. Hit a hog and his head changes to that of a fat-jowled banker . . . Baku, though rich, is still Red.’2
Rapid industrialisation, of course, needed massive quantities of fuel. But much of the oil from the Caspian oilfields was exported in order to keep foreign currency flooding into the USSR. Knickerbocker described how the oil workers had an immense ‘determination to get out every barrel with the utmost speed and convert it as quickly as possible into dollars so desperately needed for the Five-Year Plan’. With the Soviet oil industry under the remit of the Higher Economic Council, Orjonikidze was effectively the chairman of one of the world’s major oil corporations, a rival to Shell and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. When the first Five-Year Plan started, in 1928, oil production stood at 11.7 million tonnes; by the end of the five years, it had almost doubled.3
From 1928 to 1940, industrial output in the USSR grew by 17 per cent each year – a growth rate unparalleled before or since, including in China. The new steel and stone buildings, mechanised mass transport and grand palaces of culture, in Gәncә and elsewhere, ‘were a promise of the coming rewards for the sacrifices and pain that they had endured during the “Great Stalinist Breakthrough”.’4 Orjonikidze himself did not live to see this new world, probably committing suicide due to Stalin’s Great Purge.5
By the start of the fifth Five-Year Plan, in 1951, Gәncә had become one of the industrial cities of the Soviet Union. But the sacrifices required were immense. Without the capital resources or colonies that the Western economies had, Soviet industry was built on the backs and the bodies of its workers and peasants. Millions toiled in the Gulags, constructing canals and roads. Even in those factories which did not depend on penal labour, workers were tied to their jobs through restrictive ‘Labour Books’.
The following day, after dusk, we explore the suburbs of the city, walking to the rusted gates of a metallurgy plant famed in the Soviet Union, now a great hulk dominating acres of grassy wasteland, concrete and brick rubble. Train tracks run into the bushes and past the ruined walls of derelict warehouses. Redundant cranes rise above the collapsed roofs, giants looming in the dark. A couple on an evening stroll nearby explain that, only two days previously, Gәncә’s aluminium factory had announced its closure. With the loss of 800 jobs, it symbolises the end of an eighty-year vision for the city.
As with Sumqayit, decades of heavy industry have left their legacy in the earth, water and air. A 1993 study found dangerous levels of polychlorinated biphenyls in the soils around Gәncә’s manufacturing sites. Near the industrial zone once stood the medieval mausoleum of Nizami Gencevi – Azerbaijan’s national poet, who in the twelfth century wrote and retold Persian and Arabic love stories such as Layli and Majnoon and Khosrow and Shirin. By the 1970s, airborne pollution from the aluminium plant was eroding the limestone mausoleum. It collapsed entirely in 1988.
When the numbers ‘1932’ were painted on the factory chimney, it was seen as a monument to the vision of the Soviet state, a new economic power. Seventy-five years later we can read it as a relic from an era of brutal forced industrialisation. How much harder it is to read the industrial infrastructure of the pipeline. It seems innocent and mundane, silent beneath fields dotted with flowers or great expanses of plough-land. Yet BTC is also a monument – both to a vision of Western power projected across the Caucasus, and to a vision of the new Azeri state and its reasserted independence. Outside the ruined metallurgy plant we find ourselves asking: How will people look at the pipeline seventy-five years hence?
The new infrastructure of the BTC pipeline does not bring with it the labour camps and purges of the 1930s and 1940s, yet this steel pipe also causes death and destruction. Each year, the pipeline can pump 365 million barrels of crude onto the world market. These can then be converted into more carbon dioxide emissions than Belgium and Denmark produce together – over 150 million tonnes of CO2 a year. These emissions are changing the Earth’s climate, and it is estimated that over 300,000 people die from climate change every year.6 The exact figures can be disputed, but ultimately the logic is simple: pumping crude through the pipeline leads to more climate change and to many more associated deaths.
The connection between carbon dioxide emissions and the altering of the Earth’s atmosphere acquired scientific currrency during the 1970s. By 1992 it was of such concern that the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Convention was signed – the ultimate foundation for the Kyoto Protocol. In the same years that John Browne and his team were fighting to gain access to the reserves of hydrocarbons beneath the Caspian, this international treaty-based process of addressing climate change had started. The ACG rigs, Shah Deniz and the BTC pipeline were all built when there was general public recognition of the dangers of transferring carbon from beneath the ground into the atmosphere.
The oil industry, financial institutions and governments obfuscate, disclaim responsibility, and insist that they are answering the higher priority of meeting the needs of modern society. But one day, will those who have consciously chosen to profit from continued fossil-fuel extraction, despite prior knowledge that this will lead to more deaths, be held to account? Some judges have already begun to engage with questions of responsibility for climate change.
But court cases are unlikely to be successful without a political shift that makes this catastrophe, and the fossil-fuel structures that help
drive it, as unacceptable as Stalin’s industrialism. It is a transition that will not happen without conflict. For both forms of industrial endeavour – the factory of 1932 and BTC – have delivered prosperity, wealth and modernity to some parts of society, and death and destruction to others: those without power.
BTC KP 442 – 629 KM – KRAZNY MOST, AZERBAIJAN
The marshrutka pulls up at its final destination three hours north-west of Gәncә, the end of the road in Azerbaijan. Mayis has brought us to the border with Georgia, so we bid him farewell.
We clamber out of the shared taxi, grab our bags, and are faced with some low grey buildings, a maze of barbed-wire fencing, and tired border guards lounging in the shade. The sun glares down as we weave our way to the right entrance. An upturned bucket and a couple of packets of cigarettes lie unattended on the ground; the seller must have wandered off – there are not many customers around.
Three uniformed, fur-hatted border guards ask to see our papers. ‘What were you doing in Azerbaijan? Where have you been? What have you done? Did you take any photos? Let us look at your camera.’
We should have expected this. Our camera has photographs from the pipeline route on it: images of marker posts in Qarabork and Rәhimli, of the field at Hacalli. We procrastinate, while Mika takes the battery out and fiddles with the lens in the hope of getting a chance to wipe the memory; but the guards watch closely. They take the camera, and our hearts sink. As Mayis had pointed out, there were no signs in Hacalli warning that taking photographs was forbidden, but we know that our having pictures of the pipeline will alarm the border guards. Our British–Kurdish friend Kerim Yildiz of the Kurdish Human Rights Project was deported from Azerbaijan in February 2005 purely for asking questions about BTC in Baku.
An English-speaking soldier examines the camera and flicks through the photographs. Within seconds he has returned it. Apparently he has not accessed the photos correctly. ‘Only three photographs! From your entire time in Azerbaijan? Do you not find our country beautiful?’ Thanking our lucky stars, we explain that we emailed our favourite pictures back to England.
The Oil Road Page 16