The group has now grown to six farmers. One bends down to pick up a large bone – what appears to be a cow’s jaw. He explains that two cows from Hacı Ali died because of the lack of proper reinstatement. They got stuck in the mud and broke their legs on rocks: a disaster in villages as poor as this.
We head back to the house of one of the farmers, having been invited to tea. Another turf-roofed home with white-washed boulder walls. Inside we find a rich smell of warmth and damp earth. When we ask how many cows the family has, the farmer gestures for us to follow him, pushing open a wooden door leading straight off the main room into the byre. There is an overpowering smell of dung. Light falls through a gap in the roof, and we can see the cattle tethered to the walls, roped to a wooden rail. There are five cows, a fine two-year-old bull, and, curled up on the ground, three calves not more than a few weeks old. Their coats are the softest strawberry-rowan colour. Our host beams proudly.
Back in the main room, chickens hide under our bench. Tea is served – brewed on the dung-fuelled heater. The farmer, who lives with his wife and four young children, explains how permanently losing the strip of land to the continuous mound of the pipeline route has affected the family’s livelihood. Apart from having a section of grazing destroyed, it has become difficult for his cattle to get to his field on the far side of the mound. One of the lost cows belonged to him.
Questions about compensation are met with a snort of derision. We have heard elsewhere in Turkey that compensation paid to villagers who lost land to SCP was even lower than that paid for losses to BTC. The farmer says that cash payments from the companies were so measly that it was barely worth applying. There were no jobs to be gained from the pipeline, while the community investment projects that came with BTC have proved to be worse than useless. An artificial insemination programme for the cattle, run on behalf of BTC Co. by an organisation called Mavi Hilal (Blue Crescent), resulted in fewer pregnancies than usual. The project workers claimed the programme would lead to higher milk yields but, as in the nearby villages of Hasköy-Hoçvan and Çalabaş, here in Hacı Ali the scheme apparently led to a significant loss of income.
As we drive away in the dolmuş, we discuss with Mehmet Ali the difficulty of explaining to these villagers how the difference between the two pipelines came about. The international NGO campaign complained to the oil companies, banks and export credit agencies that the Turkish section of the gas pipeline was being built to lower standards than the sections in Azerbaijan and Georgia. But the institutions behind the project answered that SCP in Turkey was not their responsibility.
It is obvious that, without the preceding 692 kilometres of pipe across Azerbaijan and Georgia, there would be no gas to fill the section of SCP running from the Turkish border to Erzurum; and that, without the pipeline that now runs under the land of Hacı Ali and connects with the Turkish grid at Erzurum, the gas pumped from the Caspian Sea would never reach its desired market. While responsibility for operating different sections may change along the route, the pipeline remains one integrated project, constructed at the same time, with each section relying on the other. However, the companies and those financing the project chose to define the Turkish section of SCP as another pipeline, and therefore not their responsibility.
Not all Western government institutions agreed with this line. USAID, the American aid department that studied BTC, recognised that the total project was ‘not economically viable without the Turkish section. Consequently [the] projects and the Turkish section are mutually dependent and [therefore] USAID considered them as one project for environmental assessment purposes.’3 Indeed BP, although it disclaims responsibility for SCP in Turkey, ironically prides itself on having built the Baku–Tbilisi–Erzurum gas pipeline. It draws the entire pipeline route onto maps used in its own presentations, and does not exclude the Turkish section.
HARBOUR EXCHANGE SQUARE, CANARY WHARF, LONDON
Located in a sixteen-floor glass-plated tower at Canary Wharf, the UK Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD) provides state-subsidised credit and insurance to British exports, which in cases like this include overseas construction projects. The ECGD guarantees that companies will not lose out if an overseas buyer fails to meet its payment obligations: any loss will be covered by the taxpayer. The British state provides this support for ‘strategic sectors’ of the British economy that help further foreign policy aims – industries such as arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.
As head of the ECGD’s Business Principles Unit, David Allwood is responsible for ‘project impact screening and analysis’. His office is on one of the top four floors of the Exchange Tower in Harbour Exchange Square. Finance and PR companies fill the lower levels; Barclays Bank rents seven floors for itself. It was Allwood who assessed the probable impacts of BTC’s construction and operation and, having done so, gave his public approval to over £80 million of ECGD support to the pipeline; the final total amount is not public, and it is possible that the sum could be double that figure.4 The guarantee thus covers between 2 and 4 per cent of the pipeline’s total costs. This may appear a small proportion, but combined with the support of export credit agencies from Germany, France, the USA, Italy and Japan, it is not insignificant. Crucially, the export credit agencies provide a level of political guarantee and insurance to the oil companies, thereby reducing their risk exposure. Funding from the EBRD and the World Bank performs the same function.
Financing is theoretically supposed to go only to those projects that meet defined standards, and it is Allwood’s job to ensure these standards are met. He has two other staff members working on his team, but the ECGD finances many projects simultaneously, so in reality there was less than one full-time person assigned to making an informed recommendation on the credit line of between £80 million and £160 million for BTC.
Furthermore, Allwood’s report on BTC’s impacts was somehow deemed ‘confidential’. It took a protracted legal battle by Nick Hildyard of the Corner House to force the ECGD to disclose it. The department’s lawyers fought hard, combining personal attacks on Hildyard with legal argument.5 In the process, however, Hildyard also forced the ECGD to release the list of local environmental laws in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey from which the oil companies had exempted themselves through the Host Government Agreements drawn up by George Goolsby. This was an important revelation: BP and the institutions lending public funds to the pipeline had always claimed that no local laws were bypassed.
Looking back on the years of meetings and letters between Hildyard and the ECGD, it seems that Allwood’s job was structured to present the department’s support for BTC as principled, rather than to ensure that the project it financed actually followed sound human rights and environmental principles.
BTC KP 759 – 946 KM – ARDAHAN, TURKEY
Every village we visited in the area repeated the same complaint that we had heard in Hacı Ali: that the scheme set up to compensate villagers for the pipeline’s construction through their fields – the artificial insemination programme for their livestock – was fundamentally flawed. This was part of the BTC Community Investment Programme (CIP), run out of BP’s offices in Ankara – a sister to the CIP programmes in Georgia and Azerbaijan that we had been told about by Irina and Aydin at the Villa Petrolea in Baku. With the complaints of villagers echoing in our ears, we wanted to visit the NGO administering the programme, Mavi Hilal.
Across a small park from the firebombed pro-Kurdish DTP office, we climb the stairs to the Mavi Hilal headquarters in central Ardahan, on the third floor of a nondescript block. BTC magazines and paraphernalia dot the desks. The walls are covered with small photos of people standing in fields or constructing wells. Handwritten captions explain the scenes.
The director is not in, but the project workers are happy to talk. Anıl Çoban, the health coordinator, explains that Mavi Hilal works in thirty-seven communities along BTC’s Turkish route, mostly focusing on agricultural services such as water, cattle and bees. Ov
er 1,000 hives have been distributed. The quiet ‘bee man’ standing next to Anıl trains people to maintain them. Mostly, Mavi Hilal provides equipment and materials, expecting villagers to contribute in cash or in kind. In Hasköy-Hoçvan the organization provided pipes for a new water network, which the villagers then had to lay themselves. We have seen a sign in Hasköy, outside the hall where the men played cards, informing residents how BTC brought piped water to the village. Anıl was not here when this project began, but is palpably proud that it is complete.
We ask whether they ever receive complaints from disgruntled villagers. Apparently not: everybody is happy, especially with the new milk cooperatives that have been set up. There have been a few grumbles from some villages about not having received beehives, but then Mavi Hilal does not have the money to cover everybody. Anıl adds, ‘People should be happy if something good is done. Sometimes, they might not be, as BTC and the government tell them dreams. But that’s what those promises are – things just in dreams.’
Clearly, NGOs such as Mavi Hilal have a challenge navigating between villagers’ expectations of what the BTC pipeline can do for them and the reality of their budgets. Despite this, the description of events we are given is not reassuring. Something Anıl does not mention – but which we know from our own observation – is that the new water supply in Hasköy does not work. The pump for the water should run off electricity, but the villagers are too poor to pay for it. The pipes lie unused.
BTC KP 729 – 916 KM – DEREKÖY, TURKEY
Two years previously, the same quiet ‘bee man’ played a very different part in demonstrating Mavi Hilal’s role in the villages to us. In June 2007, together with Ferhat and our translator Ülkü, Mika interviewed and filmed some farmers, including Cümü and Binali in Dereköy, a community of Alevi Muslims north of Ardahan. Villagers were laying out their concerns when a white Mavi Hilal jeep drove past four times, with the passengers staring out.
Cümü: They always think we’re stupid, because we wear these peasant caps. They gave us a bag of chalk – to show that they were helping us.
[The Mavi Hilal jeep pulls up and the project worker jumps out and runs over, wearing his full-body white bee suit.]
Bee Man: What are you doing here? Put that camera away!
Ülkü: Why are you being so aggressive?
Bee Man: I will stop you, I’ll smash your camera!
Ülkü: What are you scared of?
Bee Man: I’m not scared of anything – they should stop filming!
Cümü: They are filming me, and they can film you, there are no problems. You are distributing the bees as you want. Unfairly.
Bee Man: Shhh, don’t dig into that issue, I’m here privately.
Cümü: But you can’t be private while you’re in this car – this is an official car.
Bee Man: We are not official, this is civil society. [To us] What is your name?
Ülkü: I’m not saying.
Bee Man: [Very threatening] What does this mean, ‘I’m not saying’?
Binali: Are these people or stones? You drove past and ignored us, and now you come shouting?
Cümü: The pipeline came through my field, but I didn’t get any bees – they only gave help to those with an uncle in Ankara. Why don’t you help the poorest – are you helping poor people?
Bee Man: No, we’re not. They shouldn’t film.
Binali: Well, why don’t you leave, then they won’t be filming you.
Bee Man: Did they get permission to film? They must have permission from the Vali [provincial governor].
Binali: Are you an authority here? Why is this up to you?
Bee Man: Give me the muhtar’s [village mayor’s] phone number.
Binali: Just go to his house, it’s over there. I lost my field and I’m talking about the problems with the stones. I don’t have anything to do with the bees, so why are you bothering us?
Bee Man: They shouldn’t film me.
Binali: They weren’t filming you, they were filming me. Is my freedom in your pocket?
Mika: I can explain…
Bee Man: [To Mika] No! No! [To villagers] You are not supposed to talk.
Cümü: Why shouldn’t we speak? We are citizens. We are trying to solve our problems.
The Mavi Hilal workers left as abruptly as they had arrived, speeding down the narrow dirt road. Five minutes of conversation later, a Jandarma vehicle showed up. It had clearly been summoned by the ‘bee man’. Mika had just enough time to switch the tapes in the video camera, hiding the original in a sock and inserting a blank cassette, before police piled out of the van, shouting for us to come with them. Ferhat had managed to slip away, but Ülkü and Mika were loaded into the covered back of the green armoured truck and driven off to the regional Jandarma headquarters.
There, Mika’s detention involved being yelled at by the commanding officer while an orderly knelt at his feet shining his boots. Other officers demanded to watch the videotape, but were disappointed when it showed them a mere thirty seconds of footage of Dereköy’s main road. Mustafa Gündoğdu, from the Kurdish Human Rights Project in London, phoned to check that Mika and Ülkü were okay, not revealing his Kurdish identity or exile in Britain. This was followed by a call from a less friendly UK official: Dan Wilson, second secretary for energy and environment at the British embassy in Ankara. Wilson insisted that it was not acceptable to visit villages affected by the pipeline without permission, whether or not Mika was near the pipeline itself. Nowhere, however, is there any official statement of such a prohibition in Turkish law. Rather, as in Azerbaijan and Georgia, the arbitrary power of the state was being utilised to prevent BP’s pipeline being scrutinised.
Mika and Ülkü were held for several hours. They passed some of the time exchanging Skype IDs with conscripts from İstanbul who wished they were studying sociology. Eventually, after background checks, a brief interrogation and receipt of a signed ‘protocol’, they were released and told to stay away from Dereköy.
BTC KP 759 – 946 KM – ARDAHAN, TURKEY
In Ardahan, the chill wind rips advertising banners off the walls as we take a last walk around town with Ferhat and Mehmet Ali. Torn election flags hang across the streets – the banners of the ultranationalist MHP party, the religious-nationalist AKP, the secular-nationalist CHP, and the pro-Kurdish DTP. A young soldier stands straight in the sentry post next to the mosque. In the poor eastern part of town, Kurdish men load a stubborn cow onto a pickup, and women in headscarves feed geese.
Everywhere there are dark birds sifting through the rubbish for morsels. We have noticed them around the town, out on the fields and in the villages. All members of the crow family: jackdaws, rooks, magpies and hooded crows. There is the occasional rough-legged buzzard and some house sparrows, but overwhelmingly, this is crowland.
The town consists of three types of building: low-rise 1960s concrete blocks several storeys high, flat turf-roofed homes with five-foot doorways like those in the nearby villages, and a third type of dwelling: single-storey, built from well-hewn granite. These are neat reddish-grey houses, with solid window sills and door frames. We notice an inscription on the keystone of a doorway – ‘1910’, followed by a different script: Armenian. These homes were once Armenian. Some are occupied, others ruined. Ferhat explains that, at one time, most residents of Ardahan were Armenian. Now there are none. Only ghosts. We peer behind shop signs or at house fronts looking for the telltale inscriptions. Many more are dated 1910 and 1911.
One hundred years ago, eight out of ten of the city’s 10,000 inhabitants were Armenian, living on the fault-line between empires. Tsarist Russia had long desired this eastern territory of the Ottomans. After defeating the sultan in 1878, the Tsar annexed Ardahan and the surrounding region, and established Kars Province. Russian control lasted only forty years, until Leon Trotsky’s signature at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 formally returned this territory to the Ottomans.
But the order from the Ottoman government to expel Armenians fro
m the empire had already been given, in April 1915, while World War I raged in this border country. Those living here may have survived longer than their cousins further west; but by the time Ardahan had been returned to Turkey and Atatürk had established the Turkish Republic, in 1923, the Armenian community of this town was no more. The inhabitants of these homes had joined over 1 million others, force-marched south to the Syrian desert, killed in their thousands by Lake Van, or escaping into exile.
Dusk falls. The jackdaws leave their daily labour of picking the fields and rubbish heaps. Wheeling in great flocks above the town, they come to roost in the trees of the Atatürk Park, between the Mavi Hilal and DTP offices, amid the empty Armenian homes. We watch in amazement as thousands upon thousands pour out of the sky. They cram the branches of this tight little wood, filling every tree – black rags falling from the dark sky, their voices chattering, chattering, filling the air. Bodies huddled tight, lit by the sodium glare of a streetlight also illuminating a golden statue of Atatürk. Crowlands. Ghostlands.
14 NO-ONE WANTS THIS PIPELINE ON THEIR CV: IT’S AN EMBARRASSMENT
EUPHRATES VALLEY, CENTRAL ANATOLIA
İstanbul House of Detention
I love my country:
I have swung on its plane trees
I have slept in its prisons.
Nothing lifts my spirits like its songs and tobacco.
My country:
so big
It seems endless.
it seems that it is endless to go around.
Edirné, Izmir, Ulukıshla, Marash, Trabzon, Erzurum.
All I know of the Erzurum plateau are its songs
and I’m ashamed to say
I never crossed the Taurus
to visit the cotton pickers
in the south.
Nazım Hikmet, 19391
Our carriage trundles slowly across the plateau from Erzurum. Together with Mehmet Ali, we picked up the train just south of Ardahan, close to the border with Armenia. We are now moving due west, both following the pipeline and in the wake of a mass human migration. Many of the homes and villages we glimpse from the windows appear deserted or barely inhabited. It feels as if the train from the east has swept up those it passes, depositing them eventually in the slums of Ankara and İstanbul. Long stretches of this railway follow the ancient trade route that connected Tehran to İstanbul and Sofia, part of the Silk Road, travelled by mules, horses and camel trains. Today, the E80 highway, thundering with trucks and cars, runs in parallel with the train. The railway track from Ankara to the eastern cities of Erzurum and Kars was opened in 1939 – a symbol of the bold modernity of the Turkish Republic. The coal-driven engines thrust into a land that was then almost entirely without oil-driven vehicles.
The Oil Road Page 26