Global Policy Forum

By Jim Lobe

Amid tensions in eastern Turkey arising from the U.S. invasion of Iraq, environmental and Kurdish rights groups are calling for a moratorium on the construction and financing of a pipeline that will link the Caspian Sea to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean.

In a statement released Monday several groups complained that a fact-finding mission they sent to eastern Turkey, through which the pipeline is supposed to run, had been constantly followed, harassed, and detained by Turkish police as it attempted to gather information and interview residents about the situation in the region.

"What the fact-finding mission has experienced in the course of our visit has given us some small indication of what local people in the Kars and Ardahan regions suffer daily," said Miriam Carrion of the British Bar Human Rights Committee (BHRC). "It makes a mockery of BP's claims that there are no security problems along the Turkish section of the pipeline."

BP, British Petroleum, leads a consortium of oil companies that is investing in the construction and operation of the US$3 billion pipeline that will pump oil about 1,200 miles from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku through Georgia to Ceyhan.

"The obvious lack of freedom of expression calls the legitimacy of the whole process of consultation into serious question," added Carrion.

BP is currently trying to access about $1.5 billion for the project from international financial institutions, including the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), as well as the export credit agencies of Japan, France, Britain, Germany and Italy.

The multilateral agencies generally require as a condition of their lending that local communities affected by major projects, such as an oil pipeline, be consulted before the project goes forward to ensure that any negative social or environmental impacts are lessened.

But the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) opposing construction of the pipeline are arguing that the security situation in eastern Turkey, as in parts of Azerbaijan and Georgia, will not permit local communities to voice their views freely.

That argument has been strengthened in recent months amid reports that Turkish security forces have cracked down, particularly against the Kurdish population in eastern Turkey, as tensions in the region have increased due to the uncertainties created by the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The Turkish government and armed forces have expressed growing concern that the invasion may spur Iraqi Kurds to seize Kirkuk, an Iraqi oil producing center, as the first step in a broader push to break off from Baghdad. Ankara, which has its own territorial claims on the Kirkuk region, fears such a move would re-ignite a Kurdish insurgency in eastern Turkey.

Ankara's uneasiness has expressed itself in significantly greater military presence in eastern Turkey and the banning just last week of a major Kurdish political party.

The NGO delegation, which also included representatives of the Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP), Corner House of Manchester, England, and Italy's Campaign for the Reform of the World Bank, said it found a marked increase in tensions in the area over the last few months, including evidence of arbitrary detentions and arrests, some of them apparently related to the pipeline construction plans. The delegation was detained twice during its investigations.

"BP has promised us personally that the pipeline would not have a detrimental effect on the security situation in volatile areas of Turkey, yet everything we have seen indicates precisely the opposite," said Anders Lustgarten, the KHRP's environmental officer. "Repression of Kurds in the region is particularly pronounced, but the human rights of all in the region are not respected," he added.

NGOs have documented a number of problems with the project, including the lack of appropriate consultation and compensation, corruption in awarding sub-contracts, and possible serious environmental damage.

"The litany of deficiencies when considered against the backdrop of human rights violations we have seen and experienced leads us to conclude a moratorium on the project is essential," said Antonio Tricarico of the Rome-based Campaign.

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