Tag Archives: turkey

“The Oil Road” – in search of a subtitle

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Platform has submitted a complete manuscript of “The Oil Road” to Verso; it’s gone to the copy-editors now and will be published in May (with a different cover!).

But we’re still trying to pick a sub-title – do you have any suggestions? Here’s a blurb about the book, and we’ve copied some possible subtitles below.

Send us any new ideas or your favourites from the list below -  tweet us @platformlondon or email Mika. If you come up with the best suggestion, you get your subtitle on the cover of the book!

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BP violated human rights rules, says UK government

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Company failed to respond to alleged intimidation by Turkish security forces along its UK-backed Caspian oil pipeline

Ruling places BP in breach of loan agreements, say campaigners

A BP-led consortium is breaking international rules governing the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies in its operations on the controversial Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the UK Government ruled today [Wednesday 9 March 2011]. Environmental and human rights campaign groups, who filed an official complaint against BP, say the ruling puts the oil giant in breach of loan agreements – including a multi-million pound loan from UK taxpayers.

Villagers living along the flagship oil pipeline owned by the consortium have had an eight-year struggle to hold the companies accountable for alleged human rights abuses associated with its development. The controversial Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline brings up to one million barrels of oil a day from the Caspian Seaa, cross Azerbaijan and Georgia to Turkey from where supertankers ship it to Europe.

The UK government has ruled that BP’s consortium broke international rules governing the human rights responsibilities of multinational companies.

The ruling follows a Complaint lodged under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises lodged by six public interest groups in April 2003. The UK government backed the pipeline in 2004 through its Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD).

The ruling states that BP failed to investigate and respond to complaints from local people of intimidation by state security forces in Turkey guarding the pipeline. Local human rights defender Ferhat Kaya, for instance, was detained and allegedly tortured by the paramilitary police for insisting on fair compensation. Villagers allege that they are routinely interrogated when they raise concerns over the pipeline.

The pipeline passes through an area of north-east Turkey with a substantial Kurdish minority who have been subject to state repression for decades. Since the pipeline’s inception over a decade ago, human rights campaigners in Turkey and the UK have highlighted the risk of local people, particularly Kurdish minorities, being intimidated by state security forces. Today’s ruling has found that, despite widespread awareness of this “heightened risk intimidation”, BP failed to put in place mechanisms to investigate allegations of abuse and ignored those brought to its attention.

The Complaint argued that such intimidation deterred local people from participating in BP’s consultations about the pipeline’s route and compensation negotiations for loss of land and livelihoods.

BP has consistently promoted the BTC pipeline as “world class” in its approach to human rights. According to its legally-binding commitment to comply with the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights (an international code of conduct for multinationals operating in the energy sector), BP should “consult regularly” with local communities about the impacts of pipeline security arrangements and should record and report credible allegations of abuse by security forces to the authorities.

The UK government has now ruled that BP conspicuously failed to implement these undertakings in the north-east region of Turkey by failing to respond to allegations of intimidation and to put in place flexible enough mechanisms to investigate such allegations in areas where local people consider the local authorities do not protect them.

The ruling sets a major precedent. In future, to comply with these corporate social responsibility guidelines, multinationals will have to take into account the human rights context in which they operate, including the risk of intimidation, when designing and implementing corporate grievance mechanisms. Such mechanisms need to be robust enough that people can report intimidation without fearing further reprisals.

Given BP’s legally-binding commitment to ensure that the BTC project complies with the OECD Guidelines, today’s ruling from the UK government potentially places the company in breach of its contracts with the major international financial institutions (IFIs) that backed the project with taxpayers’ money in 2004. In addition to the UK’s export credit agency, these include the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and other European and US export credit agencies.

The failure of BP to adhere to the OECD Guidelines and the Voluntary Principles, as required under the project agreements, also raises major concerns over the due diligence undertaken by the IFIs before supporting the pipeline.

Nicholas Hildyard of The Corner House says:

“Public funders knew about the intimidation, but failed to check whether BP had adequate procedures in place to address and remedy it. They ploughed ahead with the project anyway for political reasons. Western governments appear to have been willing to sacrifice the human rights of those living along its route in order to grab the Caspian’s oil for the West.”

Rachel Bernu of Kurdish Human Rights Project says:

“It has taken eight years for the claims of villagers facing repression in this isolated area of Turkey to be recognised. We hope this ruling marks a turning point for the governments and companies involved so that those affected receive just compensation, and human rights are not only respected, but also promoted through investment in future.”

James Marriott of Platform says:

“This ruling shows that BP’s pipeline allowed and enabled repression of local communities. Yet EU governments and companies continue to push for new pipelines to suck oil and gas westwards from distant places of extraction. BTC stands as a warning that these planned ‘energy corridors’ risk becoming ‘corridors of militarisation and human rights abuse’.”

Friends of the Earth’s Policy and Campaigns Director Craig Bennett said:

“Using taxpayers’ money to fund this pipeline at the expense of people’s human rights and the planet is a stain on this country’s reputation.

“This pipeline would not have been built without public funding – Ministers must come clean about what action it will take against BP for breaching its loan agreement.

“The only real way to stop this cycle of exploitation is to wean us all off our fossil fuel dependency by investing in safe, clean and ethical technologies of the future.”

Commenting on the ruling, Nick Dearden of Jubilee Debt Campaign says:

“This long-awaited ruling underlines the need for urgent changes in the UK’s export credits system. Empowering British companies to violate the national laws of other countries goes against the most basic form of social and environmental responsibility. Without effective safeguards, projects like BP’s one are bound to happen again.”

Peter Frankental of Amnesty International UK added:

“The UK government’s condemnation of BP for breaching internationally recognised human rights standards on the BTC pipeline begs the question of why taxpayers’ money, in the form of export credit guarantees, was used to fund such a project in the first place. If such support had been withheld until BP had addressed the human rights context of their pipeline project, then these violations might never have occurred. It is time the UK’s Export Credits Guarantee Department was reformed to prevent this from ever happening again.”

The ruling gives BP three months to introduce new grievance mechanisms in Turkey.

ENDS

For more information and press enquiries, please contact

Nicholas Hildyard, The Corner House:
+441258 473 795
+447773750534
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/resources/results/taxonomy:87

Rachel Bernu, Kurdish Human Rights Project
+442074053835
rrbernu@khrp.org
http://www.khrp.org

James Marriott, Platform
+441634713050
+442074033738
http://www.carbonweb.org/showitem.asp?article=5&parent=66&link=Y&gp=3

Nick Dearden, Jubilee Debt Campaign
+447932 335 464

http://www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk/TAKE%20ACTION%3A%20End%20Britain%2…

Wikileaks cables reveal BP cover-up in Azerbaijan

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New Wikileaks cables about another major offshore gas leak in the Caspian give a rare insight into how BP attempts to control the public narratives when it hits crisis and failure. Writing a book about the company’s Caucasus pipelines, we’ve been all over the region, digging for the truth behind these events. Now the sudden release of documents allows a glimpse into the company’s preferred world of secrecy and back-room meetings.

On 17th September 2008 BP scrambled helicopters and rescue vessels to reach the Central Azeri oil rig far out in the Caspian Sea. Lying 130 kilometers offshore from Azerbaijan’s capital city Baku, the country’s largest platform was threatening to explode, with gas leaked rapidly from the seabed,. All 212 staff were rapidly evacuated and the platform was shut down, as were its sister platform, West Azeri. Oil production from the company’s Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli oil field (ACG) plummeted by 500,000 barrels per day.

As the Guardian’s publication of cables relating to the gas leak have revealed, BP was eager to prevent even its commercial partners knowing the full extent of the near disaster. The oil field is run by a consortium of ten companies, including ExxonMobil and the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR). With oil prices high, the shut-down meant a daily loss of $50 million. The gas leak was slashing BP’s partners’ revenue streams, so unsurprisingly Exxon et al were uneasy being kept out of the loop.

Given the importance of oil revenues to Azerbaijan’s budget, state pressure for disclosure might be expected, as Capitol Hill forced BP to provide live streamed video of the Macondo leak in May 2010. However the Wikileaks cables make clear that BP came under no such pressure in Azerbaijan, illustrating the close collusion between company and the Azeri autocracy. President Ilham Aliyev’s government recognises BP’s operations as crucial to propping up his regime, and extremely tight control of the Azeri media ensured that there was next to no coverage of BP’s crisis. The company’s position in the country is so dominant that the head of BP Azerbaijan is widely seen as the second most powerful man in the country .

When the gas leak struck threatening disaster for the Caspian Sea, both BP and the Azeri government were already uptight and nervous over their export pipelines, recently shut down by a combination of Kurdish rebel attack and the Russia-Georgia war.

Barely one month earlier in August, a vast explosion had ripped through the wooded valley near Refahiye in Turkey. Sheets of fire 80 meters high shot into the sky followed by an immense column of smoke as 30,000 barrels of oil from the Azeri fields went up in flames. The fire raged for 6 days, troops were deployed and government ministers arrived by helicopter. The ccompany’s pipeline was shut down and BP declared force majeure claiming ‘an act of terrorism’. Visiting the place of the explosion nine months later, farmers nearby were extremely reluctant to describe how their fields were covered in ash and the temporary evacuation of a village. In large part their silence came from the perception of this foreign-owned pipeline as a Turkish ‘state project’ and thus should not be criticised.

With their primary pipeline shut-down, BP routed Azeri oil through a back-up route. But on the night of 7th August 2008 a Russian fighter flew low near the village of Alkahi- Samgori in eastern Georgia, dropping bombs across a wide valley of grazing land. The Georgian government announced an attempted bombing of the pipeline, whilst BP strenuously denied this was the case. With repeated Russian bombing runs, Georgian Ministers kept making public statements to the West, hoping the US and NATO would be alarmed by the gravity of such an attack on one of Europe’s oil supply lines. But BP had no interest in a news story about the threats to its oil infrastructure; a company executive in Tbilisi told us they chose to ‘close down’ the story. Only five days after this first aerial attack, BP quietly shut down the pipeline. Eight months later, we stood in one of those craters peering out at the pipeline marker posts just yards away.

Within the month, disaster struck again, although this time it was a technical failure and BP’s own fault. But with all the turbulence over the previous months, the company wanted to keep the dampers on media coverage and avoid another story about its failures to run safe and secure operations in the Caucasus and Caspian. The Wikileaks material illustrates how one of the UK’s largest corporations chose not to share crucial information with even its closest partners, actively engaging and disengaging the media in constructing the public narrative of events.

James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello of PLATFORM are co-authors of the forthcoming book The Oil Road – to be published by Verso in June 2011.

Cables released by the Guardian on BP in Azerbaijan include:
Aliyev changes tune after Georgia invasion, says BP
BP says ‘rush job’ by Turks on gas pipeline is ‘not inconceivable’
BP under fire over handling of gas leak incident
BP blames gas leak on ‘bad cement job’
BP may never know cause of gas leak, US told

Global Witness slams EU for cosying up to Turkmen dictatorship

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The European Commission is turning a blind eye to corruption, lack of transparency and poor human rights in the repressive police state of Turkmenistan in a bid to secure future gas supplies, according to a new illustrated briefing paper from the campaign group Global Witness, launched on the eve of the 2009 oil and gas conference in Ashgabat, the Turkmen capital.

Global Witness’ report, ‘All that Gas?’ includes original artwork by satirical cartoonist, David Rees. His seven new cartoons feature EU bureaucrats discussing crude strategies to ‘get the gas’.

Just days after the report was launched, oil industry journals reported that the US has been pushing for access to Turkmen gas for American oil companies during the energy conference in Ashgabat. Chevron is apparently already in talks about taking over part of Turkmenistan’s giant South Iolatan gas field.

This follows previous pressure from the EU for a Turkmen commitment to pump gas through the proposed Nabucco pipeline. Oil companies including BP have already been trying to secure exploration licences in Turkmenistan for several years. BP has consistently been the main sponsor for the (almost) annual Turkmenistan Oil & Gas Conference. Yet again, BP is the “Platinum Sponsor” (Shell only made Silver), which seems to have netted the company two speakers on the programme Chief Economist Christof Ruehl and Exploration Vice President for New Business David Dalton. BP also hosted a cocktail party on Wednesday evening, while Total hosted a “VIP luncheon” Thursday afternoon. Developing fields under the Caspian and exporting the gas would be comparatively easy for BP, as its Shah Deniz field in Azerbaijan lies close to the marine border with Turkmenistan and its South Caucasus Gas Pipeline already pumps gas across the Caucasus and into the Turkish grid.

Industrialising the Cukurova

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After a cushy night on the Ankara – Adana Mavi Cukurova night train, we jumped straight into a coach headed east to Antakya. Once the grand city of Antioch benefiting from trade routes running between Europe & South Asia, medium-sized Antakya is the last Turkish town before Syria, and the source of an ongoing border dispute between Syria and Turkey.

With the temperature display hovering around 34 C, our bus passes field upon field of roasted brown sunflowers to our south, in the fertile Cukurova plain. After being reclaimed from marshland in the late 19th and early 20th Century, the plain became a malaria-filled hell for poor migrant workers from the mountains to our north and the site of local resistance against brutal landlords, described by Yashar Kemal in Ince Memed & other novels:
“I’ve been picking cotton in this accursed Çukurova for fifteen years […] and I’ve never known such a heat nor seen so many mosquitoes.” […] “We’ve never seen such wonderful cotton either, Anakız sister,” [Memidik] murmured. “The hotter the weather, the better the cotton crop.”
Today Cukurova’s soil produces the watermelons piled up outside London’s Turkish & Kurdish corner stores, and continues to rely on seasonal Kurdish migrant workers.

As the bus curves around the Bay of Iskenderun from North to East, orange groves with thick green leaves and purple thistles line the roadside, with teasing views of the sea through the trees. Six supertankers can be seen waiting just off the coast, ready to collect oil from BP’s Heydar Aliev Marine Terminal – named after the former Azeri dictator and father of the current one. Each ship will collect 500,000 barrels of thick black crude oil, before chugging across the Mediterranean and delivering its load to refineries at Fawley (near Southampton), Trieste or Augusta in Sicily over the next ten days. Together, the supertankers will move half a million tons of crude closer to the atmosphere.

Fourteen days previously, these 500,000 tons of oil were neither in barrels, tankers nor split up into any type of corporate storage container. They lay still, part of a large viscous mass of former organic material, thousands of metres deep beneath the Caspian, as they had for many millennia.

Thirteen days previously, the pressure changed abruptly with a strong suction force, and the crude began to move first sideways towards a funnel and then straight up – slurp – several kilometres through wide pipes – to the sea surface. One of BP’s Azeri-Guneshli-Chirag rigs out in the middle of the Caspian was sucking it up. Once on the move, BP didn’t let the heavy black liquid stop. Eight power stations forced the 500,000 tons at 6 kilometres every hour across the Azeri desert, Georgia’s Borjomi mountains & nature reserve, Turkey’s north-eastern plateaus, along the Euphrates and then down to the Cukurova – ready to be sold on in tanker loads of either 80,000 or 130,000 tonnes.

Across the bay, a plume of smoke ascends from Isken coal plant – financed by the Germany’s Export Credit Agency Hermes with over $700 million in 2000 and built by Siemens in the years after that. BP’s oil terminal and Siemen’s coal plant were followed by various other industrial projects. A myriad of confusing jetties now protrude out into the bay, one next to the other. Fisherfolk and villagers believe that the industrialisation of their coastline and resulting chemical emissions and discharges is causing crops to die and killing fish. Several cases have been filed in local courts demanding compensation.

Briefly, I catch a glimpse of Burnaz beach – used by the people of nearby Erzin to escape from the oppressive summer heat and dip into the sea. Although I can’t spot them at this distance, on a hot summer day like today there’ll be boys playing football in the sand, teenage girls rafting in the surf on inflatables and families introducing toddlers to the water.

The Turkish state and several coal companies are planning to build 5 new coal power stations [Termik Santral] on this four kilometre stretch. This will destroy Erzin’s beach and poison the nearby orange groves – the primary local product and source of income. The five plants together will total more than 4000 MW – more than Drax, the largest coal plant in Britain.

There is strong local opposition in an area not known for resisting, with local residents particularly worried about the health impacts. The first demonstration had up to 1,000 people on it, with several protests since, led by the Erzin Volunteers Group. National support has come from Greenpeace Mediterranean in Istanbul, with the Rainbow Warrior arriving to block coal deliveries to the existing Isken plant in September 2008.
Over 40 new coal plants are planned across Turkey – almost all to rely on imported fuel from South Africa and Russia. Local community campaigns resisting the proposed plants have sprung up everywhere, and are increasingly linked up.

The Cukurova is known for its oranges and its prawns – the heavy industrialisation heralded by BP’s arrival threatens to change this.

Dodging tankers in the Bosphorus

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We wake up to a view of corn and sunflower fields fast giving way to rows upon rows of apartment blocks in Istanbul’s outlying suburbs. Unlike the crumbling towers of Eastern Europe, many of these are new and shiny, as Istanbul spreads into the agricultural land to the west.

Our Belgrade-Istanbul sleeper curves down to the Sea of Marmara, as we chug through the outlying suburbs. As we get closer in, I can spot tens of tankers queued up, waiting to pass through the narrow Bosphorus. Many of these will be heading for Supsa in Georgia or Novorossiysk in Russia, to fill up with Azeri Caspian crude pumped across the Caucasus, destined ultimately for European or American cars.

Waiting at Sirkeci station is Memedali, a close friend who interned with PLATFORM and did a lot of work with us on theBaku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline this last year.

Once off the train, we cross the Bosphorus on one of the many city ferries bustling back & forth, in between tankers and cruise ships. Little round jellyfish float past our taxiing ferry, while over fifty fish churn up the water, competing to devour a piece of bread a passenger threw over the rail.

In Kadikoy on the Asian side, Memedali takes us to a restaurant serving home-cooked meals run by four women imprisoned for several years in the 1990s for leftist activism. Vines trail over the patio, providing shade from the intense sun. A poster of Marx in a hard-hat marks 160 years since the Communist Manifesto, while Lukacs and Zizek fill the shelves. Swifts diving over our heads, screeching as they zoom above the café tables. Large gulls flap slowly above the rooftops, two air-storeys above the swifts. Cats snooze, spread out on top of nearby bookstalls.
Take the last ferry back to Karakoy on the European side. As the boat pulls out, it passes 850 cormorants huddled together in single file on the Ottoman pier that juts out from Kadikoy harbour.

I meet an old friend on Istiklal Caddesi, the central pedestrianised shopping street. The last time I was here the air reeked of tear gas as heavily-armed riot cops and water cannons patrolled the streets, trying to stop us reaching the symbolic Taksim Square, site of a massacre of trade unionists in 1977. Now the street is packed with young trendy people, spilling out of bars and cafes everywhere.

My friend M had to leave Turkey to avoid compulsory military service – due at 34 if not fulfilled before. Joining the armed forces of a state conducting aggressive operations against Kurdish communities is not appealing to many young people living in Turkey, particularly activists. Avoiding it can be hard – and many ultimately have to leave the country. M can only return now that hes has found work in a university abroad – but only until he’s 38. Then he must either pay (about £4k) and serve a reduced term, or stay abroad.

He takes us to a back street in Tarlabasi, where some friends are shooting a feature length drama about trans sex-workers in Istanbul. The community is well-established in the area, with specific shops (eg selling wigs) catering to them. While being gay is not illegal, the queer community still faces repression. Tension is high on set, with everybody is worried about possible attacks.