De politiek van de de oliepijpleiding van de V.S. en het conflict Rusland-Georgië
Door Alex Lantier | De media van de V.S. de eisen over Georgische democratie niettegenstaande, is een zeer belangrijke factor in de V.S. die voor Georgische President Mikheil Saakashvili in zijn conflict met Rusland steunt de totstandkoming van Georgië geweest aangezien een zeer belangrijk doorgangsland voor olie en gas van de Kaukasus en het Kaspische Overzeese bassin uitvoert.
7 Augustus uitbarsting van vijandigheden tussen Georgië en Rusland, als Georgië gebombardeerde Russische vredeskorpsen in het afgescheiden Georgische gebied van Zuid-Ossetië, is het voorspelbare resultaat van het agressieve gebruik van de V.S. van van de pijpleidingspolitiek en volmacht staten om zijn commerciële en militaire invloed in Centraal Azië te beweren.
De brede overzichten van dit beleid hebben de relaties van de V.S. met de vroegere Sovjetrepublieken sinds de instorting van 1991 van de USSR geregeerd. Tegelijkertijd, stormden de investeerders van de V.S. binnen om grote gedeelten van de economie van de vroegere USSR te verwerven, in het bijzonder de olie en gasindustrieën van het Kaspische Bassin. In de vroege jaren '90, verwierven de Westelijke energiebedrijven staken in het ontwikkelen van talrijke projecten, zulke het Tengiz oliegebied in Kazachstan, de gebieden azeri-Chirag-Guneshli (van ACG) in Azerbaijan, en het Dauletabad aardgasgebied in Turkmenistan.
Van bij het begin, drukten de firma's van de V.S. en de adviseurs de ex-sovjetstaten om akkoord te gaan aan pijpleiding mijdende landen de V.S. bekeken vijandig aan zijn belangen, in het bijzonder Rusland en Iran leidt. Dergelijke pijpleidingen niet alleen beroofden de rivalen van de V.S. van doorgangsprijzen en politieke hefboomwerking die van hun capaciteit het gevolg zijn om pijpleidingsstromen af te snijden, maar ook boden Washington de kans om regionale allianties aaneen te smeden de pro-V.S.
In de medio-jaren '90, het beleid van de V.S. President Bill Clinton op twee belangrijke pijpleidingsprojecten regelde om Kaspisch olie en gas uit te voeren terwijl het mijden van de gebieden van Rusland, Iran en China. De eerste was een plan om Turkmeens gas door Afghanistan en Pakistan naar havens op het Indische oceaan-a- plan uit te voeren dat Washington ertoe bracht om Taliban in 1995-6 te steunen om Afghanistan te verenigen en te pacificeren zodat de pijpleiding turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (van TAP) zou kunnen worden gebouwd. Het plan stortte uiteindelijk op het Taliban onvermogen in om noordelijk Afghanistan te veroveren.
Het andere plan moest een pijpleiding door klein, staten de pro-V.S. in Kaukasus-Georgië en Azerbaijan westelijk bouwen. Together with an undersea trans-Caspian pipeline connecting Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan on the Caspian’s eastern shore with Azerbaijan on the western shore, the Baku (Azerbaijan)-Tbilisi (Georgia)-Ceyhan (Turkey) pipeline would send a substantial fraction of Caspian energy exports to the Mediterranean. This pipeline was conceived of as a major blow, in particular, to Russia’s longstanding domination of energy routes from the Caspian to the West.
The politically-driven character of the project was undeniable. As the Christian Science Monitor recently noted, “The $4 billion BTC pipeline, managed by and 30 percent owned by British Petroleum, was routed through Georgia to avoid sending Caspian oil through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, or Russia. A 10-mile pipeline could have connected Caspian oil to the well-developed Iranian pipeline system.”
Clinton administration officials relentlessly lobbied for the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, which would pipe oil from the ACG fields near the Azeri capital of Baku through the Georgian capital of Tbilisi to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. After Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey signed an intergovernmental agreement in favor of the BTC pipeline, Clinton said in 2000 that the pipeline represented “the most important achievement at the end of the twentieth century.”
As it took office in 2001, the Bush administration planned on even more aggressive use of US military power and strategic influence to carry out the same fundamental policy. Many of its top officials had been intimately involved in US energy companies’ initial penetration of the USSR: National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice served on the board of US oil major Chevron from 1991 to 2001 as an expert on the USSR, when Chevron was acquiring a major stake in the Tengiz oil field.
Vice President Dick Cheney had served as CEO of oil infrastructure company Halliburton and as a member of Kazakhstan’s Oil Advisory Board, a group set up by the Kazakh government after the fall of the USSR that included the CEOs of oil majors Chevron and Texaco. In the 1990s, Cheney had also used his political pull, as former US secretary of defense in the administration of the senior George Bush, to arrange interviews between Halliburton executives and the Azeri government.
The Bush administration faced a significantly different government in Russia: President Boris Yeltsin had transferred power in 2000 to his chosen successor, Vladimir Putin. Thanks to its oil revenues, the Russian economy had bottomed out from the devastating collapse that followed the fall of the USSR, and Putin planned to carry out a more independent and assertive Russian foreign policy. The recovery picked up steam after Putin’s arrival in power, as world oil prices began to rise.
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, however, Putin acquiesced to US deployments to military bases in the Caspian region, ostensibly as logistics bases for US military action against the Taliban in Afghanistan. However, these deployments also allowed the US to assert its pipeline interests—most notably leading to the temporary demise of Chinese plans to build a “Pan Asian Global Energy Bridge,” a competing network of Chinese-run pipelines linking the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia to China’s Pacific Coast.
Georgia soon emerged as a major transit country for Western pipeline plans. In 2002 in London, an international consortium was founded to begin construction of the BTC oil pipeline, as well as a natural gas pipeline (BTE) running from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz gas fields through Baku and Tbilisi to the eastern Turkish city of Erzurum. Plans were also made to connect the BTE pipeline to the European market via a pipeline extending from Erzurum to Vienna, the so-called “Nabucco” pipeline.
Georgia subsequently became the site of the first major open confrontation between Russia and the US in the region, the December 2003 “Rose Revolution” that displaced Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze. In the aftermath of parliamentary elections whose results were disputed by the US-backed opposition, the opposition staged a series of demonstrations and ultimately took over Parliament. The Georgian military, which had received extensive US training, stood aside, while top US officials, including then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, personally intervened to order Shevardnadze to step down.
This made-in-the-USA coup brought to power a series of former Shevardnadze associates who were more closely associated with the US, most notably Columbia University-educated lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili. Saakashvili formally assumed the Georgian presidency in January 2004.
One of the main disagreements between Shevardnadze and Saakashvili in the 2003 parliamentary campaign had been the question of how to deal with ethnic-minority regions of Georgia. Shevardnadze allied himself with Adjarian politician Aslan Abashidze, while Saakashvili stridently advocated that Tbilisi exercise total control over all of its territory. This represented a definite concession by Shevardnadze to Moscow, which had considerable influence in breakaway or autonomous regions of Georgia, such as Adjaria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia.
In 2004, Saakashvili successfully forced Abashidze to flee by threatening Adjaria with invasion by the Georgian army. Throughout his presidency, he issued threats against South Ossetia and Abkhazia, despite the presence of Russian peacekeepers there.
From the point of view of US oil interests, the Rose Revolution was perfectly timed. It came one year before the 2005 opening of the BTC pipeline, a project whose value to US foreign policy depended on the Georgian government being independent from Russian pressure. The Rose Revolution succeeded in pushing the Georgian government in this direction, replacing Shevardnadze with a president firmly committed to Georgian nationalism and to eradicating Russia’s influence in Georgia. Under Saakashvili, Russian influence was limited to a few enclaves living under constant threat of Georgian attack.
The broader developments in Central Asian pipeline politics since the Rose Revolution have not favored the US—a fact that no doubt played a role in US calculations to back Saakashvili in an increasingly reckless confrontation with Moscow. The growth of resistance to the US occupation of Afghanistan has precluded all plans for constructing a TAP pipeline south from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. As a result, the Caucasian pipelines through Georgia represent the only viable path for Central Asian oil and gas exports that is acceptable to Washington.
In December 2007, Russia signed an agreement with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to build a new natural gas pipeline along the eastern Caspian Sea coast towards Russia. The construction of the pipeline, which would have an initial export capacity of 20 billion cubic meters per year, was seen as a major blow to US hopes that Central Asian governments would commit substantial oil and gas resources to a potential trans-Caspian pipeline linked to the existing, US-backed pipelines in the Caucasus.
China, whose attempts at securing energy supplies through pipelines from Central Asia into neighboring western China came to an abrupt halt after the US’s 2001 deployments to Central Asia, has since concluded a number of pipeline deals. A Kazakhstan-China oil pipeline, linking Kazakh fields in the northern Caspian region to the Chinese pipeline network in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, is currently under construction and will become operational in October 2009. A parallel natural gas pipeline, with a branch downwards towards fields in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, is also under construction.
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