The Messenger, Georgia
Feb 9 2007

Regional cooperation by rail

"A new silk road", "A geopolitical revolution", was how President
Saakashvili described the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway project on
February 8. We can forgive the president his hyperbole, because
behind all the grandstanding, there is an undeniable reality: Turkey,
Georgia and Azerbaijan are sewn together by globally significant (at
least in political terms) oil and gas pipelines, and where
hydrocarbons currently flow, people and cargo are soon to follow.

What to most people just looks like a few miles of rail across a
rocky plateau is in fact a cornerstone of cooperation that, along
with the pipelines, cements a tripartite relationship that is a model
of mutual benefit. And what is more, this cooperation is remarkable
given the obstacles that stood in its way.

Turkey and Azerbaijan share close linguistic and cultural links,
indeed former Azeri president Abulfaz Elchibey used to like saying
that Turkey and Azerbaijan were "one nation, two states", so the fact
that they have become such close strategic partners is unsurprising.
But the regional partnership that has been forged with Georgia is
more so. Turkey, after all, is Georgia’s historical foe. For three
hundred years western Georgia struggled under the Ottoman Yoke, and
Georgian’s have long memories. Further, in the early nineties Turkey,
which has a large Abkhaz diaspora, was less than 100 percent on
Georgia’s territorial integrity, with Turkish vessels frequenting
Abkhazian ports to Georgia’s great chagrin.

Azerbaijan too, was not necessarily an obvious strategic partner for
Georgia. The excesses of Gamsakhurdia’s ultra-nationalist regime just
after the fall of the Soviet Union led to hundreds of ethnically
Azeri families being forced out of their homes in Kvemo Kartli.
Villages, rivers and hills had their names Georgianised. Even now,
Azreri’s are hugely underrepresented in government at a local and
national level, even in areas where they make up the large majority
of the population.

Georgians living in Azerbaijan, Ingilos, faced and continue to face
discrimination on ethnic and religious grounds, and accusations that
Georgian cultural monuments, including working monasteries, located
in Azerbaijan, are vandalised and/or neglected surface regularly.
Furthermore, while the close relationship between former president
Shevardnadze and Azerbaijan’s late Heydar Aliyev can in part be
explained by their long history, going back to the Central Committee
of the Communist Party, the chumminess of Saakashvili and Heydar’s
son and successor Ilham Aliyev was less predictable. After the Rose
Revolution many thought the new beacon of democracy would attempt to
shine its light towards its distinctly less democratic neighbour, but
in nothing was further from the truth. It is also remarkable that
Georgia has managed to maintain good relations with Azerbaijan and
its enemy Armenia at the same time, without choosing, or being
forced, to take sides.

In this context the cordial and mutually beneficial relations that
have developed among the three countries are something all can be
proud of, even if it isn’t quite a geopolitical revolution.