Today’s Zaman, Turkey
17 August 2008, Sunday
Conflict in Caucasus: risk or opportunity for Turkey?
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili shakes hands with Turkish Prime
Minister Tayyip Erdogan in the presidential residence in Tbilisi. A
preliminary agreement to resolve the Georgian crisis is in place, but
hostilities continue in the besieged Caucasian state, forcing Turkey
to think about its priorities and face its dilemmas as a close ally of
Georgia and with strategic ties to Russia.
The crisis began when Georgia attacked the separatist pro-Russian
territory of South Ossetia on Aug. 7, sparking Russian
retaliation. Scores of people have died in the fighting. Russian
troops targeted not only the Georgian forces in South Ossetia but have
also occupied parts of Georgia, including the Black Sea port of
Poti. In sum Russia has repelled the Georgian attempt to seize back
control of South Ossetia, which liberated itself from Tbilisi’s rule
in the 1990s.
Turkey cooperates with Georgia in the field of energy, and Turkey
hopes to become an eventual energy hub for Europe via the gas and oil
pipelines that pass through both countries. Turkey also provides the
former Soviet Union country with critical military assistance and
training. But it also has important ties with Russia. Russia is
Turkey’s foremost trading partner with a trade volume of an estimated
$30 billion this year, up from $23 billion last year. Turkey is also a
key importer of Russian natural gas, as experts estimate Turkish
dependence on Russia for natural gas to be about 65 percent of the
total.
Concerned over the escalation of the conflict, the Turkish government
has had difficulty determining the correct response to the
crisis. Professor Mensur Akgün, who lectures on international
relations at Ä°stanbul’s Kültür University, said
nobody was prepared for Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to make
such a move.
`Nobody could guess that Saakashvili would defy the Russian giant;
attacking South Ossetia means attacking Russia,’ he told Sunday’s
Zaman.
He said it was therefore not unusual for Turkey to be in an initial
state of limbo, as no foreign relations expert in the world could have
predicted such an act from Saakashvili. `Turkey has followed a healthy
policy by not supporting one side over the other,’ Akgün added.
Another seasoned observer of the region, Paul Goble, director of
research at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy in Baku, agreed. `I
don’t think Turkey could have intervened earlier and prevented
this. Indeed, I think the one thing Turkey could have done and still
can do is to provide genuine expertise to the new and often
inexperienced governments on how to read what the West and especially
what the Americans say. More established regimes know how to balance
what Washington says diplomatically with what it says publicly and
politically. Had Georgia been able to do that, it might have avoided
this problem,’ he explained to Sunday’s Zaman via e-mail from the
United States.
After initial calls for an end to hostilities, Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip ErdoÄ?an made a surprise move and flew to Russia and
Georgia on Wednesday, calling on Russian and Georgian leaders to heed
his proposal for a Caucasus pact. ErdoÄ?an said such a regional
platform would play a key role in preventing similar clashes in the
future. He said it would also include crisis management mechanisms
based on principles of the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (OSCE).
Saakashvili backed the idea, saying it would be beneficial to create a
common security mechanism in the region. Russian President Dmitry
Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin also welcomed the proposal,
and ErdoÄ?an said after talks in Moscow that the foreign
ministries of the two countries would start working on the
idea. `Regional peace and welfare must be secured via cooperative
projects that reflect common sense and mutual interests, not
sentimentalism, clashes and tensions,’ he said.
Akgün said this is the kind of role that Turkey can play in the
region, similar to what it does in the Middle East. `Since the
mid-2000s, Turkey has become a force for solutions rather than
problems.’ He offered the example of the Turkish-mediated indirect
talks between Israel and Syria.
According to Goble, Turkey has some enormous opportunities but faces
some enormous risks as well in the wake of the Russian aggression in
Georgia.
`Its opportunities include establishing far closer ties with
Azerbaijan and Georgia and assuming the role of a major regional
power. Its risks include falling into the trap of a `cooperative’
venture with Moscow, something that would tie Ankara’s hands, forcing
it to sacrifice its interests to Russia’s,’ he said.
Goble added that it is important to recognize that Russia
miscalculated even more than Georgia. `The frozen conflicts have been
internationalized, Russia has suffered a black eye diplomatically,
Georgia has left the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] and will
get into NATO as will Ukraine, and other countries in the region will
become more independent of Moscow as well,’ he stated.
Turkey’s EU membership, energy deals threatened?
Turkey sits in a volatile region bordering Iran, Syria, Iraq and
former Soviet republics. It wants to join the European Union, but some
EU states’ hesitation to expand the bloc up to the Caucasus may have
increased due to the Georgian-Russian conflict.
Amanda Akçakoca, a policy analyst at the Brussels-based
European Policy Centre, said this is a chance for Turkey to show those
in the EU — the French president in particular — the strong role
that Turkey can play through taking a lead peacekeeping role.
`ErdoÄ?an should be in regular touch with French President
Nicolas Sarkozy and Javier Solana [high representative for the Common
Foreign and Security Policy, secretary-general of the Council of the
European Union] so they can work on a solution together,’ she stated.
She also said this should serve as a warning regarding the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and
Armenia. `Nagorno-Karabakh is only a short distance from the key
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan [BTC] oil pipeline, where both Baku and Yerevan
have been increasing their defense spending. Turkey could play a far
greater role here, again together with the EU, before Nagorno-Karabakh
also blows up in the world’s face.’
Since Turkey severed its ties with neighboring Armenia in the early
1990s in protest of the Armenian occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh in
Azerbaijan, Georgia has become a valuable outlet for Turkey to reach
the Caucasus and Central Asia.
According to Akçakoca, the EU will have increasingly close ties
to and responsibility for countries in the Caucasus regardless of
Turkish membership, but will be far better placed to deal with them
with a strong Turkey.
Turkey has worked hard to become a transit route for Caspian and
Central Asian oil and gas exports as Europe tries to reduce its
dependence on Russia. But Russia’s invasion of Georgia has raised
doubts about the security of oil and gas pipelines that cross Georgia
and the wisdom of further investment in the pipelines.
Necdet Pamir, board member of the World Energy Council’s Turkish
National Committee, worries about whether transit lines through
Georgia will remain secure in the long run and whether additional
foreign investment will be safe. `The Russians have demonstrated their
military capability of getting very close to the pipelines, and they
have shown that they can easily blockade Georgia,’ he said.
Pamir said that if the gas and oil pipelines are closed, Turkey’s
losses would total up to $12 million per day.
James L. Williams, publisher of the Energy Economist newsletter, was
blunt about the possible repercussions of the conflict. `The Georgian
president brought in the whole pipeline issue probably to send more
worries to the West, and especially to European consumers, so as to
draw more attention to the conflict,’ he said. `It’s not that we
should ignore it, but it’s certainly not a reason to panic.’
Turgut Gür, co-chairman of the Turkish-Russian Business
Council, said he is not too worried as he believes that the risk will
be limited to short-term effects only. He mentioned that trucking had
been temporarily impacted. He said that both Russia and Georgia were
important countries for Turkey, adding that `we can’t choose one over
the other.’ He noted that Russia values Turkey and is aware of what an
important role Turkey plays in the region.
The 1,000-mile BTC pipeline represents the core of Turkey’s economic
interests in Georgia; it can carry up to 1 million barrels a day of
crude from the Azerbaijani coast on the Caspian Sea through Georgia
and Turkey to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea. The BTC is
owned by a consortium of companies. It was expected to carry more than
900,000 barrels of oil a day this month for export, bypassing routes
that would have taken the oil through Russia and subjected it to that
country’s transit fees.
Deliveries through the BTC pipeline were halted on Aug. 4 after a fire
was sparked along the Turkish portion of the route. The outlawed
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) claimed responsibility for the
incident. BP also shut down a smaller line, the Western Route Export
Pipeline, which was recently overhauled. It can carry up to 160,000
barrels of oil a day from Baku to the Georgian Black Sea port of
Supsa. As a precaution, BP also shut down the South Caucasus gas
pipeline, which transports natural gas from the Azerbaijani city of
Baku through Georgia into Turkey. That gas is not exported.
17 August 2008, Sunday
YONCA POYRAZ DOÄ?AN Ä°STANBUL
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
