Foreign Correspondence

[StephanieVanbryce]

The Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline: BP’s Time Bomb

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 09:47:10 -0700

Summary:
This story hits close to home for me. A good friend and co-worker of mine left last Saturday to be commercial manager for this pipeline in Tbilisi, Georgia. As an employee I have had an inside view of the hypocrisy of BP’s Beyond Petroleum marketing strategy.

[Posted By BigOil]

By Hannah Ellis, Special to CorpWatch
Republished from Corpwatch

BP's BTC Pipeline has huge implications for the environment and the countries it crosses
In recent years, British Petroleum (BP) has been working hard to remake its public image. Their well-crafted print and television ads feature upbeat electronic music and a vibrant new yellow and green starburst logo. With it’s cutting-edge content on human rights, biodiversity and macro-economic theory, their website is designed to look like that of a developmental think tank.

In reality, BP is the world’s third largest oil and gas company and one of the largest polluters on the globe. Exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas are the company’s main activities and it operates in 100 countries in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa. Its revenues for 2003 were over $16 billion; its profits were over $10 billion.

BP’s profits come with enormous human cost and environmental damages, and its latest venture—the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline which opened in late May—has done little to make amends.

BP is the lead shareholder in the 1,100-mile long oil pipeline, which runs from Baku, Azerbaijan, through Georgia to the Turkish seaport of Ceyhan. In addition to opening up an alternative supply to the US (which has long been in search of an oil source outside the Middle East), the project has led to allegations of human rights abuses, sparked regional conflict, and deprived local people of their livelihoods and land. By 2010, The pipeline is scheduled to deliver an estimated one million barrels of oil a day, predominantly to the already saturated Western markets.

The pipeline legal agreements also give BP effective governing power over a strip of land 1,750 miles long, where the company will likely override all national environmental, social, human rights laws for the next 40 years.

70 percent of the $ 3.3 billion it cost to build the pipeline came via loans from banks. A large proportion of this debt came from public financial institutions led by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the part of the World Bank which lends to companies rather than governments) and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. This allowed BP to secure further private investment funding from banks like Citigroup. The additional thirty percent came in the form of equity (capital provided by the oil companies which hold shares in the project).

This article is long, I didn't want to post it all here for that reason . It just about goes into every aspect , political, environmental etc. ... here is the website.

http://gnn.tv/headlines/3358/The_Baku_Ceyhan_Pipeline_BP_s_Time_Bomb

Here is another part of the article . This article is really mind grabbing , well, at least to me .. LOL ..

Shattered hope

Despite widespread media pledges that the project would generate plentiful work, many communities expecting job opportunities have had their hopes shattered. In both Azerbaijan and Georgia—areas where unemployment is already severe—the pipeline has created very few jobs for local people. BP estimates the pipeline created about 10,000 temporary jobs during construction, but permanent positions are another story. In Georgia, for instance, only about 250 people will be permanently hired.

Ed Johnson, BP’s former project manager in Georgia told the St. Petersburg Times, “People were told that there would be 70,000 Georgians that were going to be employed because of this pipeline. The (Georgian) government needed to sell the project to its own people so some of the benefits were overblown.”

Many local people have also raised concerns over exploitation and lack of insurance for workers, corruption in recruitment and the outlawing of trade unions. Partly in consequence, there have been hundreds of strikes and disruptions to construction work, notably in the Krtsanisi and Borjomi regions, with more than 80 in the first six months of construction alone.

Corruption by officials in assigning land compensation, for both privately owned and municipal land, is an enormous worry in both countries. Concerns have also been raised regarding illegal occupation by BP of land not formally sold.

In October of 2004, members of the Baku-Ceyhan Campaign went on a fact-finding mission to Azerbaijan. There they met with several BTC workers who worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week (despite the fact that such a schedule is illegal in Azerbaijan). In Georgia, a national trade union “Georgian Trade Union Amalgation” held a demonstration against BTC arguing that both Georgian labor laws and those of the International Labor Organisation (ILO) were being violated due to the pressure on the workers to maintain a tight construction schedule. Similarly, BTC workers in Georgia are currently required to work 12-14 hours per day, including weekends and holidays, to secure a minimum subsistence salary.

The three host states have also stationed military units along the pipeline for protection. Amnesty International warned that the project could result in inferior rights of redress for some 30,000 people forced to give up their land rights to make way for the pipeline.

The Kurdish Human Rights Project has filed cases in the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of 38 affected villagers along the route, alleging multiple violations of the European Convention on Human Rights including the illegal use of land without payment of compensation or expropriation, underpayment for land, intimidation, lack of public consultation, involuntary resettlement and damage to land and property.

Ferhat Kaya, a Turkish human rights defender was detained and allegedly tortured in May 2004 as a result of his work with villagers affected by the pipeline. The trial of the eleven Turkish police officers who were accused of assaulting him lasted only 15 minutes. In a recent statement, Kaya said he believes the offences against him were “completely political.”

“I am being subjected to these kinds of practices because I have been protecting the rights of the victims whose lands are affected by the BTC pipeline,” he added. “The practices against me… are motivated systematically to intimidate and deter me.”

http://gnn.tv/headlines/3358/The_Baku_Ceyhan_Pipeline_BP_s_Time_Bomb