People fed up with pipeline from Baku to Ceyhan

by Chloe Arnold

Armen Kuchilgyan has lived in Kizil Kilisa, a tiny village of ethnic Armenians high in the Georgian mountains, all his life. He's a teacher at the local school, a tumbledown building with a lopsided roof and cracked window panes.
There's no electricity in his village, and no gas. But for the last few months, a team of construction workers has been clearing the forest at the end of his vegetable patch to make way for a multibillion-dollar oil pipeline to transport oil from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean.
"They said they would fix our road," he said. "It's only 2 km long, but they didn't bother."

From Baku in Azerbaijan to Ceyhan in Turkey, local residents have been complaining about the pipeline. They say they haven't been given enough compensation for having their land ploughed up and for the noise and dust clouds the heavy machinery makes from dawn till dusk.
Environmental groups say the project will cause untold damage to the region's fragile ecology, particularly in Georgia, where the pipeline will skirt the Borzhomi Valley, home to a mineral water reserve that is also the country's most lucrative export. For the last few weeks, international lending organizations, including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, have held a series of public meetings for local groups to air their grievances.

I went to the one in Tbilisi. It was a wonderful PR job. There were information packs for all the participants and steaming plates of seafood pasta for lunch. Teams of bankers from London and New York pulled concerned faces at all the complaints and everyone got to have their say. But I suspect the decision to invest up to $ 600 mm in the project was made long ago.
To be fair to the oil companies building the pipeline, the damage they are causing is minimal. The pipe is to be buried underground, so once it is built locals won't even know it is there. If Friends of the Earth campaigners sitting in London think this pipeline is bad, they should check out the rusting monsters left by the Soviets.

Concerns have also been raised about the ethics of a pipeline that runs through countries as notoriously corrupt as Azerbaijan and Georgia. The EBRD hopes the revenues will be used by the governments to improve the lives of the poorest sections of society. Some chance.
But Armen Kuchilgyan's worries are less complex. The so-called East-West Energy Corridor will soon be pumping a million bpd of oil through his backyard, and he hasn't had electricity for as long as he can remember. "Where's the justice in that?" he asks.

Chloe Arnold is a freelance journalist based in Baku, Azerbaijan.