It’s not difficult to see why Joseph Stalin liked Borjomi. Nestled along a curve in a deep river gorge and surrounded by lush, forested mountains, this Georgian spa town was the dictator’s favourite summer retreat in the 1930s. Accompanied by hundreds of Soviet officials, Stalin would descend by steam train from Moscow and spend weeks taking the waters, lolling beside the Kura River and enjoying his native Georgian cuisine.
Borjomi’s local spring water remains famous throughout the former Soviet Union, but the glory days of this once grand resort are long gone. Instead, Borjomi’s decaying streets are as good a place as any to reflect on the demise of the vanished Soviet empire. The stucco facades of villas once owned by communist dignitaries are collapsing and plastered with mould. The crumbling hotels are full of refugees from the ethnic war in Abkhazia.
But now a new force has arrived, which promises to drag this remote backwater into the 21st century. Britain’s biggest company, BP, is building two huge oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea, which traverse the Kura and the mountains just a few miles from here.
The 1,100-mile Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline is the largest private construction in the world, costing more than $3bn. Once it is fully operational in 2009, it will pump one million barrels of oil a day from the Sangachal terminal near Baku in Azerbaijan to the Ceyhan terminal on the Mediterranean in Turkey. From the port at Yumurtalik, just south of Ceyhan, oil will be loaded on up to three supertankers every day to carry it to markets in western Europe and the US.
The pipeline, which has been underwritten by UK taxpayers through the Export Credits Guarantee Department, is nearing completion and represents a vital artery to feed, for the next 40 years, the west’s addiction to oil. It is the largest of four vast oil and gas projects, costing $20bn in total, designed to unlock the Caspian’s huge commercial oil and gas potential.
BP, which is leading a consortium of international oil companies and banks behind the project, claims that it will transform this impoverished region, with “positive economic advantages” and a programme of social and environmental investment to ensure that the “peoples of the three host nations share in the benefits”.
Certainly the governments of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey will scoop big transit fees and royalties. The region’s major oil and gas fields and pipelines are expected to generate more than $150bn between 2005 and 2024. The Georgian government will receive $70m per year in cash and subsidised gas. BP says it will spend an extra $50m per year on social investment. It also claims the pipeline will create hundreds of jobs in a country with 40 per cent unemployment. But not everyone is as enthusiastic as BP.
The village of Dgvari lies an hour’s drive into the mountains from Borjomi, up a track so rutted that only fortified Soviet army trucks regularly make the trip. From the centre of the village, where shoeless children play and chickens peck at the muddy ground, it’s just a short walk to the pipeline. This is visible as a broad scar across the landscape, snaking through a pine forest down from the mountains and off into the horizon. The people who live here say they are being forced to leave because of a huge landslip, which they claim the pipeline has destabilised.
“This was once a beautiful place, but not any more,” says Beso Gogoladze, a farmer, casting his eyes at a mechanical digger as it grinds through the red earth. “We have had no benefits and now we have to leave.”
Some of the houses in Dgvari are listing precariously and huge cracks have appeared in the walls and ceilings, yet villagers say that an offer of money has recently been withdrawn. BP claims the landslip predates the pipeline and denies any responsibility, citing detailed geological evidence. It also says the aid offer was actually declined by the local government. Nevertheless, locals are angry and are threatening to take matters into their own hands.
“Nothing good has come of this,” says Gogi Gogoladze. “If we don’t receive compensation, then we will blockade the roads with our farm vehicles.”
It’s a familiar dispute, says Kety Gujaraidze, a campaigner with Green Alternative, a non-governmental organisation in Tbilisi – and one that is echoed all along the pipeline’s route. On the one side are angry locals who feel their needs are being ignored; on the other are the national and local governments, and BP.
“On many occasions like this, the government has simply used the armed forces against protesters,” Gujaraidze says, pointing out that Dgvari is by no means the only place where the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline has caused problems.
In Georgia, as in Azerbaijan and Turkey, the construction effort has been plagued with allegations of corruption, incompetence and cronyism – often involving subcontractors and government officials for whom the pipeline offers a cash bonanza. Many people who live along the route have lost their homes and land, and they have generally been poorly compensated.
In the village of Atskuri, a few miles from Borjomi towards the Turkish border, residents say their houses, as well as an ancient monastery and castle, have been damaged by the rumbling of heavy trucks to and from the construction works. Zoia Khutsishvili, a teacher at the local school, says that some people whose property was damaged received nothing at all, while others were paid off even though they were unaffected.
“The land complaints are often highly complex,” says Gujaraidze. “But in many cases the community liaison officers haven’t taken people’s complaints seriously.”
There is also an environmental threat posed by an oil pipeline that passes through 14 active seismic faults and across 1,500 water courses, including the precious Kura in Borjomi. It’s little surprise that Friends of the Earth has branded the pipeline an “environmental time bomb”.
BP claims that it has taken every possible precaution to ensure that the pipeline is safe. But Zaal Lomtadze, Georgia’s deputy environment minister, acknowledges that the route, which was agreed in 1999 with the notoriously corrupt administration of the former president Eduard Shevardnadze, is far from perfect.
“We could probably have avoided some of the sensitive areas,” he says, sitting in his office on the upper floor of a ramshackle Soviet-era block in Tbilisi. “From the beginning, our government was interested more in serving its own benefits . . . Some of these headaches could have been avoided.”
Lomtadze believes that the “benefits of the pipeline outweigh the dangers”, and that the risk of a full rupture from natural causes is now “very low”, but he also emphasises another concern – that as well as presenting an environmental threat, the pipeline provides a perfect target for terrorists. In Colombia, Iraq and elsewhere, destroying oil pipelines has become an easy way of attracting attention and causing huge disruption. In Georgia, thousands of troops and millions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated sensors and detection equipment will be needed to guard the pipeline 24 hours a day.
In the Caucasus, the threat of terrorism is very real. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline passes just a few miles from Nagorno-Karabakh, the area of Azerbaijan occupied by Armenia, where a bloody conflict in the early 1990s killed 25,000 people and created a million refugees. It skirts close to the disputed Georgian territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as well as parts of Turkey wracked by conflict between Kurdish PKK separatists and the military. Just 70 miles across the towering mountains of the Caucasus, the brutal conflict in Chechnya rumbles on.
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline has always been an acutely political project. It is part of a grand strategy to reduce the US and Europe’s reliance on Middle Eastern oil, while bringing the troubled Caucasus and central Asian regions into the western fold. Previously, oil from the Caspian had to be piped to the west via Russia, which remains lukewarm about a pipeline it fears will undermine its authority in the region.
Perhaps it is no surprise that, amid this miasma of confusion, some people reach for old certainties. “Stalin would never have allowed this pipeline to happen,” says one elderly lady selling tomatoes from a dusty market stall in Borjomi. “He was a real Georgian – a slave to no one.”
Unfashionable as he might be elsewhere, the great vozhd is revered in this part of Georgia. And at Gori, his birthplace, the town square is still dominated by a statue of the man himself.
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