The leaders of Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India gathered in Ashgabat in December to sign an agreement for the new TAPI transnational pipeline named for their countries. President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov had spearheaded the effort to revive the long-languishing project that has always foundered on the issue of stability in the war-torn regions through which it must pass. President Asif Ali Zardari said after the signing that "this gas communication will relieve Pakistan's economy of its weakness and help battle extremism," Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe (RFE/RL) reported. Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai said he would make efforts to "ensure security both during construction and after completing the project.” Hezb-i Islami, an insurgent force led by former Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, volunteered to help protect the project, but it doesn't control most of the route through Taliban-held southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces, said RFE/RL.
There are high hopes for TAPI to fix many problems in the regionTEXT, but experts soberly point out that by themselves, pipelines cannot confer wealth and prosperity on troubled regions, and past experience with them in both Afghanistan and other countries sometimes suggests the opposite. Gran Hewad, a political researcher with the Afghan Analysts Network, told EurasiaNet that Kabul might have the will and the incentive to keep the Taliban away from TAPI, but pipeline security could still turn into a protection racket for insurgents. The Asian Development Bank is set to finance the $7.6 billion project, and the participating countries have discussed joint systems to resolve the security issues involved in covering 1,700 kilometers of pipelines, perhaps now more seriously than they have in the past 15 years.
In a press conference at the State Department after the signing, Robert Blake, Assistant Secretary of State for Central and South Asia, said the U.S. backed the project, noting that there is “a great strategic logic to trying to link the oil and gas reserves of Turkmenistan with the large and growing energy markets of South Asia.” Yet Blake cautioned that much work remained not only on financing and security arrangements, but on deciding the lead. Turkmenistan will fill the pipeline with an estimated 33 billion cubic meters a year. Yet participants indicated they would put out for tender a bid for pipeline construction and logistics. When Gazprom came forward to offer its services, Ashgabat bitterly rejected it. Much will be decided by the companies in the consortium. So far, India’s state-run GAIL Ltd. has been designated, and others will be sought.
The fallout from the publication of classified U.S. documents by WikiLeaks continues. Two incidents in Turkmenistan directly relate to the publication of diplomatic cables, providing insights into the overall impact of the WikiLeaks’ activist project. After a cable was released reporting allegations about President Berdymukhamedov’s son-in-law, Dovlet Atabayev, the representative office he headed in London of the state hydrocarbons management agency was unexpectedly closed. Atabayev himself appears to have been recalled back home and stands accused of lavish real-estate dealings while living abroad – just the kind of disruption of purported corruption that WikiLeaks’ radical transparency movement hopes to achieve, although with troublesome implications of lack of due process in a setting like Turkmenistan. The other incident tied to the cables – the recall of the Turkish ambassador in Ashgabat – illustrates how U.S. Embassy sources can be harmed and future cooperation jeopardized.
Ambassador Huseyin Bichakli (Hüseyin Avni Bıçaklı), the Turkish envoy to Ashgabat, who was revealed by WikiLeaks to have reportedly served as a source to the U.S. Embassy about concerns that the Russians were helping the Turkmens to prepare uranium to transfer to Iran, appears to have been recalled to Ankara in December. Intriguingly, although the Turkish media said Bichkali was recalled before completing his fourth year abroad, and referred to the cable as a "diplomatic scandal," there does not seem to have been any official denunciations from Ashgabat or comments from Ankara about the affair. Far from being declared "persona non grata," Bichkali was given a warm personal send-off by President Berdymukhamedov in Ashgabat on December 22 -- indicating that the WikiLeaks fallout seems to have been quickly suppressed by all concerned.
Another cable reviewed by the French newspaper Le Monde, notes the expansion of business for the French company Bouygues, which constructed about 50 buildings for the Turkmen government worth about two billion euro. The cable also reports a claim that President Berdymukhamedov is trying to amass personal wealth through construction sites at Avaza, the Caspian resort town that is his pet project. The cable seems to lend credence to the impression that Avaza is a black hole through which various "extra-budgetary" funds such as outright bribes can disappear without a trace.
Turkmenistan-watchers seized on these various WikiLeaks cables because they provided more information than is usually available about this secretive Central Asian country. Even so, the cables contain only allegations of reports that are hard to check, and with rival factions in government trying to produce compromising material on each other, it’s hard to sort out the truth. The government itself tends to make many fantastic claims, as RFE/RL discovered in trying to follow up on just a few of the glowing stories in the official press.
After the December 5 local elections, the Turkmen state media claimed unnamed experts of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) certified that Turkmenistan was "in full conformity with the relevant international norms." It turned out the claim was entirely fake, as OSCE had said no such thing. Jens Eschenbacher, spokesman for the OSCE's Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), said OSCE had a small team of experts in Turkmenistan and was going to prepare an assessment for the authorities only, with no plans for any public report. Meanwhile, another story about a delegation from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), claiming that the exchange rate was stable and trust was building in the role of banks, did in fact turn out to reflect an actual statement by Veronica Bacalu, head of an IMF delegation that visited Ashgabat in December -- but her impression in turn was reliant on official government assessments,
On December 21, MTS Turkmenistan, the Turkmen branch of the Russian mobile company MTS (Mobile TeleSystems), the largest cellular operator in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, received a notice from the Turkmen Ministry of Communications telling them that their license was suspended, regnum.ru reported. While the contract signed in 2005 had expired, rumors circulated that Ashgabat wanted to get more than the 20 percent they had initially grabbed from MTS profits, and expected to force MTS Turkmenistan to sell 50 percent of its take to the Turkmen Ministry of Communications. The now-closed Russian daily Vremya Novostei speculated that the Turkmen government grab was caused by plunging revenues after Russia's sharp decrease of gas purchases. MTS now has more than 2.4 million customers, in a country with a population of over 5 million, controlling 85 percent of the market.
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick compiles the Turkmenistan weekly roundup for EurasiaNet. She is also editor of EurasiaNet's Sifting the Karakum blog. To subscribe to the weekly email with a digest of international and regional press, write [email protected]
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