In a sweeping maneuver on his trip last week to Beijing, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov simultaneously doubled China’s initial purchase order of gas to 65 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year; undercut Russia which has been negotiating to sell gas to China at a higher price; and tacitly accepted China’s veto on the Trans-Caspian Pipeline (to prevent demands for European-level prices) – even as he kept the European Union on the line for an eventual energy agreement. In Beijing, the Turkmen leader signed a number of agreements, including one that provides a grant for Turkmen police training in China, to assist in pipeline security and any other law-enforcement that might need doing in Turkmenistan. (crowd control?)
Berdymukhamedov’s trip took place after years of playing the US, the EU, Russia and China off against each other, and several months of soothing but not substantive talks with the European Union about the Trans-Caspian Pipeline (TCP). The president’s visit also follows some overtures to Russia, yet ultimately a backlash from the Kremlin over the TCP which has produced some of the most belligerent language yet in the fight over Caspian resources.
The question of whether or not Russia would actually go to war in the Caspian over a pipeline threatening its dominance has a flip side: would the European Union really go to war over a mere 10 to 30 bcm? As Russian analyst Konstantin Simonov, director of the Fund for National Energy Security told Nezavisimaya Gazeta , the West hasn’t begun construction on the TCP for 15 years because it can’t give a guarantee of defense to Turkmenistan or Azerbaijan against Russia. And politically, the EU doesn’t really have much leverage except to threaten withdrawal of cooperation on the South Stream pipeline, which EU energy commissioner Günther Oettinger has done.
As EurasiaNet reported, Alexei Kokin, a senior oil and gas analyst at UralSib Capital says that Russia’s gas monopolist Gazprom is reacting with alarm to Turkmenistan’s deal with China. “It undermines its bargaining position with China.” There’s still the question of whether China will find it costs even more to get Turkmenistan’s gas out of the ground and into pipelines, as Russian energy experts have claimed, and whether it might pay a higher price to Russia because it doesn’t have to invest in infrastructure as it does with Turkmenistan.
There's another angle to the current bargaining indicated by Dr. Robert M. Cutler in the Asia Times. Russia's daily Kommersant quoted an unnamed Chinese diplomat as saying Beijing will "do its best" to make sure the TCP "is not developed" because "China does not want Turkmenistan to use European prices to bargain for an increase in prices to China." The EU, like the US, is looking to China to invest in its debts, and may not have leverage to push back against China’s deliberate stalling tactic on the TCP.
Any conflict in the Caspian that Russia appears to incite or exacerbate has to be seen in the context of how it will deploy its other allies, so the Russian-Turkmen dispute can’t be seen in isolation. Russia has Iran as an ally against the bilateral project between Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan and the resolution of their border dispute, because Iran demands a five-way division of all Caspian resources, not defined by national borders. For various reasons, Russia has recently ratcheted down its previous pressure on Iran, a long-time ally, at the UN over its nuclear capacity. Russia is now demonstratively joined by Kazakhstan whose President Nursultan Nazarbayev sounded off against the TCP as a “foggy” deal and one that ostensibly violates the concept of a Caspian legal regime for sharing resources. And even if Ashgabat could convince Beijing that it will not change its price for China if it obtains a higher price from the EU or any other customer, China will likely want to keep the EU out of the Caspian so it has greater options for itself.
Experience has shown that in disputes with fellow members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, Russia will try things like cutting off gas delivery (as it did with Ukraine), threatening migrant workers (as it did with Tajikistan), or provoking a country into violence as it did with Georgia. What can it do with Turkmenistan, cut off a shipment of KAMAZ tractors and copies of Kommersant? On the other hand, while in theory Turkmenistan can hold hostage its Russian-speaking minority as it did back in the era of past dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, nowadays Russia doesn’t seem to support its current or soon-to-be former citizens struggling with a new requirement from Turkmen authorities that they give up their Russian passports and take Turkmen citizenship. When Niyazov refused to make a deal with the Kremlin in the 1990s for a time, hundreds of thousands of Russians, some managers in the gas and oil industry, fled Turkmenistan. The Russian minority is now much smaller although there is evidence that the government still relies on its Soviet-educated management stock because it has only just begun to graduate the first generation of young petroleum engineers (in fact, mainly educated in Russia).
Iran has a sizable Azeri minority and has made threats against Azeris as part of its disputes with Baku over Azerbaijan's signing of an energy agreement with Turkey, and the possibility of the TCP. Russia has also tied help with resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with energy deals with Baku. So between them, Russia and Iran have some capacity to make life miserable for Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan – but with Iran the greater threat now, and with all of them having enough reasons of mutual dependence related to trade and security to motivate them not to escalate conflict.
One thing is certain: with the turn toward China, the discovery of additional gas reserves and the doubling of Beijing’s order, Berdymukhamedov feels absolutely no pressure to listen to Western human rights concerns. Where once he visited France and talked later about adding a second party in addition to the lone ill-named Democratic Party; where once he met with various EU and US officials and discussed further democratic reforms, now he can afford simply to ignore a direct question about democratic elections put to him by Lamberto Zannier, the Secretary General of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
According to an account from exiled Turkmen Republican Party leader Nurmukhammed Hanamov, Zannier reportedly privately raised the issue of the participation of exiles in the February 2012 presidential elections, following up on Berdymukhamedov’s invitation last July – not repeated -- for the opposition to take part in the ballot. But Hanamov said Zannier's assistant later told him that Berdymukhamedov simply ignored the question and it went unanswered. “Pressure” is not the word to describe the stance the EU and US have taken regarding human rights with Ashgabat; the OSCE Secretary General was in Ashgabat primarily to attend the annual Oil and Gas Turkmenistan conference and promote energy security, as were other recent Western interlocutors on human rights such as German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle.
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick compiles the Turkmenistan weekly roundup for EurasiaNet. She is also editor of EurasiaNet's Sifting the Karakum blog.
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