Amnesty Magazine
Spring 2004
The Devil's Tears
The Politics of Oil and Human Rights in Central AsiaWashington has joined cause with some of the world's worst human rights abusers in Central Asia to protect oil interests and fight its war on terrorism. The policy may backfire and sacrifice not only human rights but U.S. national security as well.
BY LUTZ C. KLEVEMAN
On a sun-warmed winter day, Armani-wearing biznizmeny and their wives stroll past the expensive boutiques that dot the shiny new city center of Baku, capital of the ex-Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. They are the winners in a new oil boom fueled by the world’s largest untapped oil and gas reserves. Since the mid-1990s, Western oil corporations such as ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, and British Petroleum Amoco have been investing heavily to exploit the fossil resources that lie underneath and around the Caspian Sea. The companies enjoy strong financial, political, and even indirect military support from a U.S. government keen on reducing America’s dependence on oil from the volatile Middle East. An international consortium led by BP Amoco is already constructing a controversial 1,100-mile pipeline from Baku through Georgia to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.
Just outside Baku’s city center, however, is an industrialized zone called the “Black City,” where tens of thousands of people live in conditions of abject poverty, with little running water, electricity, health care, education, or at times even enough food. All over Black City, hundreds of old oil wells rust amid giant pools of shiny black sludge and pinkish water. Beneath the grinding derricks, men and women in rags poke through piles of rubbish in search of some aluminum scrap that they might be able to sell for a few cents on the black market. “The government talks a lot about a big oil boom,” one elderly man says. “But we cannot even pay for a loaf of bread.”
That the oil wealth is more of a curse than a blessing to most local people is nothing new. In most oil-producing countries, the “devil’s tears” has led to corruption, political instability and repression, economic decline, environmental degradation, coups d’état, and often bloody civil wars. Most “petrostates” also have abysmal human rights records. I first realized this terrible causality when reporting on the Niger delta’s fossil wealth. There, in 1995, the bitter confrontation between the energy giant Shell and Nigerian tribes culminated in the execution of poet and human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Things are not much different in Azerbaijan, known locally as “BP country,” where BP Amoco wields a $15 billion budget for investing off the Azeri coast. “If we pull out of Baku,” said a former BP spokesman, “the country would collapse overnight.” So Big Oil’s interests—including its desire for stability—were high on the agenda this past October when Azerbaijan’s late ruler Heydar Aliyev established the first dynasty in the former Soviet Union. The presidential elections that lifted his son Ilham to power were described by international observers as highly fraudulent.
One of the new dictator’s first acts was to brutally suppress popular protests in Baku, with Aliyev’s security forces arbitrarily arresting hundreds of opposition members and killing at least two people. The next day, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage officially congratulated Aliyev on his “strong showing” in the elections. Armitage is a former board member of the Washington, D.C.-based U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, set up nine years ago to support American companies’ activities in Azerbaijan’s multi-billion dollar oil industry. Many Azeris noted which side Washington took when promoting democracy and human rights clashed with ensuring stability for oil investments.
This sort of oil-linked repression and suffering (and Washington’s blind eye) is what I have seen time and again during my research travels in the past two years through ten countries, from the Caucasus peaks across the Caspian Sea and the Central Asian plains all the way down to the Afghan Hindu Kush.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the vast expanse in the heart of the Eurasian landmass has become the battleground of a new “Great Game”—a fierce geopolitical struggle reminiscent of the 19th century race between the British and Russian empires for mastery of the region. But this time the stakes are higher: The United States, determined to exploit Caspian energy reserves in order to wean itself from dependence on the volatile and hostile Middle East, is pitted against Russia, China, and Iran. All are jockeying for dominance of the Caspian region, its resources, and pipeline routes. Shrewdly navigating the political minefields are transnational oil corporations that have already invested more than $30 billion in rigs and pipelines.
After the September 11 terror attacks, the oil bosses, warlords, diplomats, generals, and other Great Game players I interviewed saw a dramatic change in the layout of the game board. The Bush administration has used the “war on terror” to massively expand U.S. influence in Central Asia, opening military bases not only in Afghanistan but also in the newly-independent republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgia. These first U.S. combat troops on former Soviet territory have strengthened Washington’s geostrategic leverage vis-à-vis the longtime imperial overlord Russia, the awakening giant China, and the increasingly beleaguered Iran. The U.S. “war on terror” thus meshes nicely with its promotion of U.S. energy interests.
The financial and political prizes in the new Great Game are substantial: On the shores and at the bottom of the Caspian Sea could lie up to 200 billion barrels of crude oil, worth up to $6 trillion. According the Department of Energy, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan alone could sit on more than 130 billion barrels—more than three times U.S. reserves.
And with a potential oil production of up to 6 million barrels a day by 2015, the Caspian region could help America diversify its energy supply and lessen its dependence on Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Washington has long sought a way to undermine the ability of the Arab-dominated cartel to use its possession of more than two thirds of the world’s oil reserves to dictate prices and expand its political clout. Increasingly, oil interests and policymakers worry about Saudi Arabia’s growing instability and suspected sponsorship of terrorism. The search for alternatives to the Saudi kingdom as a political ally and a strategic energy supplier may also have played a part in the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq.
A s a result of its aggressive pursuit of energy interests in Central Asia and its need for antiterrorist allies, the Bush administration has courted some of the region’s nastiest autocrats, including Azerbaijan’s Aliyev, Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev, and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf.
But the most tyrannical of Washington’s new allies is Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov. Under the rule of this ex-communist dictator, tens of thousands of political and religious prisoners languish in the country’s overcrowded jails; many are tortured and executed. “Such people must be shot in the head. If necessary, I will shoot them myself,” Karimov once famously told his rubber-stamp parliament. After an assassination attempt in 1999, Agence France-Presse quoted him as saying, “I’m prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people, to sacrifice their lives, in order to save peace and calm in the republic. ... If my child chose such a path, I myself would rip off his head.”
Since then, Amnesty International has documented an average of more than 30 executions a year in Uzbekistan, many in secret. Last December, on the eve of an international conference on the death penalty—organized by a local NGO and which AI was scheduled to attend—Uzbek authorities forced its cancellation.
Throughout the 1990s, the U.S. State Department and human rights groups alike condemned Karimov’s record. Then in late 2001, during the Afghan campaign, Uzbekistan allowed U.S. troops to set up a large, permanent military base on its soil. Since then the Bush administration has turned a blind eye to Karimov’s human rights abuses. In 2002, his regime received $500 million in aid and rent payments from Washington, despite a public acknowledgment by the State Department that Uzbek security forces use “torture as a routine investigation technique.” That same year, President Bush met with Karimov at the White House and thanked him for his help in the war on terror.
Under Karimov, who sees the strong post-Soviet renaissance of Islam in rural Uzbekistan as a threat to his secular regime, Uzbek authorities have been cracking down on religious groups, driving them underground and into the arms of radical preachers. I had a sense of this in the southern Uzbek town of Termez, right on the border with Afghanistan. There, hundreds of worshippers assembled for afternoon prayers in the town’s blue-tiled mosque; they wore tupetaika caps and heavy caftans, or veils, in spite of an official ban on wearing religious attire or even long beards. A dozen policemen kept a close eye on the congregation. “They often arrest us just because our beards make us look suspicious to them,” a Muslim who called himself Aziz told me later. “Then the police accuse us of working for terrorist groups and they beat us. A few men from our community have not returned from prison to this day.”
Did Aziz know anybody in Termez who would join the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a terrorist group blamed for several deadly attacks in the late 1990s? “No, but many people like the IMU because they fight against the government.”
The U.S. State Department—less eagle-eyed than the Termez police—quietly removed Uzbekistan in 2002 from its annual list of countries where freedom of religion is under threat.
Aziz and other young men I spoke to in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia voiced anger at the United States for shoring up their corrupt and despotic rulers. In a dangerous trend throughout the region, impoverished peoples react to the appearance of Washington’s collaboration with repression by embracing militant Islam and virulent anti-Americanism.
It is not only Washington that makes ugly choices out of thirst for Caspian oil. There is strong evidence that Moscow’s continuing military campaign in Chechnya has an oil dimension. Chechnya sits on considerable oil reserves, and its capital Grozny used to be a key processing center, employing some 18,000 people at three giant oil refineries.
More importantly, Grozny is the center of a major network of pipelines linking Siberia, the Caspian, and the Black Sea port of Novorossijsk; the only existing pipeline from Baku to Novorossijsk runs through Chechnya. Doubtless, former Russian President Boris Yeltsin had this geographic significance in mind when he ordered the first invasion of the secessionist republic in 1994, just weeks after Azerbaijan and transnational energy corporations had signed the “contract of the century” to exploit the Caspian oil fields.
The Kremlin has also fomented ethnic conflicts in Georgia by providing arms and political support to rebels in the Georgian provinces of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Ajaria — as well as to the Armenians in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. Western diplomats and Caucasus experts have long seen Moscow’s machinations as part of a thinly-veiled strategy to stir up trouble in the South Caucasus and undermine plans for the U.S.-backed Baku-Ceyhan pipeline.
Eager to accrue transit fees and to keep their political leverage over Azerbaijan, the Russians are trying to thwart the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline so that oil from Azerbaijan continues to be pumped across Russian territory. Despite the horrific death toll, Moscow has failed to regain control over Chechnya.
Human rights groups regularly document atrocities by the Russian security forces and its mercenaries, as well as such abuses by Chechen fighters as hostage-taking, suicide bombings, and attacks on municipal authorities. Amnesty International has denounced Russia for “disappearances,” extra-judicial executions, and its treatment of internally displaced persons. During “cleansing” operations, Russian forces surround Chechen villages at dawn to comb them for rebels and other suspicious people. Innocent civilians have often been tortured or killed, and adolescents are routinely abducted, only to be tortured until their relatives scrape together $1,000 to buy their freedom. Similar amounts are paid to retrieve corpses.
The most brutal Russian forces are the mercenaries hired by the Russian Defense Ministry. They receive meager salaries with the understanding that they can earn extra money from robbery and kidnappings. During my last visit to Chechnya and neighboring Ingushetia in late 2001, I met Markus, a German aid worker who brought food to starving civilians in Grozny. “In Chechnya, anarchy and violence are worse than ever,” he said. “One of my Chechen employees had a little brother who was perhaps 14 or 15 years old. Last month, mercenaries raided the village where his family lives. They just dragged the boy away, for questioning, they claimed,” Markus said. “Immediately, the family started collecting money to ransom the boy but were unable to raise the $1,000 on time. A few days later, the boy was found dead in a field.” Before he died his tormentors had pulled out all of his fingernails. “On every journey to Grozny I am seized with horror.”
Just south of Chechnya, however, there is some hope. The U.S. pleasure with the recent popular overthrow of strongman Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia—a linchpin country for the pipeline export of Caspian oil and gas—showed that protecting strategic energy interests can go hand in hand with promoting democracy and human rights. The overthrow also sent a warning to Central Asian dictatorships whose stability rests precariously on a Kalashnikov crutch.
Since the September 11 terror attacks, security experts have increasingly seen the lack of democracy in Muslim countries as a root cause of terrorism. Western governments are realizing that they can no longer afford indifference to abuses in the Middle East and Central Asia—even those perpetrated by dictators who keep the oil flowing. In two recent speeches, President Bush has called on autocratic regimes in the Middle East, including U.S. allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to implement internal reforms in order to stop churning out angry young terrorists.
Somehow, though, Bush has neglected to mention Azerbaijan or Uzbekistan. For those countries to help progress toward democracy, as is happening in Georgia, they need stronger civil societies. The current U.S. policy of helping tyrants oppress their people sparks enormous resentment that makes it easier for Al Qaeda-like organizations to recruit new fighters. The Bush administration repeats the very same mistakes that gave rise to “bin Ladenism,” jeopardizing the few successes in the war on terror. It is all very well to pursue energy interests, but is it worth sacrificing human rights and mortgaging our security to do so?
Lutz C. Kleveman is the author of The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia (Grove/Atlantic, www.newgreatgame.com) Email: Lutz@Kleveman.com
This article appeared in Amnesty Magazine,the quarterly magazine of Amnesty International USA. For copies of the original article, the full magazine, subscriptions ($12/yr), or membership to AIUSA including subscription ($25/yr) please: email now@aiusa.org; write to Amnesty Magazine, 322 8th Ave. New York, NY 10001; or call 212.633.4246. Text and photographs are copyright protected.
