Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2008
From: Thomas Goltz <thomascgoltz@gmail.com>
Subject: Last file wrapup
For the past 24 hours, ensconced once again in Hijran’s garden apartment with a tiny side-view of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn, I have had the luxury of catching up on diverse emails that I had no time to file or process during my two-week long, seat-of-the-pants romp through Georgia. There is probably another stack of some 500 messages built up in my erstwhile primary email account goltz@wtp.net which fried about two days into the journey, and to which I still have no access. The server has still not bothered to inform me why they fried/froze the account, just when I needed it most. Ah, well. One of the things that this journey has taught me is the need for backing up everything associated with modern communications, and indeed life. Back up email systems, back up telephones, back up emergency evacuation plans, back up money, back up friends and back up clean shirts. And back up oil and gas delivery systems, if you are a country like Azerbaijan.
In any case, in the mass of built-up back-log on my computer, I ran into a message from an editor from the Wall Street Journal concerning a story idea I had back in mid-July. Essentially, I was proposing a quick trip from Istanbul to the eastern Turkish city of Kars to attend the grand inaugural ceremony of the Turkish leg of the Kars-Tbilisi-Baku ‘Steel Silk Road’ railway on the afternoon of July 14th.
While not as sexy as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) main export pipeline that I rode my motorcycles down in the years 2000, 2001 and 2002 (and which finally opened in July of 2006), the KTB is a project I have long kept my eye on, from its initial ‘insane idea’ phase circa 2001 or 2002, through the various studies, the political back-lash (Armenian lobbyists in DCs demanding that Congress pass resolutions depriving credit to the project unless it included Armenia; the whole idea of the KTB was to further tighten the screws on that country by avoiding it, etc), the first ceremonial ground-breaking in Georgia (Azerbaijan floated an interest free loan to the Georgians to avoid the US Congressional demands altogether), and then finally, the meeting of the three presidents of Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan at Kars to symbolically slam in the spikes of the last 29 kilometers of track of the multi-millions USD project to be built from Kars to the Georgian frontier, which would link ‘London to the Great Wall of China’ (and other hyperbolic notions along that line) and thus massively increase trade and travel along a modern Silk Road, and bring prosperity to all (or at least to all participating in the project) when it finally came on line circa 2012 or so.
Now, why it would take six more years to complete 29 kilometers of train track was always a mystery to me; so was the routingnamely, across the often restive part of southern Georgia usually referred to as Javakhkheti, which is populated mainly by (maybe separatist) Armenians who represented, one would think, some sort of security concern. The BTC pipeline planners very specifically avoided running through their neighborhood, and presumably with good reason. Be that as it may. The main point was that by belief and grit and the happy fact that Azerbaijan had the money to throw around without reference to the lending whims of the US Congress (and thus OPIC, the IMF, World Bank, etc), the KTB was getting done, and it seemed a natural story for me to go out and write about, and then proceed to have some pre-Fall Semester 2008 adventures in the Turkish east, such as a jaunt into Naxjivan, or possibly a quick plane ride to Baku aboard the newly initiated Baku-Kars flight on Azerbaijani Airlines.
Imagine that! An AzAl flight to Kars! The south Caucasus was really starting to take off, and with good ol’ Azerbaijan as the economic motor! My, how times have changed!
As it happened, the people at They Hate You airlines (THY, the national carrier) left me in the lurch, and a furious me flew south instead to spend a lovely five day period as the guest of Hugh and Jessica Pope (and god-daughter Scarlette) at their place in the hills outside Olympos, where we sat back and considered the fate of the Justice and Development (‘Islamist’) Party of Prime Minister Erdogan, talked life and literature and other issues. I could still have written an Istanbul-based OpEd on the KTB I guess, but it would not have felt right, and there were a dozen other things to do. But I never got back to the editor to tell him I would not write up the event (he had not commissioned it; he had merely expressed interest in taking a look once I got back from my non-trip).
Fast forward to a meeting I had in Baku last week with a number of highly intelligent individuals engaged in Azerbaijani foreign policy. While we are all old friends and could be content to speak about the weather, the obvious subject of interest was my impressions, evaluations and analysis of the situation in Georgia, and its impact on Azerbaijan. I tried to be honest. I said things like “If I were the president of this country, I would expand the annual ‘Azerbaijan Cultural Week’ in Moscow to the annual “Azerbaijan Cultural Month.” (chuckles) and “I would also bestow not just an honorary doctorate on Vladimir Putin from Slavyan University, but rename the university after him.” (more chuckles). And then I guess I said something wrong, because the main host became agitated, glared at me and then sort of declared the lunch to be over because he had an important meeting to attend. It may have been completely coincidental, but all this happened after I had said something like “And the Kars-Tbilisi-Baku railroad…has become a joke.”
Am I over-interpreting? It is possible.
But unlike the BTC, which is ‘safely’ under the ground, or most of it) the KTB is by definition on top of the groundand unfinished. And unlike the BTC, which was a consortium project led by BP, and thus part of a larger, international oil & gas network, the KTB is very specifically an Azerbaijani-initiated project put together by regional governments (Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey) that are now under threat by ‘resurgent Russia’ in a way that the BTC never was or will be. As such, it is a perfect pressure point, and I will go so far to say that not one piece or rolling stock much less millions of happy passengers will ever roll down that Silk Steel Road Line without explicit permission from Moscow. If that is true, then the KTB is also a perfect symbol of what the south Caucasus states (plus Turkey) will have to be dealing with in the future.
A few brief notes on my four days and nights in Az, and then on to the main subject of this epistle, Turkey.
I missed the whistle time at Tbilisi station because I had to stop off and have a deep-dark political conversation with my refugee sister pals Nunu and Nana Chachua before leaving town (readers of the Georgia book will recognize them and not be shocked at their attitude toward the current conflict; in essence, it is: ‘let the Russians come and bomb Tbilisi a bit so that the people here understand what we had to get used to in 1993 in Sukhumi, and then let the Russians occupy the country, demilitarize it and turn us into a neutralized satellite state. At least we will know where to sell our wine’…) and thus was obliged to catch the Iron Horse at the end of its 3 hour wait at the Georgian/Azerbaijani frontier. Nothing new about this; I have shown up without a ticket a half dozen times, handed the conductor a couple of bucks and presto! Gone on my way. But this time it was different. For starters, the conductor and guys working the passenger wagons were all Azerbaijani gals, or women, and they would have none of this ‘let me slip you a bill and give me a berth’ business. It took real convincing (speaking Azerbaijani of course helped) as well as the real promise that I would allow myself to get kicked off the train if there were no ticket to be had at the first station on the Azerbaijani side of the border. While I did not want to camp at the station, at the same time it was truly refreshing to note that yet another standard, little corruption in the Azerbaijani state system had become history.
The huge placard in the station, a famous saying by Heydar Aliyev, said it all: “I think that the railway system in Azerbaijan is really developing!”H.Aliyev…
The journey itself, after having acquired the ticket, was not interesting. It was night, hot, but not crowded or nasty aside from the communal toilet. Most of the passengers seemed to be Azerbaijani oil men working the diverse export points on the Georgian Black Sea coast that had been shut down by the war, and Georgians with something to do in Azerbaijan. I only mention this because there is indeed some weird Ali & Nino camaraderie between these two countries, living a sort of déjà vu of the 1918-21 period.
In the morning, my friend Yusuf Agayev picked me up at the station and we went through our standard realpolitik evaluation of the situation. As a military man and historian (readers will remember him from the Az Diary book as the Military Prosecutor in Karabakh who was wounded out of action three times, and nearly killed during the fall of Aghdam; he now works for Transparency International) Yusuf could only chortle cynically about any and all reports by non-military specialist reporters that Saakashvili had somehow initiated the crisis, and that the Russians had ‘merely’ made a disproportionate response. Then we scooted back to his place for me to wash the filth out of my clothes, have a quick breakfast, watch and compare Russian TV with the BBC reports on the Russian Duma Upper House decision to ask for recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, after which I slept for a spell, and then went into town.
The next three days were a bit of a blur. Lunches, dinners, meetings, WiFi site discovery, bad crash pad selection, a new B & B managed by a burnt out veteran of the Karabakh war, meetings high and meetings low. Hot. Windy. Chance encounters with old friends. A sense that the place has been ruined by insane construction. A sense that a new generation has taken root. A sense that Azerbaijan has become an international cul de sac, and knows it. I will let Ambassador Escudero’s analysis serve as my own, and then return to Turkey after dinner.
Hijran is getting snarly; the reality is that I keep Soviet-style hours, waking at the crack of noon and grinding things out until 6 AM, which is usually when she wakes.
Bests
Thomas, Istanbul Aug 30 (Turkish Victory Day), 2008.