Owen Bowcott
Oct 29, 2002

Plans by the British oil company BP to construct a 1,100-mile pipeline from the Caspian sea to the Mediterranean will reignite regional conflicts and deliver few benefits to communities, a coalition of more than 60 environmental and human rights groups has warned.

Launching an international campaign to oppose the subterranean oil line, which will eventually deliver 1m barrels a day to the west via tanker terminals in the Turkish port of Ceyhan, speakers at a seminar in the House of Lords said the £2bn scheme would accelerate global warming.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline is likely to be partially underwritten by UK taxpayers' money through the export credits guarantee department.

The decision to build the line is the culmination of 10 years of US and British investment in the oil fields of Azerbaijan and central Asia. The route, through Georgia and Turkey, reflects western strategic desires to avoid Iran, Chechnya and Russia. It will lessen reliance on oil from the Gulf.

The project, supported by British contractors, crosses sensitive political faultlines in the Caucasus and Turkey. British firms have had to pull out of the Ilisu dam project in Turkey because development groups claimed it would destroy historic local sites.

The alternative route, sending more tankers through the narrow Bosporus to Georgia's Black sea ports, was rejected because the straits around Istanbul are congested. The long overland route ended up as the favoured option. Critics of the pipeline, however, point out it avoids the most direct line through Turkey and skirts the heart of the Kurdish south-east where a 15-year separatist rebellion by the Kurdistan Workers party recently ended.

"This pipeline [will] militarise a whole corridor running from the Caspian to the Mediterranean," Kerim Yildiz, of the London-based Kurdish Human Rights Project, said. "This could threaten the fragile ceasefire. All oil will be exported, so locals will not benefit."

The pipeline will also pass close to Armenia, which has not resolved its conflict with Azerbaijan."This pipeline will not benefit people in those conflict zones," Tony Juniper, of Friends of the Earth, told the meeting yesterday.

A mission to the area disputed the company's claim to have carried out consultations.